Page 2 of 2 China turns netizen anger on Seoul By Peter Lee
With United States and South Korea increasingly engaged in China's domestic
markets, Beijing has more options available than the traditional enticements of
big ticket purchases of ships and jet aircraft, or granting preferential access
to real estate and investment opportunities to influential foreign businessmen.
China has apparently decided to refine its diplomatic strategy to introduce a
new stick - what might be termed a popular-opinion component - to its economic
relations arsenal.
Observers with long memories of China's 150-year history of anti-foreign
boycotts, strikes, protest marches and embassy outrages might be forgiven for
calling it the xenophobia option.
An editorial in China's Global Times entitled ''A test of Chinese
people's diplomacy'' offers an insight into lessons learned and China's
probable approach to future crises:
China should consider the Yellow
Sea drill a chance to test its non-governmental diplomatic clout. The country
is no longer a uniform mass with only one voice. The public can explore ways to
complement Beijing's official diplomacy.
It might not be good for a government to handle the crisis with a harsh hand.
But the Chinese people should act in a way that compels US government's
attention. It is the Chinese consumers and workers who contribute to the hard
currency to buy US Treasury bonds, and support struggling US companies during
the financial crisis. Washington may not have the reason or guts to ignore
their demand.
There need to be more channels for these voices to be expressed in order to
warn the US. And, grass-roots patriotism needs real tests to grow into an
effective alternative power to China's diplomacy.
The Chinese media may also help amplify the public outcry. Public anger or
protests should not be considered a burden by the Chinese government, but an
additional force on the bargaining table. If China does not try to explore
various means to press Washington, it will become more difficult to deal with
future incidents. [3]
On one level, the editorial indirectly
acknowledges China's diplomatic difficulties. With the eurozone, Japan and
South Korea more or less solidly in the US camp and the friendship of India and
Russia by no means assured, the Chinese government is relatively isolated.
Efforts to counter US influence in the western Pacific militarily will simply
play into Washington's hands by increasing anxiety over the Chinese threat and
encourage an even greater American presence.
Judging from the editorial, China recognizes that its most effective weapons
are economic, and they can be leveraged more effectively as expressions of
popular outrage with the Chinese government presenting itself to distressed
foreign governments as a moderating force.
Indeed, nationalism and a thirst for vigilante justice targeting anyone from
rude waitresses to corrupt officials to countries deemed insufficiently
friendly and respectful have emerged as a remarkable source of potential
energy, particularly on the Internet.
It is easy to imagine China permitting the expression and, through the media,
"amplification" of anti-foreign feeling to threaten the economic interests of
countries that challenge China's interests and self-esteem.
The strategy would have the added benefit of using vociferous and intolerant
nationalism to crowd out domestic criticism of Communist Party rule and its
various shortcomings, which threaten to become a dominant theme on China's
lively, massive, and indignant domestic Internet despite extensive monitoring
and censorship operations and the Herculean efforts of paid sock puppets to
dilute and redirect unsuitable threads.
There are increasing signs that the Chinese government prefers to repackage its
own media operations as channels for expressions of useful popular feelings and
unobtrusively guided image and issue management, and not just explicit
platforms for official government and party positions.
A flagship for this new experiment appears to be People's Daily Online English
edition. As it attempts to keep up with China's rambunctious local tabloids,
People's Daily Online has made some questionable editorial choices recently,
including pushing a story that the Taliban is training monkeys to attack
American troops in Afghanistan with assault rifles. [4]
It has also allowed posts on its forums that serve to decouple the website from
official foreign policy positions and turn it into an expression of the
purported concerns and priorities of Chinese netizens.
China has been awash with posts, editorials and articles flaying the United
States and South Korea for planning military exercises in the Yellow Sea. As
part of that trend, People's Daily Online featured a forum post [5] including
some photographs of a US aircraft carrier in flames, obviously faked but
apparently also extremely gratifying to the hypernationalist audience.
In an indication of the convoluted path of content across the Chinese Internet,
the People's Daily English-language post was an uncredited cut-and-paste of an
EastSouthWestNorth (ESWN) post [6], itself a credited translation of a
Chinese-language post at my1510.cn [7] that reposted (with a credit only to the
author, Jia Qingsen) an opinion piece in Nanfang Daily [8]. The opinion piece
glossed the sina.com micro-blog hoax-post that had been pulled - but not until
after it had created a sensation on the Chinese Internet.
Commentary on the photos discussed the role of popular opinion, at least for an
English-speaking audience:
When there is such a vigorous official
opposition, it is no surprise that some Chinese netizen would make up the story
that "an American aircraft carrier has been bombed". In a certain sense, this
can be regarded as the interplay between the official and civilian sectors in
response to the South Korea-American military exercise in the Yellow Sea.
