Author: mtj828

Down with the Nihilists!

mtj828 Ideology , , ,

Cairo

Multiple Choice Question: Who brought victory to the Sino-Japanese War 70 years ago? A. Kuomintang, B. The Chinese Communists, C. The United States, D. The Soviet Union.

If your answer does not in some way include B, then BAM! You are a historical nihilist, even though you might not have read a single word by Nietzsche, the German philosopher who elaborated on this important concept in the 19th century. He declared nihilism as a characteristic of the modern age and “a moment of the deepest self-reflection for humanity”. The “death of God” and the dissolution of Christianity as a singular source of truth deprive the world of meaning, intrinsic value and destiny.

But what has nihilism to do with the Kuomintang? This obviously perplexed a few serious philosophy scholars and historians who took pains to organize a seminar at Tongji University in Shanghai earlier this month. The seminar was titled “Nihilism and the End of History: a Dialogue between Philosophy and History”. A consensus coming of it was that “recent criticism on ‘historical nihilism’ has nothing to do with the academic sense of the word.”

The academicians were responding to a tide of attacks on “historical nihilism” largely waged by party publications and leftist opinion leaders. Their targets are very simple: anything that challenges the historical orthodox that depicts the Party as the decisive force in the Chinese people’s struggle for independence and liberation from suppression. It is basically a move against what they consider to be revisionist views of contemporary Chinese history, but for some curious reasons they adopt “nihilism” as the label for their target, probably just for the forcefulness of the word in Chinese (“xuwu“). In the past year, a few controversies surrounding the veracity of communist war-time heroism hammered the term into modern Chinese vocabulary. For instance, in April this year, a beverage company got harangued by conservative commentators for associating itself publicly with a Weibo personality who once compared a Korean War hero to “barbecue” (as party propaganda maintained that he endured being burned alive by an incendiary bomb in complete silence in order not to expose his comrades). The Communist Youth League’s official mouthpiece triumphantly declared at the time that “the consistent condemnation (of the company) from the netizens shows that the public is no longer swayed by the historical nihilism that uses the excuse of ‘freedom of speech’ to smear heroes.” But reality was far from “consistent condemnation.” Actually, the questioning of the “physiological feasibility” of that heroic act was so strong that official media even had to use the example of the 1963 self-immolation of the Vietnamese monk to establish its validity.

The crusade against “historical nihilism” met with a major setback this month when the cause suffered from unexpected friendly fire. A film commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II that sets its scene at the Cairo Conference of 1943 induced widespread astonishment by highlighting Chairman Mao in its publicity campaign. To be clear, the film itself does not put Mao in Cairo, as that would have been outright fabrication (It was Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek who represented China at the conference). But in its posters, the film’s PR team gave Mao an equal treatment as Roosevelt and Churchill, overshadowing Chiang. Criticism immediately ensued, some even from across the Taiwan Strait. Put on defense, the filmmaker responded by saying that the Cairo Conference was the result of the sacrifice of the entire Chinese population, and the Chinese Communists were surely an important part of it. Spurred by the unapologetic tone in the response, netizens made fun of it by photoshopping unrelated public figures onto the poster, claiming that they could all have legitimately been at the conference, the climax being the Kim Jong-un version of the poster.

Some left-leaning online commentators took a confrontational stance. One of them even declared that Mao’s blown-up role in the posters was a place he “deserved”. And if anyone had a problem with it, he should “win a war to make his point”. The winner-writes-history cynicism was blaring in this instance. Compared with their online comrades, commentators at the Global Times were much more worried that the backlash might give opponents of the anti-nihilism campaign excuse to discredit it entirely. They regarded the posters “inappropriate” and argued that it was unnecessary to arbitrarily link the Party with every episode of that war, even if its role in it should not be denied. They even suggested last minute modifications to the film if it contained undue elevation of Mao.

The campaign against historical nihilism and the anxiety about its undone both betray a sense of insecurity. The Party is deeply disturbed by the risk of losing its righteous place in history. It might have a point though, as its war-time record, like its currency now, is being depreciated not only by domestic liberals but also international observers. The Economist, in a recent editorial, just gave the credit of resisting the Japanese invasion completely to the Kuomintang.

The Chinese theater of World War II was messy and intricate. At any given point, the Kuomintang, the Communists, the Kuomintang traitors and the Japanese were all fighting each other. The Soviet Union was involved from the very early stage, supporting the Kuomintang government (not the Communists) for a substantial period of the eight-year war. When the Pacific War broke out, the United States upped its ante in China by subjecting its China-Burma-India theater commander, General Stilwell, under Chiang Kai-shek as his chief of staff. In this intertwined situation, any attempt to claim full credit for the victory against Japan would be challenging if not outright impossible. The Kuomintang enjoys an advantage in this race as it was the “legitimate” government at the time of the war. That’s why it was Chiang Kai-shek who appeared in Cairo, and the reason why most of the international aid of that time (including that from the Soviet Union) went to Kuomintang during the war. And truth be told that as the government, Kuomintang organized the country’s major defense against the Japanese, and its soldiers suffered epic sacrifices.

But nominal legitimacy can only get you so far. As a corrupt, crude and incompetent dictatorship, the Kuomintang regime was not without its fierce criticizers for its humiliating military defeats, its startling mismanagement of the economy, and the brutal ways it treated its own people. The horrifying conscription programs that brought as much death and fear as the war itself was widely noted even by biographers sympathetic of Chiang. The tragic famine of 1942, in Henan province, became a whole chapter in Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby’s influential book about that war (both were Time magazine’s China correspondents at that time), which showed to the American public the cold-blooded indifference  of the Kuomintang government to the unbelievable suffering of the Chinese peasants. The book was written in 1946, when there was already widespread disillusion and discontent with the Kuomintang regime among US elites. But White and Jacoby’s account of the famine, which was based on first-hand personal experience, should still be read as an overall reflection of Kuomintang’s stage of decay at that time.

Within this context, where the Kuomintang’s real legitimacy was being contested, the Chinese Communists advanced their argument that they played a pivotal role in the fight against Japan. For one thing, their status as a partner against the Japanese invader was formally recognized by their 1937 “United Front” agreement with the Kuomintang, whereby they agreed to subject the Red Army under governmental line of command. That “partnership” proved to be fragile and unstable. Skirmishes (some of them quite bloody) between Kuomintang and Communist forces abounded in the years between 1937 and 1940, after which a new agreement had to be drawn which demarcated where both parties should operate (but mainly for the Communists). After that the Communists, and the millions of Chinese people living in the areas north of the Yellow River, were basically left on their own to bear the weight of Japanese savagery in that part of China. And in those years the Communists were the only protection that the people of North China could have. White and Jacoby estimated that at the peak of Japanese activity, forty percent of the Japanese military force in China was battling Communists. The estimation could have been influenced by both Communist and Kuomintang propaganda, but it is probably fair to say that Communist resistance to the Japanese invasion was not as trivial as some would perceive.

