Chinese people on and off campus are complaining about the portrayal of the simmering conflict between Tibet and China in media outlets around the world, including Dateline.

One example is the April 4 Dateline story, "Tibet-China: Tensions on 'the roof of the world,'" that quoted a Tibetan graduate student and two faculty members, one in history and the other in psychology. The article was apparently linked to and e-mailed around the country and possibly the world — some e-mails contained Chinese language symbols, and phone calls criticizing the article came from as far away as Dubuque, Iowa.

As Dateline went to press Wednesday morning, the office had received at least 38 e-mails and 10 phone calls, many of them filled with language and assertions that violate the campus's Principles of Community. (For more information, see principles.ucdavis.edu).

Here are some excerpts from phone calls and e-mails from those within the UC Davis community:

"The article is full of bias and mistakes," wrote Yongfeng Yang, an assistant project scientist in biomedical engineering. "As people in other parts of China, people living in Tibet had happy and peaceful lives until the riot happened this March."

Like many of the writers, Yang pointed out that many buildings were burned and many people were injured or killed in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. Tibetan exile groups believe that Chinese security forces have killed more than 140 Tibetans, while the Chinese say the figure is much lower, under 20, and point out that Tibetans have killed Chinese people in Tibet.

Western media access to Tibet has been severely restricted. At the same time, according to the Associated Press, Western media in China and elsewhere have received phone calls, e-mails and text messages charging an alleged bias in their recent coverage of the anti-Chinese protests in Tibet.

Western media

Jingmin Zhou, a UC Davis alumnus and software engineer in the Bay Area, said the Western media and academic world misunderstands the situation between Tibet and China. He has spent time gathering information on the subject.

"Most of my materials are from academic research papers conducted by the scholars in U.S. or the Western countries, media, tourists and anti-Chinese-government advocators," Zhou wrote in an e-mail. "All these materials show the liars (sic) by Dalai Lama and the Tibet government-in-exile as well as the bias, distortions and fabrications by the Western media."

He said he realizes that many Westerners "do not believe the words from the Chinese government." But, he maintained, many scholars and even Western tourists who have visited Tibet "have made many conclusions conforming to what the Chinese government has said."

Some Chinese say their government's rule in Tibet since 1950 has been favorable for the people there. Yang noted, "Each year Chinese government spends a huge amount of money in Tibet to improve the life of Tibet people."

'A good memory'

The changing economic conditions in Tibet, wrote Jinbo Wang, a graduate student in plant pathology, "is not an excuse for them to kill and attack Han Chinese. The civilization or Westernization of Tibet from a slavery regime is not easy process."

Zhaonian Zhang, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering, described the Dateline article as "quite misleading."

He explained that as a high school student in China's Guangdong province in the late 1990s, he got "along very well" with Tibetan students there. "One Tibet student joined my family and stayed for a week during the summer of 1998. We ate on the same table, slept in the same bedroom, enjoyed the same air conditioning and browsed Web sites on the same computer. That was really a good memory," he recalled.

He said the community development graduate student quoted in the Dateline article, Tenzin Youdon, has a different view than the Tibetans he knows.

"I think the story in the news is a special case for Tenzin Youdon," he said, "but (she) is not representing the majority of the native Tibet people, at least not representing the native Tibet people I know."

Asked to respond, Youdon said that critics of the free Tibet movement "do not question what's happening in China" and that "they are taught to believe in whatever the Chinese government says."

"Over here we debate things fairly, democratically," she said by cell phone while heading to San Francisco April 9 to protest against the Olympic torch's passage through the city. "But in China you often only see one point of view."

Huawen Wu wanted to see more points of view from the local Chinese community in the media coverage, as did most of the others who called and e-mailed.

"Have you ever wondered if there's another perspective to these accusations?" Wu asked. "Ever consider that places like China are filled with human beings?"

To read the Dateline article on China and Tibet from last week's issue, visit dateline.ucdavis.edu/dl_detail.lasso?id=10196.