(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-04-12 11:44

LOS ANGELES - The Chinese American community here has been enraged by "Tibet independence" activists' attempts to disrupt the ongoing global relay of the Beijing Olympic torch, and some prominent members have acted to fight back, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

Many people from the Chinese American community also feel angry that the Western media has been biased against China in its reporting of the recent riots in China's Tibet Autonomous Region, the newspaper said.

"They're pretty angry. People usually trust Western media because they think it's balanced. Not anymore," Cat Chao, hostess of a popular Chinese-language radio talk show in Los Angeles, was quoted as saying.

According to the report, two members of the Committee of 100, an influential organization of leading Chinese Americans, recently wrote newspaper editorials warning that confrontation with China would stymie progress and that support of the Beijing Olympics would lead to more openness.

Helen Zia, a renowned journalist and social activist who was chosen by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom as a torchbearer for the Olympic torch relay's run in the city two days ago, used her experiences of traveling in China to explain why she carried the torch.

"The Chinese government was heavily promoting the Olympic spirit and teaching Olympic values of friendship, understanding and fair play in the schools," she wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Zia said she observed firsthand the wide-ranging diversity and openness of viewpoints and cultural expression that now exists among China's 1.4 billion people.

"The calls to boycott the Olympics and to label everything about China as evil can only serve to isolate China and the United States from each other," she wrote.

Many Chinese Americans say they are proud that China is to host the Olympics for the first time, but Tibetan separatists and their supporters using the Olympics as a weapon to attack China's Tibet policies make them unhappy.

"The Olympics were supposed to bring glory to the Chinese," said Daniel Deng, a leading Chinese American lawyer in Los Angeles. "Now the focus is the Dalai Lama and Tibet. A lot of Chinese are offended."

The newspaper said that even some Chinese Americans from Hong Kong agree that the Chinese government's investment in Tibet is improving a backward region.

Stephen Chan, a local broker and property manager, said that Tibet has been the hot topic in recent days among his circle of friends and there has been little disagreement that China is right.

"I'm a big fan of China now. Everything they do makes me proud to be Chinese," Chan told the newspaper.