Still angry after all these years

• Source: Global Times
• [11:44 April 20 2009]
• Comments

In a discussion program on Phoenix TV about whether China should help rescue the United States’ financial industry, military commentator and co-author of Unhappy China, Song Xiaojun, said that a lot of Chinese laborers’ fingers had been “minced in machines” making products for American consumers.

Many China watchers in the West have claimed the nationalists are endorsed by the Chinese government in order to redirect internal discontent to foreign enemies, but Wang is indignant at such a suggestion.

“When was the government ever on our side?” he said.

Nationalism is treated warily in China because of its ability to be both a lubricant of social coherence and a potential cause of social instability if it runs out of control.

According to Wang, the liberal intellectuals who control most of the State-owned mass media resources often ridicule their ideas. Their only soulmates, he said, are the generation born after the 1980s.

“The young generation is the most patriotic, because they witnessed how the West treated us during the Olympic torch relay,” he said.

“The problem is that they don’t have a say in society, so we’re here to represent them.”

China’s angry youth has drawn international attention in recent years with its anti-Japanese protests, clashes with protesters during the Olympic torch relay and boycott of French supermarket Carrefour, which it accused of supporting the Dalai Lama.

Co-author Huang, 54, said today’s young people play a big role in setting the “degree of patriotism”.

The generation born between 1940 and 1970 – with the exception of himself and a handful of his colleagues – is the most unpatriotic, he said.

“They grew up in an age when we Chinese were torturing ourselves, and now they have power, they are avenging their sufferings on the nation. I understand that they became psychopaths because they were bullied so much, so I have to keep sober to cure them,” Wang, also 54, said.

Shen, however, called the theory absurd.

“We Chinese committed more crimes on ourselves than any foreign power did. I wonder why some people don’t admit this.”

The younger generation does not have an adequate knowledge of history and such narrow-minded nationalism is “poisonous and irresponsible”, he said.

“They don’t know what patriotism is.”