New post on The China Beat

I have a new post up at The China Beat on Chinese reactions to foreign criticism, “Prejudice Made Plausible: Foreign Criticism and Chinese Sensitivities.”

Why does concern about the Olympics, criticism of Chinese government policies, or even a news story about the effect of air pollution on athletes, provoke such a visceral response from many Chinese?

Obviously no one set of reasons can cover the gamut of reactions, everybody perceives issues in different ways, but in perusing the comments section of China blogs and the threads on Chinese BBSs, I sense three main themes: the close integration of state/nation/party in both PRC ideology and the minds of the Chinese people, genuine pride at China’s rise in the world and a belief that many countries in “the West” seek to undermine China’s development to satisfy their own selfish strategic goals, and finally, barely smoldering resentment born out of a history of foreign imperialism in China.

Enjoy and let me know what you think.

(Mainland link)

February 27th, 2008

Mao and the Marriage Counselor: The Hundred Flowers Movement of 1957

“People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.” – Somerset Maugham

“As a scientific truth, Marxism fears no criticism.” – Mao Zedong

Like so many other hasty marriages, by 1956 the relationship between Mao and the Party had begun to suffer from a seven-year itch. Still only in their first decade of rule, the CCP were shocked by events in Eastern Europe. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s legacy vexed the aging Mao, while the Party leadership (more concerned with maintaining order and control in the “here-and-now” than protecting their legacies in the forever after) listened warily to the news out of Hungary and Poland.

At the same time a lot was actually going right in the PRC. It’s easy to forget this now: but between the end of the Korean War and the start of the Great Leap Forward, there was a period of increasing prosperity, economic recovery, and a certain relaxation of ideological and social controls. It was all relative of course–this was still Mao’s China–but compared to later periods of PRC history, the mid-1950s had much more in common with the early years of the Deng Xiaoping regime than with the dark days which lay just around the

February 27th, 2008

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