Huolong

No. This is how some people in the Western media would answer this question.

As recommended by my CIMA study materials, I started to read the Financial Times for current financial knowledge and today I came across a report titled China’s angry youth vent their feelings.

The most interesting thing I found about this report is that, Jamil Anderlini, the writer tries very hard to understand why fenqings should think and behave so in all the fuss associated with the Olympic torch relay, but arrives at an ill-informed conclusion.

Images of angry Chinese students beating up Korean protesters in Seoul and attacking Carrefour supermarkets at home may well have been the last thing Bo Yang, the controversial author of The Ugly Chinaman, saw before he died on Tuesday in Taiwan at the age of 88.

Chinese students did beat up Korean protesters. But the problem is what was the reason behind the beating. In this typical Western media-style, saying-nothing at-all, and secretly-taking position-in its-wording report, this sentence in green said absolutely nothing, but implies the bad behavior on the part of the Chinese students. And Anderlini uses the recent death of Bo Yang as a guidepost to his conclusions.

Mr Bo, renowned for his criticism of what he dubbed Chinese cultural tendencies towards authoritarianism, xenophobia and intolerance, spent nine years in prison in Taiwan . But he saved his most scathing criticism for the Chinese Communist party, which he accused of drawing out the worst characteristics of the Chinese people.

Authoritarianism, Xenophobia and Intolerance. When you say these three words, you are condescending to your targeted listeners as if you were preaching about Democracy, Xenophile, and Tolerance. Please wait for Anderlini to elaborate later.

For some in China, those characteristics have been evident in the behaviour of the young nationalists known as fenqing, or “angry youth”, behind an aggressive response at home and abroad to the pro-Tibet protests that greeted the Olympic torch relay in places such as Europe and ­Australia.

So, here we know what Anderlini has been driving at! He thinks fenqings are authoritarian, xenophobic, and intolerant. As he believes, right or wrong, pro-Tibet equals pro-Tibet independence.

“These people have been trained in an authoritarian system. They are at the same time victims of an authoritarian system, but they also behave in an authoritarian way towards others and are incredibly self-righteous,” says a Chinese politics professor, who asked not to be named. “We should be more tolerant and respect the right of people to disagree with us but these people do not understand such values.”

Another Western-media’s “not to be named” source! This professor, as he or she is quoted as saying this by Anderlini, has a strange logic here. (Being authoritarian has nothing to do with what the professor has to say. The key is:) “We” are not tolerant and do not respect the right of other people to disagree with “us”.

But, did those pro-Tibet independence rioters rioted in Lhasa and the Korean protesters provoked the Chinese students to be “tolerant and respect the right of the Chinese people to disagree with them but these people (pro-Tibet independence rioters+Korean protesters) do not understand such values“? If I’m not mistaken about what the professor intends to mean, I think the Chinese people, represented by fenqings, do have the right to disagree with others.

The term fenqing has been used in each of the past three generations to describe very different kinds of rebel.

In the Cultural Revolution, the word referred to the millions of urban-dwelling students who were sent to the countryside to toil with peasants and became embittered towards a society that had stolen their futures. In the 1980s the term was used to describe the students and intellectuals who shaped the movement for greater social and political freedoms that ended when the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square on June 4 1989. The Ugly Chinaman became hugely popular among that generation of fenqing when it was published in 1985.

I’d like to thank the writer for providing the part of fenqing’s history related to the Cultural Revolution because I have believed this term is borrowed from the British.

This kind of Western journalistic cliches is what I find most disgusting. It starts from a single, unrepresentative point (disillusioned student-turned peasants[!]) and continues to add hollow statements (movement shapers) and ends with what he truly wants to say that is apparently undisputable (June 4). The problem is each point of the writer’s facts and arguments needs citation and evidence, but obviously he cannot provide them in a news item. At least he does not want to make its readers bored. So, he conveniently uses Western journalistic cliches pointing to a stereotype of China, CPC, and social/political environments here. This way, he hopes his readers can draw their own conclusions - of course - from the stereotype. He does not bother to go below the selective, hollow, and superficial Western journalistic image of China.

In recent weeks the world has seen a glimpse of the modern fenqing – patriotic, xenophobic, nationalistic and, in some cases, violent in their defence of the motherland. This latest incarnation has partly emerged as the result of government policies implemented in reaction to the events of 1989, after which “patriotic” indoctrination became an even more important element of the education system.

Anderlini boldy and conveniently attributes Chinese protests around the world to a flawed education system that brainwashes each of its products. Since we are brainwashed, we cannot think for ourselves rationally and logically, even though some of us might have lived abroad for years and been bred and brought up there! How arrogant he sounds!

We are young people in China, who think for ourselves, do not want others (Western media or Chinese government) to tell us how we should feel, and do not buy all the things our government or you as part of the Wester media try to sell us! God damn it! We know what we are doing and thinking!

Also, this Anderlini tries to make us believe that young Chinese people, because of this flawed education system, all have an original sin of being patriotic as we understand it. What he says boils down to his unsaid conclusion: we, the young Chinese people, do not have a sound mind to differentiate things and do not understand what patriotism is at all!

There are no indications that the contemporary fenqing are members of the sort of organised nationalist movement seen in places such as Russia, where Nashi, a pro-Kremlin youth group, has had a growing profile in recent years.

Anderlini, you bet we are not! Our response to the West’s provocation is purely voluntary. We are not that interested in politics as you paint us to be. We only react to threats, humiliations and trouble targeted at our country. Though the Chinese government and the Chinese people are two, we do stand as one when facing external threats and presures. You hit us, and we will hit back. This is a universal rule of every living being.

