http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090714/ap_on_re_as/as_china_awash_in_protest_analysis
How safe do you think you are over there? What precautions/preparations are you taking, should angry mobs start hunting westerners? What does the average poor working bastard (guy like me) think of his government, and ours? What does he think of westerners, specifically Americans, as a people?
Is this thread aimed at me? There isn’t anyone else here in China…except for sun (who is actually Chinese).
Anyway, short answer…if you read the article, none of those protests have anything at all to do with Westerners. A vast, vast majority of all the protests in China (and there are lots of them, though mostly pretty small) involve corrupt LOCAL governments. There is nearly unanimous support for the central government, which is seen as protecting Chinese interests and having made a lot of people rich. Local governments, however, are generally corrupt as all hell and there’s a lot of simmering anger, esp. when the local governments basically sell people’s land for a fraction of what its worth to their developer friends for massive profits. When local governments get tied up in murder, explosive protests tend to follow as well. There were some big protests last year when some high-up government official raped and murdered a pretty local girl. In these situations, the central government generally swoops in pretty quickly and “cleans up” the mess, i.e. removing the figures, exiling them to some wasteland in Xinjiang or something like that ,occassionally even executing one or two of them (as happened in the tainted milk scandal), but the central gov’t doesn’t really do anything to change the endemic system of corruption. They just replace the corrupt officials with a new batch of officials who will end up just as corrupt, though more subtlely so to avoid detection.
The latest riots are more ethnic violence…but it’s still internal struggles. About 8% of China’s population consists of ethnic minorities, many of whom are Muslim (there are also quite a few muslim Han Chinese in the West). Make no mistake though: internal ethnic conflicts have nothing to do with the West at all. These are conflicts with hundreds of years of history behind them. It would be like saying the riots in Black communities in America in the 60’s were because of the Soviet Union. They were both going on at the same time, but they had nothing to do with each other. Anyway, the idea that angry mobs of Chinese are going to start hunting Westerners is ludicruous. It’s not the 19th century anymore. There were riots a few years ago against the Japanese…but no Japanese were actually hurt or killed. It was more of a symbolic thing: some businesses were destroyed, but most “Japanese restaurants” in China aren’t even owned by Japanese anyway. The ethnic violence is so far away from me that it feels like another country though. Urumqi is farther from Shanghai than Los Angeles is from New York, to give you a bit of an idea. My office is actually right next to a Muslim quarter in the city. All of those restauarants and such are still open for business, and I see Chinese in there everyday eating lunch. It’s not a universal hatred of minorities or anything: most of it is localized in the Southwest and Northwest…a bit in the southeast too, where you have tons of migrant labor from all over China mixing and melting together in a crockpot of violence just waiting to explode.
65% of China’s GDP is a direct result of foreign direct investment. Millions of Chinese everyday study Western languages and cultures. Every year, hundreds of thousands of Chinese venture abroad for the first time, and this exposure does slowly start to change perceptions back home. To be honest, I hardly ever leave Shanghai/Beijing/Hong Kong, so I don’t really know what is going on in those places. I never see any protests or anything like that, so I really can’t answer this question that well. I made a post last year around March about getting the shit beat out of me in Beijing…it was not “violence against Westerners” though so much as a bunch of drunk morons in a bar, which could happen anywhere in the world. You can search for it if you want though.
I’m hijacking my own thread.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090712/ts_nm/us_afghanistan_police