It is clear that the “nihilist” challenge that the Party faces today is partly fueled by dissatisfaction of its current rule. It is both a backfire of its own propaganda overkill (things such as the Cairo Declaration blunder) and an over-correction by romanticizing the China under Kuomintang’s reign. Lately, the “ROC Fever” (“ROC” stands for the Republic of China as opposed to the People’s Republic), which refers to a general nostalgia of the pre-communist China in some circles of the Chinese society, has become a cultural phenomenon. Part of it can also be attributed to the complete re-invention of the Kuomintang in Taiwan after the 1980s. Today’s Kuomintang is no longer the collection of reactionary warlords and capitalists that Chiang Kai-shek presided over 70 years ago. It has turned into a modern political party firmly committed to basic democratic values. One author even went so far as suggesting that the Kuomintang’s record in Taiwan proved Chiang to be the ultimate winner over Mao for his more superior political philosophy of Confucianism (“Mao won the battle, Chiang won the war.”) A relatively more positive light over today’s Kuomintang reinforces the feeling that the Communists “stole” the fruit of the WWII. In such an environment, the Party finds itself mired in an endless battle to defend once well-recognized historical “positions”.

George Orwell once famously said that “He who controls the past controls the future; He who controls the present controls the past.” A present with treacherous deep currents is making the past ever more slippery for the Party to hold on to. Much of the pain has been self-inflicted. In an article published last year, a PLA Major General explicitly criticizes past party propaganda about the Sino-Japanese War:

“In the past, our account of the War was often shaped by immediate political needs, which led to biases and exaggeration. Because of our post-war hostility towards the United States, and in order to highlight the power of ‘people’s war’, American victory in the Pacific was downplayed, while land mines and tunnels were depicted as the major weapons defeating the Japanese. After the Reform and Opening, mainland China proactively upheld Kuomintang’s role in the War. However, in the process some media outlets went too far by exaggerating the overall importance of the China theater in World War II. Even if this could somehow elevate the public’s spirit and pride, in the long run this would create distrust in such propaganda in general.”

So the real enemy is not so much “historical nihilism” but rather historical cynicism. Indeed, the victor CAN write history if he chooses to. But now he’s concerned that nobody gives a damn about what he has written.

Ground Zero

mtj828 Propaganda and Media , , ,

Tianjininterview

Everything feels like a déjà vu of the 2011 high-speed train wreck.

On Aug 16, four days after the devastating blast in the coastal city of Tianjin, local officials once again turned their daily press conference into a national spectacle, not for its brilliance, but for its jaw-dropping level of confusion. In front of live broadcasting cameras from all over the world, the city’s chief propaganda official could not answer the basic question of “who’s in charge of the emergence response?” In previous occasions, they had also dodged questions in utterly clumsy ways, such as abruptly walking out while journalists watched in disbelief.

The scene is reminiscent of the press conferences after two high-speed trains collided in Wenzhou four years ago. In the aftermath of the accident that killed 40 passengers, the nation was incensed by the arrogant and smart-ass comments from the spokesperson of the Railway Ministry. His notorious comment that “no matter whether you believe it, I believe”, instantaneously became a joke on the internet.

But the two events resemble each other on a deeper level. The chaotic governmental response in the initial few days of the disaster, which dealt another heavy blow to the government’s (remaining) credibility, betrays the fundamental lack of unity in the Chinese officialdom which often tries to project the image of a tightly clenched fist. And in both cases China’s societal forces make use of that precious vacuum to pierce into the territory with determination. The impact of such small breakthroughs, after years of retreat, is yet to be seen.

From the authority’s side, the difficulty with handling the Tianjin blast, as with the Wenzhou train wreck, lies with the structure under which the different administrative jurisdictions are organized. The accident happened in Tianjin, in a GEOGRAPHICAL sense. Administratively speaking, it happened within the bailiwick of the Tianjin Port Group, a state owned entity that falls under the “dual management” of both Tianjin and the Ministry of Transportation. And in that administrative enclave, the different regulatory responsibilities are divided like puzzle pieces among the Tianjin municipality, the Ministry and the Port Group. Fatefully, the permitting schemes relating to the storage of explosive chemicals and the fire department in charge of the port are run by the Port Group under an authorization from the Ministry, not by the municipality.

With the train accident, the Railway Ministry was ultimately responsible for what happened on the rail track, but since it also happened geographically in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, it made the local authority unavoidably involved. The tension between the Railway Ministry and the Wenzhou local government flared up in the initial stage of the rescue work, when the latter disagreed with the plan to remove the car from the track before confirming that nobody was still alive inside it. It put the Railway Ministry, and the entire official communication effort on embarrassing defense mode for five days, until Premier Wen Jiabao came to the rescue.

Official communication after the Tianjin blast was even more disastrous. An evaluation conducted by a think tank affiliated with the People’s Daily accused the six post-blast press conferences as “producing secondary communicational difficulties”, a sophisticated way of saying “they did more damage than good.” Instead of dispersing doubts, officials actually created more of it by acting completely clueless in front of the press. Censor did not help either: “Cutting the broadcasting is only counter-productive in this era of smart phones.”

While some were quick to ridicule the seemingly incompetent bureaucrats, others offered an alternative explanation: these officials, who invariably came from the municipal government, were meticulously following a clear bureaucratic logic. They did not want to second guess the intentions of their colleagues who were actually responsible for the incident. Neither did they want to cover somebody else’s back. Unlike their Wenzhou counterparts who made that tension explicit for everyone to see, the Tianjin authority took a much more passive approach. The theory goes that it is likely they really did not know what was stored inside that warehouse and had no authority to decide who should be in charge of the rescue work.

The apparent lack of mandate and coordination from the government side had a more far-reaching side-effect: its complete loss of the ability to set the agenda. Yes, the self-valorization is still there, but it was quickly muted by waves of to-the-point questions. The aftermath of the blast saw the return of the 24-hour news cycles that the Chinese society had not seen for a while. They were propelled by social media platforms such as Weibo, which fed new raw materials into public attention on a real time basis. Yet it was ultimately the more market oriented media outlets that had been driving the evolution of the discussion and the news agenda. After the initial shock by the magnitude of the explosion, it was the media that quickly drew the public’s attention toward the massive loss endured by the firemen who first responded to the accident. Southern Weekly’s decisive Aug 13 exclusive interview with a survived fireman, who told the newspaper on record that they were not informed of the hydro-reactive nature of the chemicals in the warehouse, set the tone for an intensive round of public questioning of the authority’s liability. The Paper rode on that tide and interviewed the fire department’s spokesperson at the central government level, who incidentally revealed the fact that those first-responding firemen did not fall under the official fire-fighting system, but were “hired hands” employed by the port itself. Caixin immediately followed on that lead by digging out the exact three teams that first showed up at the site and were instantaneously devoured by the explosions. Yet their sacrifice had not been accounted in the official death toll released to the public. The bitter irony of “unequal death” has since then become a commanding mood of the Chinese internet.

