In spy-speak it is known as a "walk-in"—an unsolicited approach to a diplomatic mission by a foreigner claiming to have sensitive information. And when an agitated former police chief, Wang Lijun, entered a U.S. consulate in early February with an eye-popping tale about the death of a British citizen, the stakes could hardly have been higher.
Six years ago, in the first article I filed after moving to Shanghai, I listed the things that struck me as different, compared with my initial visits to China 20 years before. At the top of the list was the increased virulence of anti-Japanese sentiment in modern China.
After the Democratic and Republican National Conventions closed, as candidates charged back to the campaign trail and as the American media moved on, the campaign speeches made their way across the Pacific Ocean to China, where they are still echoing. While the conventions might be derided within the U.S. as political theater, they have sparked nuanced, even fond discussions among tens of thousands of Chinese, about the differences between the American and Chinese political styles.
On the afternoon of September 16, rows of policemen and security personnel in black T-shirts lined Beijing’s Liangmaqiao Road near the Japanese embassy during protests over the Diaoyu Islands controversy. Security guards were visible everywhere, both in the middle of the road and alongside it.
Near the embassy, the road was closed to traffic, but pedestrians and bicycles could still pass. The area was packed with bystanders, and a rendition of the Chinese national anthem filled the air.
The “voluntary” insurance at the entrance had cost just two yuan, about thirty-five cents, but I had been fleeced all the way from Beijing and somehow this was the final straw. Why did everything have to be so crass and commercialized? I whined to myself. I knew the answers—all the nuanced reasons why so many religious sites in China had been reduced to a carnival—but was in too foul a mood to be rational. The view didn’t help either. Once one of Taoism’s holiest mountains, Mount Heng in Shanxi Province was a denuded wreck, seeming to consist of nothing but broken slate.
Putting the right spin on one’s words is a science, and civil servants with fiduciary responsibility have to master this subject. It helps to shift blame to someone else; a child, a spouse, or a convenient foreigner will do.
Several weeks ago Yang Dacai, head of the Work Safety Department in Shaanxi province, drew outrage across China because he smiled while visiting the scene of a disastrous highway accident.
Numerous mainland cities are experiencing days-long Anti-Japan protests in defense of China’s sovereignty over the Diaoyu Islands. Authorities have begun exerting increasingly strict control over the demonstrations. Police in the city of Changsha,Hunan Province, issued an edict urging authorities to “complete the work of influencing employee ideology,” forbidding municipal government employees from instigating or taking part in anti-Japan demonstrations and marches. The edict also orders public employees to immediately report any incidents to their superiors. Reports from the city of Xiamen, FujianProvince, also claim protests in defense of the Diaoyu Islands were met with suppression from the authorities. High level members of the Beijing media revealed they had received orders from above that allow the media to “report on nationalist sentiment, but breaking information from the street must be strictly controlled. Interviewing Diaoyu defenders is strictly prohibited.”
The reappearance on Saturday of Xi Jinping, a top Chinese leader who had vanished from public view, removes one question mark facing the Communist Party, but a wave of protests against Japan is a sign that internal power struggles are far from over.
In China, where notions of freedom of speech and freedom of expression are seen by the government as secondary to the all-important ideal of social stability, there is little space, if any, for truly open and unmediated public conversation. Elections, the media, and protests, where they exist, are ultimately subject to top-down government control. Certain topics, such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and the personal lives of the nation’s top political leaders, are off-limits altogether.
A growing conviction is taking root in America that Chinese views of the international system are becoming increasingly assertive and nationalistic. One of the prime referents for this contention is the Global Times (Huanqiu Shibao), a hugely popular Chinese newspaper that is frequently portrayed as promoting an ever more hardline and nationalist take on the world.
