Interesting article about Chinese youth nationalism

[JaiMin]

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February 3, 2015

Nationalism and Chinese public opinion
Written by Andrew Chubb.

Few terms in public political discourse are as contested, contradictory and downright slippery as nationalism. Deployed to describe an enormous variety of social movements, ideologies, popular attitudes, mass sentiments, elite policy agendas and even consumption patterns, use of the word carries with it a risk of stringing together superficially related phenomena with very different causes under the same label. The recently released resultsof a survey on the South and East China Sea disputes offer further reason for caution when approaching Chinese public opinion through the lens of nationalism.

The giant conceptual umbrella

Agreed-upon definitions of nationalism have proved elusive. As Craig Calhoun wrote in his 1997 book on the topic, therhetoric of nation is the one basic factors that unites disparate phenomena like Japanese economic protectionism, Serbian ethnic cleansing, American anthem-singing at sports events, Chinese democracy protests, and pan-Arab political movements under the same conceptual umbrella.

In the case of China, with its large and diverse population, nationalism encompasses a particularly complex and often contradictory range of phenomena, making it crucial to specify just which aspects of nationalism we are referring to. Suisheng Zhao’s classic study showed how the “state-led pragmatic nationalism” of the ruling the Communist Party, prioritizing economic development and a peaceful international environment, has existed in uneasy cohabitation with liberal and ethnic variants emphasizing, respectively, themes of popular civic participation, and ethnic Han or minority identity.

The distinction between Chinese nationalism’s more nativist and cosmopolitan tendencies may be relatively easy to discern, but there are important and much less intuitive variations within the ostensibly anti-foreign attitudes and actions most commonly associated with the term.

Militarism and the Global Times: more marginal than mainstream

In a recent report, Exploring China’s Maritime Consciousness: Public Opinion on the South and East China Sea Disputes, I detailed the results of face-to-face surveys with 1413 urban respondents in five Chinese cities carried out in April 2013. Around 60% of the respondents reported paying close attention to the PRC’s maritime issues, and a majority expressed absolute certainty regarding the correctness of China’s disputed claims. These results would no doubt please the CCP’s propaganda strategists, who have long sought to increase “maritime consciousness” (海洋意识) among the general public in order to bolster the country’s maritime claims.

The widespread concern with distant islands, and strong conviction that they belong to China are clearly manifestations of nationalism – if by this we mean the rhetoric of the nation’s existence, an ideology that seeks to advance the nation’s interests, or a mass “in-group” sentiment to the exclusion of outsiders. But this certainty regarding China’s correctness cannot be equated with “nationalistic” policy preferences. When respondents were presented with a menu of ten policy approaches, military action was the second-least popular policy approach – well behind “compromise through negotiation” (55-57%), “UN arbitration” (58-61%) and “international publicity” (84-85%). In fact, only two policies received less than 50% approval: the famously unpopular official “shelve disputes and pursue joint development” formulation (30-31%), and “send in the troops, don’t hesitate to fight” (42-46%). The survey question specified no conditions under which each policy would be pursued, so the result suggests only a minority of respondents believe the military option should even be on the table. So while China’s urbanites appear to follow the issue closely, and express belief in their country’s claims to the islands, they are cautious about the prospect of starting a fight over them.

This picture of Chinese public opinion contrasts starkly with the warmongering vitriol that often dominates China’s online discourse on foreign affairs, and the assumptions of overseas based academics and commentators who worry that the Chinese public’s “rising nationalism” is exerting an irrational force on PRC foreign policy. It is different, too, from the picture painted by “hawkish” PLA media pundits and state-run media like the Global Times (环球时报), which often claimto speak for Chinese public opinion.

Indeed, while the Global Times uses sensationalist and self-righteous editorial lines on foreign policy issues to help stimulate sales, it would be a mistake to assume this approach is attractive to the general public at large.
When the survey’s respondents were asked to give an example of a newspaper from which they obtained information on the South China Sea and Diaoyu Islands issues, only 11 of the 1413 respondents (0.8%) named the Global Times. Rather, most named their local metropolitan daily.

