“In Danger”

mtj828 Private Opinion , , , ,

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On the morning of Nov 14, I woke up to the bloody massacre in Paris feeling blunted in my head. It’s terrible, it’s huge, it’s immense. But beyond that, there was very little I could say about what had happened there. A state of speechlessness descended upon me more or less like a cold: a part of your sensory capabilities is trapped in your own body by an external condition. It’s uncomfortable.

I spent hours swiping my telephone screen pointlessly, browsing Weibo posts one after another, most of which were about the terrorist act. It’s interesting how fast Chinese online discussion about the incident turned into a collective lamenting about the entire agenda of the European Left, ranging from its foreign policy (supporting Syrian Rebels against Assad), to its moral tendency (the limitation of “tolerance”), to its cultural norms (excessive political correctness). While these could be legitimate shortcomings of the Western liberal camp, it’s still amazing how a part of the Chinese society, which is in no way bound by the moral codes, the cultural taboos and the political constraints of the Western liberal-democracies, can be so worried about a “Europe turning Muslim.” Equally fascinating is how much of that discourse is imported through the Western ultra-right (even Zionist). Two articles that went viral on the Chinese cyberspace last week were translations/summaries of writings from pundits who openly lambast Muslims, one about the “demise of Europe” through population decline and welfare state, the other approvingly describing Japan as “a land without Muslim” by setting up all kinds of restrictions in its society, which is highly dubious. There seems to be an underlying craving for homogeneity manifested by the popularity of the second article, whose subject Japan is probably one of the most homogeneous societies in the world.

The propensity of Chinese online opinion to be carried away by misguided judgment prompts some influential figures on the Internet to openly declare a “shut-up”, claiming that they are not informed enough to comment on such a perplexing issue as the rise and spread of ISIS. There is also a part of me that resists the daunting task of doing a rundown of the clearly misinformed commentaries or the shoddy analyses provided by mainstream media outlets. So I turned to someone who I knew was intellectually more equipped than me to take on the Paris attack and terrorism in general.

Below is a solicited commentary written by my college friend Xymbolic, whose critical mind and erudition I have admired ever since we shared the traumatically cramped dorm room in Beijing fifteen years ago. The views expressed here are all his, but his call for a “planetary response” and a “cosmopolitan order” does invoke in me Philip Allot’s famous critique of the international order as “a glove turned inside out”. While the French Revolution got rid of kings for France, on the international level our world is still essentially ruled by the “princes” (sovereign) who do not respond to an “international society” the same way as they do to the societies within their own arbitrary boundaries. The very chaos of Syria today could be rooted in the fundamental inability of our “princes”, who get so accustomed to dealing only with other sovereigns, to relate to, negotiate with and be held accountable for a part of the human society that has been suffering too profoundly too long.

 

“In Danger”

by Xymbolic

Perhaps one of the most disturbing, albeit truthful, descriptions of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris is “not unexpected.” Actually, not only the recent attacks, but the Charlie Hebdo attacks, at the time it happened, was described in the same way by many. Though its cruelty is still shocking, and the loss deeply grieved; though the same feeling of powerlessness resulting from the inability to grasp the meaning, or total lack of meaning, of the event, still haunts the public, the strange undertone that the attacks had been somehow vaguely foreseen; and that by now such events even carry an eerie familiarity,  is definitely disconcerting.

November 1, 1975, almost exactly forty years ago, Pier Paolo Pasolini gave what turned out to be the last interview of his life.  During the interview, commenting on the murkiness of the situation of the struggle, Pasolini said: “We’re particularly pleased with conspiracies because they relieve us of the weight of having to deal with the truth head on. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, while we’re here talking, someone in the basement were making plans to kill us? It’s easy, it’s simple, and it’s the resistance. We might lose a few friends, but then we’ll gather our forces and wipe them out.” However, when asked by the interviewer, Furio Colombo, to give a title for the interview, Pasolini said: “Here is the seed, the sense of everything. You don’t even know who, right at this moment, might be thinking of killing you. Use this as a title, if you like: ‘Because, we are all in danger.’” A couple of hours later, Pasolini was brutally murdered. The details of the murder, even the identity of the perpetrators of the crime, remain a mystery to this day.

Though it is not terrorism in today’s sense that he had in mind, we can still detect the similarity between Posolini’s “prediction of his own death” and the current situation. (Pasolini’s view that consumerism contaminates the working class with middle-class hedonism and thus stifles class struggle in the social life is clearly related to the discussion of the emergence of terrorism in its present form in the context of global capitalism, but we will leave this aside for the moment.) We are aware that we are indeed “in danger,” an impending, gigantic danger, which is at the same time extremely elusive and protean. Efforts at pinning down the source of the danger often deteriorate into various forms of conspiracy theories, e.g. the 9/11 truth movement, the ungrounded belief that Saddam Hussein was harboring al-Qaeda, or even the most banal version of racism and islamophobia from the average person in the street. Though ISIS is perceived to represent the biggest threat at the moment, it only rose to prominence less than two years ago, and it is impossible to tell when the next deadly reincarnation of terror will emerge. And even about this present archenemy, much less than adequate is known. The fact that Obama made the remarks that ISIS had been “contained” just hours before the Paris attacks took place, even if these remarks correctly describe the situation in general, indicates the imprecision and inadequacy of information. There seems to be no measure that can be taken to stop the lurking danger from leaping at the people. As Patrick Cockburn has commented: “Because the potential target is civilian populations as a whole, no amount of increased security checks or surveillance is going to be effective. The bomber will always get through.”

Subtly different from the widespread #jesuircharlie hashtag and the Republican marches in response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks, social media hashtags like #prayforparis and #porteouverte, and also the most prominent spectacle: the world’s landmark buildings lit with the French tricolor, all emanate an air less of outrage than of composure and courage. The impression is almost as if Paris had been struck by a catastrophic natural disaster. But maybe this is indeed how the terrorist attacks could be treated, i.e., as if they were natural disasters.

By no means am I saying that no one should be held responsible for this inhuman cruelty. What I am suggesting is that the inhuman feels inhuman and should be treated as inhuman. First of all, both terrorist attacks and natural disasters are absolutely meaningless in human terms. Oftentimes, when a terrorist attack happens, the perpetrators would release a message saying that the attack is meant to “teach a lesson” to the victims or their country. There is, however, no lesson to be learned from a terrorist attack, which is pure meaningless violence, just as Slavoj Žižek says when commenting on the Charlie Hebdo attacks: “We have to abandon the idea that there is something emancipatory in extreme experiences, that they enable us to open our eyes to the ultimate truth of a situation.” To comprehend is a human intellectual activity. There is nothing human in inhuman violence. It is therefore incomprehensible, and there is in fact nothing to be comprehended in it. In fact, to assume the role of a spectator and attempt to extract or produce certain meaning from grisly scenes of both terrorist carnages and natural catastrophes is in itself obscenely presumptuous.

