Immune: in the name of rationality

mtj828 Environment and Science , , ,

vaccine

In the middle of a massive eruption of public anger over compromised vaccines, a small group of influential individuals considered themselves immune to what they saw as cheap sentimentalities, and set out to restore “rationality” in the Chinese cyberspace. Their intervention created a deep cleavage in the public debate over the scandal, a consequence that considerably complicates the unfolding of events.

The origin of the story is the Mar 18 revelation by the Paper that 2 million pieces of compromised vaccines (due to improper storage under high temperatures) had entered the market through shady traders all over the country. Two suspects, Pang and her daughter, were caught illegally obtaining and selling Class II vaccines (those that are for voluntary use, as opposed to Class I vaccines that are mandatory for children, whose distribution is controlled by the state). While regulations mandate that vaccines should be kept in a controlled temperature between 2-8 Celsius degrees, the Pangs stored them in a make-shift warehouse with no air conditioning at all. As more details were dug out by the media, the uneasiness among the public, especially young parents, quickly approached boiling point.

As soon as signs of a major public outcry started to appear, a counter-move also began to collect momentum. The Paper’s report immediately met with criticism of “scaremongering”. Ironically, the source of the criticism was a WeChat account targeting young mothers. Declaring that there is little to fear, its main argument is that the vaccine scandal is “old news” (the suspects were actually arrested one year earlier but the police department chose to disclose it to the media now), and there is no reason to believe that the compromised products are still available on the market.

The argument is shaky, as a rebuttal from a veteran Paper journalist points out. Rather than using a piece of old news as click-bait, the fact that the Paper makes a new story out of an arrest a year earlier is a troubling indication of the police’s inability to make progress on the case for over a year and need to overcome interagency barriers by soliciting external support from the press (it was the police that fed the lead to the Paper).

What’s interesting is the man behind that WeChat account. Mai Tian, an Internet executive who made his name in 2012 by venturing the sensational allegation that Han Han, the famous Chinese writer and a sweetheart of the liberal middle class, had hired shadow writers to pen his best known stories, now runs a mobile site focusing on childcare. He is among a vocal group of individuals who have become increasingly vigilant against what they consider misguided populist sentiments. Within this highly heterogeneous group, you find Internet personalities such as him, “science disseminators”, journalists and leftist patriots. Despite their diverse political leaning and professional background, they seem to share one common denominator: a general distrust of popular judgment, bordering on condescension and a contrarian stubbornness.

While this kind of intellectual orientation is not entirely unusual in any society, in China it bumps into a big dilemma: what if that “populist sentiment” is the main driver of progressive change in a country besieged by all kinds of social ills?

An inconvenient truth in recent years is that more often than not, “irrational” concerns from the public outperform “scientific” assurance in terms of their prediction power. A few years after the Xiamen residents were scolded by “science disseminators” for their persistent and “irrational” protest against a planned PX chemical plant in 2007 (as PX is not particularly toxic), a massive explosion at the very facility that was supposed to be built in Xiamen and was relocated to a nearby town due to the protest vindicates the Xiamen protesters in a big way.

The vaccine scandal pitches the two forces against each other once more, this time in the shadow of a media report that is already three years old. On Mar 21, a post named “the tragedy of vaccines” got viral on people’s WeChat walls. In 2013, then Southern Metropolis News journalist Guo Xianzhong completed a three-year investigation into the horrendous side effects of vaccines and the suffering of families all over China. He managed to put a face (or to be accurate, 38 faces) to a problem that was obscured by the country’s general improvement in public health and prevention of contagious diseases. With his camera, he documented 38 kids who suffered severe, debilitating side effects after vaccination and posed serious questions about how the country had been mishandling the recognition and compensation of vaccination victims.

The heartbreaking photos of children are apt ingredients for a new scandal unfolding in front the public’s eyes. The victim of the new scandal is temporarily invisible, as the authority’s investigation has not been thorough enough to uncover those affected by the poorly stored vaccines. When the public is in need of a vehicle to carry their frustration and anger, they pick the most emotionally potent at hand, despite the substantive discrepancy between Guo’s report and the current situation. Side effects happen to proper vaccines too. It is a matter of chance, and when it occurs what’s crucial is expedited recognition and care for those families affected. Compromised vaccines generally pose a different kind of risk, the risk of failure (zero effect), which could be life threatening for those who have to count on their effectiveness, such as potential rabies victims. Angry parents ignored the nuanced differences and aired their discontent using images of crippled or paralyzed kids from three years ago.

The mismatch deeply troubled Hecaitou, a veteran Internet commentator, who penned a sarcastic blogpost insinuating that those retweeting the side-effect story were illiterate and stupid. He maintained that the current scandal concerned only Class II vaccines, and there’s no evidence that these compromised vaccines would be highly toxic. He was particularly harsh on the great number of online media outlets that kept feeding the public with that 2013 story. “Manipulating an ignorant public is like channeling a mindless flash flood. Whoever use it to earn clicks or build up influence is shameless.”

His unnecessarily arrogant tone may have complicated the response to his criticism. Emotional netizens, especially young mothers, were infuriated by his comments. They believe if public pressure can induce positive changes in the management of vaccines in general, then there should be no reason to try to quench that fire. Detailed difference in the numerous facets of the vaccination problem does not matter. Picking bones with public grasping of the issue “is equivalent to defending the evil,” as one popular comment under Hecaitou’s post quipped.

Hecaitou did not back off. Replying to one of the more supportive comments, he revealed his true concern: Chinese parents might be misled into distrusting vaccines totally, a consequence that would be detrimental to the country’s hard won public health gains. A Weibo account fully dedicated to the dissemination of vaccine related scientific information was visibly desperate: “I used to persuade parents that as long as the vaccines are from properly registered producers, they should feel assured of their safety. Now I feel like I am an accomplice in a crime.”

Chinese elites have a natural tendency in worrying about “panic attacks” in the society. One might say that this reflects a deep-seated condescension, seeing the public as incapable of critical thinking and independent judgment in the face of crises. But their wariness is not completely groundless. In 2011, days after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, many Chinese shoppers raided supermarkets to hoard regular sea salt, as they feared that future salts would be polluted by radioactive water. The episode created a temporary shortage of salt in a few towns. The collective fury of young Chinese parents can also be pretty “lethargic.” Last year, a sudden surge of angry calls for the indiscriminating execution of all those who are involved in child trafficking even pressed the nation’s supreme court to formally response, claiming that doing so would be tremendously counter-productive. It turned out that the “call for execution” was the machination of an online outlet to attract clicks. With such recent memories in mind, the concern that a public clenched by fear may turn away from necessary, legitimate vaccines is understandable, even though no evidence is available to show that this is actually happening.

Only this time the pushback against elitist condescension comes strong. Panic, as one commentator puts it, is a society’s natural reflex mechanism to danger. It acts like one’s immune system. Trying to mute such reactions will desensitize the body and make it vulnerable to future threats. “In this country, we need more panic attacks, not less.”

Amid the heated debate, a new term is chauffeured into the Chinese vocabulary: “the right to panic.” (konghuangquan) Supporters uphold the “right” as essentially a freedom of expression, the expression of fear. But others caution that even if the public has the freedom to air whatever they feel, it’s a different thing if media and those with influence choose to intentionally fan the fire of irrational fear. At the bottom of that debate is “opposite assumptions about whether public sentiment is being artificially subdued and whether intervention from the media is warranted.”

This is where the rationalists’ seemingly noble cause meets with intense suspicion. Their call for calmness and reason seems always fall in line with the government’s maneuvers to silence alarm and discontent. This time, while “the tragedy of vaccines” was being attacked for being misleading, reference to the report were quickly deleted all across the Internet.

