1) believed by the vast majority of the population because the lovely government created a system in which all media news is propaganda and the people know this for the most part, so they rather trust word of mouth.

2) often some very smart people are very focused on their particular skill and so don’t have the broad frame of reference to be able to discern between made up stories (as you can see some of the people leaving comments are able to do). But really not that different from the US!

3) “bbs” comments get reported as ‘news’ and as an accurate measure of the mood of the people, rather than the morons with no lives they are who sit at home in chat rooms every night.

4) foreign reports are often limited in their access to real news, and also are often somewhat lazy and often don’t speak Chinese very well so are too reliant on their Chinese assistants, who of course relish the idea of being able to publish these types of stories as either they are slightly patriotic themselves or the opposite. Or they just take what they find in a chatroom and call it news. A good journalist is a rare find these days, really!

All that said, anyone living in China the past decade or so, like myself, would agree that the smell of anti-foreigner sentiment is much more palpable than a decade ago, fostered in part by Hu and his evil henchmen, but just generally because you have got a simmering society which despite its obvious improvements, is still very imbalanced, but everyone feels less insecure about being in a messed up country now that they have paved roads and cell phone service. As the comments above state for me, Chinese don’t get along with each other so easily! So why not, as most of the disgruntled developing world does, blame the ’round eye’ barbarian. And maybe rightly so. We did after all sell them tons and tons of opium a century ago, and recovery from drug addiction and the feelings of low self-esteem and worthlessnes don’t go away overnight, as any drug addiction counsellor will tell you! Question is though, how did all those junkies get hooked on the stuff to begin with? As white folk weren’t exactly partying with Chinese back then. Hmmmm, the thing about Chinese that does keep them down, and people often will back this up, is they don’t help each other very often. I saw this on too many occasions to recount here. And as you can see from the comments above, there are some who also hate black people too! All that said, there are tons and tons of really nice people in China. And women who like black guys too(never met a Chinese man who does in ten years there). So quit panic mongering buddy!