The Southern Weekly-Paper-Caixin news relay was impressive, but it was just one thread that the Chinese media were persistently following through. Simultaneously, other bold outlets, including a new Shanghai-based digital platform called Jiemian.com, were trying to uncover possible corruption behind the string of green lights that the warehouse owner (supposedly a private company) managed to obtain before setting up a deadly time bomb in the vicinity of a densely populated area. Clues led journalists to the management and shareholders of the company, including Zhi Feng, its General Manager, who happened to share a very rare surname with a former vice mayor of Tianjin. This line of investigation culminated at the end of the Aug 14 press conference where officials had to exit the venue under the bombardment of one single question: “Who is Zhi Feng?”

Four years ago, the train tragedy defined Sina Weibo as the no.1 social media outlet that had the potential to replace traditional market-orientation media as China’s agenda-setter. The Tianjin blast seems to have catalyzed the re-invention of the traditional media. The perfect storm of media inquiry this time excites a veteran observer into saluting his former colleagues: “In the past few days, most of the first-hand media coverage with added value all came from the familiar bloc of Beijing News, Southern Metropolis Daily, Southern Weekly, Caixin and iNewsweek. Despite the increasingly suffocating and difficult environment, you guys are still charging ahead. Stay safe!” It indeed looks like a renaissance for which those news organizations have been saving up. Almost overnight, they unveiled to the world the formidable arsenal they have accumulated: WeChat live broadcasting, 360 degree panorama photography, and HTML5 aggregation of information. All of a sudden, drones seemed to have become a standard piece of equipment in a journalist’s backpack. And the images that they produced within hours of the incident stunned the world. Many of those news organizations probably have become substantially stronger after this battle: viewership of their materials on digital channels exploded, which almost certainly translates into a larger follower-base online.

A widely read blog by a young journalist who ventured into the core area of the explosion epitomizes this “charging ahead” spirit, showing that the “renaissance” likely goes beyond an instrumental level. Without even carrying a bottle of water, he sneaked into ground zero that was sealed off by the police and stayed in the war-zone for a full day to capture first-hand images of the event. These were heartbreaking documentations of the broken Chinese dreams. The most surreal pictures were the debris that was blown out of the apartment buildings: cash, a Teddy bear and a bouquet. “Everyone’s life is like a pottery jar with lots of stuff in it. But it’s too fragile. Shake it, and it’s broken.”

The metaphor is not new, nor is the sentiment. What’s interesting is how naturally a journalist’s eye-witness account of a blast scene turns into a sort of elegy for the vulnerability of middle class life. It is a resonance reinforced by almost every memorable mega-events in recent years, from the 2011 train wreck to the 2012 Beijing flooding to the Shanghai stampede earlier this year. The plight and insecurity of the Chinese urban middle class are part of what have fueled the pointed questioning and fearless investigation of the Chinese media. Just like what a survivor wrote after escaping from his expensive Vanke apartment building hundreds of meters away from the epicenter: “This high-end neighborhood is only two-hours of driving away from the Tiananmen Square. It’s full of foreigners and multinational corporate executives. Yet only a few banging noises rendered it an empty war zone. Who can imagine that nearby this ‘little Europe’ something equivalent to a tactic nuclear weapon has been installed?”

The familiar motif prompted an influential Weibo commentator to pull out a four-year-old post written at the wake of the train accident on what he termed “corruption terrorism”:

“At the early stage of corruption terrorism, the middle class does not have to worry too much. You are not the ones who work at coal mines or production lines. But when it further exacerbates, most of the population can’t stay out of it, as you cannot avoid taking a train, driving a car or going across a bridge. Your apartment may have a quality problem, so is the food you buy from the supermarket. In its most advanced stage, even the privileged cannot escape from it.”

It seems that after four full years, the country has arrived at the exact same spot. Just as his predecessor did after the Wenzhou train collision, Premier Li Keqiang’s belated arrival at the blast site brought certain order to the post-disaster disorientation. And one of the first things he had to say publicly was the commitment to equal treatment of firemen who lost their lives in the mission, a direct response to an item high on the media agenda.

Some were pessimistic. To them, there is little sign that the iron curtain shielding the corrupt politician-business bond, which is probably the real culprit of the explosion in the first place, is letting loose even a little bit, despite “almost half of Beijing’s best journalists concentrating their efforts on Tianjin.” But for other observers, the mushroom cloud over Tianjin might have changed something permanently: “After Tianjin, the Chinese public’s NYMBY (“not in my backyard”) protests against industrial facilities will almost certainly become unstoppable.” Be it a legacy or a spell, this sounds like the most plausible post-Tianjin scenario that the country needs to face. We may still be circling around our Ground Zero, but something is definitely growing out of it. At the moment, we can’t tell if it’s going to be beautiful or ugly.

Love Thy Country

mtj828 Ideology , ,

TG

In early 2007, a chic, young CCTV news anchor called Rui Chenggang posted a blog on Sina.com titled “Why Starbucks Needs to Get Out of the Forbidden City?” In the blog, he declared the presence of a Starbucks shop in the Forbidden City “obscene” and demanded its removal. In a distinct style that later became his signature, he incidentally brought up, with apparent pride, his encounter with Starbucks CEO Jim Donald at a Yale event where he made the latter “flushed” in front of the audience with his challenging questions. The blog created a wave of support from the Chinese public, generating half a millions clicks, tons of media reports and awkward responses from both Starbucks and the Forbidden City administrator.  Six months after the blog’s appearance, the Starbucks store was closed, ending a 7 year presence in the very heart of Beijing.

The Starbucks incident in 2007 was a landmark of China’s surging nationalism at that time. And Rui stood for its new face: young, well-educated, confident and most importantly, sufficiently exposed to Western ideas and values. The last one was a defining feature of China’s new brand of nationalism: participants considered their nationalistic stance a well informed choice, rather than brainwashed parroting. The sense of agency, the feeling that “I know exactly what you Westerners are talking about yet I beg to differ”, adds to the vitality and potency of the surge, whose rising crescendo ultimately reached a peak around the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In Evan Osnos’s resounding piece (“Angry Youth”) that featured this new generation of young nationalists, his subjects were PhD students in western philosophy who took their ideas partly from the likes of Leo Strauss and Harvey Mansfield. Like Rui Chenggang’s criticism on Western businesses’ disrespectful encroaching into the sanctity of Chinese culture, these “angry youths” had their own target: the Western media’s biased portrayal of China. The “anti-CNN” website was the most well-known product that captured the Zeitgeist of the time.

