Chinese State TV Airs Tibetan Self-Immolation “Documentary” [UPDATE: You Can Watch It Here]

State media is reporting that state media aired a documentary on Tibetan self-immolations on Sunday. Here are the opening paragraphs of Xinhua’s story about China Central Television:

National broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) has released a documentary on self-immolation in the country’s Tibetan-inhabited areas.

The documentary debuted at 9:27 p.m. on Sunday on CCTV-4, an international channel mainly targeting overseas viewers in Chinese language.

Can we stop here and note that if you’re reporting, in the second paragraph, on the broadcast time of an already-aired show out to the minute, you really have nothing to say?

It also aired on CCTV’s English channel, Spanish channel, French channel, Arabic channel and Russian channel on Monday.

The documentary, titled “Facts About Self-Immolation in Tibetan Areas of Ngapa (Aba),” discloses the truth about self-immolations that have occurred in Aba, a Tibetan and Qiang autonomous prefecture in southwest China’s Sichuan Province.

We haven’t seen Facts About Self-Immolation in Tibetan Areas of Ngapa (Aba) online — you can watch all of CCTV-4′s shows on its website, but the program listed on Sunday (at 9:30 pm, not 9:27) is a cooking show called A Delicious Dish A Day.

UPDATE, 5:01 pm: As commenter Björn Djurberg points out, Xinhua’s official Twitter account, @XHNews, has linked to the full 32-minute documentary on what appears to be Xinhua’s official YouTube page, China View (@XHNews often links to videos from there). The documentary is embedded above. End update

It’s possible that the “documentary” is only a three-minute clip that ran from 9:27 pm to 9:30 pm. The 9 pm show on CCTV-4′s listing is the 9 o’clock nightly news, and only the first 20 minutes of it are available for viewing.

Below is a December 13 CCTV news report about Chinese courts ruling that inciting self-immolation is intentional homicide:

(H/T Alicia, RFH)

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