The smartest person on Earth, Benji Hardy, sent me this article from the Washington Post. He asked for my opinion on it, and I seem to have written a bit more than I meant to about Chinese Nationalism. Here’s my response.

The article was written by Yang Jianli, who according to wikipedia, left China after the “1989 incident” in Beijing. He later earned a couple graduate degrees in the States and founded an organization called the Foundation for China in the 21st Century (blocked here, but here’s the link, if you live outside of China)– I assume this is an organization that works for human rights within China.

Because of his dissenting views about China’s government, he was blacklisted from China, and his passport revoked. But he went back anyway in 2002 to observe labor struggles in DongBei (North East China), where he was arrested and put in jail for five years. According to the wiki, “Yang [had] been held incommunicado by the Chinese in violation of their own and international law. His wife and children as well as his extended family were denied access to Yang and were justifiably concerned for his health and safety while he languished in prison.”

Anyway, when he was released from prison in 2007, he went back to the States and started writing for the Washington Post about Chinese human rights issues (amongst other things, including a good article about China’s “parasitic link” to Burma — Washington Post blocked now, just search the Washington Post for “Yang JianLi Burma”). His most recent article is about China’s nationalism in relation to the upcoming olympics. This is an issue I’ve been following quite a bit, as it really affects my own life here.

Rather than bringing human rights awareness to China, the recent Olympic Torch protests in the West seem to have created a firestorm of resentment in the government and people here. So much so, that Anne and I have wondered that IF something happens at the Olympics (ie. protests and specifically, the anti-foreigner sentiment that would create), should we have plans to get out quickly if we need to. Our fears are certainly overblown, but not THAT overblown. Just look at what happened to the Chinese student in America who tried to create dialog between some fr33 T1bet (sorry, I don’t want this site to get filtered) protestors and their Chinese counter-protestors at Duke: article in NYTimes. For those who won’t click through, basically, the Chinese netizens have threatened to kill her if she ever returns to China, and her parents have been harassed to the point where they had to go into hiding. This is simply for trying to create a dialog between the two groups as the protests got out of hand (she had not sided with the Tibet people).

Additionally, though perhaps less violently, public demonstrations still continue against the French supermarket chain, Carrefour, on a daily basis in many cities around China. The significance of this should not be lost–other forms of protest or demonstration within China are met with fierce (and often bloody) repression from the government. That these protests have not been met with such force from the police or government officials implies direct support of these anti-foreign and anti-western protests. Recently, the government has called on the protestors to stop their demonstrations, which the protestors have willingly done, but the government has not openly admonished the protests or disagreed with their sentiments.

Another more frightening aspect of these violently anti-foreigner attitudes comes from a website called www.anti-cnn.com. This site argues that western media, especially CNN, have been misleading the public into thinking that the Chinese police are brutally cracking down on monks within Tibet. In fact, they argue, it is the monks that are creating all the violence within Tibet and killing innocent policemen. All of this, again, their words, is because of direct influence by the “Dalai Clique”. As evidence of this, they use screengrabs of news casts from the West. A couple of the photos do indeed show Nepalese police and not Chinese, but many of the photos simply show Chinese police in their military uniforms that is common place in China. However, the irony of someone criticizing Western media for lying to the people while openly promoting China’s state-run and censored media seems to be entirely lost.

The site also references how China has brought freedom and prosperity to Tibet by ending their feudalistic and the rampant human rights violations that happened there before China stepped in. Indeed, the same stories that most Chinese tell when asked about Pre-Chinese-Rule Tibet are also mentioned. The drums and lamp shades made from human skin, the torture etc. No mention is made, however, of emperial disgraces during China, or other human rights travesties that China (and indeed many other countries, including the US) commited during this time.

What’s most frightening about this is the extent to which these sentiments have been echoed throughout the internet by Chinese netizens. Often these anti-foreigner feelings and tirades are directed not only at foreigners, but TO foreigners themselves. Anti-cnn.com is an English-only website. Other things are translated into (often broken) English so that foreigners can read the views themselves. One frightening example of this can be found in this flash video. At first the video is a bit humorous, as Chinglish usually is, but after a few minutes of listening to the Patriotic music and reading the anti-West text, it becomes downright scary. (I made a flash video parody of this called “Auspicious Mao Zedong so Fckuing COOL!”, but there is absolutely no way I could post it on the internet for my own safety.)

Yet another example of China’s nationalism comes from a rather unexpected place– its English classes. A few months ago, a reporter from Harpers asked my opinion about a program called Crazy English which is a very popular English training course here. The slant of the article, the reporter told me, was to highlight the program’s founder, Li Yang, to instill what he thought of as Western attitudes and learning styles (shouting as loudly as possible, etc.) while at the same time imprinting his students with a nationalistic viewpoint of the West. However, because of my misunderstanding of her slant, and my unfamiliarity of the Crazy English program, I ended up sending her mainly my own tirade about how annoying students are who actually buy into this program and a series of essays by students about the program. However, not long after my correspondence with the Harper’s reporter, this article came out in the New Yorker about the program.

