Read on Twitter
To all the foreign "journalists" in China, if you can't read & understand a Chinese newspaper from cover to cover, or pass 9th grade Chinese Literature, then your opinion is worth fuck all to me. https://twitter.com/annafifield/status/1310739178343157760
Because Chinese is a non-phonemic writing system, most casual learners can speak but can't read/write. This is at best the level where most western foreign reporters *who knows Chinese* operate at. In China this is considered illiterate, and CPC had a big campaign to reduce it.
Not only can they not read publications in Mainland China, they can't read papers critical of CPC from HK/TW/SG etc. either. So basically people who base their understanding of China solely on these media outlets are reading reports done by illiterate people.
This applies to foreign reporters in general but specifically western reporters in East and South East Asia because of the structural difference in writing systems.
Although to give Anna credit, she let slip 1 truth in the tweet (perhaps unwittingly): it is just what China *feels like* to her. Not facts, not data, not structured & logically deduced opinion, but feelings. It's just a narrative, and nothing more.