Perhaps the disconcerting sense of familiarity upon learning that a terrorist attack has happened is not so different from the way we feel when a natural disaster strikes. We experience terrorism much like the residents of an earthquake-prone area experience earthquakes: they are aware that earthquakes may strike any time, try they best to do precise predictions, take all cautionary measures, but are still unable to stop them from happening. Furthermore, terrorism seems to have evolved into a stage where it no longer has a face. (I would argue that this is the reason why the term “terrorism” has remained in use despite constant criticisms.) Even though our daily life is much more saturated with images than a decade ago, the image of Baghdadi is not as instantly recognizable to the average person as those of bin Laden or even Zarqawi, who were “the faces of terror.” However vague the term “terrorism” is, it conveys the feeling that it is an inhuman, nameless, shape-shifting force that constantly displays its horrendous forms in terrible manifestations. Derrida was right when he predicted that the way in which the 9/11 attack took place would one day appear outdated. When we now read news reports about how today’s terrorist groups recruit new members by lurking on the social media and corrupting those susceptible to their propaganda, we cannot help but somehow take the metaphor of terrorism as a contagious disease more seriously than we usually do with a common figure of speech. Thus, we are, as Pasolini has it, “in danger,” a danger that is very much like natural disasters, which we as humans confront equally, and in the face of which we are equally vulnerable.

Recognizing the inhuman, natural-disaster-like aspect of terrorism may provide insights into the necessity of international cooperation in response to terrorism. In a letter written the day after the attacks,  Judith Butler says: “…[P]ublic services are curtailed, and no demonstrations are allowed. Even the “rassemblements” (gatherings) to grieve the dead were technically illegal. I went to one at the Place de la Republique and the police would announce that everyone must disperse, and few people obeyed. That was for me a brief moment of hopefulness.” Such gatherings in defiance of the ban from the police, I believe, exemplify what Walter Benjamin refers to in Thesis 8 of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” as the “real state of emergency.” Hollande’s declaration of the State of Emergency has been greeted largely with mistrust and scorns from the Left. “The State of Emergency has become a synonym for the government doing as it pleases,” writes Paul Alliès. Echoing Giorgio Agamben, he also points out “a violent paradox: the institutionalization of exceptional powers reduces the scope of public liberties even as it is justified by the need to defend those liberties. ” According to Agamben, Benjamin’s idea of “a real state of emergency” aims at breaking out of the Carl Schmitt’s rigorous constructed “state of emergency” which is an anomic space where law has been suspended, while the force of law remains effective, and which, according to Benjamin, has become the norm. The prolonged “War on Terror” since 9/11 has witnessed such a process where it is no longer possible to differentiate between laws and exceptions to laws enforced by the force of the law. As Alliès oberseves, the State of Emergency “is therefore less a democratic mobilisation of society as it is its demobilisation.” If, however, the violence of terrorism is perceived as akin to that of natural disasters, which poses an equal threat to the life of every individual as a living organism, then this is a violence coming from out of the state of emergency rigorously controlled by the sovereignty. It may not be what Benjamin calls a divine violence, but it is clearly a pure violence that human beings, provided that we want to guarantee our survival as a species, must give a planetary response. When responding to the crisis of 9/11, both Habermas and Derrida proposed that it was necessary to begin a transition from the framework of international laws still based on 19th-century nation-states to  “a cosmopolitan order.” Yet what we have seen since that time was exactly the opposite to this vision. International cooperation has become an oft-mentioned yet empty promise, and the space for such cooperation is torn up by sovereignties operating in their respective states of emergency. So maybe it was too optimistic to expect the international alliances of sovereignties to transition automatically into a cosmopolitan order. Maybe what we need is, like the gatherings Judith Butler has mentioned but probably on a grander scale, self-organized responses to inhuman terrorism by people whose very lives are in danger, which may render the state of emergency declared by sovereignties superfluous.

Though since the attacks took place, given the background of the Syrian refugee crisis, the discussion has been carried out largely within a framework of the relationship between the West and the Middle East. As the ensuing events have demonstrated, however, China will by no means be able to assume the role of the spectator in the current situation. The ideal scenario, however pale its imitation in the real world would turn out to be, is that China will be able to take part without superficially taking sides, i.e., without submitting to the dichotomy of Eurocentrism versus Anti-Eurocentrism, which, according to Derrida, has its possibilities already exhausted; and according to Žižek, is but a trap set by global capitalism to counter that which, in the legacy of the Enlightenment, is still powerful as a resistance, viz. egalitarianism, fundamental rights, freedom of the press, the welfare-state, etc., the values that may ultimately fulfill the promise of a cosmopolitan global order that protects us from inhuman danger.

You and Me, Ma and Xi

mtj828 Hongkong, Taiwan and Ethnic Issues , , , ,
Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou, left, shake hands at the Shangri-la Hotel on Saturday, Nov. 7, 2015, in Singapore. The two leaders shook hands at the start of a historic meeting marking the first top level contact between the formerly bitter Cold War goes since they split amid civil war 66 years ago. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)
Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou, left, shake hands at the Shangri-la Hotel on Saturday, Nov. 7, 2015, in Singapore. The two leaders shook hands at the start of a historic meeting marking the first top level contact between the formerly bitter Cold War goes since they split amid civil war 66 years ago. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)

The ANGLE is in the detail.

Initial response to the historic hand-shake between the two “misters” from across the Taiwan Strait is full of obsession with minute details, sometimes bordered on being excessive: digging up the pronunciation of dish names at the 1993 ice-breaking meeting between the two special envoys from both sides, which set thirty years of bumpy interactions in motion. But symbolism is always a big part of Chinese politics, especially when it comes to language. Up until this moment, reports about the meeting in mainland China are still flecked with quotation marks, which are meticulously put on every reference to political institutions in Taiwan, from the “presidency” to its “legislative yuan”, in lieu of putting “so-called” before each one of them.

“If titles are incorrect, words are not smooth.” The old Chinese saying applies perfectly to the decades of struggle between the Communists and Kuomintang, mainland China and Taiwan. Much of that can be traced through the names they called each other. An excellent piece by Beijing News’s book review section looks back at the 70 years since Chiang Kai-shek invited Mao to the fateful 1945 negotiation that determined China’s destiny right after the end of World War II. They referred to each other as “misters”, and toasted each other with even more amicable terms: “Wansui” (long live). The friendship lasted only for weeks, if not days. Neither side accepted the other’s conditions for peace, and references to each other quickly deteriorated into “gansters” or even “turtle monster”(an innuendo to Chiang’s bald head). Those derogative references lasted until both Mao and Chiang were dead, when new leaderships in Beijing and Taipei decided to set aside their bitter enmity by starting to adopt neutral titles.

