tijaco

I often start things that aren’t very long lasting, especially when it comes to creating content like blogs and videos. But here I am again, trying to start a new routine. This time, I am going to attempt to write a blog post every day. I am currently trying to build a website, and that website will take the domain tijaco.blog. This blog, as you know from reading it, will be posted on my write.as page. In future, I might buy a domain for this one, but for now it will just be left as is.

In these blogs, all I am going to do is sit and write for a whole hour each day. This will be basically unedited and more like a stream of conscious or rant than a real piece. My real, polished pieces will appear on my website tijaco.blog and once I get back on social media, they will be shared more regularly. That’s the plan at least.

That’s something I wanted to talk about today. On Saturday night, as I have done a few times before, I blocked myself from all social media sites for an entire week. I am using a program called SelfControl that doesn’t let me access whichever sites I give it permission to block. In this round, I have blocked Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit and YouTube. These are my main culprits for distraction and while some of them, especially YouTube, offer a lot of good, there are ways I have found to access YouTube videos which doesn’t get me embroiled in a long rabbit hole of rubbish content consumption. This alternative is to illegally download the YouTube videos I want to watch, which is an annoying process, before discarding them when I have finished watching them. This has worked especially well today as I have been researching the Xinjiang region of China and although I have found a new YouTube channel I enjoy, I haven’t been sucked into a spiral of consuming their content for hours on end. Instead, I have watched three longer videos that gave me the information I needed and moved on to the next thing.

That brings me to the other thing I wanted to talk about here: Xinjiang and China in general. I always knew that it was absurdly difficult to research China as an anglophile and gain a balanced perspective. Oftentimes I resort to reading the obvious propaganda reports from Western media and trying to garner some sense of truth between the bullshit. I was doing just that today, reading a report by a man named Adrian Zenz whose credentials read like a CIA checklist. After reading about half of this utterly confusing report, I found him complaining about an organisation called the Global Times, denigrating it as the mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Upon reading that, I became interested. After a look at the reports from the Global Times, I couldn’t believe that I had never stumbled upon this before.

Zenz is not wrong in noting its affiliation with the CCP – it is essentially the English version of the People’s Daily, the CCP newspaper – but this is exactly what I have been looking for. After all, despite the “diversity” of media in Australia, all of the perspectives are aligned with Australia’s (business) interests. All I have been looking for is a publication that provides the Chinese perspective. After reading some of their articles, I have found that they are far more objective in their reporting than any newspaper I’ve seen in the West. There is a level of analysis and evidence that just is not present in Australia outside of the independent, investigative space. This is a publication I will be using in the future. Of course, as with any publication, you must note the biases.

After having explored some of the pieces from the Global Times, in particular those connected to Australia and the United States, I found one which referred to a TV channel called China Global Television Network (CGTN). Again, this network is subject to the CCP, but as noted above, all of the mainstream media outlets in the West are connected to their respective governments through the propaganda model – this is simply more overt. Once again, watching some of the videos from CGTN, I found the analysis to be far better, far more evidence-based, than that of the Western media. After watching a documentary on terrorism in Xinjiang, I saw the Chinese perspective on the situation. Unlike all of the analysis I have heard from Western media, the Chinese perspective was incredibly reasonable. With my previous research on terrorism in Xinjiang, I know that the documentary-maker could have been far more scathing of the United States flaring of terrorism in the Middle East, but instead it focused on what China is doing to solve the problem. I then watched an analysis show called The Heat in which several intellectuals conversed on the topic of Xinjiang and the treatment of the Uyghurs in the region. Rather than platitudes and emotional claims, they explained how the CCP sees the situation, how they are solving the problem and exposing the inconsistencies and lack of evidence in the claims by the United States.

In exploring who is on the right and wrong side of this debate, I want to make sure I am not siding too quickly with China. I tend to assume that the United States is in the wrong based on previous patterns throughout history, especially since WW2. But in this situation, if there is a better case to be made on the American side, I am failing to see who is making it. There doesn’t seem to be any concrete evidence that there is a lot of wrongdoing on the side of China. There are images that are flashed on Western TV screens of prison camps and forced labour, but this isn’t concrete proof of wrongdoing – the United States in particular has the biggest prison population on Earth which is overwhelmingly black. We don’t see China flashing images of African American prisoners around the world. They know better than to meddle with the internal affairs of other countries, and their media makes that crystal clear.

So, this is the story of two outlets that I have discovered today that will offer me a more balanced view of the world in combination, or even in the absence of, Western media. My journey to find the truth takes another step.