Jia Qingsen at Nanfang Daily, while decrying the false rumor (and reproducing
two of the best pictures), declared it "reflected the feelings of the netizens
(I don't know if it could be elevated to the level of 'national will' or not)
and is worthy of being savored and heeded."
Obviously, neither accuracy nor copyright will stand in the way of the Chinese
media savoring, heeding and pushing a crowd-pleasing piece of xenophobia.
It should also be noted that the nation most vulnerable to attacks led by
aggrieved netizens is not the United States, but South Korea. The Super Junior
jihad in early June, before the current Yellow Sea crisis emerged, gives an
idea of the latent energy of anti-Korean xenophobia on the Chinese web.
A free ticket giveaway for a concert at the Shanghai Expo by the K-pop group
Super Junior became a fiasco when tens of thousands of fans turned up for
thousands of promised tickets, only to find that 500 were available. The
infuriated Chinese fans vented their anger by manhandling and spitting on
security guards, apparently rousing the patriotic ire of China's vast network
of pop-averse World of Warcraft gamers.
Hackers among the gamers initiated a furious assault against websites and
online forums catering to the "brain-damaged" fans of the South Korean group,
as well as South Korea's national portal.
As ESWN reported [9], progress of the jihad was live-blogged with entries like:
414 QQ "brain-damaged" groups related to Super Junior have been bombed out.
Hongke/Hacker have taken the official Super Junior website out.
Blood has taken the Super Junior Forum at Baidu out.
Music download statistics have been banned.
Renren's Super Junior section is half-paralyzed.
Hacked websites were adorned with obscene and racist comments and
demands that Koreans depart China, mixed with more forgiving notations to
Chinese fans along the lines of "I don't look down on your brain-damagedness, I
just want you to stand on the side of your homeland, China" and heartfelt
patriotic sentiments such as "i love china f**k kr".
The Chinese government apparently decided that the anti-Korean hostility of a
vocal segment of the population was perhaps not a bug, but a useful feature in
diplomacy.
On July 12, Global Times upped the pressure surrounding the Yellow Sea
exercises and invoked the element of popular opinion to illustrate the threat
to South Korean interests:
Public sentiments in China and South Korea
vis-a-vis each other have fallen to a new low in recent years. Some Chinese
people have been comparing the US-South Korea drill to the visit to Yasukuni
Shrine by Japan's former prime minister Koizumi Junichiro.
If a US aircraft carrier enters the Yellow Sea, it will mean a major setback to
Seoul's diplomacy, as hostility between the peoples of China and South Korea
will probably escalate, which Beijing and Seoul have been working for years to
avoid. [10]
For South Korean businesspeople, the official
displeasure of the Chinese government and its vindictive bureaucracy would be
bad enough; but popular Chinese agitation against South Korean businesses and
individuals, fanned by a reckless media, that the government claims it cannot
control and will not suppress, would be even worse.
Indeed, as the Yellow Sea dispute heated up, the Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo
editorialized:
The US-South Korea alliance forms the cornerstone of the
South's national security and diplomacy. But China is South Korea's largest
trading partner, and it also has a huge influence on peace and reunification on
the Korean Peninsula. The time has come for Seoul to factor into its diplomacy
and security policies both China and its intensifying competition with the US.
[11]
Korea Times interviewed Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group under
the headline, "Korea's future lies with China - economically".
"[E]conomically
speaking, South Korea's future is China. That's very clear," said Ian
Bremmer...
"I think what we need to recognize is that South Korea's long-term economic
interest is really much more aligned with China. The growth of bilateral trade
between the two countries is overwhelming. But its security interest is much
more aligned with the US.
China is already South Korea's largest export destination, and the bilateral
trade is larger than the total trade South Korea has with the US and Japan
combined. In the first four months of this year, the trade volume skyrocketed
48% over the same period last year, according to China's Ministry of Commerce.
Analysts say China will use South Korea's economic dependence as a bargaining
chip to expand its political muscle, pulling Seoul away from the US political
sphere of influence and nudging it closer to Beijing.
South Korea can reduce China's advance if it can be impervious from the pull of
its economic black hole. But Bremmer is not optimistic.
"The economic integration between South Korea and China has been ongoing and
will continue in the future," he forecasted. [12]
As the
current crisis recedes, it appears that China's economic leverage - enhanced by
the threat of xenophobic nationalism - increases, and President Lee Myung-bak's
ability to drive the next Korean security crises into a more pro-US outcome
decreases.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