The government also seemed to have seized the opportunity of this “rationalist backlash” to shift public attention from its responsibility in oversight to the safety of those compromised vaccines. The highly anticipated press conference held by central governmental agencies after the scandal broke dedicated substantial amount of effort to explaining to the public that compromised vaccines were unlikely to lead to toxic side effects. Even the WHO intervened along these same lines, issuing three statements in a roll assuring the Chinese public that the risk of adverse health risk is low. The intervention was so unusual that some on the internet suspected the authenticity of the statements, believing it’s the government’s plot.

The drift of public debate into the territory of risk and science is considered by some as “loosing focus” from the urgent priority of tracking those 2 million pieces of problematic vaccines that are still at large in the market. “Scientific rationalists” were believed to have played a key role in blurring that focus. Whether intentionally or not, they helped reduce the pressure on the shoulder of the authority.

In this clash between righteous public indignation and detached rationalism, a kind of cynicism is discernible on both sides. Agitated parents believe whatever maintains public fury works, even if it could be misinformation. Self-professed defenders of science, on the other hand, have no faith in an increasingly well-informed and well-educated general public, and seem to be more interested in establishing their own intellectual superiority than advancing actual improvement in social conditions. Accept it or not, the Chinese society has to zigzag toward better governance of public goods harnessing those flawed yet powerful forces. To slightly adapt a famous line from the Dark Knight: it is a progressivism that China needs now, but not the one it deserves.

It deserves something much better.

Pan Yue’s Unique Vision of Green China

mtj828 Private Opinion , ,

Pan Yue.jpg

The news that Mr. Pan Yue, Deputy Minister of China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, will soon move to a new position outside the environmental apparatus (a promotion) leaves many people with mixed feeling. In his capacity as a deputy environment minister for the past 13 years, he has been a symbol of the Chinese government’s green commitments, winning himself the unforgettable nickname “Hurricane Pan” (an allusion to the numerous high-profile campaigns he waged to crackdown on polluting industries).

While he pioneered many initiatives that are later considered groundbreaking (his creation of a Green GDP system is one of them), one legacy of his could be easily overlooked especially after an extended period of low public visibility of him in recent years. It is his articulation of a kind of environmentalism that is so organically Chinese that it takes deep root in China’s national environmental narrative without being noticed. Today, upon the departure of Hurricane Pan from the environmental field, it is a good moment to review that mark he has left.

In 2007, Pan made a speech in front of a group of young students which was later published online as an article. It was at the height of his reputation as China’s “environment tsar”, and he demonstrated an eloquence unparalleled among Chinese bureaucrats. The article provides an interesting snapshot of Pan’s thinking on an issue that has occupied a special place in his heart ever since he became one of China’s first environmental journalists in the 1980s.

Unlike mainstream environmental narratives of the West, which often have Nature at the heart of their concern, Pan’s message is one of national rejuvenation. The fundamental issue he grapples with is not the relationship between Man and Nature, but the one between the environment and the Nation. Titled “Green China and Young China”, the article tells the audience that China has reached the stage where continued environmental disasters not only degrade its natural resources and harm its economy, but also hamper its prospect of (re)rising into a great nation.

He places China’s current environmental crisis in the same historical vein as the imperialist invasion of the country in early twentieth century and its self-inflicted political turmoil during Mao’s time. He maintains that every generation of Chinese in the past century shoulders their own historic mission in overcoming the seemingly insurmountable obstacles and bring the country back to its rightful place in history. And the new generation will have to grapple with their own: the environmental challenge. Such elevation of the environmental issue might seem self-serving. After all, Pan was at that time the spokesperson of a weak ministry badly in need of attention and resources. But much of his “scaremongering” predictions then, that the environmental crisis would quickly worsen to shake the country’s still wobbly economic foundation, proves to be prescient after the world watched first-hand how apocalyptical air pollution shrouded large part of the country in a matter of a few years after the article was published.

What’s striking in Pan’s vision of national rejuvenation, beyond the possible intention of mobilization for support, is that it does not just inherit an old-fashioned narrative of “enriching the country and build up its muscles”, but develops an alternative vision that contains a set of distinctive aspirational features such as social justice, democracy and sustainability. In this line of thinking, the environment adopts another layer of significance, serving as the Chinese society’s “laboratory” to experiment on some of these elements.

This is probably Pan’s biggest contribution to China’s environmental field: the direct linkage of environmental protection with a set of broader progressive agenda items. In his own words: “Every aspect of the environmental issue today mirrors an aspect of the Chinese society in general. And every solution to it is an experiment to reform China.” The greening of manufacturing is a step towards the upgrade of China’s industrial capabilities; Ecological compensation, the practice of downstream regions paying upstream regions for its ecological services, is a pilot for larger social justice initiatives; Public participation in environment-related decision making lays the foundation for reforms in governance structure.

The 2005 controversy over the seepage-proofing of a lake in the Old Summer Palace became a showcase of Pan’s “laboratory” metaphor. In that case, the Old Summer Palace administrative office irritated the public for its project to cover the bottom of its historic lake with impermeable membrane, in an attempt to prevent water loss. Environmental groups were concerned that it would destroy the ecosystem of that area. They were even more outraged by the fact that the project had already been underway without undergoing a proper environmental impact assessment. Pan’s agency seized upon the opportunity and pushed the Old Summer Palace administration to redo a proper impact assessment for the lake project. Moreover, they went one step further by organizing an unprecedented public hearing for the assessment, inviting the park administration, NGOs, researchers and the press to openly debate the merit of the project. When commenting on the case, Pan said that he would like the case to be a demonstration of the agency’s transparency and respect for procedural integrity.

It is probably not too far-fetched to say that Pan’s “experiment” narrative opens up political space for the country’s nascent environmental movement. By connecting the field with noble objectives of nation-building, Pan lends it newfound legitimacy. The result is a relatively free atmosphere where advocates can touch on broader governance issues such as information disclosure and procedural rights in ways that their counterparts in other issue areas do not enjoy. Years later, when China’s dominant environmental narrative has turned more personal and right-based (the emergence of NYMBYism is an example), Pan’s “environmental nationalism” may seem a bit vintage. Yet it is exactly because of that legitimacy early on that a more diverse discourse on the environment can take hold.

There are elements of Pan’s environmental thinking that are more idiosyncratically his. For instance, he believes that environmental problems are fundamentally rooted in ethics and culture, and should be addressed in such dimensions. His critique of the country’s ecological plight is morally charged, accusing people of a single-minded, short-sighted pursuit of materialistic wealth, without regard for their moral responsibilities. His invocation of Confucian values as a way to approach the era’s fundamental challenges reflects not just a nationalistic leaning, but also a conviction that problems in the material world originate from the heart. Such a moral and cultural critique of China’s environmental crisis has largely been absent after the passing away of prominent environmental intellectuals such as Liang Congjie (founder of Friends of Nature, China’s earliest environmental NGO). In a field that is now filled with discussions over technical fixes and policy configurations, a look back at Pan’s words from 2007 serves as a reminder of the multi-dimensional nature of China’s green conundrum, and the different possibilities in intervention.

No country for Phoenix man

mtj828 Culture and Education , , ,

dinner

Food occupies a sacred place in the celebration of the Spring Festival. The whole Chinese experience during these few days each year is built around eating: the careful preparation before, the sophisticated rituals during, and the extended wrap-up after the feast.

This year, one such dinner party went terribly awry and became a national spectacle. Not only did the extended wrap-up not happen, it actually involves a guest running away from it. And she did not just run from it, she ran hundreds of kilometers from where the dinner was to her home in Shanghai, in a borrowed car.