Although it may seem surprising at first glance, this result is perfectly consistent with the Global Times’ reported circulation of around 2 million copies and 10 million readers – figures that have not risen in recent years. This further underscores the paper’s outsized influence on Western perceptions of Chinese public opinion: its fulminating editorials may be a selling point, but only to a limited (and apparently stagnating) target market. If by “nationalism” we mean the conviction that China is in the right in its disputes with its neighbours, then it is mainstream. But if we mean militaristic policy preferences and consumption of pompous jingoism, it is decidedly marginal.

Historicism = nationalism?

Zheng Wang is one of several authors who have detailed the rise of the CCP state’s “patriotic education” campaign in the years following the Tiananmen crisis, in which the Party nearly lost power. Zheng shows how in the 1990s the Party consciously traded in its original revolutionary vanguard identity for a self-proclaimed role as China’s greatest patriotic force, restoring the nation to its bygone greatness. This has meant waves of educational campaigns targeting the whole society with reminders of China’s history of humiliation and victimization at the hands of foreigners through the “Century of Shame” (百年国耻) during which the weakness of the Chinese state is seen to have resulted in invasions by Western and Japanese imperialists.

The results of the above-mentioned survey confirm that the Party’s efforts to encourage the Mainland public to view current events through this historical lens have been largely successful.More than 87% of respondents agreed with the proposition that “Japan’s presence in the Diaoyu Islands is a continuation of the ‘Century of Shame’.“ This is understandable, given Japan’s history of imperialist aggression against China. However, 83% said they also viewed the status quo in the South China Sea in the same light – a startling result given China’s rivals there, principally Vietnam and the Philippines, were also victims of colonialism. Around 60% even said they considered the disputes to be matters of personal dignity.

Crucially, however, this seemingly exaggerated historicism and concern with national and personal dignity does not appear to translate into demands for hardline policy measures. The sense of ongoing historical humiliation and personal dignity being at stake was not strongly related to advocacy of the use of military force in the disputes, and had little effect on respondents’ willingness to countenance compromise.

Not surprisingly, given the party-state’s emphasis on “patriotic education” for young people, respondents belonging to the “post-1990” generation were much more likely to see the maritime disputes as matters of national dignity and humiliation. Yet they were also less likely to approve of (and more likely to oppose) the use of military force in dealing with the issue. This calls into question the commonly expressed concern that, under the influence of “patriotic education”, China’s young people are a dangerously nationalistic generation. We might say Chinese youth are more nationalistic if by that we mean they’re more inclined to connect the contemporary world to historical narratives of victimization. But they’re not more nationalistic in the sense of wanting to go to war. Once again, opposing conclusions are on offer, depending on how we define nationalism.

How nationalist is nationalism anyway?

This short piece has raised some issues related nationalist public opinion in China – that is, attitudes towards issues of national identity. It has left aside similar difficulties that exist in relation to nationalist mobilization, or actions taken on issues of national identity. In China, the most eye-catching varieties of “nationalist” mobilization, such as street protests, have clearly involved a range of causes besides the surface-level anti-foreign attitudes. Li Zhiwei, for example, was adowntrodden migrant worker who did not even know the national anthem until one day in September 2012 when a toxic combination of state propaganda and pent-up social alienation turned him into one of Shenzhen’s most-wanted rioters. At the more orderly protests in Beijing the same month, a carnivalesque atmosphere prevailed, with more attendeessoaking up the rare spectacle of street protests in the capital than screaming abuse at the Japanese embassy. The looting seen in recent anti-foreign riots in both China and Vietnam suggests, criminal opportunism explains some of the most extreme “nationalist” actions. Finally, as scholars including James Reilly and Jessica Chen Weiss have argued (both here on this blog and in substantial research works), in a country under Leninist one-party rule, state tolerance is a crucial precondition for nationalist protest. Thus, not only does the idea of nationalist public opinion encompass an unwieldy collection of varied attitudes, it is only one of the causes of “nationalist” mobilization, and it may not even be the most important. This N-word, in short, needs to be approached with care.

Andrew Chubb is a PhD student at the University of Western Australia.

