The violence and vehemence that these Chinese students (and non-students)
have been demonstrating overseas give a good idea what might happen at
home
if the very real grievances and problems there get out of hand, and is one
of the reasons that the CCP rules with such an iron fist. My apartment is
near the French Embassy in Beijing, and for the past few weeks the whole
area has been blocked off intermittently with scores of police manning
barricades in case mobs come to vent their anger about what happened at
the
torch relay in Paris, as happened a few weeks ago. The modernity of
contem****ary China is a thin veneer over a very rough society that has
been
continually brutalized for centuries both from within and without, and
which
still bears deep wounds from the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural
Revolution. Things could get very ugly here if things are not played just
right, and the CCP knows this well. Just to be clear, this is not
something
intrinsic to the "Chinese character", but the result of scars from an
unfortunate history. One needs only to look at Taiwan to see the strengths
of Chinese culture and character, fostered in a much less traumatic
milieu.
Let us hope that the integration of China into the world community happens
smoothly and allows the healing of wounds that have scabbed over but never
healed.
"Micky Wong" <mickywon@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:4818efd4@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> The ****trait of an Extraordinarily Ugly and Violently Dangerous "Olympic
> Host" -- Chinese students in U.S. fight image of their home
>
> гнгн Micky's humble opinion : The violent body language the Chinese
> students displayed in attacking and harming those who disagree with
> China during the torch run in Seoul is the glaring proof that the
> current generation of Chinese are not only very ugly, but also extremely
> dangerous. --
>
> International Herald Tribune
>
> Chinese students in U.S. fight image of their home
>
> By Shaila Dewan
> Tuesday, April 29, 2008
>
> LOS ANGELES: When the time came for the smiling Tibetan monk at the
> front of the University of Southern California lecture hall to answer
> questions, the Chinese students who packed the audience for the talk
> last Tuesday had plenty to lob at their guest:
>
> If Tibet was not part of China, why had the Chinese emperor been the one
> to give the Dalai Lama his title? How did the tenets of Buddhism jibe
> with the "slavery system" in Tibet before China's modernization efforts?
> What about the Dalai Lama's connection to Hitler?
>
> As the monk tried to rebut the students, they grew more hostile. They
> brandished photographs and statistics to sup****t their claims. "Stop
> lying! Stop lying!" one young man said. A plastic bottle of water hit
> the wall behind the monk, and campus police officers hustled the person
> who threw it out of the room.
>
> Scenes like this, ranging from civil to aggressive, have played out at
> colleges across the country over the past month, as Chinese students in
> the United States have been forced to confront an image of their
> homeland that they neither recognize nor appreciate. Since the riots
> last month in Tibet, the disrupted Olympic torch relays and calls to
> boycott the opening ceremony of the Games in Beijing, Chinese students,
> traditionally silent on political issues, have begun to lash out at what
> they perceive as a pervasive anti-Chinese bias.
>
> Last year, there were more than 42,000 students from mainland China
> studying in the United States, an increase from fewer than 20,000 in
> 2003, according to the State Department.
>
> Campuses including Cornell, the University of Wa****ngton in Seattle and
> the University of California, Irvine, have seen a wave of
> counterdemonstrations using tactics that seem jarring in the American
> academic context. At the University of Wa****ngton, students fought to
> limit the Dalai Lama's address to nonpolitical topics. At Duke,
> pro-China students surrounded and drowned out a pro-Tibet vigil; a
> Chinese freshman who tried to mediate received death threats, and her
> family was forced into hiding.
>
> And last Saturday, students from as far as Florida and Tennessee
> traveled to Atlanta to picket CNN after a commentator, Jack Cafferty,
> referred to the Chinese as "goons and thugs." (CNN said he was referring
> to the government, not the people.)
>
> The student anger, stoked through e-mail messages sent to large campus
> mailing lists, stems not so much from satisfaction with the Chinese
> government but from shock at the ****trayal of its actions, as well as
> frustration over the West's long-standing love affair with Tibet ? a
> love these students see as willfully blind.
>
> By and large, they do not acknowledge the cultural and religious
> crackdown in Tibet, insisting that ordinary Tibetans have prospered
> under China's economic development, and that only a small minority are
> unhappy.
>
> "Before I came here, I'm very liberal," said Minna Jia, a graduate
> student in political science at USC who encouraged fellow students to
> attend the monk's lecture. "But after I come here, my professor told me
> that I'm nationalist."
>
> "I believe in democracy," Jia added, "but I can't stand for someone to
> criticize my country using biased ways. You are wearing Chinese clothes
> and you are using Chinese goods."
>
> Students interviewed for this article deplored the more extreme
> expressions of anger, like death threats against the Duke freshman and
> the tossing of the water bottle, and pointed out that Chinese students
> had little experience in the art of protest. But, they said, they could
> also understand them.
>
> "We've been smothered for too long time," said Jasmine Dong, another
> graduate student who attended the USC lecture.
>
> By that, Dong did not mean that Chinese students had been repressed or
> censored by their own government. She meant that the Western news media
> had not acknowledged the strides China had made or the voices of
> overseas Chinese. "We are still neglected or misunderstood as either
> brainwashed or manipulated by the government," she said.
