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Chinese Response to Tibet Criticism
China has been shaken by massive anti-Western demonstrations and calls to boycott foreign goods in response to criticism of the People's Republic for its actions in Tibet. Officials have begun a propaganda campaign to calm hot patriotic tempers, fearing that the demonstrations will scare away Western investors and even threaten the communist regime.
The largest anti-Western demonstrations in China in several years took place last weekend in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Kunming and other large cities. The demonstrations were preceded by alls to action on the Chinese Internet for the previous two weeks. A main target of demonstrators were Carrefour supermarkets. The French chain has 112 stores in China. Demonstrators were incensed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy's threat to keep French athletes home from the Beijing Olympics and the incident with the Olympic flame in Paris. The CNN television network was also targeted due to newsman Jack Cafferty's negative comments about the Chinese government's leaders “bunch of goons and thugs.” Police protected Carrefour stores from property damage, but otherwise did not interfere with the demonstrations.
The government changed its tune yesterday, when the state news agency Xinhua and the official Renmin Ribao (People's Daily) newspaper published several articles under the heading “Ardent Patriotism and National Interests.” Regional media have also been brought into play in the new propaganda campaign for “rational patriotism.” Besides the concerns being voiced by foreign business executives in China, the government is alarmed by nationalists who have expressed their dissatisfaction with the government's handling of the situations in Tibet and Taiwan and who are accusing the Communist Party of China of “criminal collaboration with Western capitalists” and similar offenses and pointing out that it has failed to raise China to the status of a great power. Those sentiments are especially popular among young, successful Chinese who have studied abroad.
The communist government began to court nationalists after the incident on Tiananmen Square in 1989 and has tacitly used similar demonstrations for its own purposes during conflicts such as occurred after a NATO bomb fell on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1999, and Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe visited the controversial Yasukuni shrine to the Japanese war dead in 2006. Now, however, the demonstrations coincide with unrest in rural areas, high inflation and falling stock markets, and the government sees a possibility that the demonstrations will turn against it next.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Apr. 22, 2008
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