Shanghai Scrap

Given that no subject in the China-based English language blogosphere gets people more excited than Chinese nationalism, it’s amazing to me that more reporters haven’t bothered to go out and report on the phenomenon’s actual origins and current adherents. And that’s why I’m so pleased that my great friend and MN compatriot Mara Hvistendhal is beginning to publish her reporting on this important topic. For more than a year she’s been reporting in places (and people) where other foreign journalists generally don’t go. The first fruits of that reporting – The Boxer Shorts Rebellion – has just appeared in The New Republic:

You’d think that the younger, Internet savvy generation of Chinese twenty- and thirtysomethings would be the ones guiding China into better relations with the West. Instead, they seem to have glanced toward the rest of the world and turned back, appalled. Groups like the Patriots Alliance Web and the Greater China Anti-Japanese Alliance claim tens of thousands of members who routinely log into chat rooms to discuss Japanese war reparations, U.S. support for Taiwan, and Chinese territorial claims, along with a host of more personal grievances. Western observers tend to assume that such nationalism is fueled by a one-party state eager to gloss over its mistakes. But, while the government might look the other way during xenophobic manhunts, fenqing [roughly, "angry youth"] tend to be professionals in major cities like Shanghai and Beijing–exactly the people who were supposedly going to lead China toward greater openness, using the allegedly democratizing tool of the Internet. Nationalism is growing even as– some would say because–China is opening up.

… [E]xact numbers of fenqing are difficult to pin down, but staunch nationalists probably number somewhere between the thousands who take to the streets during demonstrations and the 44 million who signed a 2005 online petition to bar Japan from a permanent Security Council seat–nearly half of China’s Internet users at the time. They’re abundant enough, at least, to inspire hatred among the liberal intellectuals they replaced: When writing about the nationalists, Chinese moderates sometimes replace the character for fen with a homophone, so that fenqing reads “shit youth.”

Prospective editors: I know for fact that Mara has a whole lot of additional, unpublished material on this subject.