The China Vortex

One of the recurring themes of China’s reforms and opening up over the past thirty years has been the expansion of China’s private sector, usually at the expense of the public sector, or government-invested industries. This is a theme which has been often overlooked in the west, even by westerners in China, as they are more focused on the relationship with western companies, specifically Western Foreign-Owned Enterprises (WFOEs). There are three important components in the Chinese economy: state-owned enterprises, private companies and WFOEs. For the most part, the WFOEs are only allowed to play a peripheral role with all kinds of restrictions placed on them from time to time. It is highly unlikely that the Chinese government will allow them to play major roles in any sector.

The most important and vibrant part of the economy are the Chinese private sector. In spite of being out of power politically, occasionally suppressed, lack of capital and resources, it has managed to the point where it now employs more people than the public sector.

Let’s take a closer look at the media industry, just to cite an example. All official media, including newspapers, magazines, books, television and radio are owned, in one way or another, by the government. These might be the central government, provincial government or municipal governments. The performance and careers of these government officials are often measured by how these media perform: if they perform, the careers of these officials go up, if they perform less than well, then it goes into their performance evaluation, and has an effect on their careers.

The challenge for the official media in China now is that they are, generally speaking, losing audience to smarter and more creative challengers from the private sector in fields like online gaming. When this happens, and audience and circulation go down, these officials have to think of ways to address the situation. If that doesn’t work, they cover up the bad numbers.

Virtually all of the challengers in the Internet media field are private companies which are venture capital funded. In short, they are all private sector. When the audience moves to the private sector companies, public sector media companies tend to lose first audience, then revenue.

Many westerners look at the media ownership issue in China too much from a political and social oppression angle.

Actually, there is a lot more to it than that. It’s about what industries will still stay in Chinese state ownership, and how they will remain competitive in the hyper-challenging Chinese market. The official media has tried to counter-balance this trend by showing women in bikinis and other devices, but the trend to the private sector media (or user-generated media) is continuing. This is what Chinese ministries are thinking about all the time.

After all, if there are no longer competitive industries in the state’s company portfolio, how will it get revenue?

In an earlier post, I talked about a phenomenon called the Chinese hockey stick. The concept of the Chinese hockey stick is fairly simple: it takes a while for investment in a new sector to show results in China, but when it does, it takes off, going almost straight up like a hockey stick.

So far, the prevailing wisdom re ecommerce in China is that while the potential numbers are impressive, it’s going to be a while before the upside of the hockey stick becomes apparent. There are some reasons for this: low trust, fear of fraud, etc. So far, the only place where online commerce has performed well has been in online gaming with companies such as Shanda and Giant Interactive leading the way. The trouble with the demographics for online gamers is that it includes early adopters with low incomes who spend a considerable amount of time in China’s Internet cafes. These are people who are using the Internet for cheap entertainment, and are not likely to spend too much money on products sold in in-game ads.

Now, a new report released by the Research Institute Data Center of China Internet claims that online spending has increased to 37.5B US dollars for the first six months YOY, an increase of 58.2 percent over the same period in 2007. This is very good news, and suggests that we are beginning to see traction after many years of investment in the sector. In short, we are beginning to see the upside of the hockey stick, since according to the report, Chinese spend an average of 211.9 yuan on products/services on a monthly basis. If the trend continues there will be a double boost: the number of new spenders online will grow, and the monetary amounts spent by those already in will also go up.

This suggests that many upwardly-mobile Chinese are losing resistance to ecommerce and are overcoming fears to spending online. I believe that this represents the beginning of a secular uptrend for this sector. Within this field, companies which have a successful track record in fields such as Chinese online education will perform well. If Chinese consumers are convinced of the quality of these online companies’ products and services, it would be safe to assume that interactive advertising and Internet word of mouth will also gain greater traction.

The west never seem to tire of telling the Chinese, especially Chinese government, about how China should become a more open society, and the Chinese never tire of telling the west to shut up and stop interfering in China’s internal affairs.

The great irony is that for the most part, both sides agree on one thing: that China should become more open. It’s just that many westerners think that they should set a timetable which the Chinese should march to, and the Chinese believe that they should make the changes according to their own internal considerations. I believe that by publicly criticizing the Chinese government and policy, many well-intentioned western critics (and some not so well-intentioned), actually slow down the pace of China’s opening up because if the Chinese government and society changed more quickly, they would be seen as bowing to western pressure. That is something no Chinese government can afford to seen doing.

