China cools anti-Western protests and signals talks on Tibet
Saturday, 26 April 2008.
Chinese regime performs somersaults in delicate pre-Olympic balancing act
Vincent Kolo, chinaworker.tk
There is much ’flip-flopping’ to be seen in Beijing as the Olympics draw closer. In a 180 degrees turn, China’s one-party dictatorship yesterday announced that fresh talks would take place with the Dalai Lama’s exile Tibetan leadership. Parallel to this the regime has taken determined steps to lock down anti-Western protests directed especially against French interests in China.
President Hu Jintao’s government is involved in a high-risk balancing act as it tries to diffuse – or at least postpone – multiple and complex crises involving instability in Tibet, a stock market implosion, soaring inflation, an incipient protectionist backlash and continuous eruptions of social unrest. Taken separately, any one of these problems has the potential to spoil the Olympic party. Taken together they could fuse into a ’perfect storm’ of social protest to threaten the very basis of the regime. This was not how it was supposed to be. The Olympics, coming at the height of a spectacular economic boom, was always meant to buttress the regime’s hold on power by displaying China as a global success story under its stewardship.
The nationalist backlash against Olympic protests abroad and against Tibetan protests that regrettably also targeted Han Chinese and Hui Muslim civilians, did provide a boost to the regime – at least temporarily. But at the same time, a wave of official anti-Western rhetoric not heard since the Cultural Revolution, and the street protests it inspired, have created enormous tensions with China’s main capitalist trading partners.
The latest official u-turn is so sudden it has left many of the regime’s youthful nationalist supporters gasping for breath. The Dalai Lama was branded a ”wolf in monk’s robes” by China’s regime-controlled media, an ”evil man”. He was blamed (laughably) for masterminding worldwide protests aimed at ”wrecking” the Olympics and ”splitting” China. Now his envoys will be invited to fresh discussions with representatives of the regime. In the minds of China’s nationalist youth this is the equivalent of president Bush inviting bin Ladin for talks! These layers – including fascists and ultra-nationalists – have completely dominated the debate among China’s 221 million internet users and were, until recently, given free reign to campaign against Western targets such as Carrefour and CNN.
Now, unless they fall into line with the new official policy, the nationalists may get a taste of ’Tibetan’ medicine – police harassment, blocked websites and even arrest. As in 1999 at the time of the US bombing of China’s Belgrade embassy, and the 2005 anti-Japan protests, nationalist youth have been used by the regime like extras on a movie set – told where to stand, but not knowing what’s in the script!
Protests against ’unfriendly’ French
The internet-driven campaign against French supermarket chain, Carrefour, and other companies, culminated in demonstrations in several major cities last weekend including Beijing, Shanghai, Hefei, Qingdao, Jinan, Dalian, Harbin, Wuhan, Kunming and Xi’an. The protests, initially sanctioned by the regime, reflect the depth of nationalist feelings in the country following the spectacular disruption of the Olympic torch relay in Paris and other cities. The global torch protests were portrayed by the Chinese regime as an attempt to sabotage the 2008 Games and blacken China’s name internationally – orchestrated they said by the Dalai Lama despite his repeatedly distancing himself from Tibetan activists and opposing an Olympic boycott. The well-worn script of Beijing’s leaders, repeated daily in the state-run media, argues that when they and their repressive methods are criticised, this is an attack on the whole people – including the protesting peasants, striking workers, and national minorities at the receiving end of this repression.
President Hu repeated this line when he met French Senate leader Christian Poncelet on 24 April: ”A series of unfriendly things towards the Chinese people happened in Paris recently, especially when the Olympic torch relay visited Paris. The torch relay was disrupted and attacked. This hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and is something that we do not want to see.”
