BEIJING — A word about press freedom in China: In this country, it’s a complete contradiction in terms. It’s the opposite of China’s yin and yang. It just doesn’t compute.
Saturday’s murder of Todd Bachman and critical injury of Barbara Bachman, in-laws of U.S. volleyball coach Hugh McCutcheon, in downtown Beijing, stunned me a lot more than the news coverage. Beijing is a safe city.
That means any murder in this city should trump anything else going on, including the Olympics. Yet in Sunday’s China Daily, the nation’s Eng- lish language newspaper, its total coverage of a brutal knife attack consisted of the following, and we’re not making this up: Under a small headline reading, “American tourist killed in attack,” a story credited to China’s Xinhua wire service ran about 300 words in the middle of Page 5, next to a picture of dancers performing in the Olympic Garden.
I arrived in China nearly two weeks before the Olympics and was not surprised with the media coverage. During a week in Yangshuo, a beautiful, touristy town of 300,000 in Guangxi Province near Hong Kong, locals told me their town has had three murders in the past three months. They were savage knifings between youths in the crowded streets lined with bars and souvenir shops. Yet not one word has been written about them in the local papers. I asked a Yangshuo native if it bothered her.
“Not really,” she said. “We all talk. We know what’s going on.”
Zaijian from China,
John Henderson
