This Generation (6 page)

All it takes for everyone to get so agitated is for foreigners to direct a few words of criticism or abuse our way. But with indignation comes complacency, complacency about how unified we are, complacency that “our country finally is strong, so some countries are starting to be afraid of us, and now they are scheming to undermine our territorial integrity.” But I see no evidence that our people are demonstrating the kind of strength that would spread fear all around the world. You protest against Carrefour, putting the Chinese employees of Carrefour in a terrible position, and then more and more Chinese gather round, and a few disruptive Chinese smash a few things up, and then a troop of Chinese riot police is mobilized, and the Chinese media is lapping it all up—and I'm sure from start to finish not a single French person has been involved.

Those who support us and compliment us, we feel, are our friends, and those who oppose us and belittle us are our enemies. This is a childish attitude that reflects far too much concern about matters of face.

Why is our national self-respect so fragile and superficial? Somebody says you are unruly, so you curse him and wish you could beat him up, and then you say, “No, we're not unruly!” That's a bit like if Xiaoming says you're an idiot, so you go wave a card in the face of Xiaoming's girlfriend's little brother's dog which reads “I'm not an idiot.”
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Xiaoming will get to hear about this, sure enough, but he'll still think you're an idiot, even if you feel wronged and are convinced that Xiaoming is more stupid than you.

What makes me uncomfortable now is that there is simply no debate—you just have to show your colors: Are you going to boycott or not? If you boycott, that shows you're a good sport, you're a Chinese, you stand with the right side; if you don't boycott, then you're a traitor; and if you don't show your colors, then you are a coward. But I'm sure that if the French government were to loosen
its restrictions on immigration from China to France, there would be plenty of takers.

The situation we're in now basically is this: Carrefour is an inflatable doll in the grip of a bunch of people with urges they need to relieve, for a life of confinement requires some kind of outlet—and one that costs nothing. As they abuse the doll, they keep asking it and asking its maker, “You see how strong I am? You see how much of a man I am?” And when they find that others are not interested in molesting the doll, they accuse them of impotence.

Just what will happen on May 1, we still don't know. But I really doubt that people are so fired up with indignation. I think it's more that so many years have passed since the last time people had the chance to congregate and stage a demonstration. It's fun and exciting, isn't it? And doing it under the shelter of patriotism is a very safe bet, right? If you really can't stand the insult, if you really believe that the current situation is equivalent to the invasion of Chinese territory in 1900 by the Eight-Nation Alliance, that we're facing a national emergency—a critical situation with enemies on all sides—and the solution is to protest outside a supermarket, then I respect your view and understand your feelings. But still the sense I'm left with is: You just love to go to the fair.

April 23, 2008

Here I want to respond
to comments left by many young nationalists. I don't know why this is, but patriots have a pronounced tendency toward foul language and crude behavior. I have had to do a good deal of filtering to ensure that this Q & A session comes across simply as a dialogue between two points of view. If the questions seem brief, that's because I have trimmed them substantially, eliminating a lot of emotional coloring.

Q. When a foreigner comes over and gives you a slap in the face, you just take it lying down and don't fight back. Are you just trying to show how cool you are?

A. No foreigner has come over and given me a slap.

Q. Han Han, a foreigner rapes your mom, and you still won't put up a protest?

A. No foreigner has raped my mom.

Q. The motherland—that's your mother.

A. The motherland is the motherland, my mother is my mother.

Q. How can you possibly think you're doing the right thing for this land of yours?

A. I own no land, and neither do you.

Q. You're no Chinese. A real Chinese would boycott Carrefour.

A. I don't see anything in the constitution that says that. This is simply your strong-arm, low-grade patriotism at work.

Q. Patriotism is a virtue, a fine tradition; it comes with us when we are born.

A. If, given the chance to be born a second time, you chose to be born once more in this country, I agree that this would show true patriotism and excellent moral fiber.

Q. You don't even love your own mother—can you be considered human?

A. My mom's name is Zhou Qiaorong, and I love her very much. Through my own efforts I make sure that my family has all its basic needs covered. If you want to make sure that your country has its needs met, isn't your family a good place to start?

Q. You say that the owner of Carrefour may not actually have given money to the Dalai Lama, and we have not been able to prove that he has. But that doesn't stop us from boycotting French goods. Carrefour is just a rallying point—what we really need to do is to boycott everything connected with France, like Louis Vuitton, like Peugeot, like Citroën. . . . Support the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and let the strength and solidarity of the Chinese people make the world shudder!

A. The modern Olympic Games were the brainchild of a Frenchman—Pierre de Coubertin. So you can boycott them while you're at it.

Q. We must resolutely boycott Carrefour. Shockingly, you are prepared to let foreign powers humiliate our great nation. If everyone was as cowardly as you are, our country would have been swallowed up long ago.

A. Oh yes, you're strong and brave, you're not afraid to die, you're a martyr—because you're so daring as to refrain from shopping at a supermarket, because you're so bold as to put Carrefour ice cream on a shopping cart and let it lie there melting while you go off without paying, because you're so fearless as to stand by the exit to the supermarket and curse the emerging shoppers as traitors, because you have the gumption to burn the Dutch flag as a warning to France.