Two-thirds of respondents in a poll of ten major cities declared their support for the boycott of Carrefour, which has 122 hypermarkets in China, serving 2 million customers per day. Carrefour insists its sales in China have not been affected, but it is clear the campaign against the company has animated tens of thousands through internet postings and sms messages. The company has been accused – falsely it insists – of donating money to the Dalai Lama. In terms of scale this boycott campaign has undoubtedly surpassed the 2005 call to shun Japanese products. Xinhua quoted staff at Carrefour stores in Beijing as saying customer numbers had ”dropped drastically”. Internet campaigners have published a list of 44 French brands to be boycotted, including Vivendi, Renault and L’Oreal. The latter has been targeted because its Body Shop chain of stores allegedly sponsored a tour of Australia by the Dalai Lama.
French flags were burned on some of last weekend’s demonstrations and slogans included ”Oppose Tibet independence”, ”Boycott Carrefour”, and ”Shut up France!” An American school teacher was reportedly jostled and sought police protection during a protest outside a Carrefour store in Zhuzhou, Hunan province. France has been singled out for particular opprobrium by the Chinese press because of an incident when a pro-Tibetan protester tried to seize the Olympic torch from Chinese sportswoman, Jin Jing, who fought back from her wheelchair. She has been catapulted to celebrity status by the Chinese media and has now received a personal letter from French president Nicholas Sarkozy, expressing his admiration for her and his ’regrets’ over the Paris demonstration. Other high-level French politicians have been doing some serious kowtowing to the Chinese regime in recent days.
Despite its confused and mostly reactionary nature, the anti-Western and anti-Tibet independence campaign has developed to a point that clearly alarms China’s leaders, especially by raising the risk of European retaliation. While top French politicians and capitalists have been falling over each other in public to show support for the Beijing Olympics and condemn the anti-Olympic protests, behind the scenes messages have undoubtedly been more forceful in telling the Chinese regime that continuing protests against these companies will prompt countermeasures. ”This kind of thing is a slippery slope,” warned the president of the European Chamber of Commerce in China, Joerg Wuttke. ”Once you start talking about boycotts, there will always be retaliation on the other side. Where do you stop?”
Hypocrites of the world unite!
Underlining the seriousness of the crisis there has been a flurry of diplomatic missions involving top representatives of European capitalism, which include three emissaries of Sarkozy, but also the European Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso, a former Maoist. The timing of the announcement of talks on Tibet (talks that in all probability will not lead anywhere) allows the European side to claim ’progress’ and may soon be followed by announcements that the French president and other European politicians will – despite some earlier wobbling – attend the Olympic opening ceremony. These events are extremely instructive about the true role of all the capitalist parties to this conflict. The Chinese regime exploits nationalist sentiment to further its own anti-working class and pro-corporate agenda. In equal measure, foreign governments pay (very limited) lip service to ”human rights” and ”democracy” but never let this stand in the way of profits.
As part of this week’s bridge-building talks, former French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin met premier Wen Jiabao in Beijing. Raffarin, whose attacks on the jobs and rights of French youth provoked a 3 million-strong mass movement in 2006, was described as ”an old friend of China” by top foreign ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu. The initiative for these meetings has mainly come from French business tycoons, most notably the country’s richest man, Bernard Arnault, who is also a close friend of Sarkozy. Arnault is chairman of LVMH, the luxury goods group with brands including Louis Vuitton, Hennessy and Fendi, which have proved to be especially popular with the boycotters. Arnault, supported by a phalanx of French capitalists, criticised Sarkozy’s – vague – threat to boycott the opening ceremony on 8 August.
”Boycotting a part of the Olympics is not a solution”, Arnault told Le Figaro. ”China needs time. If we want to dialogue with it, there are better ways than attacking the Olympic flame when it passes in Western cities ... We must avoid giving lessons as long as there are things we can improve in the world, and even at home in Europe.”
Once again, an example of a Western capitalist using the word ”dialogue” with the Chinese regime when he really means ”business”!
Carrefour bosses, desperate to shake-off their pro-Dalai Lama image, issued a statement saying their company does not support any ”illegal political groups” in China. The term ”illegal” covers everything except the Communist Party (CCP)!
