My Response to below article:
This is another piece of shit that fits perfectly with my analysis.
Getting angry at the absence of consicience and objectivity of such
reports and wrting rebuffs have consumed a lot of my time and lowerd my
work efficiency lately. I can't write any more to rebuff this kind of
shit. When surrounded by piles of shit, I no
longer think it is an efficient way to fight back one by one. It's
simply not worth it. And maybe useless, too, as the media here
apparently has made judgment on what is the politically correct things
to say and what not. And anyway, the public here does not really care.
For those who are aware of this event, their previous impression gets
further reinforced. The Chinese government becomes even uglier, the
Chinese people become even more of a puppet manipulated when against
foreign government whereas more of an angry populace oppressed by the
government when they have issues against the Party. And people like me,
just gets more angry with the media. HOnestly, Japan government's
reaction is outrageous but not surprising as it is with its behavior
pattern. But this event makes me more cynical of the freedom of speech
here.
Well, i might write more in response to this article if i have time and
if i can't help it. BUt tomorrow I'm going to NYC to protest Japan
government, a protest organized by the Chinese (and Korean) student
organizations in Greater New York, led by Columibia University as far as
i know. I will join the Yale gang. Of course, Yale education failed to
enlighten me, failed to free me from the brainwashing of CCP. I'm still
subject to the "mass manipulation of studnets of another era, the
Cultural Revolution", which in 2005, has reached overseas to America
where the essence of true democracy is.
(Cultural Revolution defined as a serious mistake and a disaster in Chinese texbooks. This author bases all his argument on fabrication. My question is, how could one, talking nonsense, be so confident and have it published on New York Times?!
April 21, 2005
LETTER FROM ASIA
By Playing at 'Rage,' China Dramatizes Its Rise
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
SHANGHAI, April 19 - The banners had been carefully printed, the slogans
memorized, and the students and young unleashed onto the streets of China's
largest, most sophisticated city, where they were to speak sacred truths and
make the enemies of the people tremble.
Chinese today have little experience of mass organized protests, so when the
Government tolerated - some would say encouraged - a huge anti-Japanese
demonstration here that flirted with turning into a riot over the weekend,
for many it bore echoes of the mass manipulation of students of another era,
the Cultural Revolution.
For hours on Saturday, thousands of Chinese, from teenagers to people in
their 30's, lay siege to the Japanese consulate in this city, smashing its
windows and defacing its walls with a copious rain of rocks and bottles. But
for all the expressions of anger against Japan by people far too young to
have memories of China's brutal subjugation by its neighbor, at its most
basic level this was a festival of runaway nationalism, of a
government-nurtured Chinese-ness.
Declaring themselves to be all one people, the demonstrators proclaimed
their love of the police who escorted them as they marched to the consulate,
smashing Japanese shops along the way. Banners extolled Chinese greatness,
in contrast to little Japan, chanters called for their homeland to stand
tall, and talk was dominated by Chinese "feelings," a word repeated over and
over, as if no other feelings counted.
Revealingly, people who had lived through the real Cultural Revolution, not
the sanitized one taught in China's history books, watched from the
sidelines with looks of amazement and worry. They were old enough to
remember just how badly things can go when intoxication is the order of the
day, and laws are swept aside by feelings.
"I watched the police cars escorting the demonstrators and felt this all
looked familiar, like an official event in the Cultural Revolution, but
those drew bigger crowds and were more emotional," said Zhu Xueqin, a
historian at Shanghai University who emerged from a public library to watch
the march go by. "I observed it as a bystander, and the people observing
around me looked indifferent, seemingly full of reservations."
Shanghai is the most dazzling symbol of a China that has changed so much
since the Cultural Revolution as to be almost unrecognizable. But in some
important ways, most notably the government's will to control information
and through it people's minds, the events of the weekend here and their
aftermath show that this country has barely changed at all.
