Development of human rights in China

Problemof Western media

The problem with Western media is that, especially when investigating before reporting about non-Western countries, the researchers will never step out into the field. They never try to do any research about the relation between media reports and the reality on the ground, or about the reaction of non-Western readers to the Western media coverage. As a consequence, tensions ... will go unnoticed for years.

Without the precious information I got through years of intense communication with Chinese people and people from other regions all over the globe, I would never have realized that the human rights discourse of the Western media is problematic. But becoming aware of an issue is one thing; collecting solid data and analyzing them with a sound scientific methodology is much more time-consuming.

Especially in the field of human rights, it is extremely damageable to everybody if some actors try to impose their specific set of values to the whole world, even though it is obviously in contradiction to the human rights concept which has been worked out by the international community within the framework of the United Nations.

Otto Kolbl is a researcher at the German Department of the Lausanne University, Switzerland.