The Hateful Propensity of an "Olympic Host" Exposed -- Protests against
the West spread in China
International Herald Tribune
Protests against the West spread in China
By Andrew Jacobs
Monday, April 21, 2008
BEIJING: Nationwide demonstrations against a French supermarket chain
spread on Sunday as thousands of people protested what they said was
France's sympathy for pro-Tibetan agitators. The protesters have also
been singling out Western news outlets, especially CNN, for what they
said was biased coverage of unrest in Tibet.
In a sign that the government was still allowing anti-foreign sentiment
to spill over into rare street demonstrations, thousands of people
rallied on Sunday in front of Carrefour markets in six cities, including
two, Harbin and Jinan, where there had not been protests earlier.
Demonstrators carried banners saying, "Oppose Tibet Independence" and
"Condemn CNN," according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
The rallies are the largest public outpouring of nationalistic fury
since 2005, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets to
denounce Japanese textbooks that omitted any mention of Japan's wartime
atrocities in China. Those protests, in which eggs and stones were
thrown at the Japanese Embassy in Beijing and the consulate in Shanghai,
ended abruptly after the authorities clamped down on the organizers and
blocked the anti-Japanese Web sites and message boards that were fueling
the campaign.
In recent days, the government has called on citizens to temper their
fury at the West, but it has not acted to halt public demonstrations,
which have been stoked by newspaper editorials, Internet postings and
text messages sent to millions of cellphones.
On Sunday, the state-run People's Daily newspaper called for a cooling
of passions, although it stopped short of condemning the demonstrations
or the spreading boycott campaign against French goods. "As citizens, we
have the responsibility to express our patriotic enthusiasm calmly and
rationally and express patriotic aspiration in an orderly and legal
manner," the newspaper said in a front-page editorial.
According to the official news agency, 2,000 people, many of them
students, gathered in front of a Carrefour market in Wuhan, where they
sang the national anthem and waved the Chinese flag. Similar scenes
played out in Xi'an, Qingdao and Dalian, as well as in Jinan and Harbin.
The authorities maintained a heavy police presence but did not interfere
with the demonstrators, according to wire service re****ts.
The public anger has been percolating since mid-March, when disturbances
in Tibet killed 19 people, according to the government's official count,
and Chinese security forces began a crackdown, in which Tibetan exile
groups say more than 140 people were killed.
Most Chinese view the unrest as an outburst of hooliganism and wanton
violence, and many have been infuriated by Western news accounts that
****tray the rioting in Tibet as a revolt against oppressive rule. The
dismay turned to indignation after the Olympic torch relay became a
magnet for anti-Chinese protests, especially in Paris, where pro-Tibet
demonstrators attacked a Chinese amputee athlete in a wheelchair who was
bearing the torch. The woman, Jin Jing, has become a national hero and a
symbol of resistance against those who are seen as seeking to disrupt
the Olympics and sully China's reputation.
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