Yesterday, May 1st, there were demonstrations outside the French supermarket chain Carrefour in several Chinese cities. I'm not sure whether anyone can quite remember what crime Carrefour committed, but in general terms the chain seems to be paying the price for comments made by the French president that were critical of China's human rights record in Tibet. "Well!" Carrefour might protest loudly, "he was hardly the only one." But instead of arguing their corner, Carrefour has tried placating their nationalist critics, only to find their desperate efforts to dress in Olympic-logo uniforms slammed as illegal (a huffy China having decided the uniforms infringed Olympic copyright).
Still, shoppers went on shopping. And this is in keeping with my poll of … oh… well under a dozen Beijingers. Who tell me that they simply don't care about all this nationalist ranting, that it has nothing to do with them. The days when the Communist Party could mobilise the masses are over, they say wearily. The Communist Party no longer puts rice on their table, or pays their hospital bills, or educates their children. They look at their newspapers, and they cast a large helping of salt over every word uttered by the leadership, and they watch the demonstrations and know that the only demonstrations in China are state-approved. Amazingly – and I'm pretty surprised by this myself – I've been told by several people that they don't even give a damn about Tibet and its splittists (I thought EVERYONE, no matter how sensible, hated a splittist). Granted, the people I've talked to are by and large middle-aged. They've seen campaigns come and go, and they've witnessed first hand the nastiness of the regime when it becomes defensive and hits out.
Still, there are demonstrators out there outside Carrefour, and there are people who get extremely hot under the collar about Tibet, and about 'the western media' . My own analysis is that, as is the case everywhere and always, the young are the most eager to be mobilised. I am told that many young people who demonstrate outside Carrefour are just wowed that they are allowed to demonstrate at all. (One reason the Communist Party gets nervous is that they fear nationalist protests could turn into something else – perhaps anti-party protests.) In China, many young people are not aware of how bad things can get when politics turns against you – the massacre of 1989 is taboo in many households, as it is in public discourse. When nationalist activism flips from being a positive force to being a liability, then the political tide will turn in a minute.