This is the core reason why I have so little time for most western critics of Chinese government and Chinese social reforms. At the end of the day, the Chinese government and people will have to proceed at a pace they are most comfortable with.

Some say that this is a naive approach which favors the government since, after all, they are in power. I don’t agree with this view. Thirty years of reforms have unleashed social forces which not even the Chinese government can hope to control and completely contain.

One interesting story is that of Fan Paopao, the teacher who ran away from his classroom, thinking first of his own personal safety, ahead of those of his students. Then, he wrote about it in his blog. This week, he was fired from his school, and has now become the subject of widespread ridicule.

But the true significance of the story is that Fan Meizhong is alive, and can freely speak and defend his actions and views in China. If he had had the temerity to do this 40 years ago during the Cultural Revolution, or even 20 years ago, there is a good chance that he would have been publicly denounced for the very least, and maybe have even been killed.

But he has not, and continues to defend his actions on his blog.

China has changed a lot.

It is becoming a much more open society, where different views can be heard. There are borders where the government will not countenance criticism, but as the society changes, those areas are becoming fewer and smaller. The society is becoming more and more what was called in Taiwan 多元化 or what is known in China as 多角化. This means that there are more different groups and subgroups, some of which will evolve their own subcultures within Chinese society.

Mao was never comfortable with this approach, he wanted society to be the same, right down to the dress code, not thinking and not criticizing, just obedient to him and his apparatus. Those days are gone. Like Fan Paopao, people are much more individualistic, and are not afraid to speak their minds. And they are willing to stand up for their views and take the consequences.

Without a doubt, there are groups and individuals in the Chinese government who are not comfortable with some of the changes this is leading to, but they cannot turn back the clock of reform and opening up. There may be many admirers of Mao Zedong in China, but you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would want to have another Cultural Revolution. (In the Chinese government’s official version of history, the Cultural Revolution is referred to as a “national disaster”.)

I think of the past eight years in the US as being much like America’s version of the Cultural Revolution. After 9/11, this administration tried to push its own agenda on the American people and on the rest of the world. Their interpretation was that those who attacked New York on that day hated America for its freedoms, and that the world is divided sharply between good and evil, with no room for anything in between. This meant that there must be a confrontational struggle which will end in final victory for good and defeat for evil. Ironically, in order to defend freedom, torture, the suspension of habeas corpus and other means which most Americans abhor had to be used.

Most Americans don’t subscribe to this view any longer. We’ll find out in November.

So maybe looking past all the political and social rhetoric, the west, America and China are not that different from each other after all? The challenge is that these changes are evolving in China, and do not make the western press because they are not “news”. This is why many western critics are hopeless ignorant. They don’t understand the social context of China, choosing instead to focus media attention on single issues.

In China, most of the most important things which happen do not make news, but in the aggregate, they are indeed revolutionary in scope.

If the west and China understood each other better and looked at each other in these terms, maybe there would be a lot less misunderstanding.

“Interfering in another country’s internal affairs” is a routine mantra often used by Chinese government spokespersons, and is used most often when pointed at the US and US critics, especially with regard to human rights policies.

On the surface, this makes a lot of sense, especially with regards to generally ignorant US politicians, movie stars and others, who would have a hard time finding places like Tibet and Darfur on a map, but are moved by some of the images they see on television. For them, China and Chinese policies are a very convenient whipping boy, even though they have very little context and understanding of the real underlying issues.

This naturally puts the Chinese government on the defensive and more recently, some Chinese have become angry at the overseas criticism.

So who’s right and who’s wrong? Those who argue against interfering in another country’s internal affairs, or those who say it’s OK to do so?

The fact is that if a country is big and has a strong economy, whatever it does has an effect on other country’s economies, and on the global economy. Even though only American citizens’ can vote in their elections, the gross stupidity and ineptitude of American economic and trade policies in recent years do not end at America’s borders.

They go far beyond it.