It seems that the two parties, after 70 years, returned to their starting point. But for some, using “mister” actually represents a bigger concession from the mainland side, as it shows that the communist leader is willing to park the insistence that the Taiwan leader is but a provincial governor, therefore not an equal counterpart. He is also open enough to the idea of being presented as just “the leader of mainland China”, which in a way “condones the Taiwan authority’s governance of the island.” People are reminded of last year, when Ma proposed to attend the Beijing APEC summit as “leader of an economy”, which was rejected at that time. Small names, big meaning.

Beyond the minutiae, observers on this side of the strait did sense the grand strategic significance of the meeting. “Once the meeting between the two leaders were conceived to be an unreachable ceiling. Now it has become the floor.” Many believe that the precedent creates a new framework for bilateral interaction: a leader-to-leader platform is now possible. To be clear, regular party-to-party communication between the Communist and the KMT has long been re-established. In mainland China, party leader is usually also head of state. So it might give the impression that a top-level Mainland-Taiwan communication channel is already there. But in reality the Chinese head-of-state has never met with a sitting Taiwan president in person. And previous meetings were carefully arranged as strictly “party to party”, a compromise to bypass the tricky status issue. Yet as a Caijing Magazine commentary points out, such an arrangement has the limitation of restricting the mainland’s interlocutor to only the KMT, as Taiwan’s other major party, the Democratic Progressive Party, still has independence written in its charter, an insurmountable obstacle for the mainland to set up friendly party-to-party dialogue. A leader-to-leader platform, argues the article, could overcome Taiwan’s fierce and divisive partisan politics. When they meet, both would represent the political entity (mainland and Taiwan) as a whole, not party interests, which would create the favorable condition for a DPP president of Taiwan to appear at such occasions. With the DPP looking almost set to win the coming election, many people here are seriously predicting eight years of DPP presidency in Taiwan. Creating a precedent for such a summit when it is still possible, therefore, “gives peace a chance” in the following years when cross-strait relationship is going to be tested by unforeseeable events.

The meeting was widely praised across the spectrum in the Chinese cyberspace, a rare situation in today’s highly polarized opinion market. Moreover, many people felt strongly irritated by the CCTV’s clumsy and unnecessary handling of Ma Ying-jeou’s speech (cutting it abruptly after Xi’s).

Much of the overwhelmingly positive sentiment on Chinese social network sites can be attributed to a sense of healing wounds. The tragic and massively violent clash between the communists and Kuomintang costed millions of Chinese their lives, their family and their future. Popular accounts of those years of war and separation, such as Taiwanese writer Long Yingtai’s “Big River, Big Sea: Untold Stories of 1949”, resonate strongly with a public that is beginning to see the deadly partisan struggle as unfortunate, not a vindication of more progressive ideals. The strong public sympathy toward the Kuomintang veterans expressed during the run-up to China’s commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, and a call for their formal recognition by the mainland authority, is a continuation of this sentiment. “Having gone through all the difficulties, the brotherhood remains; When we meet each other, a smile dissolves all our enmity.” (渡尽劫波兄弟在，相逢一笑泯恩仇) The expression appeared in countless articles, posts and commentaries about the Xi-Ma Summit. Or as film director Jia Zhangke puts it on his Weibo account, “The two (leaders) are also old acquaintances separated by mountains,” a theme of his most recent movie that explores separation and reunion.

It should be noted, however, that this sentiment of healing is very much predicated on the coherence of CHINESE history. The struggle between the two parties, and their subsequent split of the nation into two, is seen as a disruption of an otherwise uninterrupted line of historical advancement. In this regard, the hand-shake rejoins a grand national history. But for a part of the Taiwan society that rejects being part of this particular history, and has come to terms with an identity that is natively originated from the Pacific island, the whole affair could feel alienating or, at best, irrelevant.

Sand, Reef, Elevation, Island

mtj828 Foreign Policy , , , ,

SouthChinaSea

碰瓷儿【Peng-Ci-er】: v. deliberately throw oneself to a running vehicle to extort the driver for compensations.

Against a backdrop of an indigo blue sky and the hypnotically golden sunlight of late Beijing autumn, a sixty year old man protested with a squeaking loudspeaker outside the sturdily walled compound of the US Embassy this Wednesday, demanding the “shelling” of USS Lassen, the US warship that a day before had conducted a “Freedom of Navigation” operation near the South China Sea reefs that China controls. Photos of the scene convey a sense of quixotic loneliness. He was later taken away by the police.

The man represents one end of the wide spectrum that features the Chinese society’s response to the well anticipated US patrol in the South China Sea. In that spectrum, you can find the hysterical, the ridiculous, the cocky, the official, the reasonable, the cynical and the sarcastic. It is another example of how China’s social media adds layers of nuance to an issue that can easily be oversimplified, acting as a prism that breaks down a beam of blinding sunlight into a rainbow of colors.

Wang Zhanyang, a scholar from the party affiliated Central Socialist Institute, is one of the more vocal personalities on Weibo who try to deconstruct a simplistic reading of the US move. He disputes the claim that China has “sovereignty” over the South China Sea features in question, arguing that unlike islands, they do not qualify as subjects of national sovereignty. He further challenges the conventional wisdom among the Chinese that the vast ocean encompassed by the nine-dashed line is China’s territory, declaring that it was an outdated idea advocated by Chiang Kai-shek but was later discarded by Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, who chose to honor the 12-nautical-mile rule for territorial sea. Nevertheless, he maintains that the remaining modern-day value of the nine-dashed line is to support sovereignty claims over the islands within the area, which have their respective 12-nautical-mile territorial waters.

Wang’s view is already a marked departure from the more radical idea that the US patrol is a direct violation of Chinese sovereignty. It also serves as a benchmark of how far a relatively milder Chinese view could go: maintaining sovereignty claims on the ISLANDS (not necessarily reclaimed features) within the nine-dashed line, while honoring international maritime norms. It seems to be closer to the largely implicit official position on the matter, as expressed by the decisively ambiguous protests made by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other governmental organs, which repeatedly referred to the waters entered by the USS Lassen as “nearby waters” or “offshore waters”, instead of territorial waters.

More hawkish views to the left find themselves in an inhospitable environment this time. Recently, a Vice Admiral of the Chinese Navy somewhat frivolously commented that the name of “South China Sea” in itself implies China’s ownership of the ocean. It was immediately greeted by sarcasm on the internet, with netizens listing the Indian Ocean, Gulf of Mexico and a string of other names to highlight the obvious absurdity of such claims.

