In China, where many are angered by an unfavourable international ruling on Beijing’s maritime claims, when does patriotism become unpatriotic? When the government says so.
Chinese officials, academics and journalists have unleashed a cacophony of criticism against an arbitration tribunal in The Hague since it ruled against Beijing’s claims to historic and economic rights over much of the South China Sea on July 12. They denounced the tribunal as illegitimate and insinuated that the U.S. had orchestrated the proceedings by supporting the Philippines’ arbitration case against China.
Some ordinary Chinese rallied around the flag by picketing U.S. fast-food chains and urging boycotts against American products, but their efforts were quickly shouted down by state media. Others spread warmongering rhetoric on social media, only to be silenced by censors.
“Exposing the injustice behind the ‘South China Sea arbitration farce’ is a reflection of patriotic feeling,” the official Xinhua News Agency said in a commentary this week. “But if that feeling translates to unlawful activity that destroys social order, while being labeled as ‘patriotism,’ then they have wandered onto the wrong path.”
The pushback against small local protests reflects a longstanding challenge for China’s ruling Communist Party: how to harness populist patriotism for political legitimacy, while calming excessive nationalistic outbursts that could undermine social stability or the party’s grip on power.
Some protesters targeted Apple Inc.’s iPhones, smashing the devices and sharing images of the aftermath on social media, urging others to follow suit. Others urged a boycott of Philippine products, such as mangoes, as well as U.S. restaurant chains.
In the provinces of Hebei and Anhui, scores of people took their anger to local KFC outlets, unfurling patriotic banners and hurling abuse at patrons, according to news reports and videos shared on social media.
It wasn’t clear what commercial impact these protests may have had. An Apple spokeswoman referred to past comments expressing optimism about the China market and Apple’s popularity among Chinese consumers. Yum Brands Inc., which operates the KFC chain in China, declined immediate comment.
The protests in the past week appear relatively small when compared to previous patriotic outbursts that Chinese officials condoned, and in some cases encouraged, in order to gain diplomatic leverage.
In 1999, Chinese authorities helped organize massive demonstrations outside U.S. diplomatic missions in Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu, to protest the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. More recently, China allowed waves of anti-Japanese protests in 2012 after Tokyo nationalized control over a group of disputed islands—known as Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese—that Beijing also claims.
This time, China appears keen to keep a lid on things. No significant demonstrations have taken place in Beijing’s diplomatic zone, while authorities placed extra security outside the Philippine Embassy in an apparent effort to head off potential protests.
State media, while continuing to lambast the tribunal for allegedly infringing upon Chinese sovereignty, has poured cold water on what it deems overheated displays of patriotism.
The Communist Party’s flagship newspaper explained how boycotting U.S. products would ultimately damage Chinese interests, and urged readers to abide by the law.
“In the age of economic globalization, many products used in daily living, big and small, are ‘hybrids,’” using parts from both the U.S. and China, the People’s Daily said in an essay published Tuesday on its WeChat social-media account. “You couldn’t boycott them even if you wished.”
“With so many ordinary Chinese folk working in the [fast-food] industry supply chain, are you going to feed them if they lose their jobs?” the newspaper wrote. “The internet was invented by the U.S., so should we boycott the internet and retreat into the pre-internet age?”
State-run China Daily, for its part, decried the anti-KFC protests as a show of “jingoism that does a disservice to the spirit of devotion to the nation.”
“Patriotism is not the hotchpotch of actions that self-claimed patriots select to do,” the English-language newspaper said in a Wednesday commentary. “Nor can it be used as a label to provide self-justification and legal grounds for extreme actions that violate the law.”
The Communist Youth League went further in its criticism, alleging that some protesters were antigovernment elements seeking to discredit well-meaning patriots by staging outlandish demonstrations.
“Some people use the opportunity to smear and exaggerate the behaviour of ‘extremist elements,’ and use this to ‘represent’ and ‘denounce’ the rational behaviour of the majority of patriotic youth,” said a commentary published on the league’s verified Weibo microblog.http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/07/20/china-warns-off-south-china-sea-protests/
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