Anna Chen 是英国的华裔演员、作者、主持人，最近曾主持 BBC Radio 4 的十集节目 Chinese in Britain。这篇文章发表在 3 月 11 日。

New Internationalist 号称英国最大的左翼杂志

http://www.newint.org/features/special/200...en-china-panic/
China Panic
It’s official – according to new NI columnist Anna Chen – 2008 isn’t just the Year of the Rat and the Beijing Olympics. It’s also China Panic Year.

‘China – leading the world in toy manufacturing.’

However you choose to read it, that’s not an advertising slogan Mattel’s likely to be using any time soon. The Dim Child’s Best Friend had to recall two million toys made in China due to their illegal lead content, including Barbie pet and furniture playsets. That’ll teach the Plastic Glamourpuss to put lifestyle before study.

If parents want to alleviate their heavy metal anxiety before their offspring discover the joys of headbanging, how about a Barbie library playset featuring real books with words and sentences and everything? Or a Barbie environmental protest playset where you scrawl your own placards, shave Barbie’s head and stick a stud through her navel? No. Didn’t think so. Who needs sinister lead-encrusted death-toys to damage children’s brains, anyway? That’s TV’s job.

It’s official. 2008 isn’t just the Year of the Rat and the Beijing Olympics. It’s also China Panic Year. The sleeping dragon awakens, so everyone’s trying to shoot it down before it wipes the gunk out of its eyes. The British media keeps pressing the ‘filth and pestilence’ button with SARS, Foot and Mouth and Asian Flu. America gets poisoned toothpaste and a pet food scare.

Legitimate criticism is that, to keep prices down and foreign trade perky, China allows no trade unions. Maybe they use Wal-Mart advisers. You want your consumer goodies cheap? Then welcome to the free market, and its ugly sisters: cost-cutting and corruption.

China executes more citizens than the rest of the world put together: shameful, brutal and a sign of defeat. But seek factual reportage and cool analysis and you find the Cold War language of the 1960s. I don’t recall China being responsible for the deaths of a million Iraqis, but the colonialist subtext is that we fiendish orientals don’t value human life the way cuddly westerners do.

The protester who breached security in order to place smog masks on the Terracotta Warriors at the British Museum must’ve forgotten just who’s been pumping carbon into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Let alone who’s encouraging the rainforests to be destroyed in order to grow palm oil to keep their Humvees on the road.

Expect China Panic to increase in 2008 with the Beijing Olympics shoving the nation’s superior economy down everyone’s throat and turning us all into green-eyed monsters. It must be terrible growing up believing you were destined to rule the world forever, and then discovering you don’t.

Anna Chen is a writer, actor, poet, singer, songwriter, comic, cineaste and martial artist.

Blog: ‘Madam Miaow says...’ http://madammiaow.blogspot.com

Website: http://www.annachen.co.uk

Wikipedia 上 New Internationlist 介绍：
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Internationalist

It is easy to criticise China as one can always easily find his or her target in popular perception. However it amounts to nothing worthy of serious reading if the author let his or her thought stop at the issues on surface. One has to put China in a bigger context to understand the roots of its problems, very few of which is actually made in China, as oppose to popular belief. Using China as the culprit has long become the West's strategy to shed its responsibility to world affairs and maintain, albeit with increasing difficulty, their moral high ground.

Recent trend on Tibet is a good example of the West's hypocrisy. The media's extremely one-sided pro-Tibet Independence coverage, sometimes with deliberate distortion of the truth, shows just a mentality of sinophobia. Impartiality worths nothing when there is a chance to put China in a bad light.

Also, Lord Coe's let-slip comment on the Chinese torch guards, shows how arrogant and prejudiced these so-called celebrities really are, no matter how polite or righteous they appear to be. Calling people thugs for no better reason than "They don't even speak English" is an appalling piece of racist comment to make. No wonder Coe chose to speak his mind only when he thought it was a private conversation. The Chinese have been offended for a reason and that reason is clearly not due to supposed brainwash they had.

This hatred promoting atmosphere spiraled rapidly to a peak when pro-Tibetan Independence protesters in France repeatedly attempted their assault on Jin Jing, a female Chinese torch bearer in wheelchair and almost succeeded once (see pictures below). Yet we see no media denouncing the violence. They simply turned a blind eye to what's happened.




This is hardly surprising - they did the same last time when Tibetan mob had beaten, killed, and burnt Han Chinese and Hui Muslims alive in Lhasa last month. In their reporting, the media first mentioned unconfirmed death toll from the Free Tibet camp, and then quoting the confirmed number from the Chinese government. As for who was the victim, they just conveniently didn't report, which in effect made an impression on the public that Chinese troops were killing the "peaceful" Tibetan demonstrators.

Apologies to Anna Chen. I didn't read her article carefully the first time.