And the Chinese government has started complaining about it. After all, they hold huge amounts of US dollar-denominated treasuries which are losing their value daily as the US dollar loses value, and their sovereign wealth funds are blocked from making investments in Europe and the US, mainly on political and not economic grounds.

So aren’t Chinese government officials interfering in US internal affairs? Yes, but the two countries’ economies are so tightly intertwined, the US policies are having an effect on the Chinese economy. When they are so tightly bound together by trade and economics, there is no borderline. It’s as silly as the right arm complaining about the left arm.

The fact is that the US and China are like two handicapped people: one is blind and the other is deaf. They need each other in order to survive.

The sooner politicians, officials and miserably deficient media on both sides recognize that, the better. If they don’t, ordinary people will continue to get caught in the middle and distracted by bad policies and ignorant offline and online media pundits getting them to chase red herrings while the real problems get worse.

Last week I met with Elliott Ng, publisher of CNReviews, a US-based site which aims to help westerners get a better understanding of modern China. Today, Elliott posted on his site an idea about bringing both Chinese and western bloggers closer together through their attendance at a Chinese Bloggercon event in November to be held in the southern city of Guangzhou. As one can see from reading the comments section of the posting, the discussion has already become “lively”.

In 10 years, we probably we won’t talk about blogging, we will just call it writing, and writing will come to include the term blogging almost automatically in everyone’s vocabulary. It’s just that now, the technology and its capabilities are new enough, that some people have become enamored with its possibilities. Blogging, from my point of view, is just a new form of writing.

I’m convinced that a good part of the reason for the popularity of blogs has been because the mainstream media has done such a bad job of explaining for example, China and the west to each other. In particular, the US mainstream media, under the pressure to achieve profits and ratings, has turned everything into a gladitorial epic struggle. One moment it’s between China and the west, the next day it’s between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the following day it’s between the rulers of Myanmar and the international community. And on and on it goes.

Part of my reason for writing this blog is to highlight issues and bring to peoples’ attention issues which I believe are not shown correctly and intelligently in most of the western media. There is an awful lot going on in China, and 99% of it cannot be analyzed intelligently in terms of a gladitorial contest between opposing forces. Besides, gladitorial contests are a Roman form of entertainment! The Chinese much preferred strategy games to achieve their ends. Chinese heroes are Sunzi (writer of the Art of War) and Zhuge Liang, who used his wits to achieve his strategic goals.

The server logs indicate that most visitors to this site come from the US. If the articles on this site show visitors from the US and the west that there is more than one possible interpretation to events in China and Chinese behavior, then it has done a good job. It would be presumptuous to ask anyone who has not lived in China for more, but it certainly is a good first step. This is why I like writing about China as a medium. The reader can think things over, and then decide to agree or disagree. When they want, they can post a comment. I must say that I have been very impressed with the intelligence, thought and perception behind the vast majority of the comments, even when my opinions may be different. This is the kind of dialogue which engenders respect, even when people are separated by time, distance, language, culture and even opinions. The world needs more of this kind of dialogue.

I have become disconcerted at what I call the dumbing down of American society. Too much, issues have been reduced to 15-second sound bites and become trivialized. The relationship between China and the west is far too complex and complicated, and the relationship is so deeply intertwined, that it simply cannot afford to be trivialized.

It would be great if American bloggers visited the sites of Chinese bloggers, and western bloggers with a Chinese angle, such as this one, and posted thoughtful comments and questions about China. In my opinion, it would be entirely improper if well-known American bloggers came to China, lectured the Chinese about freedom, human rights and freedom of speech, without even making a dedicated effort to understanding what the Chinese bloggers were thinking about and discussing on their blogs. The Chinese would feel insulted, and I would agree with them. They would be insulted, yet again, by yet another example of arrogance, ignorance and stupidity. And then the Americans would move off, completely oblivious to all the damage which had been done to an event which had the best of intentions, but then didn’t play out right.

If China is about to become the great power that many think that it will become in the 21st century, wouldn’t it make sense to start reading the blogs of Chinese bloggers to find out what they are thinking about and saying? What’s so difficult to understand about that?

