Left Flank

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One aspect of living in a foreign country is resisting the urge to understand the locals, compared with voicing arguments. Whether it's one's hometown or Busan, economics and natural selection work the same, only it's the local politics and social selection that make one different from the other.

For what it's worth, living in a foreign country adds color to any opinion, and that's about it.

Anyway, John Pomfret (via Daniel W. Drezner) tries to justify his anti-CCP ideology based on his superior insight:

The most interesting group are the nationalists inside China. There, nationalism is an anti-government movement using the cloak of patriotism as a flak jacket against government attacks.

To be sure, China's government ginned up nationalism in the years following the Tiananmen Square crackdown with its various "Patriotic Education Campaigns" and its relentlessly anti-Western media campaigns. Nationalism was a natural safe-harbor for the party. With Communist ideology dead, the party turned to nationalism - and that big old growth rate - as the foundations of its legitimacy.
But by sanctioning nationalism and nationalist demonstrations, China's party-state has created a potent potential enemy.

I'll use a story to illustrate this. In 1988, I was in Nanjing covering massive protests that were touched off by a fight between African and Chinese students over a woman. The first day of the protest was an ugly racist march against what the Chinese called "black devils" stealing "our women." On the second day, however, somebody shouted "we want freedom!" and the whole tenor switched on a dime. Out came the placards calling for political change and, I might add, better food in the campus cafeterias. The same could easily happen around Carrefour stores today. It's all anti-French until the moment it isn't. Then it'll be anti-CCP.

China's nationalist movement has already broached the question of whether the current government is sufficiently standing up for China - because of its slow response in Lhasa against marauding Tibetan rioters; that's just one step away from the broader question of whether the current government possesses the legitimacy to rule China.

So to answer the question up top. China's nationalism doesn't scare me and shouldn't scare the West, even though it may cost Carrefour a few customers. But it definitely should scare the Mandarins in Beijing.

I didn't have to look deep in Pomfret's own comments section for a rebuttal from "Lived In China".

Wow, there's a great big "didn't think of that" lurking around in this article.

Westerners tend to rather blithely assume that anyone who is against an anti-Western government is for them, that anything that comes after the CCP would inevitably be better.

What unnerves people, including me, is that the underground national sentiment in China is not pro-Western, pro-engagement, or pro-responsible stakeholder, but even more radical, even more confrontational that the government we're currently dealing with.

Like many people I know, I was fervently opposed to the Chinese Government BEFORE I went to China. The difference between the CCP and the nationalist nutters that are clogging up the internet is that the CCP, at least, knows that what its peddling is çráp. Talk to anyone you meet on the street, and its like taking a time warp back to the 19th century.

Lots of insight, and even more ideological pique!