Celebrating May Fourth With Slow Internet

The internet is unusually sluggish today. I wrote a bit about some possible reasons why at Sinobyte.

Blogspot has re-disappeared, MSN Messenger is inaccessible from an artsy Beijing cafe, searches for Carrefour are just back from going unanswered, and the spring sky is clear. It’s the 89th anniversary of China’s May Fourth Movement.

In 1919, student activism took a powerful and still-honored turn for the patriotic in China. On May 4, thousands of students gathered at Tiananmen to protest the Treaty of Versailles and its treatment of previously German-held territory in Shandong Province, which was given to Japan rather than back to China.

Today, students have been at the forefront of recent demonstrations of national pride in the face of demonstrations against the Olympic flame as it toured the world. After a French demonstrator went after a woman carrying the torch in a wheelchair, anti-French sentiment was converted to demonstrations and boycotts directed against the French megamart Carrefour.

Go read the full post here.

China’s Growing Ties With the UAE

The China Brief from the Jamestown Foundation examines ties between China and the United Arab Emirates.

Since establishing diplomatic ties on November 1, 1984, the political, economic and trade relations between the UAE and China have evolved significantly in both scale and substance. In recent years, UAE-Sino ties have strengthened with burgeoning trade and investment cooperation. Bilateral trade between the UAE and China recorded an impressive growth of 33 percent in the last eight years reaching $20 billion in 2007. In 2007, China exported goods and services worth nearly $17 billion dollars to the UAE, of which nearly 70 percent were re-exported to other countries in the Middle East, Africa and even Europe (Gulf News, March 30). Per the latest data released by the Dubai Port Authority, trade between Dubai and China increased by 47 percent during 2002 and 2007. In fact, non-oil trade increased by 42 percent ($6.2 billion) in the year 2007.

Wasserstrom on the History of Chinese Boycotts

In The Nation, University of California, Irvine Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom writes on some recent and not-so-recent history of anti-foreign boycotts in China:

Between the 1910s and 1930s, several foreign powers found themselves the target of Chinese student-led boycotts. In the majority of cases, Japanese products were the ones that were shunned, in protest of Japan’s encroachments into North China. One of the biggest of these took place during the May Fourth Movement of 1919, one of the many Chinese patriotic struggles that have taken place around this time of year.

In more recent years, boycotts have remained a regular part of Chinese society. In May 1999, when I happened to be in Beijing, I saw “Don’t Buy KFC” and “Don’t Drink Coke” posters go up on local campuses soon after American bombs hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. In spring 2005, a series of rowdy demonstrations against Japan broke out.

These protests were triggered by talk of Tokyo getting a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and complaints about how certain Japanese textbooks treated the history of World War II. Yet again there was a call for a boycott.

So while the dueling boycotts of 2008 are linked, calls to pull out of the games and calls to refuse to shop at Carrefour have very different historical echoes and fit into different historical traditions. They also summon up some very different historical moments.

Nineteen thirty-six and 1980 have been common touchstone years in Western debates on Olympic boycotts. Those calling for action against Beijing say it is time to do what the world should have done when the Nazis played host to the games in 1936–refuse to grant legitimacy to a brutal regime. Those opposing a full or partial boycott of the Olympics like to counter by pointing out how little good it did when the US pulled out of the 1980 Moscow games.

Though Wasserstrom doesn’t mention it, probably because it’s not part of his point, the differences between the Nazis of 1936, the Soviet Union of 1980, and the People’s Republic of China in 2008 are nearly too obvious to state.

‘Conquer English to Make China Stronger!’

Ampontan points out that the media’s love for Li Yang’s instructional rallies and methods, called Crazy English, recently included a New Yorker article by Evan Osnos.

I’m pretty happy with myself because with my Mandarin tutor today I finished a textbook. But our meetings at a Beijing cafe are nothing like Crazy English.

One by one, the doctors tried it out. “I would like to take your temperature!” a woman in stylish black glasses yelled, followed by a man in a military uniform. As Li went around the room, each voice sounded a bit more confident than the one before.

In Shanghai at a gallery whose name I’ve forgotten on Moganshan Lu, I saw a photographic exhibition composed of massive prints of Li Yang’s instruction. The scenes were astonishing. Student-teacher ratio was actually optimized to be very high. The events in these images and in other reading on the subject emerge as motivational events, and one of Li Yang’s primary methods is to increase confidence in his students.

But there is a nationalist element. The title of this post, “Conquer English to make China stronger,” is Li’s motto, according to the New Yorker. Ampontan points to another article that contains this passage on China and Japan.

During a question and answer session with the crowd, one student told Li that he hated the Japanese for their rape and occupation of the mainland prior to World War II. The student then said he didn’t want to study Japanese because of this hatred.

“If you really hate the Japanese, then you will learn their language,” Li told the student and the crowd. “If you really want revenge against Japan, then master their language.”

Nationalism, I suspect, may be a tool to reach audiences and to keep his massive events (along with the potentially millions of books sold) from running afoul of the government. This, from the first article, may tell you something about his deeper motivations:

On the couch at the hotel, Li turned one of our interviews into a lecture for his employees, who crowded around to listen. (Someone recorded it on a video camera.) “How can we make Crazy English more successful?” he asked me, his voice rising. “We know that people are not going to be persistent, so we give them ten sentences a month, or one article a month, and then, when they master this, we give them a huge award, a big ceremony. Celebrate! Then we have them pay again, and we make money again.”

He turned toward the assembled employees and switched to Chinese: “The secret of success is to have them continuously paying—that’s the conclusion I’ve reached.” Then back to English: “How can we make them pay again and again and again?”

I wonder how much the students learn.