Angry young men-CHINA

http://www.thenational.ae/article/20081128/REVIEW/843636163/-1/NEWS


Man the barricades: Protestors shout anti-French slogans outside a Carrefour supermarket in Chongqing municipality, lashing out against French criticism of China. Today many Chinese youths not only support the Beijing regime, they believe it needs to become stronger at home and abroad. AFP


Updated: November 27. 2008 5:35PM UAE / November 27. 2008 1:35PM GMT

The China Fantasy: Why Capitalism Will Not Bring Democracy to China
James Mann
Penguin
Dh48


Chinese Cyber Nationalism: Evolution, Characteristics, and Implications
Xu Wu
Lexington Books
Dh148


When I first started working in China and was still accustomed to the cozy shopping malls of American suburbia, the ferocity of Chinese shoppers shocked me – I often waited what seemed like hours to pay for groceries as one older Chinese woman after another shoved me aside to reach the cash register. But nothing prepared me for my first visit to a Carrefour in China, in 2005. Superficially, the French supermarket looked much the same as its European outlets – there were the same wide aisles full of endless rows of produce, fresh fish, breads, canned goods. But the resemblance ended there. In the Chinese aisles, shoppers pushed and shoved as they scrambled for products, ramming their carts into one another. At the checkout counter, mobs of shoppers formed a large scrum, which occasionally disgorged one person with a shopping cart who, like a rugby runner, would make a dash for an open cash register.

A few years later, in the spring of 2008, a different kind of crowd gathered at Carrefours across China. But these mobs weren’t there to shop. In response to Western criticism of China’s treatment of Tibetan and Western protests against the Beijing Olympics, angry young Chinese nationalists lashed out. With French President Nicolas Sarkozy voicing particularly tough criticism of China, some demanded that Carrefour must pay. Across the country, demonstrators gathered outside Carrefour outlets, angrily chanting for a boycott.

These two shopping mall scenes illustrate China’s modern-day split-personality disorder. Across urbanised, eastern China, young middle class men and women drape themselves in Western brands and whip out the latest Nokia phones. While China’s industrial sector continues to supply a huge percentage of the world’s manufactured goods, its youths increasingly consume the same products and browse some of the same websites as do their peers around the world. But despite many Western leaders’ predictions that economic growth and increased cultural openness would push China toward political change, China’s teenagers and twentysomethings have not become more politically progressive. In many ways, they are far more nationalist and conservative than their older peers, the men and women who pushed for reform in the 1980s and ultimately failed at Tiananmen Square.

Today, many Chinese youths not only support the Beijing regime, they believe it needs to become stronger at home and abroad. They are pushing Beijing to become more nationalist than the Chinese government itself desires. And if these youths ultimately inherit power in China, they might turn the country, now beginning to work with the international community, in a far more dangerous direction.







Xu Wu, a former journalist at Xinhua, China’s state news agency, chronicles one aspect of China’s new nationalism in his new book, Chinese Cyber Nationalism : Evolution, Characteristics, and Implications. Many of the most strident young Chinese, known as fenqing (angry youth) blog or contribute to websites known for their nationalism, like the “Strong Country” forum linked to the website of the People’s Daily newspaper. Some forums trade in racist images of Japanese, while others call for China to modernise its military and ready itself for battle with America (even as many fenqing apply for higher education in the US). The hatred spills offline, too. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, some Chinese students told pollsters: “When the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, I really felt very delighted.” In a broader study of September 11 opinion, researchers found that “most Chinese college students ... were immediately excited because the United States, an abhorrent, overbearing, and arbitrary country in their minds, suffered an unprecedented heavy strike.” Recent polls of Chinese reveal the same trends in antipathy toward the US, Japan and other nations.

Many older professors I’ve met seem shocked at their students’ anger, xenophobia and fervent nationalism. That’s partly because these internet-savvy nationalists are too young to remember the worst moments in China’s own past. The generation of urban Chinese between the ages of 15 and 35, removed from the era of the Cultural Revolution, have never seen their country weak, poor or in total chaos; under this government, they realize, they have become wealthier than any previous generation in modern China. By comparison, older Chinese, who’ve experienced terror at the hands of their own leaders, generally remain more wary of Beijing.

China’s youth been also been carefully weaned on a diet of government spoon-fed nationalism. After the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, Beijing realised it needed to shore up domestic support, as Peter Hays Gries notes in his extensive study, China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy. Revamped school textbooks have stoked anti-Japanese and anti-Western feelings by emphasising the pre-1949 period, when outsiders carved up China, by highlighting Japan’s war crimes in the Second World War and by portraying Western criticism of China today, on issues like human rights, as red herrings meant to keep China down. Television dramas and other state media celebrate China’s long history and tacitly portray the country as ready to blossom as an international power once again.

Meanwhile, Beijing rolls out state policies designed to keep young Chinese close to the regime, taking measures to bring businessmen into the Party, for instance, while simultaneously cracking down on some anti-government activists. According to my colleague Minxin Pei of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an American think tank, the government has smartly increased salaries for professors and other opinion leaders as well in recent years. In the 1980s, those academics, angry at the regime’s corruption and at their own poor standards of living, led some of the 1989 protests.