Why is it that Robert Scoble is so quick to condemn China’s lack of rule of law (as he recently has), and then quickly changes subject to something totally unrelated to China? The answer is simple: Robert Scoble is a media gadfly who is seeking new subjects which he can feed to his followers. He is not really interested in his subjects; he wants to stand in the spotlight and serve his own agenda. And he will move wherever the spotlight moves, as long as he is in the center. China is interesting to him only so long as it serves his purposes. After that, it becomes yesterday’s newspaper. He is incapable of going deep on any subject.

When are people like Robert Scoble actually going to make an effort to understand what Chinese are thinking about before they lecture them about how they should run their country? Is that too much to ask?

I hope that this event is not turned into a spectacle. The way to do that is to start talking to each other, through our blogs, NOW.

That is what real dialogue is about.

I have written a guest post on Web-Strategist.com, Jeremiah Owyang’s personal blog, called The Chinese Internet Becomes A Platform For Grief.

Hope you find it informative.

Following the Sichuan Wenchuan earthquake, it has been very interesting to watch how the Chinese government and people have reacted, and how many western observers have reacted. For the first time in Chinese history, the Chinese government has ordered that Chinese flags have to be lowered to half-staff, for three days from May 19-21. What is most significant, is that this is the first time that the flag has been lowered for ordinary civilians in Chinese history, ever.

China has always had a larger population than other countries, and the country has had very bloody periods in its history. Some 20M Chinese were killed in the 19th century during a civil war, the Taiping Rebellion, and possibly another 20M were killed in WWII, when Japan invaded China. Millions also died because of bad political policy decisions in the 1950s and 1960s, which reached their culmination in the Cultural Revolution.

Unlike in Washington DC, where you can find war monuments to Americans killed in WWII, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, there are no war memorials to Chinese soldiers or civilians killed in these wars, or to any who died as a result of bad government policy decisions. For the most part, they have just become unknown individuals who died and are now forgotten.

This is why the decision to lower the Chinese flag for ordinary civilians is so different and marks a break with the past. For the first time in its history, the Chinese government is saying that it is OK to mourn for ordinary civilians. This did not happen during the Tangshan earthquake, which killed some 450,000 civilians in 1976, or in 1989, or even so much during the SARS crisis of 2003.

For the first time, a Chinese government has embraced the idea that any human life, even that of ordinary human lives, has value. Actually, this is a very western concept, and is a very important step on the road to democracy. Is this not a valuable change in China’s reforms and opening up? This will make it that much more difficult for any Chinese government to dismiss the value of any Chinese lives which are lost in the future, whether they are due to natural disaster, or war, or for political reasons.

The Chinese government and party have activated their media, and issued an edict that entertainment websites should shut down over the next three days, entertainment programming should be curtailed, along with three minutes of mourning each day.

This move immediately attracted strong criticism from many members of the Twitterati in the US who, to put it frankly, have embarrassingly little understanding of China, and continue to see China in over-simplified black and white stereotypes, as you can see in this feed from Robert Scoble’s Friendfeed account.

When I think that the people who have Friendfeed accounts represent smart, well-educated, tech-savvy people, and they say these things, I just get depressed. The stereotypes and distrust of China just run so deep.

I get a very different view simply because I read Chinese, and I know what many Chinese say and think on the Internet, where people have much more latitude to express themselves than on TV and the print media. Sure, the government has an agenda and is spinning and exploiting this to make themselves look good. And in some ways, they are doing it in a clumsy way. But the government is now accountable to protect the lives of ordinary Chinese.

After 9/11, the US government claimed all kinds of special powers, including surveillance wiretaps, the need to kidnap and torture terror suspects, and the need to invade Iraq because the government of Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and the government needed to keep these weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists. If there is one thing we can learn from all tragedies, it is that all governments have agendas, and they will exploit every opportunity to push their agendas in the event of a tragedy.

But it does not mean that the original intent should be completely dismissed out of hand as the actions of a dictatorial regime.

Maybe I’m asking too much, but can some people, Americans especially, try to look at China through the eyes of the Chinese, and not always try to scare and frighten other Americans into asking what the “rise” of China means to the US and the west? Is it too much to think or ask that maybe, just maybe, Chinese don’t spend everyday plotting how to steal their jobs and turn America into a third-world economy? And that maybe, they are just ordinary people who are trying to get along in life, and raise their child and get him/her in a good school, and buy a house? And that the government is far from perfect, but it has allowed ordinary Chinese to have a much better standard of living than before, and is now, for the first time, beginning to care for and mourn the loss of ordinary civilian lives?

