On top of the usual job stress, I have a pretty bad cold and this coming week will be a killer. So this blog will continue to have lots of peaks and valleys, from the flood of posts and comments from a few weeks ago to the slow trickle you’re seeing now.

The final section made me smile; the picture it paints is awfully rosy:

….China now has stakes in some of the great symbols of the western corporate world - such as Merrill Lynch and BP. China is starting to push back. Many young Chinese know that the likeliest outcome for the short-to-mid-term future is for Chinese companies and organisations to initiate a fresh and startling process of globalisation. More and more of the international agenda is now in China’s hands to shape.

So as western journalists write the Olympic stories they had already planned months before, delivering them to an audience who are already suspecting them - and thus deprived of their element of surprise and shock - the Chinese people, like sensible people anywhere, will be relaxing, sitting back, looking at this event and seeing it for what it is - a mere three weeks of corporate frenzy, redeemed by a few sublime moments of sporting excitement, which will dissolve almost as soon as it is over. When it is, the Chinese people will be able to continue the remarkable journey they began many decades ago - and which, unlike the Olympics, really can and will change the world.

No doubt their journey has been remarkable, and it’s already changed the world, painful as that is for some to acknowledge. Whether it’s sustainable or ultimately built on sand no one can say. What I can say with authority is that the author is a little bit giddy about China’s rise, which, as much as I want it to go on, is a lot more tenuous than you’d know from reading this article.

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As a lot of you know, I’ve been too busy and in too many airports and hotels to give this site any attention the past few weeks and my heart definitely isn’t in it. I’m trying to get back into it, but it just can’t be a high priority for me right now.

Even though you can comment again, I can’t post for another day or two. All of your comments from last week that you thought were gone have been restored. See you soon.

Articles like this from today’s Times underscore the vicious circle:

When the time came for the smiling Tibetan monk at the front of the University of Southern California lecture hall to answer questions, the Chinese students who packed the audience for the talk last Tuesday had plenty to lob at their guest:

If Tibet was not part of China, why had the Chinese emperor been the one to give the Dalai Lama his title? How did the tenets of Buddhism jibe with the ’slavery system’ in Tibet before China’s modernization efforts? What about the Dalai Lama’s connection to Hitler?

As the monk tried to rebut the students, they grew more hostile. They brandished photographs and statistics to support their claims. ‘Stop lying! Stop lying!’ one young man said. A plastic bottle of water hit the wall behind the monk, and campus police officers hustled the person who threw it out of the room.

Scenes like this, ranging from civil to aggressive, have played out at colleges across the country over the past month, as Chinese students in the United States have been forced to confront an image of their homeland that they neither recognize nor appreciate. Since the riots last month in Tibet, the disrupted Olympic torch relays and calls to boycott the opening ceremony of the Games in Beijing, Chinese students, traditionally silent on political issues, have begun to lash out at what they perceive as a pervasive anti-Chinese bias.

Clearly, this kind of reaction - throwing bottles in a USC classroom or throwing rocks in Korea - is not the best strategy for winning hearts and minds. But at least this article tells us where these students are coming from. Too rarely in the Western media do we see any meaningful insights into why the young people feel so frustrated and filled with pent-up anger. The article, however, also exposes their weakness, such as emotional but factually challenged “documentation” of Tibet’s progress. (And I’m not saying Tibet hasn’t progressed since its “liberation”; in many ways it has. But the materials the students are brandishing, described on page two of the article, do little to further this argument.) And a shaky grasp of history. And a childish manner of self-expression.

While I sympathize with the students frustration at what they see as the world’s refusal to listen to reason, I also know they are using exactly the wrong strategy to get their message out. With each new horror story I wonder, why can’t they take a step back and see how the Antichrist the Dalai Lama has managed to arouse global sympathy? He didn’t do it by throwing rocks. He didn’t do it by scowling and chanting furious slogans.

I am traveling and will have to cut it short. But let me just finish by qualifying a point I’ve made in earlier posts, namely that nearly all of the young Chinese I know, no matter how intelligent and urbane, are adopting the anti-CNN mentality. Since I wrote that, I’ve talked with at least a few who have voiced genuine concern over their friends’ un-thought-through approach to speaking out. Most of them are a bit older than my angry friends, mainly in their 30s, and they are in despair over the immature and ineffective tactics employed by their younger countrymen. “Why do they always have to show the world their anger? Do they think that helps?” bemoaned a business friend of mine earlier today, and I felt his pain.

Maybe the 20-somethings will grow out of it. I think most of us can look back to our 20s and cringe at some of the things we did back then. But I fear the anger may be too ingrained, a strain of disease the Party cultivated to protect itself that has now run amok. No matter how grounded in fact some of their arguments may be, as long as they present themselves like over-testosteroned adolescents, China has yet another big problem on its hands. This image of a nation overrun by strident, violent youth who threaten to once again turn China inward is exactly what the country doesn’t need on the eve of it’s long-awaited and very expensive coming-out party. It could really damage the big show. And it isn’t doing much to further China’s image on college campuses outside of China.