Seven years have passed since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The interval has not only seen the relative decline of nationalism in Chinese online discourse, but also its complete degeneration into something unrecognizable. The recent controversy surrounding a “patriotic youth” called Hou Jusen demonstrates how nationalism (or “patriotism” more specifically) has changed into an obscure sub-culture of young people that contains troubling elements. And increasingly, this new nationalism is used against domestic, rather than foreign targets.

On Jul 22, in what seemed to be a regular street fight among a group of adolescents in Shandong province, a high school student called Hou Jusen was injured. He posted photos of his wounds on his Weibo account and cursed the ones who attacked him. He called them “Na Qu” (纳蛆), a code name that literally means “the Na maggots”. The post quickly got the attention of the Shandong Provincial Youth League, whose official Weibo account tweeted about the incident and @ed the police. Furthermore, it added a spin to the incident: “a patriotic youth was brutally attacked by a mob for expressing patriotism on the internet.” The framing immediately raised a few eyebrows. Elevating a street fight to an assault on patriotism is to excessively politicize the incident and further polarize the society, one argument goes. And this time, unlike previous cases that involved law enforcement, the local police reacted swiftly on the internet. It declared the case a mutual provocation, where both sides agreed on a rendezvous place for a fist fight. The conclusion negated the Provincial Youth League’s framing of the incident and won the police rare compliments on the internet.

But why would a group of adolescents taunt each other to a street fight in the first place? And what does it have to do with “patriotism”? A probe into those questions leads us to the curious and troubling world of online “adolescent political rivalry” that runs almost completely outside the spotlight of the grown-up occupied media .

Our first key is “Na Qu”, the supposedly derogative term used by Hou to refer to his attackers. To understand the meaning behind the code name, people should first get to know an online animation series titled “That Year, That Rabbit, Those Things”, which is apparently a “cult animation” popular among a quite large audience (the first episode so far has collected more than a million clicks on Youku.com). Viewing the animation (which now contains 11 episodes) is an utterly weird aesthetic experience. In terms of visual style, it betrays a heavy influence of Japanese manga; in terms of language, it is filled with the puns and catchphrases of today’s Chinese internet; and yet in terms of its theme, it touches upon an essentially solemn topic: contemporary Chinese history. The hero of the animation is a bunch of white rabbits with red stars on their bellies. Without further hints you can easily figure out that these rabbits represent the Chinese Communist Party. Their opponents are also humanized animals: Japan is represented by a chicken, Russia a bear and the United States, not surprisingly, an arrogant eagle. In a worse-than-simplistic way, the first episode of the series depicts how the rabbit, after witnessing other animals humiliating his hometown, allied with a bald head (reference to the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek) to beat the chicken (with the help of the eagle) and in turn kicked the dishonest bald head out of the country.

Why the rabbit? Some speculates that it’s a subtle reference to “TG”, a commonly used acronym on the internet that makes fun of the Party’s peasant roots (“Tu Gong”, meaning the country pumpkin communists). And in Chinese, Tu shares the same pronunciation as “rabbit”.

With the popularity of the animation also comes disparage. There are those who regard it as stupid and disgusting, who self-organized to attack fans of the animation. Their battle field is Baidu Tieba, a topic-based online forum created by China’s biggest search engine. To ridicule the Rabbit forum, netizens created the “Na Year, Na Rabbit, Na Things” forum (already banned), in which “Na” is simply a wordplay with the same pronunciation of “That”. Participants of the two forums taunt and abuse each other online. One side calls the other “Tu Za” (Rabbit Bastards) while the other refers to their enemies as “Na Qu” (Na Maggots). Their areas of dispute go way beyond the merit of the animation to touch on recurring debates that polarize Chinese cyber space constantly: Kuomintang vs. Communists; China vs. U.S./Japan; Democracy vs. Stability. Most of the time they are not real discussions but rather simple declarations, caricatures, and, worst of all, obscene personal attacks. “Bao Ba” (Burst the Forum) is a commonly used tactic which means posting tons of nonsensical shit on the other side’s forum to bury unfavorable contents.

The young Hou Jusen emerges out of such online shit fights. Materials dug up by netizens about his online track record depict a disconcerting picture. As a staunch Rabbit defender, he argues indefatigably with those who he disapproves. And this strong political leaning leads him into even weirder realms of online sub-culture: Soviet worship. He seems to be an ardent supporter of the Soviet Union and frequents the “Soviet Red Army” forum at Baidu. Participants of the forum share a common contempt for Gorbachev, referring to him as “Gorba-pig“. In one earlier exchange, Hou complained to fellow Soviet lovers that “My history teacher was again smearing the Stalinist model. I objected in class but he insisted.” Someone replied approvingly, “I recommend you to read ‘Da Guo Bei Ju’ (A Great Nation’s Tragedy). Next time you can challenge your teacher with those materials.” At one point, his allegiance to the Soviet cause even led him to question Mao directly: “If not for [Mao]’s petulance, we would not have departed with the Soviet Union!”

Online quarreling more often than not degrades into genital spattered mutual curses. And it creates enemies that transfer their online hostility off line. To intimidate each other, forum fighters deploy far more threatening tactics. “Gang search” is used to dig out one’s off-line personal information. And it is then used in many a “creative” ways. Hou has often been on the victim side of those tactics. His ID card information was leaked onto the internet. Before long, photoshopped pictures of him in shameful positions started to appear. His nemeses also posted his contact information on gay dating sites, which became an annoying intrusion of his daily life. Later on, his girlfriend was harassed, and had to put an end to their relationship. Hou claims that he only fought back verbally, often just by copy pasting the dirty language that was used against him. In Jun this year, he posted a long article on his Weibo account, lamenting his poignant experience of being a “patriot” but at the same time showing determination to persist. Weeks later, the aforementioned street fight happened.

What ultimately turned this high school kid into a national figure was the high pitched response of the country’s political establishment. Not only did the provincial Youth League tweeted about his experience, the Central Youth League also got publicly involved and tried to escalate the matter to the attention of the Ministry of Public Security. The central party organ adopted the same patriot-got-attacked narrative and made it into a hashtag. But the move backfired in a big way. Rarely do Chinese netizens side with the police on controversial issues, yet this time even some leftists criticized the Youth League for interfering with the due process of police investigation and over-politicizing an otherwise mundane case of affray. Probably emboldened by the support they enjoyed online, the local police defiantly talked back at the Central Youth League on Weibo, expressing frustration that their hard work to maintain social order was not appreciated, even though the post was later deleted.