On the other hand, Wang’s “liberal” view is also challenged for its lack of “necessary subtlety”, which might undermine China’s long-term interest in the region. For instance, his insistence to refer to the features as “man-made reefs” met with criticism from people whose views have otherwise very little substantive difference from his. Fudan University professor Feng Wei, an authority on Japanese affairs and one who disputes the blanket claim that China has sovereignty over ALL islands in the South China Sea, sneers at Wang’s insistence as “nerdy” and “trouble-making.” He claims that the official Chinese reference to the features as “land reclamation” (rather than entirely man-made structures) has political implications and is a “necessary wordplay” that should not be undermined by careless choice of words. But it is unclear how calling them “land reclamation” brings any real gains for China in this case, as the aforementioned Ministry of Foreign Affairs response did not advance any real territorial sea claims. It might be a case where China simply wants to leave the doors open for future developments. The naming dispute did trigger a call for the abandonment of any Chinese reference to the features as “man-made islands”, seeing the term as a misnomer and a US trick to distort their legal status.

Not surprisingly, the ultra-left online “hawks” are not happy with the milder commentators (despite their nuanced differences) and waged vituperative attacks against both Wang and Feng as “shameless” and “un-Chinese.” Only this time such jingoistic views faced resistance from within the same nationalist camp. The ferociously patriotic Weibo account, Zhanhao (same pronunciation as “war trench” in Chinese) labelled the angry, militant responses online as a sign of naïveté. Even though it sees the US move as a dirty trick of “peng-ci-er” and a way to “divert US domestic attention from the failure in Syria”, it still insists that maritime engagement with the US Navy should follow proper rules of engagement and only escalate when clear boundaries are violated. It believes that the current level of “staged” confrontation actually rewards both sides in their respective contexts: for the US, the move pacifies those who want to see the administration take stronger actions against China’s South China Sea ambitions. While for China, the stand-off provides an excuse for future militarization of the installations.

In an article written for the Financial Times’s Chinese website, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences expert Xue Li provides by far the most nuanced reading of the China-US South China Sea confrontation. First he makes a distinction among the seven Nansha reefs that China claims. He states that three of them, including the two where the USS Lassen approached this time, are mere “low-tide elevations” (meaning that they are submerged under water at high tide), therefore they are not eligible for 12-nautical-mile territorial waters under international law. He further argues that “innocent passage” by the US warship does not constitute substantial violation, even though it may not have paid China “due regard” in this case. The other four reefs sit above water during high tides, hence entitled to the legal status of islands bestowed by international law. But even for those reefs which do possess territorial waters, innocent passage of warships should still be considered acceptable, though more sensitive. He maintains that only when US warships anchor or conduct other clearly non-innocent activities within the territorial waters of the four islands, or within the 500-meter safety zone of the three “low-tide elevations,” should China consider substantive retaliation. Despite such possibilities, Xue argues that the United States, as “an experienced hegemony,” would hardly venture in such directions.

The relative mellowness in the Chinese response to the US patrol in the South China Sea seems to be doing the government some good. In particular, a subdued and neutralized hawkish wing on the Chinese internet, confronted by a vocal group of issue experts, gives the authority some space in building certain subtlety into its official response. As expressed through its mouthpieces such as the Global Times, there seems to be an intention to distance foreign policy maneuvers from the influence of over-enthusiastic domestic public opinion and hand them to the “professionals” to take care. For a country that has in the past forcefully used nationalistic public opinion as a weapon, this could be sheer wishful thinking or a serious change of mind that is worth watching.

A Cure for Humanity, A Bitter-sweet Pill for China

mtj828 Environment and Science , , , ,

Tuyouyou

“Now I firmly believe that the Nobel Prize is a hostile foreign force. Not to mention the previous (Chinese) winners, now they finally granted us one in the sciences, and they had to pick this particular field of study! In doing so it fulfilled its hidden agenda of tearing apart the Chinese society,” says Wuyuesanren, an influential personality on Weibo.

He meant it to be a half joke, yet it perfectly captures the bitter-sweet Chinese reaction to the Nobel Committee’s decision to award its 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to 85-year-old Chinese scientist Tu Youyou, for her contribution to the discovery of Artemisinin, a compound that helps the humanity to combat the deadly malaria that has ravaged many communities in the least developed parts of the world.

In many ways, it should have been the moment that the Chinese society has long awaited. In the quintessentially Chinese point of view, only the Nobel Prize in the sciences truly “counts”, as the peace prize proves to be too political and the one for literature too subjective. In the past, even when ethnically Chinese nominees such as Chinese American Steven Chu won the award, a joyful mood would sweep over China, and there has always been a discussion about when an “authentic” Chinese citizen, born, raised and educated in China, could win a Nobel Prize in the sciences. So you would expect Tu Youyou’s recognition by the Committee to be a cue for unconditional national   celebration. Yet the prize somehow acts like a gigantic boulder rolling over an open field full of land mines, touching off all kinds of explosions and leaving behind a smoldering landscape that might utterly perplex an innocent observer.

How could a seemingly apolitical, objective and straightforward Nobel Prize lead to such complications? The answer lies in the country’s own state of mind and its fundamental inability to fully internalize the troubling legacy that Tu and her generation of scientists have left. And when the full weight of the world’s most prestigious recognition is suddenly thrown upon the edifice that used to support and justify China’s own way of pursuing scientific advancement, the structure starts to wobble due to its internal contradictions. Alfred Nobel’s gaze turns out to be too glaring for a country whose scientific endeavors have been discounted for so long.

The discovery of Artemisinin, an active compound extracted from a traditional Chinese herb, is the product of the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution, two of the most tragic events of 20th century history. In 1967, Tu Youyou, then a young researcher at a Beijing-based Chinese medicine research institute, was dispatched by her superiors to participate in the secretive “523 Project“. It is widely believed that China initiated the project upon the desperate plead from Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, whose soldiers were plagued by malaria while waging guerrilla warfare against the United States military in the unforgiving heat of Indochina’s tropical forests. No archival evidence seems to be available for this supposed origin of the Nobel-winning discovery, but it is clear that the scientists involved were operating under a pressing mandate detached from a general improvement of the human condition. Understandably, most of those involved were “volunteered” by an order from the top, just like Tu Youyou. Worse still, at a time when the country’s intellectual elites were being marginalized and “re-educated” en masse as “reactionary capitalist academic authorities”, the 523 Project, said to be directly overseen by Premier Zhou Enlai, might have become a shelter for those battered academicians.

It was under such conditions that Tu and her colleagues embarked on an improbable journey of groundbreaking discovery. Inspired by a thousand-year-old ancient record of herbal medicines, Tu came up with a way to extract a highly unstable compound from Artemisia carvifolia, later proved to be very effective against malaria. The pursuit met with unimaginable difficulties (the extreme shortage of proper instruments is but one of them) and involved tremendous personal sacrifices (including testing the new drug on the researchers themselves).