As China’s autocrats and foreign billionaires hug and make-up, a marked change of tone is discernible in state propaganda. Chinese newspapers are this week praising Carrefour and other French businesses, declaring them to be ’model’ companies. CCTV pointed out that, ”Fully 99 percent of Carrefour’s 40,000 employees in China are Chinese and 95 percent of the products it sells are made in China”. A front-page editorial in the People’s Daily newspaper, the official CCP mouthpiece, called on people to cherish patriotism ”while expressing it in a rational way.” Meanwhile, an editorial in the English language China Daily exclaimed that, ”Over-the-top nationalism is not constructive but can harm the country.”
Reports from universities in Nanjing, Shandong and Hefei indicate a clampdown has now been ordered against open nationalist activity on campuses. Students who took part in the anti-Carrefour street protests are being called in for ’counselling’, while the state-controlled Young Communist League is distributing leaflets and holding meetings to counter ’extreme’ nationalism. Some boycott activists report that sms messages including now sensitive words such as ’Carrefour’ and ’France’ are not being delivered. But China Mobile, the state-owned telecoms network, denies it is blocking the messages.
Trigger for wider protests?
”The Chinese government is trying to cool patriotic fervor now, because it believes that it has already achieved the desired goal: to tell the world that Chinese are protesting against the French,” Guo Quan, a researcher at Nanjing Normal University told the Wall Street Journal. ”We’re in a time when there are lots of other social problems such as a troublesome stock market, and rocketing commodity prices might drive people’s anger to a larger scale.” [The Wall Street Journal, 24 April 2008].
Unless it is quickly de-activated, the regime fears the nationalist wave it has set in motion can spread beyond French companies to other targets and political issues. Some nationalists have called for boycotts of US-owned fast-food chains McDonald’s and Yum! Brands. This is not without irony as McDonald’s, with over 670 restaurants in China and 50,000 employees, is an official sponsor of the Olympics! At the same time the regime is not in full control of the situation. Events in the outside world, including the risk of further clashes on the route of the Olympic torch, for example in Japan where right-wing Japanese nationalists are mobilising in ’support’ of Tibet (!) can introduce further complications into the situation.
This year, in addition to the pomp and ceremony of the Olympic Games, the Chinese regime plans to hold huge celebrations for the 30th anniversary of the ’reform and opening’ process (read: capitalist globalisation), which was initiated by Deng Xiaoping in December 1978. The current protest movement risks awakening massive but as yet latent and ill-defined opposition to globalisation among its many losers.
”That’s why they want demonstrations to be very short,” a commentator at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology told Associate Press (21 April). ”The government allows people to vent their spleen but then immediately reins it in. They are certainly afraid it will go too far.”
The Olympic crisis and revolt in Tibetan regions coexists with a host of other serious problems for the Chinese regime. Last week the government was forced to intervene in the stock market – cutting stamp duty in order to trigger a rally after the market has lost half its value in six months, ruining millions of small investors. Shareholders in Shanxi province reportedly smashed a local stock exchange, while in other areas investors have organised protest marches. At the same time, surging food prices have dealt a savage blow to poor working class and rural families, increasing the risk for wage conflicts and even food riots. According to the state-run ACFTU trade union, 26 percent of Chinese workers have had no pay increase for five years.
Just last week, the central government announced an additional 1.9 billion yuan food subsidy for 20 million undergraduate students in yet another sign that it fears potential student unrest that could provide a focus for other social grievances. The new subsidy will provide the princely sum of one yuan per student per day!
As Guo Quan explained, ”China is like a bundle of dry wood. All fields are at the point of burning. Once nationalism is stirred up, the fires will spread to flame up the dry wood of other fields.” [Epoch Times, 24 April].
In a coming article chinaworker.info will examine what the latest offer of talks between Beijing and the Dalai Lama’s exile government means. Can it lead to a possible solution, or will this just be an excerise in filibuster by the Chinese regime until after the Olympics? What are the main stumbling blocks to an agreement in Tibet, and which interests do the two sides represent? And what will be the reaction from Chinese nationalists as the ’patriotic campaign’ of recent weeks is stifled and suppressed?