There’s a very simple rule: If you reach out and treat people like friends, they tend to act like friends, and if you treat them suspiciously, they become enemies.

In the beginning, it’s hard to reach out and trust people you don’t know well as friends because they seem so foreign and different, but it’s always works out better in the end.

UPDATE 5/20/08: I was interviewed by Christine Lu of China Business Network about this article and you can read that interview here. This article is also referenced in a blog article for the Guardian (UK).
EastSouthNorthWest has an article about how the Central Publicity Department, which is a Chinese government and party organ in charge of making sure that the official line is carried in the Chinese media, dealt with the earthquake crisis.

When the western media and some outside observers talk about “Angry China”, they really miss out on the real story, and even the real questions which need to be asked. For instance, how do very large groups of people, who at least on the surface, have nothing to do with each other, organize in large numbers so quickly in a society which many westerners see as authoritarian? Are they government-led or influenced, or do they do it themselves? How do they come to believe some of the wild rumors which come up, such as for instance, the belief that Carrefour sends a portion of its earnings to support the Dalai Lama and Tibet independence, and are seemingly oblivious to the fact that any large company would like to keep as much of its earnings for itself?

There is a very simple answer to all this: a large part of the organization is done on the Internet in China, specifically on BBSes. While the BBS (bulletin board system) is something outdated and antiquated in the US Internet, it has been a very important part of the Chinese Internet, and I would argue, it is growing and becoming more influential. For the Chinese government, it is a headache because in spite of Chinese government regulations, it is largely unregulated. For western corporations it is a good place to gather information but is useless for advertising, but for many Chinese it is the most important part of the Internet (along with online gaming and their IM client, which is most likely to be QQ or MSN Instant Messenger depending on their age and demographics).

Don’t believe me? Go to your nearest Chinese Internet cafe and watch what people are doing.

Most westerners who come into the China Internet market have no idea of its power and influence, and instead think that the Chinese Internet is largely the same as the US market, but it isn’t. The Chinese government doesn’t really like BBSes because it really is free (as in free speech), and is the breeding ground for all kinds of weird stuff. And while it is important for gathering buzz on products (as CIC, based in Shanghai, does) for corporations, nobody has really been able to monetize it. And, western journalists fail to monitor it, which is why they miss on so many big stories, and end up giving credit to some sinister Chinese government policies. ( I guess it’s kind of flattering for the Chinese government to be given credit for something when most Chinese know that it isn’t that powerful.)

Isn’t it amazing that such a huge and important part of free speech in China has been entirely missed? Fortunately, Tom Melcher’s new blog Live from Beijing! has a very good introductory article to BBSes (h/t to Andrew Lih). I got something of an introduction to the BBS in 1998, shortly after Sina was formed from the merger of SRS and Sinanet. One of the first web applications created by Wang Zhidong was a simple BBS which he demoed to me in the summer of that year. It really took off in popularity with the US’s accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in April 1999 when millions of angry Chinese hit the Sina news forum. Please don’t think of the Strong Nation forum on the People’s Daily site as being at all representative of Chinese BBSes; it is official and closely monitored for content. The interesting BBSes are all unofficial or semi-official.

Most of the angry Chinese in China, or fenqing, are organized on the BBSes, where they gather and shoot the breeze. These people have time on their hands, and play games, spend time in QQ, and gossip on the BBSes of their choice at the moment. They spend almost no time on what we would call the official Internet, except going to get news on Sina, Sohu and Netease. It is very hard to reach them with advertising.

Now, let’s talk about their persona. For the most part, they:

• They distrust the official media and do not buy magazines, and get as much information as they can from unofficial sources, such as BBSes. They only go to the official media for some sports information and major news information.
• They trust unofficial news more than news which comes from official sources.
• They are the perfect audience for spreading rumors, because they can be quickly organized by anonymous leaders, or “honeybees” as Tom Melcher calls them in his article.
• When organized, they can be huge, in the millions, and they can move like a swarm.

