The courage of Chinese blogger Chang Ping

As discussed in the previous post, Chinese blogger Chang Ping blogged that the Chinese netizens' campaign against the Western media has gone off the deep end. For this he has been the focus of a movement to purge him from his job as deputy chief editor of the Southern Metropolis Daily. Here are some key extracts (translation via ESWN) from the blog post for which he is being attacked:

Many netizens have gone to the opposite extreme end. . . . They do not care if the news is objective and fair . . . rather, the key is just which side you are on. If the netizens genuinely care about news values, they should not only be exposing the fake reports by the western media and they should also be challenging the control by the Chinese government over news sources and the Chinese media. There is no doubt that the harm from the latter is even worse than the former. When individual media outlets make fake reports about real events, it is easy to correct because just a few meticulous Chinese netizens can do the job. When media control is exercised by the state authorities, the whole world is helpless. . . .

The biggest harm to news values by these fake reports is that many people have chosen to abandon their trust in objectivity and fairness and hence seek refuse in narrow nationalism. They draw the conclusion that talks of universal values are all deceptive tricks used to cover up underlying national interests. They even say that it is standard international practice to tell lies . . .

But what about us and the ethnic minorities? If we use nationalism as the weapon to resist the westerners, then how can we persuade the ethnic minorities to abandon their nationalism and join the mainstream nation-building? The Dalai Lama asked the Chinese government to reassess him, so what kind of person is he really? . . .