beat, smash, kill...or maybe not

Looks like the Guardian guy went off on one. Here’s the original description of the assault on Lu Banglie:

They continued for 10 minutes. The body of this skinny little man turned to putty between the kicking legs of the rancorous men. This was not about teaching a man a lesson, about scaring me, about preventing access to the village; this was about vengeance - retribution for teaching villagers their legal rights, for agitating, for daring to hide.

They slowed down but never stopped. He lay there - his eye out of its socket, his tongue cut, a stream of blood dropping from his mouth, his body limp, twisted. The ligaments in his neck were broken, so his head lay sideways as if connected to the rest of his body by a rubber band.

And here’s a transcript of an interview with the man himself from Radio Free Asia:

Q: What was the diagnosis of your condition at the hospital? Can you tell us what the hospital said and how you personally felt?

A: After the examination, the hospital said that I had quite a bit of muscle injury, including two spots that were bleeding. I had bleeding on my upper arm and then the shoulder ... the principal diagnosis was "muscle injury" as well as "external head injuries." That was at the Bailizhou hospital. But the examination at Zhijiang basically said that there were no real problems. But I still feel more foggy than before. I am hurting all over, but there are not too many visible signs. Therefore, I think that they were pretty good at beating people. I cannot eat much right now. I can eat a little bit, slowly. I can control my movements and thinking. My body aches, but my will power can control the aches.

Bad enough, but more “outside the pub” than “inside the heart of darkness”. But then Chinese democracy activists “crushed under tanks” finally and irrevocably seems to be part of the established outside narrative of Chinese politics, and it does seem to be a potent one. It certainly got me going, as you can see from the last paragraph of the previous post. And the problem with a narrative is that it lets you say anything that fits in with the storyline and the mindset it generates.

But this story isn’t about a dodgy freelance getting carried away. Making it about the Guardian as some people already seem to wish to do tends to draw attention away from Taishi itself and the fact that Lu Banglie lives to fight another day. What’s more, he evidently wishes to do so.

Comments

[Jody Tresidder]

"But this story isn’t about a dodgy freelance getting carried away."

I respectfully disagree. I came to Joffe-Walt's original shocking Guardian splash while in the UK yesterday. (I'm usually a US-based web Guardian reader. Reading the hard version is a slightly different experience because you are inescapably directed to noticing and absorbing the paper's lead story). I happened to have spent part of the previous day at the powerful London Victoria and Albert Museum exhibit of "Between Past and Future: New photography and video from China". I was in China for a couple of weeks last year - a tiny detail, I know, but I suppose it has made me more alert to items about the new era there.
So I don't think I was thoughtlessly stunned by the original story. The Guardian imprimatur, the original detail, the position it was given gave no wiggle room for the "oops, sorry - dodgy freelance copy" back pedal that seems to be happening today.
Lu Banglie and his heroic like deserve far better. I'm not sure - in this instance - that I even care about the difference between "outside the pub" and "heart of darkness" cock ups.
Once again, wearily, I remind myself not to trust what the Guardian reports (New Orleans etc) until it has been independently sourced.