One of the most common criticisms levelled at foreign journalism by Chinese media-watchers is that foreigners are only interested in making China look bad.  The foreigners, so the meme goes, are threatened by China’s development and are therefore out to smear China at every opportunity.  The truth, however, is that, rather than being part of a fiendish international conspiracy to undermine China’s rise, a lot of the journalism on China is, quite simply, just plain lazy. 

Most mainstream Sino-related articles in the major foreign newspapers still fall into the same three cozy stereotypes: "those crazy kungfu Chinese", "the mystical ‘Buddhism and Confucius and stuff…’ Chinese", or "the evil Chinese authorities and their dastardly plots".  And while they are almost certainly not committed to "making China look bad", many foreign editors do have a tendancy to seek out the more sensationalist stories about China.

On recent high profile story serves to illustrate this point.  The Guardian, among others, has been focusing on the decision by Jining City authorities to cull stray dogs after a recent rabies scare.  Newsworthy? Well, maybe, but this story really has been done to death in the international press, receiving far more coverage than it actually deserves.  (Although, it should be noted that this item is generating quite a bit of chatter on internet forums within China too.) 

The reason for this blanket coverage is cleary because this news item makes a perfect off-the-shelf article in the "Communists as Pantomime Villains" genre: guaranteed to attract the eyeballs while at the same time requiring absolutely no research whatsoever.  "Chinese Government Slaughters Cute Pets": the story pretty much writes itself.  (Of course, the way this incident was handled doesn’t say much for the Jining authorities’ spin doctors - if they have any - but that’s a different matter.)  Earlier this week the NYT had another prime example of this genre: a pretty gruesome report on China’s booming cadaver trade.

Ronald Soong, at the peerless Zonaeuropa blog, has an excellent post looking at the tendancy of negative China-related rumours to spread unchecked, and the resulting difficulty of refuting these rumours.  This is in relation to the recent "organ harvesting" scandal.  At Zonaeuropa you can also find an article debunking the recent, obviously very suspect tale of a "government sponsored massacre" in Xiangyin, a story that was picked up on spec by certain foreign news outlets.