So how horrible can a table full of food be? The young woman posted a picture on a Shanghai-based web forum. For eyes not spoiled by the aesthetics of the Chinese cuisine, it might not be immediately obvious why it is that bad. It looks like there are plenty of meat on the table, all put in large steel containers that can hardly contain them. If relocated to another context, this might as well be a symbol of abundance. But for a Chinese, it is at once clear that this is an unrefined dinner from the countryside. The color is unsightly; materials are illegible at best; and the containers, steel rather than china, are simply indecent, particularly for a dinner on the New Year’s Eve.

Even though the authenticity of this dinner party is heavily contested, it is understandable that a white collar from Shanghai can feel frustrated with such quality of food. It was supposed to be her first dinner at the home of her boyfriend, a colleague from rural Jiangxi province, one of China’s most poverty stricken landlocked provinces. Before making up her mind to embark on that over-dramatic cross-country escape the next day, she sought support from fellow forum goers in Shanghai. The underlying message was not just about the dinner, it was about whether she should give up that relationship.

The post almost touched off a referendum on the issues of marriage, etiquette, and women’s right, among others. Compared to that, the suspicion that the whole thing was fabricated by the online forum to salvage its dwindling traffic is beside the point. The bizarre incident once again thrusts the issue of rural China into the national conversation. Only this time, the collective gaze turns unambiguously harsh.

The intellectual tradition that sympathizes with the peasantry runs deep in the Chinese culture. The canon of Chinese classics is stocked by beautifully written passages that bemoan the abject lives of its men and women in the countryside. That tradition paves the foundation for the egalitarian aspirations in much of China’s dominant political thinking throughout its quest for modernization. More recently, the precarious situations of “farmer”,”agriculture” and “countryside” capture the imagination of not only the country’s intellectsia, but also its leadership, making rural issue the nominal “number one” issue for the past decade.

That warmth toward the dirt roads, the paddy fields and the hunched figures laboring in them is dissipating. And strangely, the forces tearing that emotional attachment apart are supposedly “progressive” trends: the advocacy for women’s right, the belief in equal status of husband and wife, the care for children’s well being…

All that newfound hostility is concentrated in a term originated on the Internet: “the Phoenix man”. Its precise origin is untraceable but it is safe to say that it emerged out of the pages upon pages of online sharing of family tensions and dramas, at forums that excel at such topics, such as Tianya or Liba.

Even though the Phoenix, a mythological bird that regenerates itself through blazing nirvana, is often associated with luck and blessing in the Chinese culture, the “Phoenix man” is actually a satirical play of that cultural heritage. It refers to a category of Chinese male, who invariably comes from poor, rural roots and have received higher education in the cities. Through that education they manage to join the ranks of the urban middle class or even higher, get married to an urbanite, and settle down in one of the concrete jungles of the east coast. It sounds like an inspiring story of the China Dream but it’s not. The narrative of the “Phoenix man” is actually a wake-up call of the China nightmare.

The rural roots of the Phoenix man carry much “baggage”, both material and emotional, as the story goes. He feels infinitely indebted to his family, his relatives, his kinsmen, who are left behind in his hometown. Their sacrifice has propelled his rise in social ranks. So he needs to pay them back (and they feel entitled to that payment), often by squeezing his own modest resources. The urge to reciprocate starts to shape his personality: he becomes paranoid, petty and ultra-sensitive to his status. It takes a toll on his relationship, as his girlfriend/wife is often reluctantly drawn into his orbit of incessant repayment. There is a strong patriarch element to the legend. Despite coming from more modest background than his female partner, a Phoenix man is yet adamant in insisting that they play by HIS set of values. She can’t reject that ancient obligation to his village folks. She has to embrace it lest she loses his love.

The fact that in early 21st century a kind of prototypical personality can be so precisely and vividly pinned down through anonymous “crowd-posting” on the Internet is in itself something spectacular. To some extent, it can be read as a quiet, unobtrusive resistance to a suppressive relationship imposed upon a large number of Chinese women. Instead of an open revolt against their men through nasty fights, splits, divorces, they take to online forums to share, recount, and mock. Their collective work is no less powerful. In no time, there are novels personifying that character and television dramas visualizing that label.

But a supposed correction of one set of imbalance (men vs. women) has exacerbated another (city vs. countryside). And that other set of imbalance has been in a state of disrepair for a long time. The Chinese peasants have endured the fate of being an “afterthought” for millennia. They have been the subject of heavy taxation, brutal conscription and devastating collectivization. Even with political movements ostensibly run in their names, they end up becoming the loser, being locked up in their backwardness by a system that restricts their upward mobility in the society.

The “folk education movement” (pingmin jiaoyun) tradition, albeit marginalized in the upheavals of 20th century Chinese history, is probably the only serious attempt from China’s educated elites to “payback” to a class perpetually betrayed. That tradition manifests itself in recent years in the form of sympathetic accounts of the sorry state of the Chinese countryside by liberal intellectuals, journalists and artists.

Almost around this same time last year, a wave of nostalgic sentiments swept through the Chinese Internet. The annual reverse migration back to the countryside during the Spring Festival by the hundreds of millions who work in the cities creates first-hand accounts of the country’s struggling rural communities. In the most popular ones, authors lament about the dissolution of traditional rural values, demoralization of those remaining in the countryside and the disintegration of once strong bonds among people. The eruption of such sentiments became a national post-Spring-Festival topic that drew in the country’s most powerful media institutions.

This year almost saw that same mood unfold as the Lunar New Year approached. Weeks before the national celebration, a piece written by a female scholar who spent some time in her husband’s hometown in the underdeveloped part of Hubei province started to circulate on the web. It is a troubling account of a family and a community disintegrating under the pressure of poverty and sheer whims of life. Their social safety net is so thin that one construction contract going awry sent a relatively prosperous family deep into the abyss of debt. The stress spreads across the family and starts to eat into the life of the author and her husband, who is the only son in his family with a higher education and an academic job in the city. He is a “Phoenix man”. But the author, a deeply compassionate social scientist, was sophisticated enough to reject that label and to relate to the tremendous ethical burden her husband shoulders. She is also sorely aware of how stigmatization like this could close the only remaining channels of upward mobility for people from China’s poor rural regions. The article again raises concerns over the precarious state of the country’s rural communities.

But that concern was completely drowned out by the dubious dinner in Jiangxi province. In its place, a very genuine distaste descends on the farmers and the “lifestyle” they embody. In its most extreme form, a self-claimed “petty bourgeois” female writer goes all the way to explain, with a seriousness that borders on being scary, why social classes are not supposed to mingle, and why it is a good thing to have social stratums separate themselves naturally “like mud from water”. A girl who grows up knowing that steel plates are indecent does not deserve to marry into a family that prepares a dinner like this. The unabashedness and self-righteousness in her message are already glaring. What’s even more troubling is the unexpected surfacing of another line of assault, which, strangely, springs out of a concern for women’s fate in the province of Jiangxi. By highlighting the legitimately disconcerting data that shows Jiangxi as among the provinces with the highest fatality rate for baby girls, posters make a far-fetched case for the escape of our heroine, claiming that she has the right to leave behind a place that treats women in such hideously evil ways (The suspicion goes that peasants in Jiangxi province kill baby girls intentionally as a way of sex selection).

The problem with that argument is that it casts the systematic practice of sex selection of newborn baby simplistically as a moral failing of individual farmers, and from that reading women’s right advocates derives a kind of punitive indignation completely directed at the rural community. No question is raised about the role of the state in causing this problem: the issues of one-child policy or rural education never surface during such discussions. People seem to be complacent about stopping the questioning at the individual level of the poor farmers. They finally have someone to blame for the misery of Chinese women in the countryside.