In recent years, the Project has become a subject of serious historical study, partly due to increasing international attention on the significance of the discovery (in 2011 Tu was awarded the prestigious Lasker Award in the United States). It has also become a source of bitter irony because of its special historical circumstances, as one Weibo post remarks after the Nobel announcement: “Just as China initiated a Cultural Revolution to completely destroy its traditional culture, it embarked on a parallel journey to seek a secret cure for malaria from its ancient medicines. How ironic! The fact that the 523 Project ‘incidentally’ protected hundreds of researchers from political persecution is a chilling reminder for every Chinese to remember.”

The Cultural Revolution mark on Tu Youyou’s discovery not just affected how people view its legitimacy, but also caused practical problems that later led to controversies dogging Tu for decades. A key problem is around how the work was organized and how the breakthroughs at every key stage of the drug’s development should be properly attributed. At a time when “private property” was seen as an evil concept, scientists involved in the 523 Project hardly had the luxury to consider things such as intellectual property or patent. The few key pieces of published work were collectively authored in the name of “The Artemisinin Working Group” and other pseudonyms, a common practice during the revolution. This causes headaches for back attributing the discovery. And in this area, Western academic norms and a unique Chinese historical reality inevitably clashes. In 2011, Cell, an authoritative journal in life sciences, published a paper that elaborated the rationale for the Lasker Committee to grant its 2011 award to Tu Youyou. The authors of the article upheld three key principles whereby they determined Tu’s “primary contribution” to the discovery: Who first brought the idea of Artemisinin to the 523 Project; who first extracted the compound with a 100% inhibition; and who conducted the first clinical trial. But Chinese researchers Li Ruihong, Rao Yi and Zhang Daqing contested this way of attributing credit, arguing that this approach imposes a modern appraisal method to a piece of research conducted outside the Western academic norm, i.e. Tu (or any of her colleagues) did not act strictly as a primary investigator (PI) as defined by contemporary scientific project management. They further argued that discovery of an active compound is not equivalent to the invention of a successful therapy. The latter requires a string of steps including not just the extraction and separation of the chemical substance but also the assessment of its therapeutic mechanisms, effects and its chemical structure. And their comprehensive review of the 523 Project reveals that other Chinese scientists played equally important roles in those multiple steps of the medicine’s development, even though Tu’s contribution is still considered “pivotal”.

The attribution controversy, not surprisingly, sucks up much of the oxygen in the aftermath of Tu’s winning of the most craved science award in China. Rumors about her fight with other colleagues to get the Lasker Award spread widely in the cyberspace. Some of the gossip-type posts almost border on personal attack, suggesting that she has “a bad personality” and is “very arrogant and unreasonable”, therefore “deserves to be criticized”. The phenomenon led some to deride the Chinese society for its “foul cultural roots,” full of jealousy and ill-will toward its heroes.

Luckily, credit for the discovery is not the only focus. The Cultural Revolution background of Tu’s research also inspires a completely different discussion: a critical scrutiny of China’s current scientific efforts. If China could achieve such an important scientific development under extremely modest Mao-era conditions, how come modern day state-sponsored science projects with much more abundant cash supplies do not deliver results with the same significance? This line of questioning touches upon a long-time sore point: rampant corruption in China’s academic field and the misaligned incentives for Chinese academicians. A series of 2011 People’s Daily commentaries on Tu’s recognition by the Lasker Award were reposted on social network sites, still creating strong resonance today. The commentaries take their aims at China’s wasteful academic systems that incentivize quantity over quality, which encourages Chinese researchers to produce loads of low-quality publications just to meet their quotas. The result is a “frivolous” academic culture. China’s mechanism to elect its fellows of the Academy of Science is also under fire after the revelation that Tu never made it to that empyrean of Chinese science despite multiple attempts in the past. Web posts remind the public that many sitting fellows of the Academy have been involved in plagiarism scandals or are mere opportunists good at pulling strings in the system.

The discontent was so intensive that it almost brought about a full-blown revolt against China’s scientific establishment: even the congratulatory letters to Tu from the “big bosses” of Chinese science, including the Minister of Science and Technology and the President of the Academy of Science, were openly ridiculed for their grammatical errors and inappropriate wording.

Compared to the above, the bickering over whether Tu’s award “vindicates” Chinese medicine is almost a side show. The fight over the value of Chinese traditional medicine is a perpetual fault line cutting deep into the Chinese cyberspace, with one side (the “science disseminators”) declaring it as nothing more than primitive voodooism and the other (the “traditionalist”) seeing it as a correction to the extremes of Western medicine. Both sides found condolence (and ammunition) in the Nobel Prize Committee’s decision. And when a Chinese journalist brought the issue before the Nobel Committee at the press conference, the spokesperson again handed both sides the sweets they wanted: Tu’s research had been “inspired” by traditional Chinese medicine, but the award was for her scientific discovery using modern methods.

It looks like the Chinese society still needs some time to absorb the aftershocks of Tu’s Nobel Prize. The breakthrough happened in such unique circumstances that some already claims that the journey to find Artemisinin is both unrepeatable and unrepeatworthy, for its toll on those Chinese scientists and its moral compromises. If that’s the case, then the question is: what’s still left with the Tu Youyou legacy? Maybe prominent Chinese scientist Rao Yi is right. He believes Tu’s achievement shows that “science is not the work of geniuses, but the result of a relentless pursuit of ordinary people with very limited resources.” An inspiration for generations of Chinese scientists to come.

A more sophisticated observer looks at the whole Nobel affair with a naughty grin on his face: “The Nobel Prize committees seem to have reached a kind of tacit understanding among themselves: experiment with multiple awards to trigger political discussions in China. In a society at once de-politicized and highly politicized, politics is everywhere. Even an award in the sciences can tap into abundant resources for (political) criticism. Because China is under such a magic spell, the Nobel Prize likes China.”

Li Ka-shing’s Indignation

mtj828 Business and Finance , , ,

李嘉诚

What on earth can agitate the steely Superman? It turns out all it takes is an article written by some dubious “researcher” from a Chinese institute.

On Sept 29, the 87-year-old Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, nicknamed “Superman Li”, broke his cool by releasing to the Chinese media a statement in response to a controversy that had been raising eyebrows all over the country in the past two weeks. It started with an article titled “Don’t Let Li Ka-shing Run Away” that appeared on the WeChat platform of a major think tank run by the state-owned news agency Xinhua. In that article, author Luo Tianhao accused Li of being ungrateful and opportunistic by cashing out his real estate properties in mainland China and moving investments to Europe. It then moved on to instruct Li to do three things, with a tone at once condescending and menacing: invest in lower profit industries in mainland China; hold on to “symbolic” properties in the mainland and Hong Kong as a token of his loyalty and confidence; do more philanthropy. The author also spent a good portion of the article belittling Hong Kong’s business tycoons and highlighting their relative “dispensability” compared to the early days of China’s reform and opening.