In simple terms, the characteristics of this unofficial crowd are:

• Chinese official government influence is very limited
• They are mostly self-organized
• The numbers are in the millions
• They move extremely fast
• They disappear just as fast as they appeared
• They are almost always anonymous and do not use their real names, preferring instead to use their own handles

In simple terms, they are an issue-focused flash mob. For corporations, they are:

• Not susceptible to traditional PR methods since you are dealing with an anonymous group
• Very tightly focused around one issue
• Move much faster than corporations and their decision-making apparatus is diversified,
• Do not trust/ believe in information from any government, including Chinese

My estimate is that more than 60% of non-IM traffic in China is to these unofficial BBSes, and that number is growing.

When it comes to advertising, most adspend hits that remaining 40% of the official and semi-official Internet, without reaching where many people are. CIC acts as the eyes and ears of corporations, but corporations have not been able to do anything yet with that information and are still reliant on mainstream advertising approaches for both online and offline which are largely out of date. This is the background for my article on why agencies need a new approach to online marketing in China.

So, BBSes are the real social media marketing tool, and as usual, the Chinese are ahead of everyone else, but just haven’t figured out that part themselves. While the west talks about social media and Web 2.0, China has had a version of it for the past ten years. It may not be pretty, but it works.

It’s just that vast majority of outsiders haven’t figured it out yet.

One of the great challenges in any relationship is about establishing the right tone of dialogue. Should it be friendly, adversarial, competitive, or something else? Can the two parties be constructively critical, or will they just be critical? Can they listen to each other without becoming overly offensive and/or defensive?

Just about the only thing more difficult than setting the right tone of dialogue, is setting a new tone for a new conversation when the old tone of dialogue no longer works, if only because the underlying dynamics has changed. If there was one thing which came clear through my article criticizing the Economist’s Angry Chinese article, it was that this was something which needed to be examined more closely and discussed more openly, if only because the article attracted a large number of readers and comments (34 at the time of writing).

At the heart of the problem is how to break through outdated stereotypes about China. I, for one, believe that its time to get past criticizing “China” and to start being critical about China. Many western media experts and journalists tend to think that Chinese need to be separated from the Chinese government, and become more outspoken about the shortcomings of the Chinese government, believing that only when this happens, will China become a more open society. If they speak out in support of Chinese government policy over Tibet for example, they are quickly dismissed as government-supported actions, or being not aware of Chinese government-sanctioned policies in Tibet. In fact, it is far more likely that the positions of most of the Chinese population will harden in the face of criticism from the west and the western media. Instead of making it easier to reach a compromise, it actually makes it more difficult.

The fact is that the official Chinese media, even though it is state-controlled and monitored, frequently is very open in its criticisms of some government policies. There is a huge number of magazines and newspapers, and all of them now have to attract readers in order to justify their existence as businesses. If you are not reading it already, you should read Danwei just to get an idea of how much Chinese society has changed. Just keep in mind that what Danwei is able to cover is just a small snapshot of what is happening in modern Chinese society.

This is not to say you can say anything in the Chinese press. There are limits, and the Chinese frequently talk about “stepping on the red line” for violating government ground rules. Part of the role of those working in the media is to know exactly where that red line is, because it sometimes moves.

A very interesting development is the rise of the Chinese Internet, as increasingly large portions of the population depend on it for information, trusting it more than the traditional media. Sometimes this means that some of the wildest rumors spread much faster in China than in the west. It is possible to make the case that there is free speech in China, and that it exists in parts of the Internet. But often this free speech is closer to the analogy of the man who falsely shouts “fire” in a packed movie theater. This kind of free speech is unfortunately, more than unproductive, and is sometimes used to whip people into a frenzy. This happened with recent coverage of western media coverage of the Tibetan situation. When the Chinese became angry, many in the western media were taken aback at the scale of the reaction.

Part of this can be ascribed to the power of the Internet and mobile networks in spreading information and rumors.

Welcome to the power of the Chinese Internet.

The problem many western editors make is that they seem to want Chinese to cross the red line, then when it happens, they can use hold it high as an example of how authoritarian China is. This is an overly simplistic view of Chinese society which tries to reduce everything to black and white terms. In an increasingly complicated world, it’s not enough to reduce important relationships to overly simplistic terms, this will only make things worse and set the stage for future misunderstandings which may have tragic consequences for everyone.