The feminist backlash against the peasant class is the most intriguing turn of events in this saga about one silly dinner. It is hard to tell how much of that can be attributed to the systematic removal of the “root cause critique” from public discourse. As observer Song Zhibiao puts it: “Prejudice is often de-politicized. From the very beginning there is no mention of the government, as if the Chinese countryside is an isolated utopia, a self-contained sin that has nothing to do with the cities. It only deserves to die by itself, silently.”

In 21st century China, its aging, sick and disenfranchised countryside is faced with another menace: urban public opinion turning unforgiving.

 

* It has just been confirmed that the story of the dinner is completely fabricated.

Further reading on this blog: Poor Man’s Violence

Subculture Hegemony

mtj828 Hongkong, Taiwan and Ethnic Issues , , , , ,

diba

Try to think of great subcultures worldwide, those surrounding Japanese anime and Norwegian black metal might come to mind.  After January 21, 2016, you might as well put Chinese online forum in that pantheon.

On that date, tens of thousands of users from mainland China logged onto Facebook and “occupied” the comment sections of the pages of major Taiwanese news organizations and politicians to express their disapproval of Taiwan independence.

If as a non-Chinese speaker you are confused by references to “Diba”, “D8” or “Tieba” in news reports about this incident, it means you are normal. By definition, a subculture tries to construct an alternative identity that differentiates itself from the one bestowed by the parent culture. It often has its own language, symbols and rituals that may be unintelligible to an outsider. Not surprisingly, it took many usually Internet-savvy Chinese observers some time to figure out what was going on. Equally dazzled were the Taiwanese targets of this campaign.

Getting some basic understanding of that subculture has become somewhat imperative not just because it injects itself so forcefully into the high politics of the Taiwan Strait this time. Its permeation into the daily discourse of Chinese society and the favorable attention it gets from China’s propaganda machine warrant a deeper look into its root and temperaments.

Our protagonist this time is called “Diba”, a keyword-based online forum (or “Tieba” as they are known in Chinese) hosted by China’s largest search engine Baidu. It was at first just a regular Tieba dedicated to a mediocre Chinese soccer player, set up in 2004. Over the years, it has gone through major transformations that make it outstanding among the hundreds of thousands of Tiebas that exist, boasting a membership of 20 million, which easily dwarfs any other such forums in the Chinese cyberspace.

One of such transformations is to go beyond its designated “keyword”, “Li Yi”, the soccer player who said stupid things such as “my skills resemble those of Henry”, the French superstar. Since Henry was fondly referred to by fans as Henry the Great (Henri le Grand), members of the Tieba jokingly dubbed Li “the Emperor”, hence the forum’s nickname “Diba” (“Di” means emperor in Chinese). Participants of the forum initially gathered to make fun of Li Yi, but then quickly extended their sarcastic talents to whatever issues that attracted their attention.

As a recent analysis of the Diba phenomenon puts it, the forum gradually transcends its namesake and is increasingly organized around a unique discursive strategy: a veiled, satirical way of badmouthing someone that disguises itself as compliments. It’s the Chinese equivalent of singing hymn to Justin Bieber. The strategy also has a class signature to it: members of the group self-deprecatingly refer to themselves as “Diaosi” (another play with the pronunciation of “Di” but has the meaning of pubic hair), which is considered a label of those from a lower social class. Rather than avoiding a label like this, participants, mainly young males, embrace it proudly. Furthermore, they invented a host of terms applying to the opposite social class, such as “Gaofushuai” (“tall, rich, good-looking”), with very little resentment embedded in them. Instead, self-branded “Diaosis” use them with humorous resignation, adopting a posture of self-disarming capitulation. Both “Diaosi” and “Gaofushuai”, among other Diba-originated words, have find their place in modern Chinese language, a sign of the subculture’s ability to reciprocate its influence to the parent culture.

Why would a loosely organized online community so self-involved in constructing subtle jokes suddenly wake up to a nationalist call to confront the so-called Taiwan independence force?

Events in January alone could not fully explain such an eruption of enthusiasm, although they do serve as a trigger. Prior to the presidential election in Taiwan on January 16, public sentiments on the mainland were influenced by an agitator coming, ironically, from Taiwan. Since late 2015, a third-tier Taiwanese singer and former TV show host, Huang An, had been running a personal campaign against “Taiwan independence” by crucifying fellow Taiwanese celebrities in front of the mainland authority and public. His approach was clumsy and tacky, at one point involving holding a banner in front of the mainland’s Taiwan affairs office with anti-independence slogans. Yet it was also effective in its own way. Many Taiwanese pop stars named and shamed by Huang saw their business plans in the mainland disrupted for appearing to be sympathetic to the independence cause. Huang’s motivation for such uncalled-for agitation is unclear, as his behavior alienates the Taiwanese society, effectively burning the bridge back to his home market. Some conjectured that he was just trying to camouflage his practice of advertising for dubious health products in the mainland with disingenuous patriotic posturing. What’s more interesting is the mainland authority’s willingness to entertain such behavior and watch Huang lynch Taiwanese public figures with the mainland’s ultra-sensitive political taboo as a weapon.

Things got a bit heated up when in November 2015 Huang set his eyes on Chou Tzu-yu, a young Taiwanese pop star who had barely started her performing career in South Korea. Huang regards some of her acts in public, such as waving the Taiwanese flag in a video clip, as reflecting an “independence tendency”. But what finally agitated Huang into a full attack mode, as he later claimed, was Taiwan’s pro-independence media, which used Chou as an upholder of the Taiwanese identity and crowned her “the light of Taiwan”. The unfortunate 16-year-old saw herself sucked into a nasty swirl propelled by two mutually reinforcing forces: one that sees Taiwanese independence as an absolute, non-negotiable taboo and would err on the side of caution by eliminating any possible association with it, and the other that amplifies any conscious or unconscious expression of one’s own identity as a political statement. The result is a string of cancellations of her appearance in mainland TV shows.

Apparently under tremendous pressure, Chou released a pre-recorded apology on the Internet on January 15. In the VCR, people saw a pale, distressed girl wearing a black turtleneck. She read from a piece of paper with a blank face, saying she “felt proud being a Chinese” and expressing her regret for irritating the public from “both sides of the Strait”. In the end, she announced that she would suspend all her activities in China to “reflect on her mistake”. She bowed to the camera.

People on both sides of the Strait were indeed irritated, but for very different reasons. For those watching in Taiwan, the VCR was an appalling scene of a 16-year-old being politically bullied and humiliated publicly. Some of them vented their anger on a mainland TV star who joked about Chou’s stuttering performance in the video by flooding his Facebook post with criticism.

This became the detonator of a massive mobilization campaign at the Diba, where its millions of members vowed to give the other side a lesson.

On Jan 20, the Long March began. According to a first-hand account from a participant, “conscription” ads started to appear on the Internet asking people to join numerous “columns” formed to execute the campaign. There were groups responsible for translating materials into foreign languages so that “foreigners can be sympathetic to the cause”. Others were in charge of all the Photoshopping and graphic design of “pic-emojis”, which became the main ammunition of the campaign. Leaders of the mission set down rules that were at once militantly disciplinary and comically naive. There were rules about not using dirty language, and also those barring participants from using images of the top leader. People were asked to differentiate separatists from “the Taiwanese people.” You can be merciless to the former, but should be friendly to the latter.