As many Chinese observers have pointed out, the significance of that particular article is probably overblown by its somewhat unfortunate pick-up by the Xinhua-affiliated think tank. Likely what happened was that some inexperienced editor in charge of its WeChat account innocently carried it without realizing the potential explosiveness of its content. Commentators also dug out the bogus nature of the author’s numerous self-claimed titles, revealing that he was nothing but an aggressive self-promoter.

In a society where the ruling elites are accustomed to communicate in codes and hide political intentions behind cryptography, the probability of the signal-hungry public to misread or over-interpret things runs high. But even if this is a classic example of overreaction to an essentially trivial piece of opinion, the waves it stirred up and the fact that people so naturally associated it with some sort of high-level intention speaks to a deep-rooted concern that had been fermenting over this past summer.

Economists were among the first to cry foul of the mentality embodied in the article. They dubbed it “anti-market” and maintained that Li Ka-shing’ accumulation of wealth in the mainland was essentially a market phenomenon and should be encouraged. Applying moral judgments on market transactions (including cashing out) is going to affect the business community’s confidence in the system itself. The same sentiment also defines the reaction to the government’s botched effort to rescue a sliding stock market in the summer. Instead of “letting the market play a decisive role”, the authority displayed an assortment of administrative weaponry: suspension of IPOs, banning short selling and arresting a journalist whose exclusive report about the possible wrapping-up of governmental rescue efforts sent the market downward again. In both the Li Ka-shing and the stock market cases, observers sense the ominous encroachment of the logic of power into the sanctity of the marketplace, the former features demagogy, mass mobilization and coercion, while the latter run under the principles of contractual spirit, mutual consent and free will.  People satirically refer to the authority’s stop-running-away mindset as “the foundation of this strong nation” and a “panacea” to every conceivable problem the country faces.

But as business writer Wu Xiaobo writes, in the case of Li Ka-shing, as in many Hong Kong tycoons of his generation, the line between politics and market is never that clear-cut. He even considers Li the symbol of a business philosophy that treasures and embraces the partnership with an ascending power. By supplying the power with much needed capital and support, Li got handsome returns from his investment and therefore became the “biggest winner of China’s transition.”

That ambivalent relationship with power becomes an original sin that Li’s critics exploit. The author of the original article argues that since real estate development in China is almost impossible without some forms of governmental “benevolence”, Li’s cashing out is no less than an equivalence of betrayal. His status as the richest Chinese man on earth (only recently taken over by Wanda Group’s Wang Jianlin) also means that every move he takes carries a symbolic meaning beyond the transaction itself. As early as 2013, when Li’s initial shift of his portfolio to outside mainland China and Hong Kong drew public attention, Wang Shi, president of one of China’s largest real estate developers, sent out a Weibo post reminding everyone: “The very shrewd Mr. Li Ka-shing is selling properties in Beijing and Shanghai. This is a signal. Be careful!” And when China’s economic troubles make business transactions, be it stocks or real estate properties, an issue of allegiance, Li finds himself caught in a spot utterly uncomfortable.

It is particularly unfortunate that Li, a man who builds his life time of business career on optimally timed transactions on a global scale and an extreme prudence in cash flow management, would have to respond to morally charged allegations of ingratitude and disloyalty. Li’s Chinese biographer, Xu Zhiyuan, once compared Li with the likes of John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Bill Gates and Akio Morita, all of whom were short-listed for the London Times’s 1999 award of the “Entrepreneur of the Millennium.” Unlike his great peers who had either enjoyed large home markets or generous government support, Li launched his business from a tiny free port city. From the very beginning he had to face the global market or perish, and up until this point his global portfolio still stands out among Chinese businesses.

His relationship with mainland China has also been complicated. Originally coming from Guangdong province, he spent a good part of his adolescent years sending back money to his mother and siblings who remained in the mainland while he struggled to make ends meet in Hong Kong, where his father died abruptly of tuberculosis and he himself almost died of the same disease. It was this attachment to his hometown that brought him back in the 1980s to set up the first university in the region of Chaoshan, so that kids from the same modest roots as his could receive first-class education. A 2013 profile of Li in a Chinese magazine also took note of his interactions with then Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Even though Deng individually received Li twice in 1986 and 1990, an absolute privilege, it was until after Deng’s 1992 speech in Guangdong that finally inject confidence in Li of China’s future. As a perfect example of his signature prudence, Li only started large scale investment in the mainland after that point, which sets him apart from Hong Kong’s other pro-Beijing tycoons who got into the game much earlier.

Xu, his biographer, noticed a sort of “unsophisticated patriotism” in Li. “His generation has experienced violent turbulence (in modern Chinese history). They have a special craving for a wealthy and strong China, and a deep affection for its traditional culture. For them, China is not only just a market. It’s an identity and a place where they can help change.”

This probably explains the tone of Li’s response to the article which sounds hurt and indignant. It is already quite unusual for the old man, who largely stays out of the spotlight, to make such a statement to begin with. The brief press release to the Chinese media contains a distinct personal touch of Li Ka-shing. In response to allegations of him being “unpatriotic”, he listed contributions to the mainland through his multi-billion dollar foundation, in particular the Shantou University endeavor which he dedicated more than a quarter of a century of his time. He quoted Su Shi, the poet from a thousand years ago, to describe his own sense of belonging: “Where my heart finds its inner peace, I call it my homeland.”

He strikes back at the article as “chilling” and representing a “cultural revolution mindset.” Yet while he defends his business decisions as based on a sound and common-sensical logic detached from political considerations, he also makes a gesture that shows his acute sense of his place: “We should not let this meaningless fight over words to become the focus and a distraction from the important message that President Xi tries to send through his state visit to the United States.” The old man, the second richest Chinese on this planet and a self-described “compassionate lion”, is following the thousand-year-old tradition of the Chinese merchant class: showing his subordination to his King.

The Grand Spin: How China Makes Sense of the Syrian Refugee Crisis to Itself

mtj828 Foreign Policy , , , ,

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When radio broadcaster and columnist Lu Jin posted her friend’s first-hand account of how Germany coped with the Syrian refugee crisis, she did not expect the vitriolic comments that flooded her Weibo wall. She was dubbed a “Holy Mother Bitch” (shengmubiao), a coinage of Chinese netizens to describe those who occupy moral high grounds through cheap and naive posturing.