China Policy Institute Blog » Nationalism and Chinese public opinion







This is quite contrast in Internet

 

[JaiMin]

China’s Loyal Youth

By MATTHEW FORNEY


MANY sympathetic Westerners view Chinese society along the lines of what they saw in the waning days of the Soviet Union: a repressive government backed by old hard-liners losing its grip to a new generation of well-educated, liberal-leaning sophisticates. As pleasant as this outlook may be, it’s naïve. Educated young Chinese, far from being embarrassed or upset by their government’s human-rights record, rank among the most patriotic, establishment-supporting people you’ll meet.

As is clear to anyone who lives here, most young ethnic Chinese strongly support their government’s suppression of the recent Tibetan uprising. One Chinese friend who has a degree from a European university described the conflict to me as “a clash between the commercial world and an old aboriginal society.” She even praised her government for treating Tibetans better than New World settlers treated Native Americans.

It’s a rare person in China who considers the desires of the Tibetans themselves. “Young Chinese have no sympathy for Tibet,” a Beijing human-rights lawyer named Teng Biao told me. Mr. Teng — a Han Chinese who has offered to defend Tibetan monks caught up in police dragnets — feels very alone these days. Most people in their 20s, he says, “believe the Dalai Lama is trying to split China.”

Educated young people are usually the best positioned in society to bridge cultures, so it’s important to examine the thinking of those in China. The most striking thing is that, almost without exception, they feel rightfully proud of their country’s accomplishments in the three decades since economic reforms began. And their pride and patriotism often find expression in an unquestioning support of their government, especially regarding Tibet.

The most obvious explanation for this is the education system, which can accurately be described as indoctrination. Textbooks dwell on China’s humiliations at the hands of foreign powers in the 19th century as if they took place yesterday, yet skim over the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s as if it were ancient history. Students learn the neat calculation that Chairman Mao’s tyranny was “30 percent wrong,” then the subject is declared closed. The uprising in Tibet in the late 1950s, and the invasion that quashed it, are discussed just long enough to lay blame on the “Dalai clique,” a pejorative reference to the circle of advisers around Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

Then there’s life experience — or the lack of it — that might otherwise help young Chinese to gain a perspective outside the government’s viewpoint. Young urban Chinese study hard and that’s pretty much it. Volunteer work, sports, church groups, debate teams, musical skills and other extracurricular activities don’t factor into college admission, so few participate. And the government’s control of society means there aren’t many non-state-run groups to join anyway. Even the most basic American introduction to real life — the summer job — rarely exists for urban students in China.

Recent Chinese college graduates are an optimistic group. And why not? The economy has grown at a double-digit rate for as long as they can remember. Those who speak English are guaranteed good jobs. Their families own homes. They’ll soon own one themselves, and probably a car too. A cellphone, an iPod, holidays — no problem. Small wonder the Pew Research Center in Washington described the Chinese in 2005 as “world leaders in optimism.”

As for political repression, few young Chinese experience it. Most are too young to remember the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 and probably nobody has told them stories. China doesn’t feel like a police state, and the people young Chinese read about who do suffer injustices tend to be poor — those who lost homes to government-linked property developers without fair compensation or whose crops failed when state-supported factories polluted their fields.

Educated young Chinese are therefore the biggest beneficiaries of policies that have brought China more peace and prosperity than at any time in the past thousand years. They can’t imagine why Tibetans would turn up their noses at rising incomes and the promise of a more prosperous future. The loss of a homeland just doesn’t compute as a valid concern.

Of course, the nationalism of young Chinese may soften over time. As college graduates enter the work force and experience their country’s corruption and inefficiency, they often grow more critical. It is received wisdom in China that people in their 40s are the most willing to challenge their government, and the Tibet crisis bears out that observation. Of the 29 ethnic-Chinese intellectuals who last month signed a widely publicized petition urging the government to show restraint in the crackdown, not one was under 30.

