Note to the world: the CulturalRevolution has ended
via WikipediaLast night when I came back from a meeting I found in my mailbox an invitation to join a virtual meeting of the Asia Society in New York on the changing media in China. Now, that was a little bit late already, since the panel discussion was already due a few hours later and I also did not let me readers know about the meeting, since you would be soundly asleep.
Fortunately, China Bystander had a source in the US, who was mainly surprised by the current Nieman Fellow Michael Anti:
But Bystander’s man says what most caught his ear were remarks by Michael Anti, also known as Zhao JIng, a journalist whose political blog was shut down by Microsoft in 2005 in a flurry of controversy. Anti said an emerging generation of Chinese are forging a new sense of Chinese identity.
It comprises those those born post-1980 who have no memories of the Cultural Revolution; barely memories of Tiananmen in 1989. They are connected to each other and information by the Internet is a way no previous generation was. They — even the intellectuals and liberals among them –readily wrap themselves in the flag, not out of any traditional sense of patriotism of nationalism, but from a pride in their country born of two decades of economic growth and China’s growing standing in the world. Fail to grasp that distinction between blind patriotism and national pride and you miss something important about the new China and the face it presents to the outside world.
Not that surprising for those who have been following this prolific blogger in the past, but this kind of sensible remarks cannot be repeated too often.
1 comment:
My man in the U.S. says in his defence that he is more a Japan than China hand, but appreciates learning more about Michael Anti's blogging. He also mentions that there was something similar among the post-war generation of Japanese in the 1980s, when Japan, like China now, was gaining a large measure of self-confidence born of economic growth. There wasn't the internet dimension then, of course, but Japanese national pride was starting to transmute into something more akin to traditional nationalism when the bubble burst, putting an end to the economic growth that fueled it all. He asks if the same might happen in China.
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