Vincent Kolo, chinaworker.tk
There is much ’flip-flopping’ to be seen in Beijing as the Olympics draw closer. In a 180 degrees turn, China’s one-party dictatorship yesterday announced that fresh talks would take place with the Dalai Lama’s exile Tibetan leadership. Parallel to this the regime has taken determined steps to lock down anti-Western protests directed especially against French interests in China.
President Hu Jintao’s government is involved in a high-risk balancing act as it tries to diffuse – or at least postpone – multiple and complex crises involving instability in Tibet, a stock market implosion, soaring inflation, an incipient protectionist backlash and continuous eruptions of social unrest. Taken separately, any one of these problems has the potential to spoil the Olympic party. Taken together they could fuse into a ’perfect storm’ of social protest to threaten the very basis of the regime. This was not how it was supposed to be. The Olympics, coming at the height of a spectacular economic boom, was always meant to buttress the regime’s hold on power by displaying China as a global success story under its stewardship.
The nationalist backlash against Olympic protests abroad and against Tibetan protests that regrettably also targeted Han Chinese and Hui Muslim civilians, did provide a boost to the regime – at least temporarily. But at the same time, a wave of official anti-Western rhetoric not heard since the Cultural Revolution, and the street protests it inspired, have created enormous tensions with China’s main capitalist trading partners.
The latest official u-turn is so sudden it has left many of the regime’s youthful nationalist supporters gasping for breath. The Dalai Lama was branded a ”wolf in monk’s robes” by China’s regime-controlled media, an ”evil man”. He was blamed (laughably) for masterminding worldwide protests aimed at ”wrecking” the Olympics and ”splitting” China. Now his envoys will be invited to fresh discussions with representatives of the regime. In the minds of China’s nationalist youth this is the equivalent of president Bush inviting bin Ladin for talks! These layers – including fascists and ultra-nationalists – have completely dominated the debate among China’s 221 million internet users and were, until recently, given free reign to campaign against Western targets such as Carrefour and CNN.
Now, unless they fall into line with the new official policy, the nationalists may get a taste of ’Tibetan’ medicine – police harassment, blocked websites and even arrest. As in 1999 at the time of the US bombing of China’s Belgrade embassy, and the 2005 anti-Japan protests, nationalist youth have been used by the regime like extras on a movie set – told where to stand, but not knowing what’s in the script!
Protests against ’unfriendly’ French
The internet-driven campaign against French supermarket chain, Carrefour, and other companies, culminated in demonstrations in several major cities last weekend including Beijing, Shanghai, Hefei, Qingdao, Jinan, Dalian, Harbin, Wuhan, Kunming and Xi’an. The protests, initially sanctioned by the regime, reflect the depth of nationalist feelings in the country following the spectacular disruption of the Olympic torch relay in Paris and other cities. The global torch protests were portrayed by the Chinese regime as an attempt to sabotage the 2008 Games and blacken China’s name internationally – orchestrated they said by the Dalai Lama despite his repeatedly distancing himself from Tibetan activists and opposing an Olympic boycott. The well-worn script of Beijing’s leaders, repeated daily in the state-run media, argues that when they and their repressive methods are criticised, this is an attack on the whole people – including the protesting peasants, striking workers, and national minorities at the receiving end of this repression.
President Hu repeated this line when he met French Senate leader Christian Poncelet on 24 April: ”A series of unfriendly things towards the Chinese people happened in Paris recently, especially when the Olympic torch relay visited Paris. The torch relay was disrupted and attacked. This hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and is something that we do not want to see.”
Two-thirds of respondents in a poll of ten major cities declared their support for the boycott of Carrefour, which has 122 hypermarkets in China, serving 2 million customers per day. Carrefour insists its sales in China have not been affected, but it is clear the campaign against the company has animated tens of thousands through internet postings and sms messages. The company has been accused – falsely it insists – of donating money to the Dalai Lama. In terms of scale this boycott campaign has undoubtedly surpassed the 2005 call to shun Japanese products. Xinhua quoted staff at Carrefour stores in Beijing as saying customer numbers had ”dropped drastically”. Internet campaigners have published a list of 44 French brands to be boycotted, including Vivendi, Renault and L’Oreal. The latter has been targeted because its Body Shop chain of stores allegedly sponsored a tour of Australia by the Dalai Lama.