Barring major changes in China’s education system or economy, Westerners are not going to find allies among the vast majority of Chinese on key issues like Tibet, Darfur and the environment for some time. If the debate over Tibet turns this summer’s contests in Beijing into the Human Rights Games, as seems inevitable, Western ticket-holders expecting to find Chinese angry at their government will instead find Chinese angry at them.

 

[Gufi]

This is quite contrast in Internet

copy and paste the article and leave a link... do not put things in quotes

 

[JaiMin]

A New Definition of Chinese Patriotism

CCP Authorities Increasingly Insist Loving the Party is a Precursor to Loving the Country

• Rachel Lu
• September 12, 2014

China’s ruling Communist Party has a message for Chinese citizens: You are for us, or you are against us.That’s the takeaway from a widely discussed September 10 opinion piece in pro-party tabloid Global Times, in which Chen Xiankui, a professor at the School of Marxism at Beijing’s Renmin University of China, proclaims that “love of party and love of country are one and the same in modern China.” Chen’s article has caused an uproar on Chinese social media, with many netizens scoffing at his formulation of patriotism.






Exhorting Chinese to love their ruling party is nothing new, usually done in the same breath with an exhortation for citizens to love their country. The implication—that one cannot choose between the two—has long been clear enough. But drawing an explicit line between the two is rare, and Chinese have noticed. Reaction on Weibo, China’s equivalent to Twitter, suggests most Internet users don’t buy into Chen’s logic. “Have they no shame?” commented Lin Tie, a television anchorman from the northeastern city of Tianjin. Businessman Shi Liqin wrote, “That’s what Nazis told the German people: loving one’s country is the same as loving the party, and loving the party is the same as loving the Führer.” Another netizen was more direct: “I love my country, but I don’t love the party. It’s that simple.”

Chen roots his analysis in the dubious conjecture that while political parties in the West represent different interest groups, the Chinese Communist Party only represents the “fundamental interests” of all Chinese people. Chen cites Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine as examples of developing countries that have become embroiled in upheaval after attempts at Western-style democracy failed. Chen writes that China’s one-party rule has shown itself to be “superior” in terms of stewarding economic development, bettering lives, and managing crises.



Chen isn’t the first to use the Global Times as a platform to espouse equivalence between party and country. On September 3, the Times published an editorial, penned by Editor-in-Chief Hu Xijin, that argued that while love of country and love of party are not the same, they are “certainly not contradictory either.” Trying to separate patriotism from the love of party is a “poisonous arrow” used by people with “ulterior motives” to undermine China’s unity, Hu wrote. A day later, the paperpublished an editorial criticizing those “brainwashed public intellectual in China” who teach people to believe that “loving the country doesn’t equal to loving the government and the party.”



Books
09.11.14

Powerful Patriots
Jessica Chen Weiss


The rhetoric appears to be heating up as mainland tensions with Hong Kong, the semi-autonomous former colony in the Chinese south, increase. In late August, China’s legislature effectively ended hopes of universal suffrage in Hong Kong by declaring a mainland committee must vet candidates for Chief Executive, the city’s highest position, to ensure they had sufficient “love for country.” Around the same time, during a press conference to explain the nomination, a reporter from U.K.-based Financial Times asked a mainland official whether the candidates must also “love the Communist party” as a part of the requirement that they “love the country.” The official answered that “it goes without saying.”

The bundling of patriotism and party loyalty looks like a tough sell, both in Hong Kong and in the mainland. But it’s a tactic that the party seems increasingly willing to try. By making the concepts of party and country interchangeable, it becomes easier to label “unpatriotic” those who oppose party policies or question its legitimacy. But such rhetoric could also backfire by challenging readers to think harder about the distinctions between the two.

Source: A New Definition of Chinese Patriotism | ChinaFile

@Yorozuya, @Carlosa, @Viet

China's ruling Communist Party has a message for Chinese citizens: You are for us, or you are against us.That’s the takeaway from a widely discussed September 10 opinion piece in pro-party tabloid Global Times, in which Chen Xiankui, a professor at the School of Marxism at Beijing’s Renmin University of China, proclaims that “love of party and love of country are one and the same in modern China.”

Same same like Vietnam government with proportion of young generation and oversea Vietnamese