The Maoist slogans of 40 years ago have been replaced by anti-Japanese
watchwords, and then as now, few of those caught up in the excitement paused
to examine the relationship of today's slogans to the truth. Here were
students mouthing such claims as "Japan has never apologized to China," or
"Japanese textbooks whitewash history." Many Japanese textbooks have
recently de-emphasized atrocities committed in China, and some have been
widely distributed. But in China, the most tendentious of them is the one
cited as a representative sample, although it is used by less than 1 percent
of Japanese schools.
Others said, trembling with conviction, that Japan wants to keep China down,
or even instigate the country's breakup. Never mind that for over two
decades, Japan has been a leading source of development assistance for China
- to the tune of $30 billion in low interest loans - helping build
everything from Shanghai's futuristic airport to expensive highway and water
systems in the country's vast, impoverished west.
Few in the Chinese crowds, including many educated in the country's best
schools, seemed aware of facts like those, or of any other side to the story
save what could be fit into the dichotomy of a China that is essentially
good and a Japan that is predatory, evil, conniving or, in a word heard over
and over, "disgusting."
Like anything that involves information in China, this ignorance seems the
result of careful planning. Since diplomatic relations between the two
countries were normalized in 1972, for example, Japanese officials have
apologized numerous times to China for the suffering their country inflicted
in the 20th century. In 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the war's end, for
example, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama spoke of the " tremendous damage
and suffering" his country had caused, adding, "I regard, in a spirit of
humanity, these irrefutable facts of history, and express here once again my
feelings of deep remorse and state my heartfelt apology."
But China's state-controlled media have usually focused on finding fault
with each Japanese pronouncement, sustaining the belief that Japan has
indeed never apologized.
The largest question, perhaps, is why China would so carefully sustain anger
at Japan.
One possibility is that in recent years, the legitimacy of China's
leadership has rested on few things so much as the idea of inevitability - a
destined ascension of the country to prosperous world-power status and a
return to the unquestioned pre-eminence in the East that it enjoyed before
the 20th century. In this picture there is little room for Japan, a country
that has derailed China's ambitions before, and suddenly seems unwilling to
fade.
This could help explain China's reactions to Tokyo's bid for a United
Nations Security Council seat and discussions under way in Japan about
revising the country's so-called peace constitution, as well as Chinese
nervousness about Taiwan, which Japan, together with the United States,
recently called a joint security concern.
By midweek, signs were multiplying that China's leaders were rethinking
their confrontation with Japan, at least at the level of public relations.
With the ugliness toward their neighbor threatening a loss of international
sympathy on other issues, China first reportedly made a quiet offer to
repair Japan's damaged consulate, and on Tuesday urged an end to
demonstrations.
Left aside in the weekend's atmospherics in the effort to dispel them was
the question of whether China has done a better job teaching history than
its neighbor. In the West, it is accepted as fact that more Chinese were
killed by the policies of Mao Zedong than by the Japanese, including many by
summary execution and other atrocities that are glossed over in Chinese
textbooks. In those books, Mao is still treated with reverence.
China also claims never to have seized territory from a neighbor, but China
attacked India by surprise in 1962 and the details of other campaigns, from
Korea and Xinjiang in the north to Vietnam and Tibet in the country's south
and west, are also absent from textbooks.
More remarkable than any glance at the receding past, however, was the way
news of the anti-Japanese demonstrations has been treated in China in the
here and now. Chinese authorities televised notices that the protests had
not been approved on the eve of Saturday's anti-Japanese demonstration,
which served as much as anything else as an announcement of the event. The
news the next day avoided all mention of disorder. Similarly there were no
images of young people pelting the Japanese consulate at their leisure,
within arm's reach of paramilitary police.
The seeming contradictions in all of this were not lost on all Chinese,
however. Discussions have raged all week on the Internet, with many
questioning their countrymen's behavior and the government's permissiveness
toward anti-Japanese violence. "How shameful is it that to release our
emotions we damaged the property of our countrymen and bullied the weak,"
wrote one forum participant? "You call yourselves patriotic? Patriotic
what?"
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