Lu’s friend is a Chinese German citizen who lives in Munich. What her post tries to convey is the calmness and dignity with which the German society welcomes the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees trudging their way into Europe’s strongest economy. One particular thing she takes note of is the almost complete absence of national pride in the whole affair: “there is no attack on the refugees, no media singing praise of Germany the country, and no politicians venting emotions.” It seems to her that the whole society is discussing rationally about solutions to the problem, and is ready to give the refugees an equal opportunity to have a life in the country. She claims this experience to be the “most thorough education about humanitarianism” that she has ever received, and marvels about “not seeing a single article in the German media that implies any self-elevation of Germany as a country.”

Germany’s post-war aversion to the collective expression of nationalism should not be too surprising for anyone with a basic understanding of its historical trauma. Its suppression of even the spontaneous surfacing of national pride is a perfect example of how deep-seated that aversion has become. The fact that a Chinese observer highlights this particular aspect of Germany’s response to the refugee situation speaks more about the Chinese mindset than that of Germany. There is a subtle intention of contrast in the blog. For a moderately well-informed Chinese reader, the nationalism innuendo would ring a bell of China’s recent efforts to evacuate its own civilians from conflict stricken countries such as Yemen and Lybia using its navy, an act that came with a considerable amount of national pride.

The intended contrast and the discernible air of admiration in the blog explain why some Chinese readers get stung and agitated. For them, the exaltation of German selflessness is nothing more than a symptom of political naïveté and wishful misrepresentation. They were quick to pull out media reports in Germany that sound alarm of the deteriorating security situation in the streets of German cities, particularly a (dubious) story about a 7 year old girl got raped, as evidence that the German response to the crisis was far less “dignified” than what the author of the blog led people into believing. They went further by questioning the wisdom of the Merkel government’s decision, seeing it as misguided by liberal sentimentality rather than based on rational political calculation. Ironically this line of questioning was itself fueled by not-so-subtle Islamophobia and bigotry, which is no more reasonable than the “liberal sentimentalities” that they derided. In many such comments, the refugees were referred to as future terrorists, lazy idlers and sneaky free riders that would quickly take over the entire Europe.

To be clear, a large part of that anxiety-filled commentary on the Chinese internet comes from the Chinese community living INSIDE Europe, who has as much a stake in the problem as the Europeans themselves. But it is still interesting to note how narratives dominant in a Chinese domestic context are projected onto a crisis that is happening thousands of miles away from home, which in some cases results in bizarre interpretations on the verge of sheer fantasy.

If the nationalism lens adopted by the author of the above mentioned blog is still a legitimate and valuable perspective, other analytical frameworks used by Chinese authors would seem a bit too idiosyncratic. For example, a popular article that popped up in many people’s social network accounts these few days tries to (partially) attribute the refugee crisis to the political insensitivity of the “Syrian middle class” itself. It first states in a matter-of-fact way that the majority of the Syrian refugees are former lawyers, doctors and engineers, who used to be the pillar of the Syrian middle class. Then it launches into an eloquent line of reasoning that those white-collars are partly to be blamed for their own plights because of their cynical acquiesce to Bashar al-Assad’s autocratic rule: “They considered themselves the elites and the future of the Syrian society… Indifferent to the suffering of the lower classes, they believed that as long as they closely followed the ruling Assad regime, their life will get better… Even though they had witnessed the cruelty of the regime and its rampant corruption, they saw them as problems that can be solved through development.” At one point, you can’t tell if the author is writing about the troubles of the Syrian society or an allegory of contemporary China aiming at the Chinese middle class.

On the other end of the spectrum, commentators are spinning the Syrian crisis to a completely opposite direction. Zhanhao (占豪), a prominent left-leaning account on both Weibo and WeChat, prescribes its own medicine to the Syrian refugee crisis: Return the control of Syria to the Assad regime. To achieve that, Western countries should abandon their support to the rebels. The logic can’t be any simpler: it is the West’s continued support of the rebels to overthrow the “legitimate” government of Syria that is the origin of all the mess. To solve the exacerbating problem of the massive exodus of refugees, Syria needs to be returned to a state of “tranquility” maintained by its original government. The simplification in this line of argument is glaring. It refers to all the Syrian rebel groups as “terrorists”, ignoring their highly complicated composition and the fact that some of those groups were formed out of secular protestors. The notion that the Assad regime (“the legitimate government”) can somehow regain control over the country and rule Syria happily ever after as long as the West withdraws its support to the rebels is also close to wishful thinking completely overlooking the sectarian strife that has almost irreversibly torn apart the country politically, ideologically and geographically.

Its anti-West sentiments aside, the article epitomizes the kind of mental framework through which China’s conservative elites view the Syrian situation. In that framework, the state/society dichotomy is the dominant relationship trumping any other relationships. And within that relationship, the non-state forces are viewed with undisguised hostility (rebels equal terrorists), while the state, no matter how flawed it may be, is seen as the proctor of stability, and should be granted legitimacy for the sake of that. The complexity of the entangled Syrian situation, the Sunnis, the Alawites, the Kurds, the secular rebels, together with Iran, Russia, Hezbollah and Turkey, are all reduced to that simple equation with only two variables: the state and the rest of the country which is messy and dangerous.

So when a Foreign Policy commentary rebuts a People’s Daily op-ed for its double standard of accusing U.S. meddling while turning a blind eye to Iran’s deep intervention into that same country, it misses the key point: from a Chinese perspective, shoring up the “legitimate government” of Syria is in itself a politically justifiable thing, while supporting rebels is not.

Following the same logic, a Global Times editorial brings the argument to a new height of absurdity by openly musing about a hypothetical Chinese refugee crisis: “In the past century, most Chinese emigrants to the outside world were of economic nature. Large scale Chinese refugee outflow has almost never happened despite China’s internal turmoil in early 20th century. In the future if any unexpected developments were to occur, the external world would not allow large scale influx of Chinese refugees. This is not surprising, as an exodus of refugees from China would be in the millions or tens of millions. Western countries of course would not stomach that.” The editorial goes on to remind people what a big contribution China has made to “world humanitarianism” by reducing poverty and keeping peace domestically. “Only in a society enjoying a sustained period of peace can TV entertainment shows such as Voice become prosperous. The fact that they are the most talked about shows in today’s China is just awesome.”

It would be interesting to hear how a Syrian refugee at a European train station would respond to her personal tragedy being juxtaposed with a singing competition show as a way to justify a “stable” status quo that probably only exists in certain Chinese elites’ imagination.

More informed Chinese opinions do exist. Prominent Phoenix TV journalist Lvqiu Luwei points her readers to an article written by a researcher from one of China’s leading international relations think tank that provides a decently accurate summary of the current Syrian situation.  One commentator compares the refugee crisis with the annual influx of rural migrant workers into big Chinese cities and considers the current refugee situation in Europe to be much more manageable than many would perceive. He also cautions against the Islamophobic view that sees the refugees as potential extremists, arguing that those who fled from ISIS persecutions are less likely to be jihadist fellow-travelers, and could inject new labor forces into an aging Europe. But lacking the potency of domestic anxiety and imagination, such views are quickly buried by the moving dunes of online opinions that are eager to score points using someone else’s misfortune.