Q. The Carrefour in Hefei flew the Chinese flag at half-mast—why aren't you angry about that?

A. I'm sure Carrefour wasn't responsible for that—they wouldn't dare. The flagpole stands in the square outside the supermarket there. This action is typical of some ruffian patriots—they were the ones who lowered the flag and then blamed the supermarket and spread the rumor so as to provoke people and make as much uproar as possible. How unscrupulous can you get? So many things like that have happened in other such campaigns.

Q. At this moment where the population is united as one, you pretend to be clear-headed, make sarcastic remarks, and pour cold water over the righteous determination of patriotic citizens—this runs exactly counter to the popular will. The fact that you still manage to publish your views goes to show there's just too much freedom of expression in China—they should close down your webpage.

A. Half the time you're urging the government to relax its controls on free expression, but now when you find that
some people oppose your views you hope the government will clamp down on your critics. The country's trying to move forward, but you're pressing it to move backwards. You should be careful when you engage in this kind of backtracking—what's bad for others is going to be bad for you.

April 23, 2008

I want to start by
saying that, having received my education in China, I have no particular faith, and I'm sure that's basically true of all of us. The good thing is, I do have some humanitarian ideals, and I have never felt that love of one's country has anything to do with one's ethical principles as a human being, nor do I think that just because you were born in a particular place it is incumbent on you to love it unconditionally—or otherwise you're totally depraved.

Nonetheless, I must say I am very fond of this country of ours, even to the point that I am never keen on foreign travel. Apart from competitions where I am obliged to show up, each year I regularly turn down a dozen or more opportunities to attend events in other countries. Nor have I ever had the idea of going for a holiday abroad, much less the notion of moving abroad permanently. I prefer to stay here. Naturally, my interest in Chinese girls has a lot to do with this—I can't imagine leaving them.

What I tell them is: Don't do any of that street-protesting stuff. If you really feel compelled to join a boycott, then just take a break from shopping. I say the same thing to my readers: Just tell yourselves
you've been boycotting Louis Vuitton and Peugeot for decades now, so you've already done your duty.

Again I appeal to my readers: Don't take to the streets, don't march, don't rally, don't do anything dumb. Now is no time to risk your lives and spill your blood. Just let things settle down. Let's just focus on doing a good job of hosting the Olympics. The last thing we need is more disorder. You young people dressed in the Chinese flag—please don't let things get out of hand. Just follow the government's advice: Marches and rallies will get you nowhere—certainly not out of the country.

On the Internet, though, people are saying, “See! After this boycott of ours, the French have apologized to us. The French president has yielded to our pressure. This just shows how effective our patriotic protests have been. Once again, the Chinese people have proven their mettle.”

All right, then—you've boosted your self-image, I can see. In fact, however, so much of the time our real sensation is that we don't get the respect we think we deserve. Whether you look at things from your personal point of view or from the national point of view, whether it's a matter of slanted news reports by foreign media, or interference with the passage of the Olympic torch, or support for Tibetan or Taiwanese independence, or insults to our people, when you really get down to it, what triggers our outrage is that we don't get respect, that our pride has been hurt.

We attach supreme importance to this bunch of torches, expecting them to receive the same VIP treatment here as they move along their route that they would get in the heavenly kingdom, but now suddenly we discover just how many critics we have, and realize that they are no more to be trusted than CCTV. Actually, of course, there have always been people critical of us; it's just that normally we never get to find out about them, because CCTV and the New China News Agency keep telling us that the people of the world are our friends. This time, though, they can't keep the facts hidden any longer, so we're all very shocked. This, actually, is a good thing, for
it prompts the government to improve its performance and gradually it is making some progress in terms of how it handles the news. Ten years ago, we would simply never have had a clue that there were problems in Tibet and that the Olympic torch had been extinguished on its passage through Europe. There are lots of things like this that can no longer be hushed up, so they realize they may as well be more open—after all, we are capable of coping with a certain amount of bad news. If people insist on boycotting this and boycotting that, to the point that in the future foreigners keep their mouths shut whatever happens within these borders, then the biggest loser is going to be the expression of opinion here in China.

There have been occasions in the past—like the anti-Chinese movement in Indonesia or the bombing of our embassy in Belgrade—where actual human lives were lost, but our angry young patriots have never before unleashed so much energy as they have in reaction to the recent provocations, even though our only real grievance is that we have been the target of some unfair commentary. We have more money now, of course, and so we naturally think more highly of ourselves and are more unwilling to take criticism. Also, the embassy bombing was a matter for the government to handle and the deaths that ensued were a matter for the victims' families, but this time round what the foreigners said and did was an attack on every Chinese person, and that's going way too far. When you extinguished the torch, you trampled on my dignity! Way off there in France, you managed to bully me, so from way off here in China I'm going to have you know—you can't get away with that!