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The internet in China is often a brutal place. It offers little room for liberal voices: armies of censors crush them. Chest-thumping nationalists hold sway. Yet look carefully and you can make out important differences among those who fill China’s social media with anti-Western, anti-liberal vitriol.
On one of the most popular messaging services, WeChat, I monitor several groups set up by neo-Maoists. Their members are nationalists. They are fiercely anti-Western, but they also criticise capitalist tendencies in China. They want the country to return to a more egalitarian path. On June 3rd I received an alert from one of these groups about an event later that day. It was an online lecture by Huang Jisu, a scholar and dramatist. A play he co-authored, “Che Guevara”, was a hit when it toured theatres in 2000 and 2001. Audiences could relate to its anti-American tone and veiled attacks on social injustices in China. Mr Huang was also a co-writer of “Unhappy China”, a book published in 2009. It, too, was hugely popular.
As I wrote then,
the book aimed to tap into what the authors saw as widespread public disgruntlement with the West. China, they said, “has the power to lead the world and the necessity to break away from Western influence”. Three years later, Xi Jinping became China’s leader and crafted a message that sounded very similar (though he told America’s visiting secretary of state, Antony Blinken, this week that China did not aim to “replace America”). So Mr Huang’s lecture, titled “Trends of thinking in today’s society and related ideas”, was not to be missed.
I’m glad I listened in (he used VooV, a Chinese video-conferencing service, but did not appear on camera). In his nearly two-and-a-half-hour talk, Mr Huang was strikingly critical of the turns that Chinese nationalism was taking—veering, as he described it, towards a “frenzied, extreme kind”. He cited the recent remarks of one online commentator, Li Yi, who had suggested that Chinese people wouldn’t mind if one-tenth of the Chinese population were to die in a war against Taiwan. Mr Huang called such views “fascist”. And he offered some self-criticism. “Friends sometimes ask me, ‘A few years ago you used to make a lot of nationalist remarks, didn’t you? To some extent you were a trailblazer. You had some impact on the way
things have turned out.’ In truth, I feel it’s worth reflecting on this.”
Among nationalists, Mr Huang is not alone in wondering whether online sentiment is getting dangerously overheated, especially concerning Taiwan. In this week’s edition
I explore their debates
and how divided nationalist commentators appear to be on whether to attack the island, and how soon. I also refer to recent research suggesting that public support for war in the near future is much lower than observers might suppose, given netizens’ frequent demands for one. That is a ray of sunshine. Let’s hope that China’s leaders are paying attention.
One corner of the internet that is not dangerously overheated is the Drum Tower inbox. We love hearing from readers, and you can reach us here:
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