Firstly, having decided Chengdu is worth an extra day, there was a reasonably late breakfast this morning and time to "indulge" in that veritable 'Pravda', the 'China Daily'. Actually, on the whole, the newspaper is no better and no worse than most of the daily trash that you get in the west. However, in this weekend's edition there was a wee report on the Glasgow by-election that I read with interest and, which might have been taken straight from some of the British media where the emphasis seems to be on Labour losing the seat and not on the fact that the Scottish Nationalists won it. In the 'China Daily' they go a step further; there is absolutely no mention of who won the seat, under the headline, "Labour loses vote" it is deemed unnecessary to say who they lost against and enough to write about Gordon Brown's "setback"1. Now this was a small report of about seventy words and they might not have found the space to mention the SNP. Indeed, the report might be plagiarised from AP, Reuters or somewhere else in the western media. Nevertheless, one cannot help but think that in a country where national unity is almost a creed it might be deemed undesirable to report on seperatist tendencies elsewhere.
1 'China Daily' (July 26-27) p11
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