The most urgent appeal came from Tsinghua University sociologist Sun Liping. Deeply troubled by the violent tendency of youth “patriotism”, the professor called for the stop of “any political mobilization among the juniors, especially the kind that stirs up hatred and violence.” The concern harks back at an earlier warning that China, especially its youth, is increasingly prone to the influence of militarist ideas. As a 2005 article by intellectual Wang Yi puts it, “Among all the countries, China is where military magazines are the most popular. Almost every middle school boy reads one or two military or weaponry related publications. It is probably also one of the few countries that not only do not restrict, but actually organizes children to watch war movies.”

The years in between Rui Chenggang and Hou Yusen witnessed Chinese nationalism’s metamorphosis from an expression of the young generation’s new found cultural confidence and assertiveness to an obscure sub-cultural phenomenon that is seething with anger and hatred. More importantly, the new brand of patriotism is becoming more and more introverted. Instead of bringing substantive grievances before multinational corporations, Western media and rival governments, the young patriots of today are busy chasing and intimidating Chinese “traitors”, speaking languages that only they themselves can understand.

* A side note on Rui Chenggang’s dramatic turn of fate: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-28291107

The Master

mtj828 Culture and Education , , ,

Wanglin

The women were screaming with excitement. The half-naked man was teasing them with a snake, trying to hang it on one woman’s neck. After being prodded by her companions, the woman obliged and happily took a photo together with the man. The snakes were magically summoned by the man from under an enamel basin that was supposed to be empty inside. Before he did that, he stripped off his tie and shirt just to prove that he did not hide anything underneath his clothing. In another scene, the camera shows him feeding liquor to the same group of well-dressed men and women. The liquor came out of nowhere into the cups that he was holding in his hands. It appears that he was able to fill the cups endlessly. A few faces cringed when fed the alcohol but played along obediently. Everybody was laughing and clapping hands profusely.

This is a home party from the 1990s captured on a video. It looks like the video was prepared for the eyes of Communist Party cadres only (with the words “internal reference” at the beginning). The purpose, according to the preamble to the video, was to open their eyes to “human body science” and its mysterious wonders. The half-naked man is called Wang Lin (“the Master”), at that time a lecturer at a Jiangxi province cadre training school. For the past two years, his story has provided the Chinese public a rare chance to peep into the secret social lives of China’s ruling elites.

The latest public interest in Wang has been triggered by a murder case. On Jul 16, news broke out that a Jiangxi province businessman called Zou Yong was kidnapped and murdered, his body thrown into the Poyang Lake. Zou used to be Wang Lin’s “apprentice” but fell disillusioned with the Master after two years of “practicing”. The break-up of the apprenticeship turned out to be nasty, with both suing each other for embezzlement. The cases are still pending final ruling from the court. Yet Zou will not have the chance to see them through. On the night of Jul 15, Wang was arrested by police along with several others who accompanied him. He was suspected to be involved in Zou’s death.

Murder. That is the latest charge against the Master after he was brought into national spotlight in 2013. Illegal medication and owning guns are two of the others. Many of these charges exist because of Zou’s relentless reporting to the police and press. But the authority has never been able to pin down any real evidence of Wang involved in such activities. He proved too elusive and mysterious for investigators. More importantly, he seemed to be “protected” somehow by a web of benefactors that he has cultivated over the years. His admirers and acquaintances include central government Ministers, chairmen of powerful political bodies and top notch celebrities. It was the 2013 visit by Jack Ma, Jet Lee and A-list actress Zhao Wei to his “castle” in Jiangxi province that aroused tremendous interest from the public in this previously unheard of Master, which unleashed a wave of probing media attention that ultimately proved damaging for Wang.

The latest murder charge transforms those elites’ entanglement with Wang Lin from a mere embarrassment to something much darker. One commentator calls the Wang Lin phenomenon “the darkest metaphor of the Chinese elite circles.” Through him, “we can see how stupid and decadent this country’s 1% really are.” In another widely circulated commentary that is said to be from novelist Wang Shuo, those elites are described as “low IQ, insecure, lack of scientific common sense, and have no sense of responsibility”. For those ordinary Chinese who can feel inequality and unfairness at every turn of their daily life, seeing the country’s richest and most powerful flocking to pay tribute to someone who is so apparently a hoax gives them an outlet to vent their despise. “For most middle class Chinese, a doctoral mortarboard and a decent downtown apartment means a life time’s achievement. Yet for the power wielding elites, the middle class is just a bunch of boring monkeys. Only an ‘interesting’ person like Wang Lin can raise their heavy eye lids.”

The celebrities in show business took the heaviest hits, as they often embody quick money and brainless ignorance. Star singer Faye Wong was particularly picked at, not only because she and her (former) husband seem to have paid the Master more than one visits, but also for the fact that she has been spearheading a kind of life style that glamorizes “alternative” spiritual experiences. With a public image of being ultra-cool and aloof, she was often seen kowtowing to Buddhist monks and frequenting Taoist temples. Some of the “Masters” she visited were later found to be nothing more than swindlers and were sent to jail. Commentators blame Faye Wong for helping popularize a kind of hypocritically self-contradictory personality within the society that becomes a fertile ground for the Wang Lins:  “On the one hand, they worship religious creeds that advocate detachment from secular, materialistic pursuits, while on the other hand they closely monitor their assets in the stock market.”

The elites are not without their defenders. Apparently disturbed by the above attacks, established business writer Wu Xiaobo wrote a piece arguing that those who paid tribute to Wang Lin do not deserve such searing criticism. They are probably “just curious about the secrets of life”, as Albert Einstein said “the best thing we can experience is mystery, as it’s the source of all arts and sciences.” Comparing Chinese billionaires’ visit to a magician and murder suspect to Albert Einstein’s pursuit of the ultimate truth of the universe is more than the Chinese society could stomach. As expected the article met with unforgiving ridicule on-line, and Wu’s reputation as a respected business writer is likely to be irrevocably tarnished. But in his article he also points the “Wang Lin phenomenon” to its historical origin, which helps shed light on the deep currents that propelled Wang’s emergence in the first place. In the late 1980s, a “Chi-gong Fever” swept across the country, largely thanks to the sudden interest in “paranormal phenomena ” from a few high level leaders and established scientists such as Qian Xuesen, the father of Chinese rocket science. Their support and patronization produced all kinds of government sponsored “research” and absorption of magician-type drifters such as Wang Lin into the official system. In bringing up this history, Wu tries to argue that the elites’ curiosity in Wang Lin has certain legitimacy. But inadvertently, he reminds people of the deep-rooted irrationality of the Chinese political elites.

