Who is Vivas?
Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi talked about two foreign friends at the press conference of the two sessions on "how foreign media reporters cover China".
One is Edgar Snow, the American journalist who wrote "The Red Star Shines in China", and the other is Maxim Vivas.
Vivas, who is in his late 80s, is a Hispanic-French national. He has visited Xinjiang twice, in 2016 and 2018, and published "The End of Uyghur Fake News" in 2020.
Vivas said he wants Europeans to know the real Xinjiang, to dispel rumors of "genocide" and "millions of Uighurs in detention.
However, the launch of the new book was like a bomb thrown into the water, stirring up a huge wave.
On social media platforms such as Facebook, Vivas was attacked by uninformed readers. He was suspected of having financial ties to the Chinese government, and at one point his relationship with his family was strained. He himself said: I acted as a "suicide bomber" to publish this book.
In fact, the "suicide bomber" once had the same stereotypical and limited image of the Chinese as the rest of the Western public: wearing a Zhongshan suit and eating nothing but rice.
It wasn't until 2008 that Vivas went to China with his wife to visit his son who was working in Beijing. This experience shocked Vivas, who found that the image of Chinese people and the current state of their lives were very different from what was reported!
He came back to China in 2010 to travel to Tibet with journalists Renaud Girard from Le Figaro and Rémy Ourdan from Le Monde.
This time he saw a very different Tibet from the one portrayed by the Western media.
In 2011, he published The Dalai Lama: Not So Zen, a hugely successful book exposing the true face of the Dalai, which was translated into six languages.
Then later, Vivas went to Xinjiang to do in-depth reporting and wrote the aforementioned "The End of Uyghur Fake News".
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