TripDingo

I was over at EastSouthWestNorth and encountered the story of a rural teacher (presented as the girl to the left) who began selling her body to raise money for the school she was teaching at, already for free. Twenty months later, she passed away.

Apparently, the story made some waves within China and even reached some foreign audiences.

It was also completely fabricated.

The person who posted the story has clarified his intent as trying to raise awareness for the impoverished schools of the mountainous western region of China. Through his dramatic fictional story, he feels he has already done good and accomplished his goals due to increased public attention and “awareness” and some resulting allocations of funds by the relevant government authorities.

Zhang said: “I want to clarify to the media.  The story about the memorial meeting for the teacher-prostitute has even reached the north American and European forums.  It is a public interest campaign that I am doing for the poor schools in the mountainous western region.  As a Chinese person with a conscience,  I want to call the people’s attention to education in western China.  As an individual, my means are limited.  So I created a touching story to motivate people to take action.  Although this has created many doubts and controversies, all of that is not important.  The important thing is that my essay has caused certain western mountainous region education departments to allocate funds to the impoverished schools.  I am very grateful and that is enough for me.  As for the vicious rumors and insults, I will ignore them with a laugh, because those people failed to understand why and what I wrote.” 

This is very much a “do the ends justify the means” sort of issue.

More interesting were the comments Zhang, the writer responsible, gave during an interview regarding his ideas about the internet and the “truth and lies” of information:

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I recently had the pleasure of meeting Elliot Ng, the VP of Marketing for Kango.com (who sponsors this blog) and having quite a few exchanges about the China blogosphere, entreprenuership, travel, technology, Shanghai nightlife, and the flows of information between China and the West (amongst many other things). Fantastic guy and I want to bake cookies for him already but I’ll jump straight into what I want to talk about in this post by referencing a post of his over at his blog, CNReviews.com:

There is an incredible one-way mirror (technically a two-way mirror) effect in the world today. People (ok, educated elites) in China have a high degree of awareness about what is going on in the US. But most people (including educated elites) in the US have a low degree of awareness of China.

Elliot then goes on to give an “especially clear” example of this one-sided “awareness” where a marketing director for a Chinese company shared that she watches the American TV shows Prison Break and Entourage. 

I have a few problems with Elliot’s statement (which I’m sure likely stems just from the lack of precision when using certain terms). For one, how are we defining “awareness?” Awareness of what? Of popular media entertainment? Social trends? Political trends? Societal values? Business environments? Professional norms? History? What? I could go on and on. Granted, there are more Chinese (absolute and per capita) who have exposure to American popular media than vice versa but is that sufficient to generalize “awareness?”  (more…)