For some observers, the debate about whether those elites are stupid completely misses the point. Of course they know these are just magic tricks, the argument goes. They just play along because what they treasure is not the SUPERNATURAL power of Wang Lin but the NATURAL power that he is able to bring them. It refers to his other identity as one of China’s first-class power broker. The “home parties” at which he performs his “repertoire” are just excuses to hold low-profile, exclusive gatherings for those who use such occasions to exchange resources. It is reported that he introduced Zou Yong (his now dead apprentice) to China’s then Railway Minister Liu Zhijun (who was later sentenced to life in prison on corruption charges) and secured Zou a deal worth a billion RMB. He also used his network to help a high level Guangdong official to get pass “turbulences” caused by damaging corruption allegations, which won the unwavering allegiance of that official (who kneeled in front of Wang to thank him, but later fell victim to the new administration’s anti-corruption campaign).

If the likes of Jack Ma are truly just knowingly “playing along”, which seems to be a more plausible  explanation of their behavior, then what the Wang Lin saga demonstrates is not the elites’ stupidity and ignorance but rather their spectacular cynicism. These are the smartest guys in our room. Their readiness to entertain and bow their heads to a snake magician is an allegory of power’s erosive effect on reason and human dignity.

From “Crazy Chen” to “Made in China 2025”

mtj828 Private Opinion ,

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We first met “Crazy Chen” at the Hong Kong Football Club two weeks ago. The venue still retains a somewhat cute residue of colonial snobbishness (alert: you are not allowed to make calls with your mobile phone in this venue, but the vintage landline phones at the lobby are ok!). It was part of a two-week workshop for professionals from major global corporations (banks, funds, insurance companies and manufacturing corporations) and non-governmental groups to better prepare themselves for the challenges of the 21st century, with a focus on Asia. A key component of the workshop was to spend a week with a real Chinese SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) to help it solve problems and in return gain some insights for ourselves.

When this Wuhan-based businessman refers to himself as “Crazy Chen”, you know it carries a sort of pride in it. It’s not lunatic crazy. It’s Steve Jobs crazy. He is the Chairman and founder of this Chinese start-up that makes a kind of environmentally-friendly plastic (I will not reveal too much technical details here). As someone who moved from real estate into manufacturing at the age of 54, Chen carries the mixed disposition of new money shamelessness and entrepreneurial respectability. He spent the first ten minutes of his speech boasting about how rich he was (he had a dozen debit cards each containing over 5 million RMB). He used inappropriate language to refer to women (a common feature of Chinese men of his age). He even bragged about how young he looked (indeed he did not look like someone over 70. Not sure how much money he had spent on cosmetics). On the other hand, his personal story of self-elevation does carry a flavor of legend on the verge of mythology. He decided to pursue a master’s degree in polymer science well after middle age, with almost zero preparation in math and English (two key subjects of the entrance exam). He claimed that he mastered math by himself within a few month and gave up completely on English (got only 26 in 100). Even so he still managed to get into one of Hubei province’s major universities and got his degree in a few years. Through the exposure to the academic world he developed this weird idea of citations: that citation means borrowing from others without innovation. And he wanted to do something new. So he started to spend long hours in his laboratory developing new materials, materials that are more friendly to the environment than traditional fossil based plastics. He claimed that once he stood in the lab for a straight seven days without rest. After he got home, his legs were so swollen that his wife had to use a scissor to cut off his pants before he could get into bed. He fell into sleep and stayed in a coma-like state for 48 hours.

When the 25 of us landed in Wuhan last week, we were immediately shuttled to Chen’s company headquarters, the fruition of his crazy hard work in the laboratory. The company is now managed by his son, “Crazy Chen Junior”. He brought us to our first stop inside the office building, a fancy showroom with all their products, certificates and awards on display. Two years ago, China’s President Xi took some interest in their products when he visited Wuhan. And not surprisingly his picture was featured prominently in the exhibition.

Our immediate next stop was their research labs which they seemed to take particular pride in. The director of their R&D department, a young petite woman, showed us around and introduced the working of their equipment and devices. The labs betrayed a resemblance to those rudimentary ones that you saw in high schools. But the company’s technological edge is not to be underestimated. It held dozens of international and national patents and was among the first Chinese companies to have had received the most stringent certificates from Europe and Japan for its materials. At this point I realized that this was not a poster boy Chinese SME that was complacent in making quick money by manufacturing fake Louis Vuitton handbags or tainted food. It is a technology driven enterprise that represents the break-away from the stereotype “made in China” workshops.

Yet the company was in trouble.

The reason why its management invited us to Wuhan was that it’s stuck. As a new material start-up, it was stuck in making two things: garbage bags and disposable utensils. It was not a very comfortable place to be in as a company. For one thing, it was a low-end, low-recognition category where price competition was fierce and no brand loyalty can be expected. Their biggest markets are those street-side restaurants and wholesalers who sell to those restaurants. But such customers are extremely price sensitive and would strive to cut corners particularly on items like disposable utensils. In this area the company faces formidable competition with cheap plastic products, especially at a time when oil price is at its low point. The policy environment isn’t giving them any edge against its competitors either. For years Chinese cities talk about setting up garbage separation systems and composting facilities which would favor more degradable eco-materials over non-degradable plastics. But such efforts are often fitful and are constantly stalled by a lack of political will and incentives. One city in China took the drastic approach of banning non-degradable plastic bags at the beginning of this year, but it was seen more as an exception reflecting the personal inclination of the mayor rather than a future norm. When we met with a group of municipal officials last week to discuss about this issue, their attitude was visibly tepid. I sensed it when they started to lecture us about the “complexity” of the issue. The underlying message was two-fold: first, they were not ready to disrupt the powerful industry of plastic makers; second, they fear if they did take measures, the “Crazy Chens” and their companies would not be able to bring production to a scale that would fill the opening, which would undermine the legitimacy of such policies.

Sadly, a country perplexed by its ever increasing stream of urban wastes is not ready to pay for an eco-friendly option yet. Left on its own, the company tried to move up the ladder of values by creating its own brand name products and found its way into large supermarkets where middle class consumers picked their household products. Unfortunately, even on those shelves they were unable to collect a premium due the lack of consumer awareness and demand for eco-friendly products. Worse still, they saw themselves squeezed on both ends by better known paper and plastic products on the one hand, and surcharges from the supermarkets on the other, in the form of “listing fees” and promotional expenses. To stay competitive, they had to keep their margin at close to zero or even negative in some cases.