Poor Man’s Violence

mtj828 Law and Order , ,

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From Jia Zhangke’s film “A Touch of Sin”

“I’m trying to create a panorama view of our society. Lately, the occurrence of acts of violence continues to increase. In those acts we see their social background and roots that require us to confront. The lingering air of tension and grumpiness spreads over us like a pall.” The renowned Chinese director Jia Zhangke explained why he made his celebrated 2013 film “A Touch of Sin”.

The film recreates four true stories in recent Chinese memory: a hotel housekeeper who stabbed two bureaucrats to death when the latter tried to sexually assault her; a gunman who openly killed and robbed a dozen of people in downtown areas of major Chinese cities; a villager who slaughtered fourteen village elites with a shotgun; and a Foxconn worker who committed suicide by jumping off the dormitory building.

The director presents the cases as allegories of the China we live in: poverty, social injustice and the deprivation of dignity turn ordinary Chinese into anti-heroes of our time. In a beautifully written article by Jia himself, he referred to the ancient story of the “Mid-night flee of Lin Chong” (an episode in the classic novel “The Water Margin”), where Lin, a well-to-do military officer, was set up by his enemy, got his family ruined, forced to escape into the mountains, and returned as a rebellion leader. Jia considers it “the story of all of us.” He built it into the film, in a scene before the bloodbath in the poor village.

The well-off town of Wenzhou in late August knew no anti-heroes or rebellion leaders. The “Mr. Hot Pot” restaurant was buzzing with customers enjoying their lunch when a young waiter poured a basin of boiling water on the head of a female customer. The woman, a mother of a 7-month-old, was severely burned. Surveillance video showed the waiter struggled to hit the woman again even while he was being clasped by his colleagues and the relatives of the victim. He was only 17 years old.

Later, local media found out that the cause of the young man’s irrepressible wrath was the customer’s “disrespectful reference to his mom”, which was basically a standard curse in the Chinese language (“tamade”) when someone felt irritated. His irresponsiveness to the customer’s repeated requests annoyed her, who sent out an open complaint on Weibo and then scolded him with strong language. “I grew up in a single-parent family and haven’t seen my mom for years. She could have cursed me. But I couldn’t stand she cursing my mom.” He told the journalist.

Like many visually stunning acts of violence that are captured by modern audio-visual devices, the video immediately became a hot topic on the Chinese internet. Reactions to the event bespeak two diverging worlds: a world that tries to relate to the wounds of the abject perpetrator of violence and the other that rejects any “rationalization” of violence whatsoever. The former constitutes the emotional foundation on which Jia Zhangke builds his artistic realm of violent anti-heroes, while the second, fed up with the daily display of brutality, demands unwavering law and order. That divergence would probably define how the country makes sense of similar incidents in the years to come.

Voices sympathetic to the 17 year-old waiter were clearly audible in the immediate aftermath of the incident. Many such voices hover around the theme of rich vs. poor, the privileged vs. the disadvantaged. In those interpretations, it was the arrogance of the customer that “provoked” the act of vengeance. One commentator, who clearly self-identified with the privileged, even cautioned that people should “never have any disputes with those at the bottom of our society. They have nothing to lose and will chop you up if you threaten their dignity.”

Such reactions sickened a few observers who branded what they saw as the blame-the-victim mindset. Their views represent a major push-back against a sentiment that in the past has dominated the society’s reaction to violence wielded by marginalized groups as a weapon. (An iconic case is the 2008 Yang Jia case where Yang raided a police station and killed 6 policemen.) “Don’t lead the discussion to class hostility anymore!” A famous CCTV news anchor was visibly annoyed by the above narrative. Some commentators completely rejected the idea that the young man was the “disadvantaged” in the encounter with the victim.

In some way, the push-back stands for a progress in the evolution of online discussions about the everyday violence around us. To be clear, much of it was originally induced by a notable tendency in previous cases where a victim’s own moral failings were used to rationalize the atrocity, a recent example being the applause to the brutal beating of a pregnant woman who had a record of repeated burglary. A widely read post on Zhihu.com summarizes such a pattern as “trying to find sin in a victim, while trying to find virtue in a criminal,” and sees an analogy in the accusation of sexual assault victims for “dressing seductively”. So in a sense, the insistence on the isolation of an act of violence from the victim’s own moral conditions represents a progress towards more rationality in the ethical codes of this country, and could serve as the public opinion basis for more progressive legal protections for victims of violence.

But the no-rationalization sentiment can also transform into a general “hardening of hearts” that completely refuses to acknowledge the plight of the aggressor, particularly those coming from lower social classes, in the belief that any such acknowledgement would constitute a justification of the act itself. It was already notable in the aftermath of the horrific bus arson case in Xiamen two years ago, an act that killed 47 people including the arsonist himself. When details of the arsonist’s miseries prior to the suicidal attack (unemployed, mistreated by bureaucrats, years of ignored petitions) touched off a wave of public compassion, official media declared such sentiments as an indulgence of violence and an insult on the dignity of law. The stance met with resistance from commentators who saw the pursuit of “root causes”, which were often tied to the abuse of power and social injustice, as a legitimate cause and not equivalent to defending the cruel act itself. In return, they criticized their harsh critics for being eager to divert attention from the injustice behind the case. “We are all on the same bus. If one man feels despair, all of us are unsafe,” said one well-circulated post that resonated strongly on Weibo at that time.

In the everyday violence that fills our smartphone screens, the sensitive artist sees ancient tales of rebellion; the analytical intellectual sees problematic patterns of thinking, while the curious observer of contemporary China sees a moral compass under the influence of shifting magnetic fields. With this compass, the nation will have to navigate its own sea of misery and find a way out of it.

P.S.  Just while I was writing this blog, a man stabbed and injured four judges inside a Hubei province courtroom, for what he considered unjust ruling. The man was having a labor dispute with a company and was suing the latter for reimbursement of his work. The incident touched off widespread panic and anger among fellow judges all across the country. And that sentiment also spread to other professional circles such as doctors and nurses, who are also often subject to such violence. In an article by previous Caijing journalist and now criminal defense lawyer Xu Qianchuan, he expressed frustration over what he sees as “uncivilized” reactions to the incident:”In a civilized society, good social and cultural systems will rein in the beast of violence. Whenever it pokes its head out of the cage, the whole society condemns and scares it back. But in an uncivilized society, violence is accepted or even encouraged… Aggressors become heroes and even spokespersons of certain values. This is a horrible kind of society that we should try our best to avoid.”