Fortunately, there is some dialogue going on, and there are some very smart people who are devoting themselves to discussing these very real and important issues, and are setting the groundwork for a new and more constructive dialogue.

On the English-language side, some of the more interesting websites are:

• EastSouthWestNorth
• Danwei(for coverage of the contemporary Chinese media scene, complete with constant updates on moving red lines)
• The China Business Network(mainly covers business but also includes cultural issues
• James Fallows (I also enjoy his coverage of technology
• The Washington Note(This website proves that something intelligent can come from the global capital of spin

If you want to keep on top of developments in China, these sites will keep you informed.

And of course, there is the China Vortex. You are always welcome here.

I just read The Economist’s lead article this week titled “Angry China”. I came away from it disappointed, and I would like to explain why.

The main gist of the article is that the Chinese government should be worried about the rising tide of Chinese nationalism because a great deal of the anger now directed at western policies and interests are in fact, anger at Chinese government policy. Handled the wrong way, this tide of Chinese nationalism could very well turn against the Chinese government, leading to unpredictable consequences.

Here are the money quotes:

China’s rage is out of all proportion to the alleged offences. It reflects a fear that a resentful, threatened West is determined to thwart China’s rise. The Olympics have become a symbol of China’s right to the respect it is due. Protests, criticism and boycott threats are seen as part of a broader refusal to accept and accommodate China.

There is no doubt genuine fury in China at these offences; yet the impression the response gives of a people united behind the government is an illusion. China, like India, is a land of a million mutinies now. Legions of farmers are angry that their land has been swallowed up for building by greedy local officials. People everywhere are aghast at the poisoning of China’s air, rivers and lakes in the race for growth. Hardworking, honest citizens chafe at corrupt officials who treat them with contempt and get rich quick. And the party still makes an ass of the law and a mockery of justice.

This is a classic “bait-and-switch” argument. The anger directed at the west is in fact domestic Chinese anger at Chinese government policies, according to this thesis. This is a dismissal of any anger at the west as an argument completely without merit, and an attempt to shift all of the blame onto the Chinese government.

It is exactly this kind of argument which Chinese see as western hypocrisy and double standards. Of course there is anger at some Chinese government policies, but these are a separate issue. Please don’t try to change the subject!

Sure, there are some aspects of Chinese government policy which Chinese citizens would like to see change. But the pro-Tibetan independence folk have committed the sin of lumping Chinese citizens together with the Chinese government in their criticisms. To the Chinese, it seems like a classic attempt to hijack the Olympics, something which almost all Chinese are truly proud of, and to turn it into a bully pulpit for their claims of Tibetan independence.

What angers both the Chinese government policymakers and people is that while the country has developed in economic terms and yes, even in human rights terms, that has not been recognized in the west. Instead, there continue to be politicians and media figures who continue to hector China, and play a leading role in shaping western opinions and political policy about China. To the Chinese, it seems like no matter how hard they run to the finish line, there is always someone out there moving the finish line even further away while they are running the race.

Trying to steal the Olympics and letting the Chinese have their day in the sun would be very similiar to insulting an American simply because George W Bush is his president. This is exactly what the pro-Tibetan independence supporters, and the China media critics have done.

Why should these people, who have little deep understanding of China and the Chinese (or Tibetans for that matter) have such an influential role in shaping opinion about such an important relationship as the west’s relationship with China, and be given so much ink and free air time? In light of this, why shouldn’t Chinese get angry about this very unfair and one-sided view which is put forward in much of the western media, and then passed off as the truth? And why doesn’t the western media instead reach out to westerners who have lived in China, and maybe, even speak the language in order to get a deeper understanding of the country?

Is this fair?

The real reason many Chinese are angry is not redirected anger at Chinese government policies, it is a genuine anger at a very biased and one-sided view about China which casts it as irresponsible, selfish, oppressive and wrong, and then throwing all Chinese citizens into the same basket.

The Economist is, generally speaking, a fair and open-minded newspaper, and usually presents well thought-out positions and arguments . It should look deeper than dismiss all of the Chinese anger out of hand.

If this lead article is the best that they can do, then I’m not optimistic about relations between China and the west.