The Chens have their rationale. They would like to make their material more visible for a wider audience to see its possibilities and potential. The retail adventure therefore morphed into an expensive marketing undertaking. The sad thing, though, is that people do not associate garbage bags and disposable stuff with a cutting edge material of the future. And the disposable nature of the products probably turns the really eco-conscious customers away. After all, the “throw away” culture is an antithesis to conservation, which is intrinsically contradictory to the image that the company would like to build.

After a few late night soul-searching sessions with “Crazy Chen Junior” and his management team, we began to realize where the problem was. The company’s core technical edge lies in its “resin”, for which they possess all the patents. Like Coca-Cola’s secret syrup that it sells to bottlers all over the world, the “resin” can be mixed with regular plastics such as PP and PE to create materials with new properties. They are the largest producer of this niche material in China, and the second largest in the world. Its key advantage is the lower carbon footprint and higher degradability compared to fossil-based counterparts. Being located in China, close to the world’s largest manufacturing powerhouse, also gives it an edge against international competitors. But these advantages are all based on a scenario where it sells its “resin” directly, which also gives it a higher margin.

Here comes the pitfall: there is a huge risk in this scenario, which is associated intellectual property. Their biggest fear is that Chinese copycat competitors can easily reverse engineer the resin, wiping out whatever technological edge they still enjoy today. The answer to this challenge is “camouflage”: mixing the resin with other plastic materials to render the resin indecipherable. To do that, they have to source such materials from the open market, allowing their margin to erode in the process. Moreover, they have to invest in blending facilities to be able to blend the resin with other materials. Essentially, it means they’d turn themselves from a Coca-Cola to a bottler just to protect their own syrup. But in China there are tens of thousands of converters who are better at this kind of blending job with a larger economy of scale. That’s why they have to move into consumer products in order to generate more added-value out of the blended material. They are even careful enough not to purchase its production lines in their entirety, but to buy parts separately and then combine them by themselves, which further undermines efficiency. The purpose is again to prevent competitors from following suit. All these factors cut into their profit and keep their bleeding wounds open.

This revelation makes me a bit frustrated. In the end, all we could do to help was to build a business model for them showing that a resin-based business is better for the company. Yet we all realized that they had known it all along. It’s the circumstance that had prevented them from moving toward that direction.

On May 18 this year, the Chinese central government unveiled its ambitious plan of “Made in China 2025“, with an intention to “upgrade” China’s manufacturing sector. In later speeches, China’s Premier Li Keqiang made it clear that his country was no longer content of making T-shirts and other low-end consumer products. He would like to see its massive manufacturing prowess turned towards industrial equipment, telecommunication and new materials, among others. This is not a simple re-configuration of the country’s manufacturing portfolio; it represents a change of business model that would allow Chinese companies to move up the value chain in the global market. A model based on the export of high-speed trains and commercial airliners is qualitatively different from one that’s based on selling toys and cheap plastic cups. But the plight of the “Crazy Chens” speaks to the challenge that lies ahead. The pains that those Chinese SMEs has to take in order to move one tiny step up the value chain illustrates the distance between a vision and the reality.

What It Means to be a Polluting Company that Has Lost Its Powerful Patron

mtj828 Environment and Science , ,

When China’s former “Security Tsar”, Zhou Yongkang, went on trial days ago, I was intently watching the development of another story, the pollution caused by a lead and zinc mine in southwestern China’s Yunnan province that intoxicated an entire village’s children.

The two stories are only remotely connected, on the surface. The mine belongs to a company once controlled by Liu Han, the billionaire whose expansive business empire stretched from real estates to electricity and mining. In 2013, Liu and his brother were charged with 15 accounts of crimes ranging from murder to leading “mafia-type organizations”. They were sentenced to death and were both executed months later. Their rise and fall coincided with the political tides of Szechuan province, the southwestern power base of Zhou Yongkang and his son, Zhou Bin. By pleasing Zhou Bin, the Liu brothers secured their much needed political protection from Zhou Yongkang and his numerous protégés who occupied commanding positions in the top echelon of the Szechuan provincial leadership. The ultimate collapse of that entire layer of protection under the unbearable weight of the anti-corruption campaign of the Xi administration in the end exposed the Lius to fatal radiations of a super nova, costing them their lives.

In a country saturated by pollution stories and depressing accounts of their hapless victims, another one that involves the usual suspect of a major mining company and a small, helpless village could easily have been ignored. But this time, the intriguing alchemy of corruption and the environment produced something slightly different with a unique potency that had not been seen before in the environmental field.

A veteran reporter of contemporary Chinese politics once noted that the extent to which damaging stories about a powerful person can spread in China’s public sphere had become a precise indicator of that person’s political fate. In other words, China’s censors, hiding inside an opaque web of information control machineries, collectively constitute a much faster and more sensitive “nerve system” that signals a person’s political fortune than the country’s judges, prosecutors or disciplinary bodies. Too often, the first crack of business empires, stellar reputations and solid political backing that once seem unshakable emerges when negative stories appear in the media uncensored. Failure to mobilize the country’s censors indicates one’s vulnerability and exposure (but of course this only applies to those who are SUPPOSED to be able to do that).

The Yunnan story vividly illustrates that vulnerability. The first wave of media reports treated it more or less as a regular pollution story, with bland titles that says “Asia’s largest lead and zinc mine causes pollution”. But more discerning outlets, such as the politically weathered Caijing Magazine, quickly jumped on the juicier elements: ownership of that mine and its historical ties with an entire group of fallen heavyweights (including Liu Han and former Yunnan provincial chief Bai Enpei). If it had been two years earlier, the story would have probably been killed right on the spot. But with censors no longer standby to guard those interests, the story travelled unabated. What followed resembles the daily “circle of life” on the African savanna. After the big carnivores such as Caijing had first spotted and feasted on the game, China’s website editors gathered en masse to finish off the carcass. Accustomed to playing the game of Catch Me If You Can with the censors, they won’t let go of any opportunities to maximize the viewership of their news posts, sometimes determined by time windows as short as several minutes. And to do that they have developed an acute sense for vulnerability. Not long after the Caijing story appeared, website editors quietly “retrofitted” the titles of the original stories to harness the sexier corruption angles, entertaining with wordings such as “ex-mafia-head” which drew more attention. The censors once again turned a blind eye to these changes.

Left entirely on its own, the company resorted to pathetic tricks that were often used by those of much more modest backgrounds: key word contamination. Just one day after the news broke in the Chinese media, a dubious piece of article started to emerge on numerous news organizations’ official websites that contained the exactly same key words as news reports from the previous day: “Asia’s largest lead and zinc mine,” “pollution”, and the company’s own name. Yet the actual content of the article was pure corporate PR, praising the company for its environmental efforts. It took advantage of sections of the news organizations’ websites that were on sale for such materials and camouflaged itself as a genuine news item. As a result, search engines such as Google and Baidu were tricked to pick it up as news, “diluting” the pool of information that contained the actual negative coverage.

