Protests of the West Spread in China

April 21, 2008
By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — Nationwide demonstrations against a French supermarket chain spread on Sunday as thousands of people protested what they said was France’s sympathy for pro-Tibetan agitators. The protesters have also been singling out Western news outlets, especially CNN, for what they said was biased coverage of unrest in Tibet.

In a sign that the government was still allowing anti-foreign sentiment to spill over into rare street demonstrations, thousands of people rallied on Sunday in front of Carrefour markets in six cities, including two, Harbin and Jinan, where there had not been protests earlier. Demonstrators carried banners saying, “Oppose Tibet Independence” and “Condemn CNN,” according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

The rallies are the largest public outpouring of nationalistic fury since 2005, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets to denounce Japanese textbooks that omitted any mention of Japan’s wartime atrocities in China. Those protests, in which eggs and stones were thrown at the Japanese Embassy in Beijing and the consulate in Shanghai, ended abruptly after the authorities clamped down on the organizers and blocked the anti-Japanese Web sites and message boards that were fueling the campaign.

In recent days, the government has called on citizens to temper their fury at the West, but it has not acted to halt public demonstrations, which have been stoked by newspaper editorials, Internet postings and text messages sent to millions of cellphones.

On Sunday, the state-run People’s Daily newspaper called for a cooling of passions, although it stopped short of condemning the demonstrations or the spreading boycott campaign against French goods. “As citizens, we have the responsibility to express our patriotic enthusiasm calmly and rationally and express patriotic aspiration in an orderly and legal manner,” the newspaper said in a front-page editorial.

According to the official news agency, 2,000 people, many of them students, gathered in front of a Carrefour market in Wuhan, where they sang the national anthem and waved the Chinese flag. Similar scenes played out in Xi’an, Qingdao and Dalian, as well as in Jinan and Harbin. The authorities maintained a heavy police presence but did not interfere with the demonstrators, according to wire service reports.

The public anger has been percolating since mid-March, when disturbances in Tibet killed 19 people, according to the government’s official count, and Chinese security forces began a crackdown, in which Tibetan exile groups say more than 140 people were killed.

Most Chinese view the unrest as an outburst of hooliganism and wanton violence, and many have been infuriated by Western news accounts that portray the rioting in Tibet as a revolt against oppressive rule. The dismay turned to indignation after the Olympic torch relay became a magnet for anti-Chinese protests, especially in Paris, where pro-Tibet demonstrators attacked a Chinese amputee athlete in a wheelchair who was bearing the torch. The woman, Jin Jing, has become a national hero and a symbol of resistance against those who are seen as seeking to disrupt the Olympics and sully China’s reputation.