The New Yorker article is a fascinating read about the workings of the programs, and quotes various linguists and educators who describe the program “huckster nationalism”; Wang Shuo, a famous Chinese novelist is even quoted as comparing the populist style of learning with the populism found during the cultural revolution. The article is rife with amazing quotes and anecdotes about the program, the most enlightening of which is one of Crazy English’s own slogans, “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!”

So how do we, in the West understand China’s nationalism? This article, China’s Loyal Youth, appeared in many publications, including the NYtimes. It does indeed help to explain why many of my students just don’t understand the uproar about Tibet. They also tend to act very defensively when it comes to anything that might be considered a critique of China. When we were required by my foreign program to cover internet censorship in class, I had to walk very lightly on egg shells in discussing this. Certainly, Chinese students know that their internet is censored, despite China’s claim that there is no censorship taking place. However, most students’ reaction to this is not indignation (as is many foreigners’ who travel or live here), but rather that it exactly as it should be– the government is protecting them from the multitudinous amounts of “bad things”, “bad people”, and “bad information” on the internet. Even though, when pressed, the students I’ve asked don’t really quite know what the “bad things” are. One student’s response, “We don’t know because the government protects us!”

In China’s Loyal Youth, Matthew Forney argues that this faith in its government, and indeed nationalism, comes from many places, especially the Education system, “or indoctrination system” as he describes it, and the students’ own lack of world experience. As he points out, Chinese students do very little other than study (and often memorize, in my experience) the textbooks given to them by the government via their schools. In fact, there is very little time to do anything else. A third reason for this nationalism and unfaltering faith in their government is that few have first hand experience with any real form of political repression. Certainly, there are many students today who have never even heard of the “Beijing Incident” in 1989. And though there are hundreds of daily protests that are being violently repressed in the country side every day, most urban and suburban dwellers rarely learn anything about them because of the state run media.

The best article I’ve read, however, is the one I mentioned at the top of post by Yang JianLi titled The Facets of Chinese Nationalism. In the artile, Yang describes four distinct types of nationalism: “Pragmatic Nationalism,” driven by a desire to continue China’s economic growth in the international stage; “Vassal Nationalism,” which is nationalism directly linked to directives from the CCP– an additional example of this might be the Carrefour protests mentioned above; “popular nationalism,” which is the most widespread– perhaps people who fall in this category might have the ideals of human rights and democracy, but they don’t understand how to express them and additionally, Yang argues, they are not well enough informed to truly unerstand the problems; and finally “Human Rights Patriotism.” Yang’s description of this type of patriotism reads a bit like a manifesto for his organization:

This type of patriotism holds human rights as its core value and democracy as its goal; pursues Chinese glory by seeking to gain dignity for each compatriot; promotes strength and prosperity by striving to liberate people’s minds, ideas and potential; and aims to safeguard the country’s integrity through recognition of the integrity of each individual and ethnic group.

And perhaps he’s right. Maybe there are there are these freedom-fighting, democracy-loving, Chinese out there. But where do we find these “patriots”? We certainly don’t read about them in the West unless they’re being put into prison or sent to re-education camps. But every now and then an inspiring article slips through to the west that illustrates this type of patriotism. For example, the Shanghai intellectuals who released a petition calling on Beijing to resume talks with the Dalai Lama (again, given China’s usual response to dissent, this is a bit unusual).

However, a more interesting avenue for these “patriots” comes in the form of China’s burgeoning punk music scene. In the past few months in Nanjing, where I live, there have been more and more punk bands travelling through here playing shows. The Washington Post offers a good look into this music scene, that like the original punk movement in the West, has ideals of autonomy and freedom at heart, and very often takes a political stance (compare this to the Limp Bizkits and Green Days in America these days). The article is often inspiring and exciting, though some of the quotes are a bit disheartening, for example:

“Most bands are into punk because it’s fashionable. They are more like copy bands, cover bands that copy the lifestyle. Punk rock should be more dangerous, more deep. You should establish your own style,” said Yang, the lead singer of P.K. 14, which has a sizable following and performed Saturday night at a bar in Beijing’s Wudaokou district.

“We want to be a dangerous band, like Fugazi or The Clash or Bob Dylan. Woody Guthrie’s folk music influenced me a lot,” Yang said. “But because the government doesn’t care about us, we are not forbidden from playing. Maybe we are not dangerous. It’s sad.”

Nevertheless, by my own experience, the shows that are in Nanjing are drawing a larger and larger crowd every week– and the crowds, though the shows are often held at a Mostly Foreigner Hangout Spot, largely consist of young Chinese.

The nationalism found here can often be confusing, and sometimes pretty scary for expatriates when it turns into Anti-Western protests and backlashes (remember the Boxer Rebellion?). In the lead up to the olympics, we will certainly see more and more of this back and forth between groups calling for human rights in Tibet and within China and the resulting backlash by Chinese groups. I think that Yang JianLi is mostly right in his categorizations of this nationalism, but as with most things (think religion), the scariest bits of this nationalism are the most vocal ones. Perhaps there are the heroic, human-rights-minded, democracy-loving, patriots, but what is the most evident to foreigners living here and to the Western media that try their best to report on China, are the groups that are protesting anything foreign, and the increasingly frequent calls for a return to the era of Mao Zedong like in the flash video linked above.