>
> No matter what China does, these students say, it cannot win in the
> arena of world opinion. "When we have a billion people, you said we were
> destroying the planet./ When we tried limiting our numbers, you said it
> is human rights abuse," reads a poem posted on the Internet by "a
> silent, silent Chinese" and cited by some students as an accurate
> expression of their feelings. "When we were poor, you thought we were
> dogs./ When we loan you cash, you blame us for your debts./ When we
> build our industries, you called us polluters./ When we sell you goods,
> you blame us for global warming."
>
> Rather than blend in to the prevailing campus ethos of free debate, the
> more strident Chinese students seem to replicate the authoritarian
> framework of their homeland, photographing demonstration participants
> and sometimes drowning out dissent.
>
> A Tibetan student who declined to be identified for fear of harassment
> said he decided not to attend a vigil for Tibet on his campus, which he
> also did not want identified because there are so few Tibetans there.
> "It's not that I didn't want to, I really did want to go ? it's our
> cause," he said. "At the same time, I have to consider that my family's
> back there, and I'm going back there in May."
>
> Another factor fueling the zeal of many Chinese demonstrators could be
> that they, too, intend to return home; the Chinese government is widely
> believed to be monitoring large e-mail lists.
>
> Universities have often tried to accommodate the anger of their Chinese
> students. Before the Dalai Lama's visit to the University of Wa****ngton,
> the campus Chinese Students and Scholars Association wrote to the
> university president expressing hopes that the visit would focus only on
> nonpolitical issues and not arouse anti-China sentiments. According to a
> posting on the group's Web site, the university president, Mark Emmert,
> told them in a meeting that no political questions would be raised at
> the Dalai Lama's speech. A spokesman said the university, which opened
> an office in Beijing last fall, had prescreened student questions before
> the Chinese students voiced their concerns.
>
> Some experts say that colleges feel constrained from reining in the more
> extreme protests through a combination of concerns about cultural
> sensitivity and a desire to expand their own ties with China.
>
> "I think there tends to be a great deal of self-censor****p," said Peter
> Gries, director of the Institute for U.S.-China Issues at the University
> of Oklahoma, "and not just among American China scholars but among the
> whole web of people who do business with China, including school
> administrators."
>
> At the USC lecture, the Chinese students arrived early to distribute
> handouts on Tibet and China that contained a jumble of abbreviated
> history, slogans and maps with little context. A chart showing that
> infant mortality in Tibet had plummeted since 1951, when the Communist
> Chinese government asserted control, did not provide any means for
> comparison with mortality rates in China or other countries.
>
> One photograph showed the Dalai Lama with Heinrich Harrer, author of
> "Seven Years in Tibet" and a one-time member of the Nazi Party ? hence
> the question about the Dalai Lama's connection to Hitler, who died when
> the Dalai Lama was nine. The question about slavery referred to the
> feudal system in place in Tibet until the mid-20th century. Another
> photograph pur****ted to show a Tibetan drum that, according to the
> caption, was covered with "a virgin girl's skin."
>
> The students said they were frustrated by a sense that many accounts of
> the recent riots did not reflect the violence and destruction by the
> Tibetan protesters, who vandalized shops owned by Han Chinese (the
> ethnic majority in China). According to official Chinese news sources,
> 22 died in the rioting.
>
> Much of the anger has the tenor of disillusionment. During the Tiananmen
> Square protests in 1989, the Western news media was seen as a source of
> otherwise elusive truth.
>
> "We thought Western media is very objective," said Chou Wu, a
> 28-year-old working on his doctorate in material science, "and what it
> turned out is that Western media is even more biased than Chinese media.
> They're no better, and even more, they're against us."
>
> Students argue that China has spent billions on Tibet, building schools,
> roads and other infrastructure. Asked if the Tibetans wanted such
> development, they looked blankly incredulous. "They don't ask that
> question," said Lionel Jensen, a China scholar at Notre Dame. "They've
> accepted the basic premise of aggressive modernization."
>
> That may be, some experts suggest, because the students whose families
> can afford to send them abroad are the ones who have benefited the most
> from China's economic liberalization.
>
> Spring Zheng, 27, another graduate student at USC, dismissed the notion
> that her patriotism stemmed from the government's efforts to use the
> schools to instill national pride, particularly after Tiananmen Square.
>
> Rather, Zheng said, "We have witnessed with our own eyes about the rapid
> change of China. China is developing fast, and Chinese people's lives"
> are "becoming better and better, fast."
>
> As the USC session wound to a close, the organizer, Lisa Leeman, a
> do***entary film instructor, pleaded for a change in tone. "My hope for
> this event, which I don't totally see happening here, is for people on
> both, quote, sides to really hear each other and maybe learn from each
> other," Leeman said. "Are there any genuine questions that don't stem
> from a political point of view, that are really not here to be on a soap
> box?"
>
> At that moment, the bottle hit the wall.
>
> International Herald Tribune Copyright
>
> www.iht.com
>
|
