Today lots of small red hearts icons have suddenly started appearing on my msn messenger list of contacts. They followed the following message that seems to be spreading fast across the chinese internet community:
"转发;请在msn名字加上括号L括号CHINA,让全世界都知道中国人的团结,请转发你们的msn朋友们"
Which translates as follows:
"Pls forward - add in front of your MSN name with bracket-L-bracket-China to let the whole world know Chinese people are all united. Please forward to your MSN buddies"
Which leads us to the highly sensitive subjects of the last few weeks: Tibet, human rights and misunderstanding between China and the western world.
I have been wanting to write a post on this subject for long, while struggling with knowing where to start from...
I have listened to many chinese across different age groups, mainly in big cities. The general feeling is one of consciousness that the chinese government is censoring the information about Tibet. But interestingly this censorship is accepted for the sake of the unity/ harmony of the country. "The government hides part of the information in order to prevent further social problems to spread" is one explanation I heard a lot.
Over my few years in China, I got to the belief that the unity of the country is to the Chinese, what the freedom of expression is to western countries: the cornerstone of the Society, the thing that will always remain the priority over anything else.
The other thing I got to realise is how proud the chinese population is of welcoming the Olympics. They see that as nothing less than the coming out of modern China on the world stage. A unique opportunity to show to the whole world what China today is and how it has dramatically changed since the dire years of the Cultural Revolution (many mainland chinese I spoke too are still convinced that most of the western people see China and chinese people today, the way they were thirty years ago).
Net, there is a growing feeling within the chinese population (which the government naturally and dangerously helps growing in my opinion) that the West is trying to spoil their moment of fame by interfering into so called internal politics.
The recent news coming from France (the torch relay, the human rights badge, Sarkozy saying yes but no but yes to his attendance to the opening ceremony...), have made France a favorite target.
I have started seeing msn personal messages (those that appear next to your name on your friends contact list) that say in chinese:
- 'ban french products: buy counterfeited Louis Vuitton bags'
- 'we don't have a say on Crosica's independance, so why do you interfer into our internal affairs?'
- 'who are the french to tell us what to do ?'(a good question actually that the whole world has been asking itself for a while... but that's another subject)
I am not saying that China should not get any political counter while its under the Olympic spotlights. As a matter of fact, the chinese government was the first to make these Olympics a very political event: the journey of the torch is an example: from its start in Kazakhstan to its try to bring back Taiwan into the list of chinese cities hosting the torch, or its journey to the top of Everest in Tibet...).
I am just thinking the West should be careful before embarking lightheartedly into somehow sterile protests and David vs Goliath fantasies that only end up bringing together one nation into nauseous nationalism rather than affecting the way its government behave.
Below is a video of Jin Jing an handicaped chinese athlete who was holding the torch in Paris. Look at it from the perspective of a chinese person and get a sense of how you might feel...
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