The Long March
By Chip Tsao | published Oct 28, 2010
Hong Kong TV news audiences have been fed a fresh wave of anti-Japanese demonstrations unleashed in several Chinese cities in what appears to be a calculated stunt to divert public attention away from Liu Xiaobo and his recently awarded Nobel Peace Prize.
In the global village, you can be both a disaster or farce tourist, sitting on a sofa in an air-conditioned room with a can of Coke in your hand. It’s Manila on Tuesdays and Chile on Wednesdays, but China and Japan are always back on Thursdays. For ghouls with their noses pressed against the Samsung and Panasonic widescreen plasma TVs, the demonstration scenes were obviously more visually entertaining than the constant drumbeat of boring still pictures of the imprisoned, bespectacled dissident.
In second-rate cities like Chengdu and Wuhan, big protesting crowds toddled boisterously in the streets between walls of armed policemen lined up ready for a crackdown in case things went wrong. A slogan on a banner read “Marry a Japanese wife and beat her to death,” as a patriotic outcry for revenge against Japan’s occupation of the Senkaku Islands. There were so many miswritten Chinese characters on the placards that if I penalized each of them by 1RMB per mistake like a schoolteacher, I would be one-tenth as rich as the grandson of Li Ka-shing.
A young Chinese girl on the street dressed up in gaudy greens, yellows and reds, a “classical Han costume”—the kind of loose gowns commonly seen in some third-rate violent Chinese sword fighting movies set in the Ming dynasty—was soon spotted by the angry crowd and verbally assaulted as “traitor,” because demonstrators thought she was wearing a Japanese kimono. Frightened, she hurried into a nearby public toilet to change, dumping her classical costume for a t-shirt and American jeans to avoid a possible attack.
There were reports of the occasional emergence of banners displaying irrelevant slogans such as “We want a multi-party political system,” but to no one’s surprise, local Hong Kong channels never broadcasted them. Demonstrations were limited to only minor cities, because many people in Beijing and Shanghai, I guess, are rich enough and still eager to apply for their tourist or student visas at the Japanese consulate. They may fear once their faces are recognized and recorded by Japanese diplomatic officials, their chances of a pre-Christmas shopping trip to Tokyo or taking up illegal employment as waitresses in Kyoto would be greatly undermined. Putting myself in their shoes, I’d love to taste a bowl of shark’s fin soup off the Senkaku Islands, but for the time being, I’d probably do the same.
And for those who marched on the streets in Chengdu and Wuhan, they still have a long way to go—both in terms of their upward social mobility if they want to rival Beijing and Shanghai as well as in their quest for the adoption of a multi-party system. Let’s wish them good luck with their long march.
Hong Kong TV news audiences have been fed a fresh wave of anti-Japanese demonstrations unleashed in several Chinese cities in what appears to be a calculated stunt to divert public attention away from Liu Xiaobo and his recently awarded Nobel Peace Prize.
In the global village, you can be both a disaster or farce tourist, sitting on a sofa in an air-conditioned room with a can of Coke in your hand. It’s Manila on Tuesdays and Chile on Wednesdays, but China and Japan are always back on Thursdays. For ghouls with their noses pressed against the Samsung and Panasonic widescreen plasma TVs, the demonstration scenes were obviously more visually entertaining than the constant drumbeat of boring still pictures of the imprisoned, bespectacled dissident.
In second-rate cities like Chengdu and Wuhan, big protesting crowds toddled boisterously in the streets between walls of armed policemen lined up ready for a crackdown in case things went wrong. A slogan on a banner read “Marry a Japanese wife and beat her to death,” as a patriotic outcry for revenge against Japan’s occupation of the Senkaku Islands. There were so many miswritten Chinese characters on the placards that if I penalized each of them by 1RMB per mistake like a schoolteacher, I would be one-tenth as rich as the grandson of Li Ka-shing.
A young Chinese girl on the street dressed up in gaudy greens, yellows and reds, a “classical Han costume”—the kind of loose gowns commonly seen in some third-rate violent Chinese sword fighting movies set in the Ming dynasty—was soon spotted by the angry crowd and verbally assaulted as “traitor,” because demonstrators thought she was wearing a Japanese kimono. Frightened, she hurried into a nearby public toilet to change, dumping her classical costume for a t-shirt and American jeans to avoid a possible attack.
There were reports of the occasional emergence of banners displaying irrelevant slogans such as “We want a multi-party political system,” but to no one’s surprise, local Hong Kong channels never broadcasted them. Demonstrations were limited to only minor cities, because many people in Beijing and Shanghai, I guess, are rich enough and still eager to apply for their tourist or student visas at the Japanese consulate. They may fear once their faces are recognized and recorded by Japanese diplomatic officials, their chances of a pre-Christmas shopping trip to Tokyo or taking up illegal employment as waitresses in Kyoto would be greatly undermined. Putting myself in their shoes, I’d love to taste a bowl of shark’s fin soup off the Senkaku Islands, but for the time being, I’d probably do the same.
And for those who marched on the streets in Chengdu and Wuhan, they still have a long way to go—both in terms of their upward social mobility if they want to rival Beijing and Shanghai as well as in their quest for the adoption of a multi-party system. Let’s wish them good luck with their long march.
Labels: Politically Incorrect, 陶傑
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