If this post rambled or appeared more incoherent than usual, apologies in advance. I’m on the road and as sleep-starved as usual.

Recently I blogged on Grace Wang’s editorial in the Washington Post. ESWN found a rejoinder to this here.

In my view, Grace Wang’s essay is political suicide. In the language of past history (and somewhat ironically here), she has decided to stand diametrically opposite to the Party and the People. Objectively, one can say that she is a “Public Enemy.”

Ah, yes. China, a country where having an opinion that doesn’t go with the flow is a serious crime. She should have kept her head down and accepted the abuse for not following along with the rest of the herd. After all, internet thugs know best, don’t they?

First, I think that Grace Wang is wrong. The negative impact of that essay goes far beyond her imagination. She has been completely exploited by western media.

Let’s be honest here. The trouble started when Chinese students decided to launch an internet bullying campaign and this was continued by thugs who started harrassing her family. The “Western media” had nothing to do with it. Yet of course, true to form, non-Chinese are quickly blamed as being the source of all evil by “Chairman Rabbit”. Oh, surprise-surprise, there’s more on the I.M.C.M.C.L.B. (”International Media Conspiracy to Make China Look Bad”).

If Grace Wang really wanted to solve the problems and if she loves China, she would have asked the western media to report a fuller picture of China as opposed to just satisfying their pre-defined prejudices and imaginations.

Yes, no need for Grace Wang as a young Chinese woman to try to reason with her own people on the issue in hand. Chinese regularly say that its not for outsiders to comment on “Chinese issues”. Yet if Chinese people disagree with something China does, it’s implied that they have to sort out the rest of the world first? What utter hypocricy.

I tend to think that she is too young and she is very politically naïve to hold those kinds of views.

Now we’re on to age discrimination! Yes, Grace Wang is too young to have her own political views, despite the fact she is probably old enough to vote in most democracies. Or is she too young because she disagrees with the prevailing Chinese attitude?

Mr Rabbit’s commentary is rather manipulative as it repeatedly greatly reads into non-controversial statements by Ms Wang.

This shows that she loves to learn and she has good intentions. The readers will be sympathetic, and even possibly respectful.

And you have evidence that she is lying, Mr Rabbit? Or that she should not say anything about her background? She likes languages - she’s telling the reader something about her. Don’t try to pretend she’s manipulating us - you’re the person manipulating the story here.

But one has to ask: What is the concept of China? She does not employ the concept of the Chinese people as “the multi-ethnic political entity (consisting of 56 different ethnic groups)” and she does not use the narrative based upon the relationship between the Han and Tibetan groups.

Why should she repeat Chinese nationalist propaganda? Quite clearly Chinese, whether that’s Hans or anyone else, are in many ways different and generally divided from Tibetans. When the BBC did a four-part series on China last year, there was a piece which showed a giant propaganda sign in Tibet welcoming the new railway - it was in Chinese, with no Tibetan translation, and none of the Tibetan peasants in the area could read it. That is just one example of how divorced from reality many Chinese are when it comes to Tibet - they don’t even consider how to get their message across to Tibetans in a way they can understand.

There is nothing about Tibetan history, society, policies or challenges (such as those about development and poverty alleviation).

Again, why would she talk about that? She isn’t the Chinese government’s spokeswoman. She had her own views of Tibet, and she freely admits they were unrealistic. She learnt about what some Tibetans actually thought about their situation. That’s more than most Chinese have done.

Finally, her high school revoking her diploma and reinforcing patriotic education also satisfied the western imagination.

So, again, are you suggesting it didn’t happen? Or that she should sweep the petty-mindedness of her old school under the carpet because it’s an “inconvenience” for those Chinese who want to push their own image of their country to the rest of the world?

There is much more drivel from Mr Rabbit, so I won’t bore you with a continued point-by-point analysis. But I’d like to address his closing remarks.

It was just another one-sided demonization of China; it only diminishes the minimal speech space of China within the western media. In the end, it only increases misunderstanding, alienation and conflict about China. From this angle I can only say that Grace Wang was hypocritical and opportunistic.

Quite the opposite, Mr Rabbit. The only hypocricy and opportunism is coming from you. A young university student wanted to do her own thing and she was treated disgracefully for it, as was her family. Yet you spend a few lines talking about how such criminal activities were wrong, the rest blithering on about how she was wrong to want to tell her own story in the only medium available to her that would reach many others - the Chinese media would never give her space. Well after all the lies and hate spread about her, she had the right. Your analysis was a shameful attempt to undermine her defence, whilst also being a vehicle for having a bash at the foreign media for disrupting your pride.

I would like to thank Roland for translating this entry as it demonstrates the moral bankruptcy of some Chinese bloggers like Mr Rabbit. Only by being able to read this sort of garbage can we truly understand the problems people like Grace Wang have when trying to reason with those who are themselves unreasonable. I do hope, though, that the reason no positive blog entries were posted on ESWN was not that no Chinese netizens had sympathy for her. It really would bode badly for China’s future if victims of bullying are not offered aid simply because they don’t conform.