The landing was set at 19:00 sharp. Participants were asked to register at Facebook, something many of them had never done until that very moment. Together with Twitter, YouTube and Google, Facebook is blocked in mainland China by the infamous Great Firewall. To get over the wall, netizens had to use VPN services, a cumbersome undertaking. This did not stop them from parachuting into Facebook en masse. In no time, comment sections under the posts of Apple Daily, Sanli News and Taiwan’s president-elect Tsai Ing-wen were filled with seemingly mass produced contents: patriotic poems, communist party slogans, pic-emojis, and pictures of food.

Some people on the mainland were repulsed by the shallowness of the message sent by the young patriots. Others laughed at their lack of erudition. By reciting textbooks and acting as if they were “educating” the other side, theirs was essentially a message of rejection: refusing to understand the aspects of the Taiwan society that are simply alien to a mainland mind. This is not an awfully unfair characterization. The “class struggle” mark on the guiding principles of the campaign was too glaring to not notice. The idea that people can be easily identified as “separatists” and “brothers”, and should be treated in completely different ways betrays the mindset from another era, a mindset that lingers in middle school textbooks and gets passed along to the millennials. Even though “rules” bar participants from using dirty words, they found other creative ways to intimidate their perceived opponents. Calling them “independence dogs” seemed to be perfectly fine for most of the Facebook crusaders.

Among the participants of the pageant, there is a visible tendency to approach things merely from a materialistic point of view, as if the Taiwanese people could be wooed by pictures of fancy cuisines or shiny skyscrapers. To be fair, this might be just a response to the caricature of the mainland by the Taiwanese side: the Taiwan pundits’ misrepresentation of the mainland as still living in the poverty stricken era of Mao hurt the pride of many across the Strait. But the notion that economic power trumps everything, and that a superior economic position is somehow equivalent to a superior value system is not only logically flawed, but also disconcerting when a large number of Chinese youth seem to take it for granted.

When the battalions of China’s young Facebook warriors were armed, organized and aligned along such an overarching logic, it is not surprising that their narratives were full of patriarchal metaphors wherein Taiwan was the “younger brother” and the “son”, even when they were showing good will.

Military terms notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to see these youngsters as an organized force answering the call of the Party. Their tone and style set them apart from the more uptight “online patrols” the Party dispatches to enforce its political creed. This is probably the most intriguing aspect of this Facebook saga: no one, left or right, seemed to be prepared for such a massive expression of patriotism, especially from this corner of the Internet. Even though official outlets such as the People’s Daily’s WeChat account spoke highly of the newfound patriotic zeal in the Chinese millennials and the Communist Youth League came close to giving it a virtual standing ovation, their moves were more like trying to catch up to a novelty they were (pleasantly) surprised of. Conservatives were also busy helping the millennials fend off attacks from the liberals, who immediately dismissed the kids as online “Red Guards”. Unfortunately, the liberals, who are traditionally more internet savvy than their rivals on the left, seemed to be as confused this time. Red Guard is clearly a misnomer: there is no indication that those youngsters are violent fanatics. So is “little pink”, the supposedly derogatory term coined by the liberals to describe what they consider as “mildly and playfully red”. But those more attuned to online subcultures pointed out that “little pink” was an existing community with very different political leaning.

The failure of existing opinion leaders to recognize, let alone understand, the young kids who jumped over the Great Firewall to bicker with the Taiwanese, is indicative of the generational gap between the old order on the internet and the emerging new. Cautious observers took a more detached position, without cheering or condemning the episode. They considered it a rare chance for young people from across the Strait to have direct dialogue about an issue that had proved thorny for an older generation.

Interestingly, this is hardly the first time that the Diba crowd collectively expressed their political stance through post bombardment. But their previous feats were obscured by the fact that they happened largely within the underground world of subcultures. A review of the ten-plus-year history of the forum shows that at least in 11 previous cases, they “carpet bombed” other forums for views they did not approve. Nationalism, albeit an unsophisticated version,  underlines 4 (out of the 11) such campaigns. In one case, they paralyzed a Tieba dedicated to a Taiwanese pop star for her disrespect of Nanjing massacre victims; in another, they overwhelmed a Korean singer’s forum because he allegedly beat up a Chinese pregnant woman. One analysis attributes this spontaneous airing of nationalism with the forum’s soccer origin. It is said that modern sports, particularly soccer, is closely associated with nationalistic sentiments. As Orwell once famously put, “There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism — that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.”

There are others who read the Diba’s increasingly patriotic vibe as a result of the intentional guidance from its board managers, who, in interviews with the media, had indicated their interest in connecting the forum’s passive-aggressive cynical culture to the more upbeat mainstream discourse as a way to establish its legitimacy. And nationalism provides a perfect shortcut to that connection, given the forum’s largely young and male membership.

From a more macro perspective that locates the ascendence of the Diba subculture in the tectonic plate shift of China’s online opinion geology, the recent incident is a strong signal that the political pendulum of the Chinese internet is swaying momentously to the left after years of domination by liberal values. Insulated from the major battles on Weibo that decided China’s online sentiments in the past few years, the generation that has grown up chatting about ACG in obscure online communities using their own language begins to assert its own political values disregarding rules set by any established camps. The fact that they climbed over China’s notorious internet firewall to wage a patriotic campaign highlights the rebellion/allegiance contradiction in their action. The later shutdown of their VPN services reflects the authority’s uneasiness in handling this new force, and the intrinsic difficulty in co-opting it.

At this moment, it is hard to predict how this impulsive youth subculture would create any lasting political impact. The collective action might just be one of the ways a subculture reasserts and rejuvenates its own distinctive identity. Just like an active volcano, after a major eruption, the community relapsed into its everyday mode of nonsensical jokes and undecipherable jargons. Is it going to belch flames again in the future and occupy the Facebook page of Hillary Clinton, or overwhelm the Twitter account of Shinzo Abe, as some have suggested? Will it go beyond its current role of political taboo enforcer and public opinion vigilante, and adopt the more sophisticated strategies of other online subcultural communities such as Anonymous? Before anyone can clearly see the consequence, the best thing to do is to get familiar with some Diaosi vocabulary.

Further Reading on this Blog: Love Thy Country

January: a Moment of Reflection

mtj828 Private Opinion , , , ,

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The advantage of blogging is the flexibility to revisit and revise what has been written before. I started this blog slightly less than a year ago. In the process I have made observations, ventured hypotheses and passed judgments on events that defined the contour of Chinese public opinion in 2015. My intention is to be as rigorous as possible by staying vigilant about hasty conclusions and logic gaps. But the limitation of publicly available information dictates that what I can see is always just the tip of the iceberg. My mental image of that part underneath is subject to all kinds of distortion.

The only antidote to intellectual hubris, a false sense of mastery of truth, is time.  Things change, new information emerges, and situations evolve. Sometimes they require a correction of original views, sometimes they clear up the mist hung over facts like the north wind that blows away Beijing’s notorious smog.

In February 2015, when Chai Jing’s groundbreaking documentary “Under the Dome” swept across China, I considered it a stress test of the Chinese society’s environmental consensus. The result, I believed at that time, was good: the consensus was largely sound despite some pressure on the left. A major sign of that consensus was the seemingly strong endorsement from the authority. The official People’s Daily website was among the first sites to carry it. The newly appointed Environment Minister openly congratulated her. What happened to the documentary later proved that there were plenty of tensions between the public narrative about smog and the official tolerance for participation. The documentary was abruptly and thoroughly purged from the Internet days after its wildly popular debut. Chai Jing was removed from public sight. The “endorsement” turned out to be a mirage: it was probably just a bunch of progressives within the propaganda apparatus that engineered the documentary’s initially “legit” appearance, which gave an impression of governmental acceptance, a pre-condition for its light speed spread on the Internet. The backlash against Chai, both from the authority and from the conservative left, indicates that the Chinese society’s current stand on air pollution should better be understood as an equilibrium than a consensus. Even though on surface the result may look the same: society is moving slowly towards addressing pollution, the concept of an equilibrium better captures the tensions involved. While the authority has to maintain a reasonable level of supply for clean air actions, the public’s ability to demand more has also been severely curtailed with social media platforms heavily policed and key opinion leaders suppressed since 2013. The energy needed to break that equilibrium from both sides is non-existent at the moment, which prompted observers to bemoan the pathetic stalemate in the middle of December’s Airpocalypse episodes.

