April 20, 2008
By ANDREW JACOBS and JIMMY WANG
BEIJING — Armed with her laptop and her indignation, Zhu Xiaomeng sits in her dorm room here, stoking a popular backlash against Western support for Tibet that has unnerved foreign investors and Western diplomats and, increasingly, the ruling Communist Party.
Over the last week, Ms. Zhu and her classmates have been channeling anger over anti-China protests during the tumultuous Olympic torch relay into a boycott campaign against French companies, blamed for their country’s support of pro-Tibetan agitators. Some have also called for a boycott against American chains like McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
On Friday and Saturday, protesters gathered in front of a half-dozen outlets of the French retailer Carrefour, including a demonstration in the central city of Wuhan that reportedly drew several thousand people, according to Agence France-Presse. On Saturday, about 50 demonstrators carrying banners held a brief rally at the French Embassy here before the police shooed them away.
For the moment, however, most of the outrage is confined to the Internet. More than 20 million people have signed online petitions saying they plan to stop shopping at the Carrefour chain, Louis Vuitton and other stores linked to France because of what they see as the country’s failure to protect the torch during its visit to Paris two weeks ago. In a survey released on Friday, China’s state news agency, known as Xinhua, said 66 percent of those who responded said they would stay away from Carrefour during a monthlong boycott planned for May.
Public indignation has also been directed at Western news outlets, which are blamed for one-sided coverage of the torch relay and for anti-Chinese bias in their reporting on the disturbances in Tibet. In recent days, foreign news outlets here have been swamped by angry phone calls; two music videos circulating on the Internet blast CNN with expletives and lyrics like, “Don’t think that repeating something over and over again means that lies become truth.”
Like many young people, Ms. Zhu, a student at Beijing’s prestigious Foreign Studies University, said she had been infuriated by what she described as unfair attacks on the country’s image. “China used to be known as the sick man of Asia,” said Ms. Zhu, 19, who has been sending out tens of thousands of pro-boycott messages through QQ, a popular online chat service. “We were separated like sand. But this worldwide show of support by Chinese all over the globe illustrates we have solidarity on this issue. After 5,000 years, we’re not so soft anymore.”
The boycott call, spread through millions of text messages and postings on the country’s most heavily trafficked Web sites, provides a window into the technology’s growing power to mobilize a country whose political passions are usually kept in check by tight government control.
Although Communist Party officials have the ability to block text messages and Internet traffic they find objectionable, the censors have until now allowed more leeway for boycott organizers. In many ways, they have been feeding the outrage by publicizing the threat by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to skip the opening ceremonies and by repeatedly calling on CNN to apologize for remarks made by Jack Cafferty, a commentator who called the Chinese government “goons and thugs.” The network has expressed regret for offending the Chinese people, but officials here have dismissed the response as insincere.
But in a sign that the government may now be worried about the intensity of popular passion, the official news agency, Xinhua, said on Friday that it was time to curb nationalist zeal. While it lauded the boycott crusade, it advised people not to complicate the government’s aim of encouraging foreign investment in China.
“Patriotic fervor should be channeled into a rational track and must be transformed into real action toward doing our work well,” the agency said.
On Saturday, it issued a stronger warning, highlighting government concern that anti-Western sentiment could affect public attitudes during the Olympics, when 1.5 million people are expected to arrive. “Every son and daughter of China has the responsibility to show to the world in real action that China welcomes friends from all countries with open arms and will deliver an outstanding Olympics,” it said in an editorial.
In the past the government has encouraged nationalistic outbursts and then quashed them when passions grew too inflamed — or when the protests had achieved the political purpose officials envisioned. In 1999, the authorities gave free rein to a brief spasm of anti-American protest after the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia; in 2005, they allowed even larger anti-Japanese demonstrations, which were fueled by anger over textbooks glossing over Japan’s wartime atrocities in China.
During marches in several Chinese cities that year, the police stood by as eggs and rocks were thrown at Japanese consulates. A few weeks later, officials pulled the plug by shutting down the organizers’ Web sites and filtering out anti-Japanese messages.
Mindful of how a public grief after the death of a party official morphed into the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government recognizes that vitriolic campaigns against outsiders could easily pivot toward the Communist Party.
Fang Xingdong, who runs blogchina.com, a hub for Chinese bloggers, said that he thought the government would not stand in the way of the boycott but that it would intervene if the anti-Western campaign became too disruptive. “If the irrational mood and behaviors among netizens are getting more and more intense, it will be very dangerous,” he said, using the term for the community of bloggers and message-board users. “But I think this will not be beyond government’s control.”
If the protests on Saturday are any indication, official tolerance for unsanctioned demonstrations is wearing thin. According to witnesses and news reports, most of the Carrefour protests were quickly dispersed by the police. In Beijing, a rally that drew about 50 people to the French Embassy and a nearby French school lasted an hour before riot police forced them to leave. By 3 p.m., dozens of uniformed officers had sealed off access to the streets surrounding the embassy.
In a country where the press is tightly controlled, the growing popularity of high-tech communication has made such protests possible. Some 229 million people have Internet access in the country, and usage in China is growing by 30 percent a year, according to BDA China, a research firm. Cellphone text messaging is ubiquitous here, with more than 98 percent of the country’s 400 million cellphone owners regularly using text messages. Another 300 million people are registered on instant messaging networks like MSN and QQ.
Ms. Zhu, for one, says that instant messaging is an effective way to reach thousands of people with a few keyboard strokes. “I don’t send e-mails to individuals,” she said. “It’s inefficient — you can reach a lot more people by e-mailing groups on QQ.”
In a demonstration of the Internet’s viral prowess, some 2.3 million MSN users have attached “I Love China” icons to their online profiles as an expression of solidarity against “Tibetan separatists.” A Google search for “Carrefour Boycott” in Chinese yielded over 2.4 million Web pages, most of them created in the last week.
Many of the messages accuse Carrefour executives of providing financial support to pro-Tibetan advocates, a charge the company denies. Others say American fast-food chains should be boycotted as a punishment for the recent meeting by the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, with the Dalai Lama.
In the past, boycott campaigns in China have largely come to naught.
On Wednesday afternoon, as she sat in a cafe sipping a can of Coca-Cola, Ms. Zhu said she thought the boycott would be a success. “Tibet is our country’s territory. You have no right to interfere in our interior affairs,” she said, adding, “A boycott may not be the right long-term solution, but we have to give the French people a lesson.”
Huang Yuanxi contributed research.
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