Rumormongers’ Paradise

It’s hard not to feel sorry for the poor folks at the China Daily now and again. In the face of yesterday’s resumption of hostilities in Urumqi, their task of putting a positive spin on each and every news item must surely be about as much fun as grafting a brave face onto a frightened rodent. A conversation with a recent intern at the state news agency Xinhua revealed the remarkable levels of conviction involved in this process. Far from the simple burying or manipulation of facts, she saw the tendency among the Chinese press to focus on the positives as a vital public service, a reasonable defense against explosions of irrational, ill-informed public sentiment. Still, one can’t help but wonder what was going through the mind of the editor responsible for surrounding a brief news item on Xinjiang’s latest woes with ‘related links’ on the vigor of the region’s economy and tourism, without even a passing mention of the riots in July that left almost 200 dead.

While the flashpoints for earlier bouts of violence were fairly tangible events (at least at first), the trigger for yesterday’s resumption of hostilities is that most perennial of Chinese favorites, the capricious specter of rumor. Han mobs are reportedly up in arms over tales of syringe-wielding Uygurs prowling the streets in search of women and children to infect with HIV. Such imagery forms a curious blend of urban legend and racial stereotyping. While many newspapers point out the link with a similar needle-induced hysteria occurred in Tianjin back in 2002 (when fears over HIV-tainted blood donations were at their peak), the image of the sinister ‘other’ bent on sapping the life-force of ordinary citizens is a deeply persistent one in Chinese history.

In the run-up to the Boxer rebellion, Christian missionaries were widely believed to be kidnapping villagers in order to harvest their organs, while at the end of the 18^th century, fear of pigtail-clipping ‘soulstealers’ caused a full-scale national panic, a case which drove the Qianlong emperor to mount an obsessive search for culprits that simply did not exist. Coupled with this, the near-universal objectification of Uygurs by Han Chinese into a race of shifty, ungrateful thieves with a penchant for plunging a knife into everything they see seems to have spawned a genuinely terrifying bogeyman.

The new disturbances in Xinjiang are not the first time that rumor panic has flared in China this summer. In late July, local officials in the central city of Kaifeng were faced with the unusual task of coaxing thousands of local residents back to their homes, having watched them flee in terror, possessions in wheelbarrows, spurred on by rumors of an impending nuclear explosion at a nearby factory. Then, as now, a fundamental lack of trust in the abilities of the state-media complex to provide adequate information led people to concoct their own news. Such is the psychology of rumor that people are far more willing to cling to shreds of doom-laden mistruth than they are to face up to the terrifying uncertainties of an information vacuum.

But while extracting villagers from makeshift blast shelters may seem almost charmingly ridiculous, the twin failure of China’s ethnic and information policies sets up a dangerous playground for worried fantasists on the streets of Urumqi. A Chinese journalist recently noted that the Han and Uyghur communities are now so thoroughly alienated from each other that each suspects the other of being capable of literally anything. When newspaper and government reports of ethnic harmony restored and ‘isolated troublemakers’ brought to book jar so fundamentally with the situation on the ground, it’s no wonder that people are turning to Chinese whispers for their news.