If the fate of Chai Jing’s documentary looks intriguing, the Qing’an gunshot incident is almost mystical. At its most confusing moment, no one understood why a simple gunshot case inside a tiny train station lounge could not be resolved once and for all. When I wrote my blog post on this incident, I opined that the force field of dominant narratives tended to bend the ballistic trajectory of truth. What I did not know at that time was that the “dominant narrative” of injustice and suppression was to a large extent intentionally fed to the public by activists whose motivations remained opaque until now. It was the dramatic crackdown on rights lawyers a few months later that brought the activists’ involvement in the controversy to public knowledge. Official stigmatization notwithstanding, why would activists choose to concentrate the full force of national wrath on a victim who seemed to have little immediate grievance and an incident that by all means looks uncomplicated? If anything, the case serves as a caution for future interpretations of the eruption of societal anger as spontaneous. Insomuch as the state has the interest to mold public opinion, the resistance has the same.

At times my depiction of that resistance’s power is probably too optimistic. The public outcry against the Tianjin chemical blast and the intensity of media probing rekindled hope that a daring, professional press corp might lead to changes otherwise elusive to this country. But five months have passed and the highly anticipated investigation by the State Council is yet to be unveiled. Media inquiry into later man-made tragedies, such as the December landslide in Shenzhen, quickly relapsed into the good old mode of shock and oblivion.

It is also in this area that inconsistency emerges. As a tragedy of the same magnitude as the Tianjin blast, the sinking of the Yangtze River cruiser “Oriental Star” manifests the authority’s well-honed ability to shape media agenda and channel public mood to “desirable directions”. But only months later that ability seemed to have completely evaporated in Tianjin. Does this warrant a reassessment of the Party’s grip over domestic public opinion? If you buy into the assessment that the past three years were all about the state winning back its once lost battleground in social media, the Tianjin incident, where the authority seemed to have blundered in this regard, should be seen as a setback rather than a reversal. Even so, it is still worth asking what combination of factors in Tianjin managed to catch a formidable force of propagandists and “Internet patrols” off guard, whether it’s the sheer magnitude of the accident or it’s the structural lack of coordination among relevant authorities in that particular situation.

After a year of blogging about Chinese public opinion, I realize that the biggest challenge, besides the limitations of available information and the constantly evolving situation, is to assess its actual impact. Just how consequential is the collective airing of certain sentiments or viewpoints?  As a recent WeChat post perfectly summarizes the dilemma: “On the one hand, members of the public constantly discount the importance of their own opinions, seeing them as nothing more than useless ‘words’ that seldom translate into real world actions. On the other, authorities treat such ‘words’ with all sincerity and try to block them at every turn. ” So as observers, do we take the public’s pessimistic views about their own power, or do we value it based on the authority’s (over)reaction?

I think this is something I need to keep in mind and grapple with while blogging in 2016. The new year began with a spectacular stock market plunge and a public outcry against China’s largest search engine Baidu. It does not bode well for the Chinese economy but should prove fertile for a blogger. I am grateful to all of you who were patient with me in the past year. Life got a bit busy for me lately. But I promise this blog will regain its rhythm very soon. Stay tuned!

Das Evil Kapital

mtj828 Business and Finance , , , , , ,

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(China Vanke Chairman Wang Shi)

Speaking of the pot calling the kettle black, nothing sounds weirder than a Chinese real estate developer accusing a private insurer of bringing in sinful capital, which incidentally pushed up the former’s stock price to a historic high.

In what has become one of China’s most spectacular melodramas of the year, the attempted hostile takeover of China’s largest home builder, China Vanke, by a little known insurance conglomerate, Baoneng, creates a sense of intrigue so intense that it almost redefines how a corporate deal could be received by the Chinese society. In the process, it reveals the multi-layered, fantastic imagination that the society attaches to capital and those who wields it.

The substance of the event is pretty simple on the surface. In the time span of less than half a year, the Baoneng conglomerate has acquired tens of billions RMB worth of Vanke’s share through the stock market. Quietly, the insurer had become Vanke’s largest shareholder with 22.45% of its total shares by Dec 17, a dramatic increase from only 5% four months earlier.

Nothing in the public domain suggests that Baoneng’s operation violates any written rules. This is reflected in the authority’s largely ambivalent attitude toward the deal up to this point. China’s securities watchdog has openly expressed its willingness to “leave the matter to the market”, while its supervisory body for banking is “looking into” potential exposure of local banks to risks involved in the deal. But what Baoneng essentially does is disrupting Vanke’s carefully maintained shareholder structure that has been in place for two decades. The essence of that structure is highly dispersed shareholding that allows senior management a freehand in steering the company. Until Baoneng emerged on the horizon, China Resources, a state-owned conglomerate friendly to the Vanke management, had been Vanke’s largest shareholder owning about 15% of its shares. Other major shareholders held less than 6% combined.

This explains why those most unsettled by Baoneng’s move are Vanke’s senior managers, specifically its chairman, the 60-year-old Wang Shi.

In an internal speech made public on Dec 18, Wang makes it clear that he does not welcome Baoneng as Vanke’s no.1 shareholder. He sneers at the new comer’s business as risky and irresponsible, which will tarnish Vanke’s stellar reputation as China’s most credit-worthy home builder.

According to details revealed by the Chinese media, Baoneng financed its 40-billion-RMB stock market advancement on Vanke largely through margin financing, layers of collateralized loans leveraged by money from its sales of Universal Life Insurance that is often marketed as short-term investment products. In his speech, Wang blasts the financing model as excessively risk-taking. He is not without his points. Equity investment as a long-term investment strategy would put pressure on Baoneng’s short-term based money line. In an event of large-scale redemption of the ULI product or unexpected regulatory intervention, the insurer will face serious liquidity problems.

But Wang’s criticism of his fervent bidder goes beyond finance. His account of his first face-to-face encounter with Yao Zhenhua, the man behind Baoneng, betrays a hint of contempt: “He appeared not able to control his mouth… Nobody has heard of such persons before. They came out of nowhere and suddenly got very rich using leveraged money.

Unlike his “nobody” adversary, Wang has been the torch bearer of Chinese entrepreneurship for as long as “entrepreneurship” is valued in China. Being the founder of Vanke, Wang has led the legendary company for 31 straight years. Vanke was the second earliest stock ever listed on China’s Shenzhen Stock Exchange, with its trading code 000002 as a badge of honor.  Over the years, Wang has cultivated a larger-than-life public image that sets him apart from the typical “Chinese businessman”. He is adventurous, spending his leisure time climbing Mount Everest, kayaking in the torrents of western China and flying gliders over the sky. He radiates wisdom, taking three years off his corporate chairmanship to ruminate about Japanese history at Harvard; He advocates for a business culture that sounds refreshing for a Chinese audience: He claims that Vanke never bribes anyone to get business deals in China; He promotes high-quality, sustainable architecture and neighborhood; He serves as WWF US’s board member and delivers inspiring speeches at the world’s most prestigious green events.