Beijing has reaped its fruit. According to one recent survey by the Pew organisation, a leading American polling group, Chinese citizens express some of the highest degrees of satisfaction with their lives of any people in the world. (The survey concentrated primarily on urban areas; in rural areas, where the economic reforms have produced far less growth, satisfaction with the government is far lower.) Some young Chinese I’ve met deride the country’s remaining pro-democracy protestors as foolish to believe that democracy could work in such a large and potentially chaotic nation – exactly the line many Beijing officials espouse. Other young Chinese simply seem not to care, preferring to focus on exploiting their economic freedoms and enjoying the fruits of wealth. As several professors have told me, campus interest in once-popular liberal arts disciplines like political science now pales in comparison to the droves of students studying business and computing. “There’s nothing we can do about politics,” one young Shanghainese told a reporter in an article in Time magazine entitled China’s Me Generation. “So there’s no point in talking about it or getting involved.”

To be fair, Shanghai’s rich kids do not represent an entire young generation. Pro-democracy activists still stand up across China (and are quickly shut down). But without broader public interest in their actions, there have been no large-scale pro-democracy movements in China since the Tiananmen era.

If the prospect of Chinese democratisation seems more remote than it did even just a decade ago, it is partly because the government has also become more sophisticated in its techniques of surveillance and control. Unlike in the Maoist era, when the regime tried to control virtually every facet of people’s lives, today the average Chinese person is free to do virtually whatever they like in the privacy of their own homes. But the state has set certain invisible lines that average citizens may not cross. Working to form a national movement is one such line, and Beijing responds harshly when it is crossed. After the Falun Gong spiritual movement attempted, in the late 1990s, to build a national political presence, Beijing allegedly arrested, tortured and even killed thousands of Falun Gong practitioners.

Meanwhile, other invisible lines criss-cross cyberspace, granting Chinese internet users only a skewed and partial view of the Web. Beijing has developed the most sophisticated Internet firewall and monitoring system in the world. The “Great Firewall of China” screens millions of websites for certain words, like “Dalai Lama”, and allows censors to block content without most Chinese users even knowing what they are missing. Of course, people who understand how to use remote servers can get around the firewall, but this takes a relatively high degree of computer savvy.

Just because they don’t openly support democracy, the new nationalists don’t necessarily avoid political discourse, nor do they even shy away from criticising Beijing. Over the past five years, nationalist young Chinese have taken to the streets repeatedly to protest perceived international slights against China. In 2005, after Japan published its own school history textbook that downplayed some of its nastier deeds in the Second World War, thousands of middle class Chinese rampaged through downtown Shanghai, chanting “Japanese pigs get out,” attacking Japanese nationals and stoning Japanese restaurants. The riots soon spread to other Chinese cities. Similar demonstrations have erupted against the US in times of poor US-China relations, as when a US military surveillance plane crashed into a Chinese fighter jet in 2001, killing the Chinese pilot.

Though Beijing sometimes turns a blind eye to these demonstrations (a pass other types of protests would never be granted), China’s leaders are clearly becoming worried as the demonstrations grow in size and ferocity. During the anti-Japanese riots of 2005, for instance, the Chinese police initially stood aside as the protests grew, but eventually took a harder line, stopping all demonstrations.

The government is right to worry. As Xu Wu notes, fenqing often take to the internet to blast Beijing – for not being tough enough. They have demanded that Chinese authorities take harder lines on Tibet and on Taiwan, deriding Beijing’s recent policy of rapprochement with the Island government. Moreover, Xu Wu believes that the cybernationalists, once regarded as a radical fringe group, are gaining a wider audience. Earlier this year, according to a story in the New Yorker magazine, a nationalist online video called “2008 China Stand Up!”, which entreated China to confront Western nations encircling it in a new Cold War, drew over a million hits in the first week and a half it was online.

In the future, too, the fenqing may become even more bitter. If the global economic crash hits Beijing any harder – it has already resulted in the closings of thousands of factories that produce consumer goods for the West – the fenqing could become harder to handle. As jobs become scarce, the government’s leading means of keeping them quiet – providing solid economic growth – will falter. Worse, China has one of the most skewed sex imbalances in the world. The rising generation of young Chinese men will struggle to find wives, and many will fail to build a family. And as scholars Valerie Hudson and Andrea M de Boer find in their book Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population, a generation of unmarried young men is a recipe for disaster. Already, gangs of male youths have been recruited as thugs by crooked developers and other businesspeople and have been used to violently quell protests against illegal land evictions.

In the future, angry young men with loose personal ties, fired up by nationalism and furious at a government they see as too soft could turn against Beijing itself. It has happened before. In the late 19th century, unequal sex ratios in China left men idle and contributed to widespread armed rebellions in the countryside. Eventually, those rebellions coalesced in the overthrow of the last Chinese emperor – surely a precedent Beijing’s leaders keep in mind.

Many of these trends, however, barely seem to have registered in other countries, where leaders still simply assume that economic growth will eventually produce democracy in China. As James Mann writes in The China Fantasy, a short, incendiary polemic, Western leaders have relied for years on this article of faith to sell ever-closer relations with Beijing to their own, skeptical publics. They promise that deepening trade relations will eventually catalyse political reform, despite there being little evidence to support this theory. By touting this line, Western leaders gamble on Chinese democratisation, preventing their governments from preparing for an alternative future, one in which China becomes an aggressive, nationalist power, perhaps like Japan before the Second World War.

Yet even if China did develop a freer political system, this might not guarantee a smooth relationship with the rest of the world. “We don’t really know what would happen if China were a democracy,” one Bush administration official, herself a prominent democratization advocate, admitted to me. “Maybe all the public pressure would force a democratically elected government to invade Taiwan.” As Western leaders publicly denounce the Beijing government for its human rights abuses, the slow pace of its economic reforms and its coddling of dictators from Zimbabwe to Burma, many in the West are beginning to whisper behind closed doors that Beijing’s leadership may actually be more moderate than the Chinese middle class.



Joshua Kurlantzick is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power is Transforming the World.