But is it really any surprise?
Recall:
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080301faessay87203/jerry-z-muller/us=
-and-them.html
Us versus Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism
Jerry Z. Muller
=46rom Foreign Affairs, March/April 2008
Summary: Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism
in politics. But in fact, it corresponds to some enduring propensities
of the human spirit, it is galvanized by modernization, and in one
form or another, it will drive global politics for generations to
come. Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups
in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often
the least bad answer.
JERRY Z. MULLER is Professor of History at the Catholic University of
America. His most recent book is The Mind and the Market: Capitalism
in Modern European Thought.
* * * * *
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/editorial/story.html?id=3Da6ec0a29-9=
5cc-41fd-beef-33c095af516c
Criticism of China stirs a nationalist dragon
Jonathan Manthorpe
Vancouver Sun
Friday, May 02, 2008
The waves of outraged Chinese nationalism in the past few weeks
contain some strikingly new elements that the West needs to understand
if sound relations with a rising China are to be maintained.
Chinese at home and among dias****a communities in Asia, North America
and Europe have responded fiercely and with evident self-confidence to
criticism of the Beijing government's human rights record targeted at
events around the Olympic Games.
There are drives for a boycott of French goods in response to
disruption of the Olympic torch relay in Paris by Tibetan and other
human rights protesters.
There are massive online petitions against the American television
network CNN and other western media.
Some of this is in response to bad journalism in the West re****ting
the March demonstrations in the Tibetan capital Lhasa and the reaction
of the Chinese authorities. Another element is outrage -- shared by
many westerners -- at such things as CNN's curmudgeon commentator Jack
Cafferty calling the Chinese government a collection of "goons and
thugs."
All this has led to the widespread belief in China that the West, and
the United States in particular, is afraid of China's rise to world
superpower status and is determined to contain it if possible.
That belief doesn't hold much water when one looks at the
extraordinarily open-handed economic and diplomatic policies
Wa****ngton has pursued with Beijing for over 30 years.
But the im****tant point is that it is believed by many among China's
vast class of upwardly mobile, university- educated 20- and 30-year-
olds who are the country's future leaders.
These are the people who in 1989 would have been in Tiananmen Square
demanding political reform.
Now they are motivated by intense pride in China's achievements since
market-oriented economic policies were adopted 30 years ago, and a
determination not to allow any perceived insult to go unanswered.
An im****tant aspect of the outburst of nationalism in the past six
weeks is that it appears to be a genuine upwelling of emotion among
Chinese people and not a response engineered by the Communist party,
as has frequently been the case in the past.
The fostering of nationalism has been an essential element of Chinese
communism, which was always tentative in its allegiance to Marxist-
Leninism.
The party's nationalist credentials have increased in im****tance the
longer it has stayed in power and as its legitimacy to govern has
withered.
Communist party-inspired nationalism in China plays very heavily on
responding to the so-called "humiliation" of the country in the 19th
century by the industrialized powers and by Japan in the late 1800s
and the first half of the 20th century.
Along with that is intense and fully justified pride in China's
historic achievements and pre-eminent role in the world through most
of recorded history.
The Communist party has always been fully aware, though, that
uncontrolled nationalism can be a dangerous force once unleashed.
There is always concern among the leaders in their Zhongnanhai
compound in Beijing that they could easily become the target of the
mob and be deposed, as has happened to other Chinese dynasties in the
past.
So on recent occasions when nationalist outrage has boiled over in
China, the Beijing authorities have managed these incidents with great
care.
In 1999 Chinese took to the streets in their thousands and marched on
the U.S. embassy after American warplanes bombed the Chinese embassy
in Belgrade. Wa****ngton insisted the bombing was an accident as a
result of using out-of-date maps to fix targets, but few people in
China believed that.
The Beijing authorities controlled and directed the demonstrators by
providing buses and marshals.
The organization was just as thorough in 2005 when the publication in
Japan of some school history books minimizing the brutality of the
country's age of imperial militarism was the catalyst for a series of
anti-Tokyo demonstrations in China.
Again the demonstrators were carefully marshalled and the extent of
the protests contained.
But the growth of Internet use in China in the past two decades has
taken nationalist sentiments and, to some degree, activities beyond
the party's control.
And facing forces in society it does not control is the Communist
party's nightmare.
To reach Jonathan Manthorpe, go to his blog at: www.vancouversun.com/blogs
=A9 The Vancouver Sun 2008
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