Why Do Chinese People Care More about the US than Themselves?

I have been thinking, if I were a high-ranking editor for a nationwide Chinese news organization and I was deciding how to lay out the sequence of that afternoon or evening’s news, which of these two would I make the headline: an American school shooting or the stabbing of a student in Henan Province?

Without a doubt, I would choose the former.

If the American school shooting had not happened that day, but the stabbing had, would I choose this latter event as the headline?

Unlikely. I would definitely choose some other news — perhaps a political change in Japan, or some new statistics from the Chinese government showing economic growth or still something else, but it would certainly not be the stabbing of the student in Henan.

Why? By necessity, the news is laid out according to its importance. But how does one determine the level of importance? As far as I’m concerned, the target audience of your own media employer is what must be considered. You must always be thinking: What do they care about?

Of course, within this question, there is a very realistic consideration that could be called selfish, which is: When the audience turns on their television and the news broadcast begins, will they change the channel? When a reader must choose from a pile of newspaper front pages, will they choose the scene of inconsolable American parents or a Chinese child lying in a hospital with his heartsick parents at his side?

I believe my choice is correct; the Chinese target audience really cares a lot about America, especially the natural and man-made disasters that occur there. This is because they can immediately find a topic of conversation or evidence to show that Americans’ lives are miserable and their government unbearable.

My conjecture is not without reason — take a look at the commentary in the Global Times. Although I don’t endorse many of their points of view or the system of values they pass on, I must admit that, within these articles, you can see a part of the Chinese way of thinking. I even think that the success of the Global Times lies in being able to take many ideas that Chinese people are unwilling to publicly discuss and frankly bring them out into the open — many readers of this newspaper are looking for a sympathetic response.

Often as I am flying within China on business, I will hear a fellow passenger ask the flight attendant, “Do you have the Global Times?” and my mind will always recollect the old woman selling salted duck eggs that Yang Hengjun wrote about. Despite being very poor, she was still worried about those American people who had suffered a shock in the financial crisis because, to her, it seemed they were suffering more than she.

Where did the America this old woman saw come from? Why do so many Chinese people talk about the world, but the only thing on their minds is America? I think this can be credited to media portrayals of America. But what the media will not tell you is that, even after a shooting, Americans don’t have a voice with which to hold their government accountable. This is because the government is elected by the people and some responsibility is the result of the voters’ choices — for example, the legalization of guns. Therefore, one must accept the results of those choices. If there is to be change, they must continue carrying on the discussion to see what kind of consensus society can ultimately achieve.

If a stabbing such as the one in Henan happened in Hong Kong one day, how much space would the American shooting take up in the news? I can imagine that, as far as the Hong Kong media and people are concerned, at this time, there would be no time or energy to care about what happened in America. Similarly, after such a shooting happens in America, as far as Americans and the American media are concerned, bigger things that happen outside of the U.S. become insignificant. The justification for this is simple: Local media is naturally most concerned with what happens locally. If we say that Hong Kong is too small, in that case, to the American media, a dead child in Connecticut naturally relates to all Americans’ affairs.

From a humanitarian point of view, all the children who are injured or killed all over the world cause people to feel distressed. Because of this, a college student in Shandong who keeps a night vigil for an American child will not be criticized. But when we lament the life of someone in a distant land, why is it that, regardless of the media or ourselves, we seem so indifferent to a life much closer to our own?

I have always thought it cruel, but it is a fact that if a mining or other accident occurs in China and does not reach a certain death toll, the accident will not take up that much space in the media. The majority of these accidents do not require limits on reporting. Rather, the media has given up because of a very important reason: Since the readers or audience are doing OK, they will not have the interest to follow the story.

Don’t blame the media; such judgments are accurate. Ask yourself: If mining accidents occurred in China and the U.S. on the same day, and the same number of people died in each incident, which scene would you like to see more on the TV and in the newspaper?