Grace Wang and Chinese Nationalism
Shaila Dewan of The Times had a fascinating article about Grace Wang, a Chinese student at Duke University who tried to encourage dialogue between pro-Tibet protesters and pro-China protesters. Grace is from China, and bloggers there perceived her as betraying her country and siding with Tibetan independence. The result was a nationalist explosion on the Chinese web, with people posting her parents’ home address and comments that came across as threatening. Her parents abandoned their home for reasons of safety.
This is exactly the kind of story that makes those of us who like and admire China so uneasy about rising Chinese nationalism. It’s the same feeling I had after 9/11 when I saw all the posts on Sina and Sohu BBS sites, expressing the feeling that it was so “cool” that Americans were dying in the twin towers. That broke my heart.
Granted, I’m sure many of those Internet users didn’t mean what they wrote about 9/11, any more than they mean the threats against Grace Wang. People let off steam on the Internet. But this kind of Internet bullying seems more common in China — there have been many such cases — than in most other countries, and it has shades of the Cultural Revolution in it: The mob of crazed students clinging blindly to an ideology, denouncing a cosmopolitan intellectual as a “stinking No. 9″ and demanding that he or she repent to the crowd. This kind of nationalism is blinding, just as Maoism was in 1967, and it’s not good for China or for the world. And those fiery nationalists are doing far more damage to China’s image around the world than a million Grace Wangs could ever have done. I hope that more Chinese intellectuals will speak out against this nationalism, and that the Chinese ambassador to Washington might invite her to tea to show that the government disapproves of campaigns of hate.
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