BEIJING — THE Chinese government, as part of a long-running dispute over islands in the East China Sea, recently declared an “air defense identification zone” in the area, raising tensions with Japan and the United States.
In my view, the significance of this step is not the warning to Japan, but the patriotic stance it represents. For a long time a strain of popular opinion in China had criticized the government for being weak on the issue. The new stance can be seen as a response to these sentiments.
In this connection I am reminded of a pair of incidents last summer.
On July 17, in the town of Linwu in Hunan Province, in central China, a melon farmer, Deng Zhengjia, and his wife had a dispute with municipal officials by their roadside watermelon stall. Several officers beat Mr. Deng, and he fell to the ground and died. According to witnesses, he had been struck on the head with a steelyard weight before he fell.
On July 27, in a shooting in an apartment building near Miami, a gunman killed six people before being shot dead by the police.
These two episodes would seem, on the surface, completely unrelated.
But when, on July 28, Chen Mingming, deputy governor of Guizhou Province, in southwest China, posted news of the Florida shooting on his microblog, a curious link between them emerged.
“How come there’s yet another shooting in America?!” Mr. Chen exclaimed.
“How come there’s yet another assault by city management officers in China?!” an Internet user shot back, referencing the death in Linwu.
“Some people just can’t wait to see tragic incidents take place in our country, and then they blow things all out of proportion,” Mr. Chen responded. “These unpatriotic people are degenerates — the dregs of society!”
A single comment about a melon vendor’s death was enough to send this high-ranking Communist Party official into a paroxysm of rage. “These people so love to bad-mouth their native country, but then they hang around here instead of going off to America!” Mr. Chen fumed. “Off you go, hurry up! I’m all for it. But before you leave, be sure to get some plastic surgery done — you don’t want them to see you’re a Chinese! ... These people hate their country so much they feel miserable that they’re Chinese, so let’s pack them off to America — the sooner the better! Such riffraff!”
But his effort to frame the question as one of patriotism backfired spectacularly, setting off a huge controversy.
Some critics pointed out that cursing one’s government is not the same thing as cursing one’s country. Others challenged Mr. Chen’s love-it-or-leave-it logic: “If your window is broken, don’t you want to fix it? Or do you move into your neighbor’s house? Or do you make a song-and-dance about how your door is intact? If you love this country, it’s natural that you take time to point out its imperfections, for that way you can make it better.” But the majority objected mainly to his intemperate language.
Mr. Chen’s supporters strongly feel that the government is the country, but he realized he had gone too far: He made a remark to the effect that in the future he would keep his cool.
The real question that needs discussing is, does criticism of the government necessarily mean criticism of the country? But all we got was a debate about rhetoric and whether a deputy governor had expressed himself properly.
The patriotic education promoted by the Communist Party over the last 64 years has managed to equate “love of country” with love of the party and the government. But when the distinction between country and ruler is erased, patriotism ends up being hijacked, and easily manipulated by a narrow-minded nationalism.
In August and September of last year, the controversy over the islands — known as the Diaoyu in Chinese and the Senkaku in Japanese — ignited two rounds of demonstrations in many Chinese cities, which included violent attacks on Japanese-owned businesses and Japanese-made cars. In a shocking scene recorded on video, a motorist in the city of Xi’an, Li Jianli, had his skull smashed in while trying to protect his Toyota.
What makes me all the more uneasy is that it’s not just ordinary citizens who confuse nation and government. Some intellectuals do, too. A scholar friend once said to me, “Here at home we can criticize our country, but when we go abroad we need to defend it. In the same way, at home it’s O.K. to argue with one’s parents, but outside the home we never tolerate criticism of them.”
“But we’re criticizing the government, not the nation,” I replied.
Later I posted this on my microblog: “Some people still aren’t clear about the difference between nation and government. And so anyone who aims a criticism at the government gets denounced as a traitor. Let me make an analogy: The nation is like one’s parents, and the government is like a steward; loving the steward and loving one’s parents are completely different things. One can’t change one’s parents, but one has every right to replace the steward.”
One of my readers reposted my remarks, adding: “Mom and Dad, where are you? I want to file a complaint about the steward.” Our parents will never hear the complaint, for the steward has supplanted them.
The steward, however, is beginning to have a rough time. Last year, under cover of the anti-Japan protests, some aired their disaffection. One slogan urging war on Japan contained a double meaning. “Let’s fight!” it read. “If we win, we get the Diaoyu Islands; if we lose, we get a new China.” By “new China” it meant a China in which the Communist Party was no longer the dominant power.