French flags were burned on some of last weekend’s demonstrations and slogans included ”Oppose Tibet independence”, ”Boycott Carrefour”, and ”Shut up France!” An American school teacher was reportedly jostled and sought police protection during a protest outside a Carrefour store in Zhuzhou, Hunan province. France has been singled out for particular opprobrium by the Chinese press because of an incident when a pro-Tibetan protester tried to seize the Olympic torch from Chinese sportswoman, Jin Jing, who fought back from her wheelchair. She has been catapulted to celebrity status by the Chinese media and has now received a personal letter from French president Nicholas Sarkozy, expressing his admiration for her and his ’regrets’ over the Paris demonstration. Other high-level French politicians have been doing some serious kowtowing to the Chinese regime in recent days.
Despite its confused and mostly reactionary nature, the anti-Western and anti-Tibet independence campaign has developed to a point that clearly alarms China’s leaders, especially by raising the risk of European retaliation. While top French politicians and capitalists have been falling over each other in public to show support for the Beijing Olympics and condemn the anti-Olympic protests, behind the scenes messages have undoubtedly been more forceful in telling the Chinese regime that continuing protests against these companies will prompt countermeasures. ”This kind of thing is a slippery slope,” warned the president of the European Chamber of Commerce in China, Joerg Wuttke. ”Once you start talking about boycotts, there will always be retaliation on the other side. Where do you stop?”
Hypocrites of the world unite!
Underlining the seriousness of the crisis there has been a flurry of diplomatic missions involving top representatives of European capitalism, which include three emissaries of Sarkozy, but also the European Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso, a former Maoist. The timing of the announcement of talks on Tibet (talks that in all probability will not lead anywhere) allows the European side to claim ’progress’ and may soon be followed by announcements that the French president and other European politicians will – despite some earlier wobbling – attend the Olympic opening ceremony. These events are extremely instructive about the true role of all the capitalist parties to this conflict. The Chinese regime exploits nationalist sentiment to further its own anti-working class and pro-corporate agenda. In equal measure, foreign governments pay (very limited) lip service to ”human rights” and ”democracy” but never let this stand in the way of profits.
As part of this week’s bridge-building talks, former French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin met premier Wen Jiabao in Beijing. Raffarin, whose attacks on the jobs and rights of French youth provoked a 3 million-strong mass movement in 2006, was described as ”an old friend of China” by top foreign ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu. The initiative for these meetings has mainly come from French business tycoons, most notably the country’s richest man, Bernard Arnault, who is also a close friend of Sarkozy. Arnault is chairman of LVMH, the luxury goods group with brands including Louis Vuitton, Hennessy and Fendi, which have proved to be especially popular with the boycotters. Arnault, supported by a phalanx of French capitalists, criticised Sarkozy’s – vague – threat to boycott the opening ceremony on 8 August.
”Boycotting a part of the Olympics is not a solution”, Arnault told Le Figaro. ”China needs time. If we want to dialogue with it, there are better ways than attacking the Olympic flame when it passes in Western cities ... We must avoid giving lessons as long as there are things we can improve in the world, and even at home in Europe.”
Once again, an example of a Western capitalist using the word ”dialogue” with the Chinese regime when he really means ”business”!
Carrefour bosses, desperate to shake-off their pro-Dalai Lama image, issued a statement saying their company does not support any ”illegal political groups” in China. The term ”illegal” covers everything except the Communist Party (CCP)!
