The Hindu Business Line : The Chinese turn on their nationalism

France is not on the most favourite list right now in China. Carrefour, the French retail chain, is being blasted on Chinese blogs, purportedly for donating money to Tibetan groups in India, which is being denied by the company. Chinese are demonstrating in front of Carrefour stores and in front of the French embassy and calling for a boycott of French products such as Louis Vuitton bags. The French, pretty nationalistic themselves, often get hit by nationalism elsewhere. When the French government did not support the launch of Bush’s war in Iraq, US airwaves were full of radio talk show hosts calling for a boycott of French products.

With all the hype of globalisation, nationalism lies just below the surface. Look at the way governments resorted to bad economics and banned exports as a reaction to rising food prices. With economics being a prime mover of globalisation, it is only to be expected that nationalism will strike at economic activities as a form of protest. When Islamic countries were upset with the printing of objectionable cartoons in a Danish newspaper, Danish companies felt the brunt of a boycott. I have not heard of any groups around the world calling for a boycott of Chinese products, because of their treatment of the Tibetans, but the Chinese are calling for a boycott of Carrefour, which has about 112 stores around the country.

Not a new weapon

Boycotting the products of a country to send them a message has been used effectively in the past. Gandhi called for the boycott of imported mill-cloth to protest British colonial policies in India, especially its devastation of the village textile industry. It was symbolic and effective. Student movements in the US pressured universities to withdraw investments from companies that did business in South Africa to send a message to the apartheid regime there in the early 1980s.

Yet, all the current protests around the world against various unsavoury aspects of Chinese policies have served to turn on a virulent form of Chinese nationalism. The current anti-French sentiment springs from the fact the Olympic flame was targeted on the streets of Paris, and the City of Paris honoured the Dalai Lama.

Protests against the Olympic torch were to be expected. China promised good behaviour when it applied to be granted the right to host the Olympics. China would like to be recognised as a superpower with a slogan of ‘peaceful rising’ and has a finger in every economic pie around the world. If China wants the torch to be a symbol of the Olympic spirit coming to China, the world will justifiably evaluate the Chinese against that spirit. If you want to be in the limelight, you have to handle the glare. The world watches the way China treats its Tibetans. The world watches while China supplies arms to Sudan, a repressive regime. The world managed to catch the Chinese in the process of shipping arms to another repressive regime in Zimbabwe and managed to prevent it from reaching its destination. Some Jewish groups in the US have called for a boycott of the Olympics to protest China’s supply of arms to Iran and Syria.

The timing

Unfortunately, the Olympics have also come at a time when China has been getting a lot of bad press. Apart from the arms issue and Tibetan demonstrations, poor safety inspections of Chinese exports have resulted in lead paint in toys grabbing attention in the US. Again, poor quality and questionable ingredients that came from China that were used in the manufacture of the drug heparin have led to several deaths.

The Chinese are familiar with, and are resigned to, all their activities in their country being monitored or controlled by their government, and hence believe the same is true elsewhere in the world too. Hence, the Chinese believe the French are at fault for the street protest. Unfortunately reinforcing that view, the French government hurriedly sent senior officials to assuage Chinese sentiments. Protesting is in the French genetic make-up and this act by their government (objected to by many French) only suggests that the economic impact must be really strong for the government to react in this manner.

The Chinese government, with its censorship, is also able to turn on and off nationalistic pride within the country. Hence, the chief censor, who allowed all the blogs to whip up nationalistic fervour for a while, is now perhaps concerned that it may affect foreign visitors to the Olympics and is reported to have begun to block material that encourages protest. We will have to wait and see the crowd reaction to French athletes during the games!

The Chinese tried to orchestrate all aspects of the Olympics, including sending their specially trained police to run alongside the torch in blue jump-suits as it went from city to city around the world. When Tibetans began protesting Chinese policies along the path of the torch, the Chinese embassy at various cities is reported to have gotten the overseas Chinese students to organise pro-China counter demonstrations. This backfired in South Korea when the pro-China protestors turned violent and the Chinese Ambassador had to apologise.

Desire for stability

The voluble, blogging Chinese are upset that people are trying to throw mud at them during their finest hour, the hosting of the Olympics. Their reaction to the foreign criticism has been to step up their nationalism, and they are hitting back where they can. The middle-class Chinese who are seeing economic benefits today are not straining at their leash for more freedoms, much as liberals elsewhere in the world would hope. The middle classes truly believe they are better off because of ‘stability’ that their government has followed, and don’t want to rock their boat. They are told so in their schools and in the media.

Every time I turned on the television in Beijing, I was presented with another syrupy report about how wonderful the country and its policies are. They are not clamouring for free speech and a free press because they believe it will affect their stability. Their desires for stability, combined with a new confidence arising out of economic progress, are getting expressed in their nationalism. When a student from the Chinese mainland currently in a US university tried to moderate between pro-China and pro-Tibet groups, she was reportedly hounded by her compatriots, her personal information released on the Internet, and her parents back home harassed.

While China flaunts its economic success, it does not want to give up its communist core. After all, the picture that continues to grace Tiananmen Square is that of Mao Zedong and not Deng Xiaoping, the father of the economic success. My Chinese student tells me that she and her friends try not to buy Japanese products because of ‘what Japan has done to China in history.’ Chinese textbooks keep that sentiment alive by presenting the Communist Party’s version of the history of the world.

Hopefully, the Olympics will go smoothly without a hitch and their impeccable ability to organise events along with their hospitality would charm every visitor. Hopefully, they would have also have had their wake-up call. Hopefully they would believe that peaceful rising is more than economics, and with it comes a set of global principles of good behaviour.

(The author is a professor of international business and strategic management at Suffolk University, Boston, US. He can be reached at cgopinat@suffolk.edu)

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