In a weird way, the fall from power and privilege manifests itself in terms of “exposure containing methods”. No longer enjoying the “free” service of diligent state censors, those “orphaned” polluting companies are thrown into the “market” where they have to buy their way out of their own PR mess.

Titanic on the Yangtze

mtj828 Propaganda and Media ,

Oriental Star

There are no deadly icebergs on the Yangtze. But the river can be as treacherous as the capricious Arctic Ocean. At around 21:30 on Jun 1, the Oriental Star, a triple deck Yangtze River cruise ship, reached its tragic turn of fate in the middle of a section of the river that was barely 750 meters wide. Amid what was supposed to be an extreme weather event which may have involved a violent tornado, the huge ship, with 456 passengers on board, was instantaneously overturned. When people around the country woke up to the shocking news the next day, what they could see was the ominous sight of a completely belly up ship floating on the river, like the body of a dead whale.

A high profile rescue effort not unlike the one surrounding the sunken Korean ferry MV Sewol quickly ensued. Up to this moment, after 9 days of intense search, 8 passengers remain missing. The death toll on the other hand has reached 434. Only 14 have been successfully rescued.

Much can be said about navigational safety, crew judgment and the execution of the rescue mission. But the one thing unique that emerged from this disasters is the confirmation that disaster communication in this country has thoroughly morphed into a kind of grand “mood management” exercise which involves state control as well as the negotiation within the society itself. The fundamental questions that are being asked by those watching the unfolding of the tragedy are not “what happened” and “why did it happen”, but “how should people feel about it” and “when is the right time to feel about what.” You see debates about whether it is right to be skeptical about government conclusions of the accident, or whether it is appropriate to feel proud of the country when so many people are still under water. You also see strong reactions to the authority’s attempt to downplay the sorrow of the victims’ relatives, and the official media’s overwhelming emphasis on the greatness of the state rescue efforts. Deep down, people seem to believe that how their countrymen FEEL about the disaster matters a lot on a substantive level. No wonder that on the second day of the accident, official news outlets called on the public to “suspend their questioning” and “empty out a virtual highway for useful information to pass”, as if in their mind, people’s sentiments could actually block the passage of imaginary informational ambulances that need to somehow “get” to predestined places.

Part of it can be seen as an old tug of war between the state and the society, where the former, out of social stability considerations, often tries to divert public sentiments towards “desirable” directions, sometimes using utterly clumsy methods. For example, in a widely ridiculed report, the Xinhua News Agency’s Hubei provincial branch opened the article with the nauseating cliché that “the river is merciless but the human world is full of love”, referring to the “grandiose national rescue action.” The online world responded to it with merciless mockery. Shrewd observers see patterns in such behavior, identifying two common strategies of state “mood control” efforts: “national muscle flexing”(兴邦) and “empathy shifting.”（移情） The former refers to a framing that highlights national strength and unity, so as to divert attention from more unsettling details of the disaster. The latter is a technique to have the public focusing on sympathy-worthy figures: the victims, their sons, mothers, wives, who bring out the warmth of human tenderness rather than the coldness of facts. None of the two strategies are coercive. They are achieved by allowing journalists and commentators broad freedom to pursue these tracks, while creating subtle hurdles in the way of hard-core truth-finding. Time is also a factor: digging up facts and details can be time consuming, but interviewing rescuers or survivors is not.

The Chinese web society responded to the above tactics with its own increasingly sophisticated antidote: sarcasm and parody. Almost overnight, people’s WeChat walls were filled with funny, spicy spoofs that make fun of what they saw as silly propagandist maneuvers. One viral article named and shamed “the 10 most disgusting news headlines of the Yangtze ship wreckage incident”, while another one pretended to be a journalism textbook instructing journalists about how to write “moving” pieces about disasters happened in China.

That said, the Chinese society’s obsession with the emotional dimensions of a disaster cannot be entirely reduced to a state/society dynamic. There is a genuine collective struggle about how to come to terms with a tragedy, and the debate about “what to feel” represents the bewilderment of a hurt community. For instance, when truly heroic figures appear, is it right to express gratefulness and offer compliment? Weird as it may sound, this was the key discussion around Guan Dong, the scuba diver who saved two passengers from the bottom of the river.

Guan was among the dozens of divers who were sent down into the muddy, torrential river to save the hundreds of passengers trapped in the ship. It was a dangerous task to say the least (remember, two divers died in the rescue mission of the Korean MV Sewol). Weather conditions remained terrible for the days after the incident and visibility under the water was close to nothing. It was in such extreme circumstances that Guan managed to pull out two survivors. To save them, he let them use his own breather. When he emerged again on the surface of the water, his nose could be seen bleeding due to under water pressure.

His feat soon became the focus of media attention and online bickering. While nobody denied the nature of Guan’s heroism, the suffusing sentiment of feel-good celebration made some wonder if it was a bit over the top when hundreds were still dying under the water and their relatives were in a state of tortured despair. This was where a divergence of opinion occurred. One group deemed the celebration premature and should wait until the rescue mission was completed. The other considered it legitimate as a way to boost the morale of rescuers who were enduring extreme pressure. “He could die in his next shift. Should celebrate him when he’s still alive,” said one commentator.

The search for decency in the treatment of their diseased fellow-countrymen seems to have become a recurring theme in disasters like this. In 2010, thousands on thousands of Shanghai residents lined up in the streets to offer flowers to those who lost their lives in the big fire that devoured a residential building in the middle of the city, a defiant act that was deemed “the renaissance of civic spirit” in China. In the Yangtze case, the local residents of Jianli, the town closest to the sinking, again touched people’s hearts and minds through their selfless support to the victims’ relatives and journalists.

One thing that people do repeatedly after such disasters is turning to other countries’ experiences for reference. Japan once again became a source of inspiration: a Weibo post about how Japan responded to and commemorated a similar incident in the 1950s resonated strongly within the Chinese web sphere, even though some felt repelled by that country. You can’t say such resonance within the society is futile. After all, it was sentiments like this that gave birth to China’s first national mourning period for ordinary people, the tens of thousands of victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

The disaster reminded people of the Titanic. They thought of the graceful captain who sank with his ship, after arranging the evacuation of the children, women and the elderly. It became a sort of shared imagination of naval decency which led people to feel angry about the fact that the first one rescued from the Oriental Star was the captain. The resentment was so strong that it warranted a serious explanation: as the ship was overturned in a matter of minutes, there would have been no time for him to act as gracefully as the Titanic captain. And when rescuers saw him in the river, they couldn’t just ignore him.