Makers of Public Opinion About the Far East

Al MONG the factors which help to mold public opinion about the Far East one of the most important is the stream of dispatches which flows abroad by mail or cable from newspaper and news agency correspondents stationed in China and Japan. When it is realized that a correspondent of the Associated Press of America, for example, represents a constituency of some I,300 newspapers, while other news-distributing organizations have still wider ramifications, it will be seen that here is a force which can work with tremendous potency for either good or evil in the field of international relations. News-gathering conditions in the two countries vary greatly, yet certain problems are common to each. There is, for instance, the language barrier which effectively shuts off all but a very small minority of correspondents from primary sources of information. Japanese is reckoned one of the world's most difficult languages and it is doubtful whether a foreign correspondent, fully qualified in other respects, has ever been able to speak and read it with any degree of fluency. As a result most correspondents are obliged to depend upon native translators for their knowledge of what is published in the Japanese press and, however loyal and capable the translator, it is questionable whether he will always share very completely his employer's more objective view as to what should properly be translated. Etiquette, which demands the avoidance of open offense to the foreign visitor, plus a patriotic desire to present his country in the best possible light, may well combine to set up in the mind of an otherwise well-intentioned translator a sort of subconscious censorship which obscures the facts. In China the position is not greatly different. The number of professional correspondents who ever reach the point of being able to interview a Chinese official in his own language is extremely small, and the difficulty of reading books and newspapers is complicated by the fact that many of them are still written in the classical language, which even a national is able to master only after many years of study

Geography · Political science · Politics · Public opinion · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations · Law

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