Don't diss the D*l*i

More free PR advice for the Chinese leadership

If your antagonist has way more moral authority than you, try to close the gap a little by mirroring (and acknowledging) his dignity and restraint. Don't just resort to that tired old mud-slinging tactic to try to lower his standing.

The D*l*i L*m* may not be quite so spotlessly saintly as he is generally perceived outside of China, but he's certainly not the cackling comic-book villain the government here tries to portray him as.

The Chinese have repeatedly asserted that the D*l*i was pulling the strings of all the recent disturbances, and that they have evidence of this. They haven't produced any evidence. It seems inconceivable that there could be any hard evidence of this kind of activity, at least so soon after the events. I read somewhere that the D*l*i has challenged the Chinese government to send a team of investigators to the seat of his government-in-exile to try to find evidence to support this accusation (he's so much better at PR than they are!).

You know what, Chinese leaders? Even if it were true, and even if you had the evidence, you should think very carefully about how to present those facts to the world's press. It might, after all, just be better to keep it to yourselves - because you have so little credibility (as a result of your lousy PR, and your years of mud-slinging) that people are just going to assume you have fabricated the 'evidence' as black propaganda. These kinds of accusations - even if well-founded - are never going to play well with an overseas audience, whose sympathies naturally lie more with the D*l*i than with you. And I mean everyone else in the world, not just 'the West'. Some of the Asia-Pacific countries more immediately within China's sphere of influence might be more supportive of your government, more sympathetic to the use of the force; but just about everyone outside of China has an overwhelmingly positive view of the D*l*i. It's going to be very, very hard for you ever to change that. And half-arsed attempts to do so by childish name-calling are only going to bolster his 'noble martyr' image, while further diminishing your - already negligible - moral stature.

As Will, the Imagethief, pointed out in an excellent post the other day, the Chinese leadership has been peddling this anti-D*l*i narrative to its own people for so long now that it finds itself locked into it. It could be that they value consistency in the abstract (but somehow I doubt that). It could be that they worry that the large foreign media presence in China today means that messages in the domestic media will be widely reported overseas, however much they try to put over a softer line in official briefings for the foreign press only. It could be that they are worried that a different message released to the foreign media is increasingly likely to find its way back into China, especially via the Internet, and thereby confuse the populace and, perhaps, start to undermine the decades of brainwashing they've been subjected to on this issue. Those would be not unreasonable concerns. But you know what - I think actually they just expect us to buy this crap. Because the Chinese people have bought it so readily for so long. Because they themselves have bought it.

And no, I am not going to make any apology for the use of the highly emotive word 'brainwashing' back there. Chinese state propaganda is so thoroughgoing in its methods and its effectiveness that there really is no other word so apposite.

By the by, you may notice that this hysterical China Daily op ed piece (also linked to above) ridicules the notion that T*bet*ns "revere" the D*l*i - yes, their quotation marks, not mine. Sigh.