Chinese nationalism Flame on
Source: Economist (Original Article)
Chinese nationalism
Apr 24th 2008
From The Economist print edition
WHATEVER hopes there were that this August’s Beijing Olympics would be a festival of fun and friendship with a bit of sport thrown in are fading fast. The event was intended to mark China’s reintegration into the world, and re-emergence as a great power. Instead, preparations for the games have degenerated into some of the ugliest verbal confrontations for years between China and its critics. Passions and tempers are running high on both sides. On China’s, even those suggesting something as innocuous as a dialogue are being pilloried as “traitors”. Foreign journalists have received death threats. Far from being a celebration of China’s new openness, the Olympics risk vindicating those abroad who argued it was not a fit host and those at home who think a fearful, envious world will never give a resurgent China its due.
As in 1999, after NATO’s bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade, or in 2005, when anti-Japanese protests in China threatened to get out of hand, China’s government finds itself in an awkward fix. It wants to rein in the popular anger before it descends into violence, or turns on the government itself. Yet its own policies and its control of information have stoked the anger in the first place.
That is not to deny that the angry Chinese nationalists who have deluged the internet with their splenetic outpourings and staged protests in China (see article) have a point. Coverage in the Western press of unrest in Tibet has been rather one-sided. It has stressed the harsh Chinese crackdown on peaceful protests and tended to overlook the violence by Tibetans. For most Chinese observers, what happened was an outburst of vicious racist thuggery directed at ethnic Han Chinese in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. And the authorities, incomprehensibly, tolerated it until 19 people had been killed.
Similarly, views of degrassi the next generation dvd the protests attracted by the round-the-world …continue reading