The stark contrast between the public images of Wang and Yao creates an interesting tension that defines initial reaction to the Vanke-Baoneng conflict. Specters were somehow led to believe that there are two kinds of businesses, those that are benign and decent, and those that are hostile and crooked. Wang’s internal speech certainly helps create this impression by invoking the “barbarians at the gate” image, which spreads across newspaper headlines in the following days. The narrative was also enhanced by Wang’s influential admirers, the most excessive of which declares that “Vanke can lose Wang Shi. But China can’t lose him.” As a former chief editor of one of China’s most popular business newspapers puts it, Wang’s Vanke represents the “truthfulness, goodness and beauty” in the Chinese business community for its uphold of basic business ethics and rationality. The editor “shed tears” after learning about Wang’s current difficulties.

Whereas 30 years of relatively robust business does speak to the strength of Vanke’s business model and Wang’s leadership, whether it is a sign of its moral superiority is debatable. Actually many people were put off by Wang’s overtly ethical criticism of Baoneng, seeing it rather as a kind of biased arrogance. For Wang Shi, introducing the ethical argument into a corporate deal cuts both ways. While he can once again brand Vanke’s cleaner-than-thou business culture, some questions Wang’s fundamental business ethics of openly rejecting a perfectly legitimate major shareholder who may actually improve Vanke’s performance in the stock market. Interestingly, Baoneng issued a public statement on Dec 18 confronting Wang on the ethical question head on: “Where is the conflict between the pursuit of optimal, efficient capital deployment and an open, transparent social order?” In his speech, Wang speaks highly of Vanke’s regard for its hundreds of thousands of small shareholders. However, people also point out the contradiction that the management never did anything to boost the company’s stock performance, even when they had the chance to do so through a stock buyback in 2014. It turns out to be a fateful decision not to do so, as it hands Baoneng an opening (80% of Vanke’s shares were outstanding in the stock market at that time).

As financial observers are debating the wisdom of Vanke’s business decisions, and more importantly, the disturbing trend of insurance money flooding the securities market shopping for real estate equities, wider discussions about the deal are turning decisively “Olympian”. The dramatic clash between business titans teases out a deep-seated suspicion that big capitals are but proxies of more powerful interests behind them, and therefore their conflict must represent power struggles on a much higher level. In other words, this is modern China’s financial Trojan War, where the Greeks and Trojans are fighting on behalf of their rivaling Gods.

The theory goes that both Wang Shi and Yao Zhenhua are front-men of their respective political patrons, who belong to adversarial cliques of the Party. Wang’s unspecified patron controls the China Resources conglomerate (Vanke’s biggest shareholder before Baoneng’s bid), which has recently been disciplined under the anti-corruption campaign (its chairman was arrested last year). Baoneng’s attempt to seize control of Vanke is another assault on the big boss behind Wang Shi from its political rivals. The intriguing participation of Anbang Insurance in this financial drama further fuels this line of speculation. As Baoneng was making strides in the stock market, Anbang, a company widely associated with prominent “princelings,” quietly increased its stake in Vanke to over 6%, making itself the “swing vote” between the two fighting camps. If Anbang represents the will of another God which may decide the fate of Troy, is it Athena or Apollo?

A cautious mind would notice that this political reading of the Vanke-Baoneng deal shows signs of stretching reality to fit an imagination about the politics of Chinese elites. It assumes that the supposed political enmity among powerful party figures extends naturally from the political arena to the corporate realm through “proxies”, and that large Chinese corporations, no matter how complicated their financing is, can be neatly assigned to particular political figures who are involved in a zero-sum power game.

But this kind of alternative narrative does broaden the base of the story’s audience, as it proves to be something more “entertaining” than cold financial details. The abundance of conjectures and the shortage of ascertainable facts also make the story much more social-media-friendly, leaving most serious media outlets high and dry. One observer senses the irony in the popularity of the story: as something fundamentally non-relatable to most Chinese watchers, it manages to create an almost magnetic theatrical effect.

The vulgarization of the story does not stop at political gossips. Both Wang and Yao’s personal lives were added into the recipe to make it more flavory. In particular, Wang’s once high profile love affair with a young actress was held against him as indication of his sluggishness in recent years, which supposedly led to his unpreparedness in response to Baoneng’s ambush. It fits well into a misogynist tradition of Chinese classic stories, where the fall of a male hero is often blamed upon a seductive female partner. “All of a sudden many people jump out to teach Wang Shi, and everybody, a lesson: how women cost ambitious men their world.”

On Dec 21, Vanke applied for the suspension of trading in its stocks for as long as three months, citing “significant asset restructuring” as a reason. The move was widely read as a way to strike back at Baoneng, which faces liquidity pressure on its leveraged debts. A recent Caixin report reveals that Wang has been busy approaching potential equity investors to improve Vanke’s shareholding structure. But given the fact that very few shares outstanding remain on the market, it will not be an easy job.

Two days later, the mysterious Anbang Insurance issued a statement publicly supporting “the stability of Vanke’s senior management”, essentially busting the conspiracy theory that Anbang, and the political forces behind it, are set to overthrow Wang Shi’s real estate empire. With Anbang’s more than 6% share on Wang’s side, the situation improves almost overnight for Wang’s team. But Anbang’s real intention with Vanke remains unclear.

The general public probably will never know what actually happened behind the scene during these hectic days and nights of December 2015. No one is there to write the Chinese version of “The Barbarians at the Gate”, which is a lamentable fact for long-time observers of the country’s finance reporting scene. (Only Caixin’s detailed investigative report on the case is probably an exception.) No matter who emerges in the end as the winner of this bid for the control of China’s largest home developer, the loser is already visible: it’s the idea of “philosopher-king capitalists” as the progressive force to change China. The Vanke drama has revealed the fragility of the public image that Wang Shi and an entire class of so-called progressive Chinese capitalists have built for themselves. To the Chinese public, not only are their moral positions dubious, their independent agency is also under question. The widespread public perception that they are just puppets of much more powerful masters provides a real valuation of their moral capital in this country and how shaky their moral high ground really is. Expecting entrepreneurs like Wang Shi to provide the kind of moral leadership that can lift the society out of its value vacuum is almost like betting on Hector to win the Trojan War.

The Unbearable Coldness of Being (Chinese)

mtj828 Law and Order , , , , ,

nanhang

“If Everything is Cold.” The usually witty Cai Fanghua, a columnist for the Beijing Youth Daily, titled his recent WeChat post with apparent solemnity. The subject was the near-death experience of a fellow journalist, whose traumatic ordeal had stunned and incensed the public for the past two weeks. Oddly, the case has nothing to do with journalism or news reporting, but the protagonist’s profession did help make it a national front page story.

On Nov 9, Mr. Zhang Yang, a TV journalist from Liaoning province was on board China Southern Airline’s flight CZ6101 on a reporting mission to Beijing. Before boarding he ate a light lunch. Barely after the flight took off he felt an acute pain in his abdomen which, in a few minutes, rendered him immobile. He had to half squat on the ground, sweating profusely. He knew something had gone badly wrong with his body. Attended by the stewardess, he was assured that an ambulance was already waiting in Beijing.

When the plane touched down on the icy runway of Beijing Capital Airport, it turned out his nightmare had just begun. With the ambulance visible outside the window, the gate of the plane just did not open. This poor guy had to wait another FIFTY minutes before the crew sorted out a supposed brake malfunction and opened what later became the gate of hell (or at least purgatory)for this reporter.

