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The New (and hardcore) Nationalism of the Young
It’s going to be very difficult for people in the west to understand how young Chinese men and women feel, unless they imagine how they themselves felt in the nineteen-sixties, when things were “crazy” and there were assassinations, and fires, and riots, and war, and injustice, and everyone felt like they were involved even when they weren’t (or so they tell me).
In China, young people are disaffected. The world is changing fast, faster than they can understand, but they do understand that, even if only as something big moving just beyond the edge of their eyes. Families and traditional systems of mentally organizing the world no longer work, and parents don’t understand children, and children don’t understand parents, and people don’t understand themselves. There are economic problems: finding work is hard, then there are long hours (so long), and little money (so little), and always pressure to succeed even when success is undefined and impossible anyway. The gap between the rich and the poor is massive and growing; and there are social problems: crime (but did they have a choice?), terrorism (but for higher ideals?), corruption at all levels of government (but can you hate them all, even the one’s who did nothing wrong?). There are moral problems, all the moral problems of modernity and change and newness fighting together and against one another: homosexuality? Divorce? Sex and love and violence? Everything that anyone of any age ever didn’t understand.
What does a young man or woman in China believe in? There is no religion. There is no Vietnam war. There is no hippie culture. There is no rock and roll, there are no Beatles, no Stones, no Jimi Hendrix. There is no civil rights movement. There is no cold war. There is no Irak. There is no “culture war.” There is no new grassroots, Internet progressivism. There is no Mao, no Deng, no Zhou Enlai. No Cultural Revolution. No communist revolution, to join or to fight against. There is only a helpless, headlong, terrified, wondrous sprint into the future, whatever that means.
These recent years, the true Great Leap Forward, this last generation, this current generation, is very different from Americans of the nineteen-sixties. But they are disaffected, and they do need things to believe in, and what they have is their country and what it has done for them and their own (and somehow, after all, it’s not just young people). I do not condone “cheap patriotism” as a Mr. Wen refers to some recent opinions. Especially when people I know and love are hurt by it, as they have been. But the greatest things that have emerged from this thing (the written children of long misapprehension) are efforts to spread understanding.
There are a lot of things to say to a lot of people, but I thought I’d start here. I write this as a metaphor, not as truth, because I think this metaphor will help people think in a slightly different way.
Don’t Read the News Too Much
There was a period of time when I read everything I could get my hands on regarding Tibet, the protests, the media response, the Chinese media response, the counter-protests, the boycott, and anything remotely related to the above. Now I keep up in a much less serious way.
People who aren’t in China may not have paid as much attention, but the protests along the Olympic torch route and the Western media coverage of same have provoked a…powerful response. This is a very complicated issue, much more complicated than “evil communist China invaded Tibet and now their media machine is spreading lies about it again.” There are lies, there is false information, and Tibet has problems. But it didn’t help when some Western news groups ran photos of stuff “happening in Tibet” that actually happened in Nepal, or CNN’s Jack Cafferty called Chinese people (whether he meant the government or the people is unclear, but to many it doesn’t matter) a bunch of “goons and thugs.”
Among many, many Chinese people both here and in other countries, there is a very deep seated sense that the West (a unit) is out to get China, has been out to get China, and will continue as long as they (we) can. Westerners “want China to fail” or “want the Olympics to fail” or “disrespect Chinese people.” Many would argue that Chinese people’s sensitivity is “cultural” (a cultural predilection to be concerned with ‘face’), or a result of government propaganda/propagandistic educational materials. The first is completely false, and the second far too easy, far too simple. China is full of nationalist propaganda. So is America. Is ours better, more objective, less simplistic or one-sided? To a certain extent. It’s also certainly less omnipresent. And our media is light-years beyond China’s in objectivity, its ability to present multiple sides of an issue, etc. However, nationalism is something that exists everywhere, that we value, and that we want. We consider the right amount of respect and love for one’s country to be a virtue, if it is leavened with careful consideration of the government (distinct from the country) and the government’s flaws. This consideration is not as developed in China as many want (myself included). But Chinese people are not half as mindless as they are often portrayed.
The communist government has presided over the largest economic transformation and poverty reduction process in the history of the world. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of crushing poverty, seen their sons and daughters have opportunities they never could, watched their country, which they love, become someplace important again. It all happened in a couple decades. They have reason to be proud. Doesn’t mean they have reason to do the worst kinds of things patriotic Americans (or people of any nation) have done. But you can see how they might start getting annoyed if all they hear from the West is this or that report of human rights violations. Now, I think that the best Western news organizations cover China in a much less prejudiced manner than many Chinese people think, but even they are still occasionally guilty of articles that to Chinese people sound prejudiced. To many Chinese people, this whole phenomenon is understood as racism.
Like I said, it’s a complicated issue. I’ve got one more post going up, looking at young Chinese peoples’ nationalism, and then maybe a break from this.
