Chinese Yuppies yearn for a beating

[cstaylor]

Beijing Finds Anti-Japan Propaganda a 2-Edged Sword

Of all the customers his paper company has worldwide, Wang Liqun appreciates Japanese the most. Unfailingly polite and punctual, they cultivate long-term business ties and always pay their bills, he says.

Yet even when he and his best clients share a quiet meal and unburden themselves with sake, they studiously steer clear of discussing the past, especially the atrocities Japan committed during its World War II-era occupation of China.

"I think we need another march," said Guo Hui, 30, who runs his own public relations company. "I feel it needs to be peaceful and well organized. But we have to push ahead."

Mr. Guo said he had no major grievances against the government. But during an interview at a Starbucks in Beijing, which Mr. Guo recorded on his hand-held computer "to avoid any misunderstandings," he said he tended to care much more about political and diplomatic issues than his parents' generation had.

"They never got involved in anything," he said. "But I think you have certain responsibilities as an individual. If every individual says something, that has much more force than if the Foreign Ministry says it."

Uh huh. Enjoy the purge as your Government turns on you. Their parents weren't stupid: they saw the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, Mao's "Let a hundred flowers blossom", military excursions to North Korea, India, and Vietnam. Of course it's hard to learn about those things when your textbooks are carefully edited by party hacks.

[Kuang_Grade]

This is from last week, but I thought it a rather deft move...shut down protests and round up some other perceived troublemakers and blame them for it. I'm setting my watch for the gov. announcement in a few weeks that the alleged instigators were hired by the Japanese to start anti-Japanese protests in order to cause problems for China.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/27/international/asia/27china.html

State-Run Chinese Paper Lashes Anti-Japan Protests as 'Evil Plot'
By JOSEPH KAHN

BEIJING, April 26 - A top Chinese state-run newspaper said in a staff editorial this week that the wave of popular protests against Japan were part of an "evil plot" with "ulterior motives," suggesting that at least some elements of the Chinese leadership now wish to portray the demonstrations as a conspiracy to undermine the Communist Party.

The editorial, published in The Liberation Daily of Shanghai on Monday, used the most strident language to date in an escalating campaign against the anti-Japan protests, which officials had previously done relatively little to stop - and some say had even encouraged - for three weeks to mid-April.

The authorities have now made clear that they will not tolerate more protests and have detained some people involved in vandalism during earlier demonstrations, including 42 people Shanghai officials said they took into custody in recent days.

Officials are clearly concerned that the protests, if left unchecked, could evolve into a direct challenge to the party.

The newspaper, whose editorials reflect the orders of Shanghai's Communist Party leadership, did not identify the people behind the supposed plot or say how it operated. But the ambiguous wording hinted at one of two possibilities: that the protests were hijacked by antigovernment groups, or that elements in the ruling party used them to wage an internal political struggle.

"The preponderance of facts prove that the recent illegal marches were not a patriotic movement, but rather amounted to illegal behavior," the editorial said. "They were not a spontaneous movement of the masses, but rather had a backstage plot."

"The facts have already shown that the marches that occurred in some localities were an attempt to achieve hidden goals," it said. "Communist Party members must clearly see through to the essence of this struggle and understand its gravity."

The wording in the editorial, which did not immediately appear in other major state-run dailies, was striking because it departed markedly from earlier official descriptions of the protests as spontaneous expressions of popular outrage against Japan. The softer language had been widely viewed as signaling tacit approval.

For example, on April 12, even after the string of sometimes violent protests, China's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, repeated an official mantra.

"Some people, acting because of the incorrect attitude Japan has taken toward its history of aggression, spontaneously held protest demonstrations," Mr. Qin said. "The Chinese government asks that people participating in these marches take a cool and reasoned approach and express their views in a legal and orderly way."

A senior editor at a party-run newspaper in Beijing said the Shanghai editorial had been intended to frighten people away from taking part in any future anti-Japan demonstrations.

But a political analyst in Beijing offered a different explanation. He said the government had been sending conflicting signals about the protests because Japan policy has become a source of internal contention.

"I think you cannot rule out the possibility that the tension is not between the authorities and the people, but between some rival elements inside the party," this person said.

The analyst said there were similarities between the Monday editorial and one that appeared in People's Daily in late April 1989. It condemned student-led pro-democracy protests that spring as "counter-revolutionary," and gave early evidence of a power struggle that paralyzed the government for weeks before the military crushed the protests.

[Socratesabroad]