Neither the crew members nor the ambulance staff were willing to carry this suffering man down the flight. Both considered it the responsibility of the other side. The emergency service staff did not even carry a stretcher. So right in front of this patient, the two sides engaged in a nasty fight that involved abusive language of all sorts. Everybody was so self-involved that no one paid a tiny bit of attention to the guy, who,by this point, was literally howling with pain on the ground. He feared that he was to die on the plane. Mustering what remained of his strength, he shouted to the fighting crowd, “I’ll carry myself!” and started crawling down the steep stairs. Nobody offered him a hand. Upon reaching the ambulance, the driver kindly asked him if he could climb onto it by himself, as the lifting device was “too cumbersome to handle”. With bitter resignation, he obliged.

It’s not over. Ambulance staff would only send him to the airport-affiliated hospital, not a place known for its medical prowess. After running all sorts of examinations on him, doctors at the airport hospital realized that his conditions were critical enough that he needed to be immediately transfered to a major hospital. So they hailed a 999 emergency service ambulance, which was once again an ill-fated turn of event in this reporter’s eyeball-dropping journey of death.

The staff on the 999 ambulance, telling the reporter that both recommended hospitals were full (a lie probably), insisted on taking him to 999’s self-owned emergency center on the far north side of the city, bypassing all nearby hospitals that could have taken him in right on spot. Upon arrival, hours had passed since the plane landed in Beijing. Zhang was almost unconscious, head swollen and belly about to explode, while doctors at the center were clueless about how to treat him. With his lingering consciousness, Zhang asked someone at his side to make a phone call to his doctor friend in Beijing, who forced the immediate transfer of him to one of the city’s best hospitals.

At long last, Zhang received a life-saving surgery eight hours after he first saw an ambulance through the window of his flight. Intraperitoneal hernia had blown up his small intestine like a balloon. He was that close to death. Surgeons cut off 80 centimeters of his clogged intestine to save his life. Days after he barely stared down death itself, he posted his experience on Weibo.

Every once in a while the Chinese society would be stung by its own indifference to the suffering of fellow countrymen. In 2011, eighteen passers-by turned a blind eye to a dying toddler lying in the middle of the street hemorrhaging after being ran over by a van. When the video, captured by a closed circuit camera, emerged on the Internet, it became a global spectacle. The Daily Telegraph in the UK described it as “a story that has deeply unsettled millions in China, posing troubling questions about whether three decades of headlong economic development has left nothing but a moral vacuum in its wake.” Half a year later, the incident was still part of the broader conversation about China: when the young writer Han Han, then still active in social debates, did an interview with the Financial Times, he brought up the girl as a sign of “the Chinese society’s cold selfishness.”

At least part of that harsh collective self-assessment is the relic of an intellectual tradition dating back to the early 20th century. In a rush to make sense of the humiliating defeat of China in front of the major powers, militarily, politically and culturally, Chinese intellectual elites plunged themselves into an obsession with the so-called “national character” (guomingxing) . Being “cold” and “indifferent” was considered a big part of that national character, nailed into the consciousness of every Chinese by Lu Xun’s classic image of a group of by-standers cheering the execution of a fellow Chinese by the Japanese.

Whereas post-colonialist scholars have later seriously challenged the idea of a (flawed) “national character” as a myth constructed by the likes of Lu Xun under the influence of a dominant colonialist narrative of the time, the tendency to self-generalize still lingers on, particularly in popular accounts about events such as the above mentioned toddler.

But there are indications that discussions about the country’s moral status are gradually evolving into a different kind of self-examination. One such indication is the effort to debunk the myth of Chinese coldness by demonstrating, in a non-scholarly fashion, that it is nothing more than a product of poorly verified media accounts. Wang Zhi’an, a quite unorthodox CCTV investigative journalist with a propensity to bust what he sees as populist sentiments, has done some work to expose that a few well-known cases of so-called Good Samaritans being extorted by those they help, a major source of the “coldness” impression, are misrepresented by the media: The “Good Samaritans”, such as the famous Peng Yu, are actually responsible for the injury of the victims.

Another strand of the discussion, somewhat related to the above Good Samaritan issue, is to unearth the social and institutional set-up that prohibits well-intentioned individuals from extending their helping hands. A subset of the debates surrounding Zhang Yang mistreatment at the flight’s exit was on this topic. Some highlights the risks associated with handling patients in critical conditions, citing previous incidents where airline staff got complained or sued by patients. Industry experts liken it to the moral dilemma of helping fallen old people on the street, the lack of liability shields often discourages passers-by from helping.

What ultimately makes this “airport-gate” unique is that it does not stop at a mere “hard look” at the ugly side of the Chinese society. Its transformation into a genuine opportunity for social improvement sets it apart from so many similar cases that only result in increased cynicism. A large part of it should be attributed to our protagonist, Zhang Yang, who vowed to make himself “the last one to suffer from such inhumane treatment,” and has since then turned himself into a formidable campaigner who is particularly savvy in navigating the treacherous Chinese cyberspace, which eats and defecates public figures on a daily bases. He shrewdly dodges common pitfalls that had obliterated many a predecessors of his: he turned down compensation offers from both China Southern Airline and the airport hospital, neutralizing any accusation that he is doing this for economic gains; His writing, albeit poignant and pointed, was restraint in its allegations; He was sympathetic toward those individuals who made him suffer, who he saw as victims of the system too. He made it explicit that in order to push for systematic change on the problems exposed by this incident, he would take pains to keep himself “uncorruptible”. This includes refraining from taking any advantage of his journalist identity, even barring his own media organization, the largest TV station in Liaoning province, from reporting his story. His determination, and a peculiar ability to steer public opinion without getting bruised in the process, seems to have come to fruition. So far he has secured repeated public apologies from China Southern Airline and the airport hospital. His adamant yet reasonable manner left such a strong impression on his adversaries that it became part of the official record in China Southern Airline’s internal communication about the encounter:”Mr. Zhang is a polite, reasonable and tolerant person. He understands how to defend his rights in a rational, fair and legal way. He makes no absolute claims.” The airline promised to conduct a comprehensive review of its practices in relation to medical emergencies, including proper authorization for its front-line staff to give necessary, humanitarian assistance.

There is no sign that Zhang Yang, who is barely recovering from his surgery, is to halt his one-man campaign which is quickly becoming one of the most consequential events of China in 2015. His experience touched tens of thousands of onlookers who fear that one day their own lives would be hung in the balance in the same way. His integrity as a person, reflected by those bold and eloquent Weibo posts written with a distinct style of self-mockery and empathy, adds to his resonance as a voice that calls for progressive improvement of a system crucial to potentially every Chinese. After shedding light on loopholes in the airport emergency system, he has now thrown the full weight of his attention, along with that of the whole society, on the 999 emergency service, which arguably played the most detrimental role in his tortuous journey on Nov 9. Unlike China Southern Airline and the airport hospital, 999 took a hard line against Zhang’s questioning, accusing him of “disturbing social stability”. It also arranged its own “expert” to speak on CCTV News claiming that everything was done according to procedure, a move that drew wide ridicule on the Internet. After posting a scathing piece about the 999 emergency service, a subsidiary of the half-governmental Beijing Red Cross Society, Zhang filed formal complaints to the Red Cross and the Beijing health department. He has now hired a lawyer and is preparing to sue.

A story about “coldness” has led to a potential revamp of China’s emergency services. In what was supposed to be a poster-boy case of indifference and negligence, Zhang Yang’s quiet determination has created space for the expression of warmth. Anonymous Weibo users from inside the aviation industry sent him personal apologies for what they saw as a chronic problem with China’s airport medical emergency support. In a show of great empathy, they “felt ashamed of” what their unrelated colleagues have done to Zhang and asked for his forgiveness. Finally, some part of the Chinese society is responding to the coldness of their countrymen with grace and decency.