As China’s autocrats and foreign billionaires hug and make-up, a marked change of tone is discernible in state propaganda. Chinese newspapers are this week praising Carrefour and other French businesses, declaring them to be ’model’ companies. CCTV pointed out that, ”Fully 99 percent of Carrefour’s 40,000 employees in China are Chinese and 95 percent of the products it sells are made in China”. A front-page editorial in the People’s Daily newspaper, the official CCP mouthpiece, called on people to cherish patriotism ”while expressing it in a rational way.” Meanwhile, an editorial in the English language China Daily exclaimed that, ”Over-the-top nationalism is not constructive but can harm the country.”
Reports from universities in Nanjing, Shandong and Hefei indicate a clampdown has now been ordered against open nationalist activity on campuses. Students who took part in the anti-Carrefour street protests are being called in for ’counselling’, while the state-controlled Young Communist League is distributing leaflets and holding meetings to counter ’extreme’ nationalism. Some boycott activists report that sms messages including now sensitive words such as ’Carrefour’ and ’France’ are not being delivered. But China Mobile, the state-owned telecoms network, denies it is blocking the messages.
Trigger for wider protests?
”The Chinese government is trying to cool patriotic fervor now, because it believes that it has already achieved the desired goal: to tell the world that Chinese are protesting against the French,” Guo Quan, a researcher at Nanjing Normal University told the Wall Street Journal. ”We’re in a time when there are lots of other social problems such as a troublesome stock market, and rocketing commodity prices might drive people’s anger to a larger scale.” [The Wall Street Journal, 24 April 2008].
Unless it is quickly de-activated, the regime fears the nationalist wave it has set in motion can spread beyond French companies to other targets and political issues. Some nationalists have called for boycotts of US-owned fast-food chains McDonald’s and Yum! Brands. This is not without irony as McDonald’s, with over 670 restaurants in China and 50,000 employees, is an official sponsor of the Olympics! At the same time the regime is not in full control of the situation. Events in the outside world, including the risk of further clashes on the route of the Olympic torch, for example in Japan where right-wing Japanese nationalists are mobilising in ’support’ of Tibet (!) can introduce further complications into the situation.
This year, in addition to the pomp and ceremony of the Olympic Games, the Chinese regime plans to hold huge celebrations for the 30th anniversary of the ’reform and opening’ process (read: capitalist globalisation), which was initiated by Deng Xiaoping in December 1978. The current protest movement risks awakening massive but as yet latent and ill-defined opposition to globalisation among its many losers.
”That’s why they want demonstrations to be very short,” a commentator at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology told Associate Press (21 April). ”The government allows people to vent their spleen but then immediately reins it in. They are certainly afraid it will go too far.”
The Olympic crisis and revolt in Tibetan regions coexists with a host of other serious problems for the Chinese regime. Last week the government was forced to intervene in the stock market – cutting stamp duty in order to trigger a rally after the market has lost half its value in six months, ruining millions of small investors. Shareholders in Shanxi province reportedly smashed a local stock exchange, while in other areas investors have organised protest marches. At the same time, surging food prices have dealt a savage blow to poor working class and rural families, increasing the risk for wage conflicts and even food riots. According to the state-run ACFTU trade union, 26 percent of Chinese workers have had no pay increase for five years.
Just last week, the central government announced an additional 1.9 billion yuan food subsidy for 20 million undergraduate students in yet another sign that it fears potential student unrest that could provide a focus for other social grievances. The new subsidy will provide the princely sum of one yuan per student per day!
As Guo Quan explained, ”China is like a bundle of dry wood. All fields are at the point of burning. Once nationalism is stirred up, the fires will spread to flame up the dry wood of other fields.” [Epoch Times, 24 April].
In a coming article chinaworker.info will examine what the latest offer of talks between Beijing and the Dalai Lama’s exile government means. Can it lead to a possible solution, or will this just be an excerise in filibuster by the Chinese regime until after the Olympics? What are the main stumbling blocks to an agreement in Tibet, and which interests do the two sides represent? And what will be the reaction from Chinese nationalists as the ’patriotic campaign’ of recent weeks is stifled and suppressed?
Post comment
You must be logged in to post comments