Rather, “since the mid-1990s urban educated youth in China have become much more nationalistic rather than angry at the government”, says David Zweig, director of the centre on China’s transnational relations at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “There is a strong sense that the west, led by the United States, is trying to keep China down and stop it from taking its rightful place in the world.”

What the writer does not choose to understand is that the Chinese government and the Chinese people represented by “urban educated youth in China” stand united to guard the interets of their country, as people everywhere else do. We CAN tell the Chinese government from what it does! Instead of wanting to overthrow our government, we support its policies we deem beneficial to our country and oppose its policies we deem otherwise. This goes for other governments and their people. This is also a modern rule in the West. I identified a sense of double standards in the reporter’s writing!

I’m not sure if the United States-led West is funding the riots in Lhasa. But, I’m sure it feels very uncomfortable about a non-White, non-Christian, non-Democratic China with which it has to live and which is the first Oriental country not willing to play the game according to the rules set by the West or willing to do so, especially when this works against the interests of the West.

With limited access to alternative views, the vast majority of Chinese are not aware of the deep resentment many Tibetans feel towards Beijing’s heavy-handed style of governance. They accept without question the official version that recent protests began when a handful of criminals went on a rampage at the incitement of the Dalai Lama.

Anderlini, how did you know we have limited access to the information on the real situations in Tibet and what our Tibetant brothers and sisters feel about the Central government in Beijing (Beijing, as the English language refers to the central government of the country whose capital is in Beijing)? Your version of the story in Lhasa is that Tibetan people peacefully “protest Chinese rule there” and marched for autonomy, not independence, from China? The Chinese people - 56 nationalities, including Tibetant Chinese - are angered by those violent mobs who killed innocent people. Yet, you rub salt into our wounds by implying they did not stab, kill, set fire to, or beat up the victims.

The Dalai Lama? Are you talking about the guy who owned his subjects as serfs and slaves before the Chinese Communists went to Tibet to restore China’s sovereign rule over that region? A political monk who does not read his Scriptures?

The Tibetan mobs are Court-sentened criminals. Criminals are handled by each and every government around the world in the same way: arrests, trials, and imprisonment. This is a rule set by you the West. Why double standards here? A Tibetan tag does not make them full representatives of the Chinese Tibetans. Neither does it exempt them from being punished by laws.

One widely held belief, even within elite political circles, is that the US Central Intelligence Agency supported and incited the Dalai Lama to launch the recent Tibetan protests, which began on March 10 with peaceful demonstrations and descended into violent riots on March 14.

The one thing I can be sure is that the Dalai Lama has nowhere to collect taxes to fund his government and receives donations one way or the other from the U.S. and other government and pro-Tibet independence organizations. You said nothing in this sentence because you did not cite any evidence to prove otherwise.

“People in the west don’t understand the Tibet issue and they are being tricked into attacking China,” says one avowed fenqing who asked not to be named.

But for many outside China the fenqing appear to be looking at the west through the prism of their own society and assuming that governments elsewhere exercise as much control over public discourse as the Communist party does in China.

The writer’s report is filled with “perceptions” on each part of the opposing groups in the question. These key words include “for many outside of China”, “appear”, and “assuming”. Do not behave as if the media (including the FT Anderlini works for) of the rest of the world, as opposed to China, followed fundamentalist journalism rules. Of course you are not managed as your Chinese counterparts are by the government. But your media are run by the bosses, “opinion leaders” and readerships who feed you and your colleagues. In this sense, you are not superior over your Chinese colleagues at all. News reports are about taking sides and positions. You are paid to write reports and your paymasters draw the line beyond which you see the sign which reads NO ENTRY or OUT OF BOUNDS or TRESPASS AT YOUR OWN RISKS or others to the same extent.

“China and the Communist party seem to have become fused in the minds of most of the young Chinese I’ve met,” says a Danish student at Peking University, the birthplace of the Tiananmen generation’s fenqing but today a place where the politics of patriotism drown out dissenting voices.

“If you criticise the government it’s like you’re criticising the entire nation of 1.3bn people.”

What Anderlini and the Danish student does not seem to get is that we the Chinese people stand united with our government when we as a country feel threatened. We support our government’s Tibet policies and its efforts to hold a successful Olympics event. If any of you criticize and try to sabotage these, we of course will execute our freedom of speech and counteract the efforts of any troublemakers.

We, as anyone else, act on perceptions of what others do to us. We interpret the rioting Tibetan mobs as part of an effort to disembody China and protestors against the torch relay in whatever names as their meant intents to sabotage our hopes to hold a successful Olympics event for athletes from around the world.

If they or you do not want us to feel this way, do not do these things we loathe. This is how our thinking mechanism works. We do not like neighbors poking their fingures at us or gatecrashing our happy parties in an unwelcome way. Be acclimatized to it. If you act, you can be sure we will react.

After a wave of anti-western protests centred around Carrefour supermarkets, the government has mobilised its state security apparatus to tamp down passions.

Do you mean it is the Chinese government that started all the fuss in the first place or took advantage of it? You refer to the efforts of a government to cool down its country’s protesters as a tamp-down. OK. What did the government in Germany do to its country’s violent protesters on May Day? Water jets? Arrests? Clamp down there, too.

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好久没写这么长的东西了。太爽了。写完之后，又可以靠它活一阵儿了。