Angry youth. Rebels with a cause. Torch slips by.

China’s angry youth vent their feelings
By Jamil Anderlini in Beijing
Published: May 2 2008 17:15 | Last updated: May 2 2008 17:15
Images of angry Chinese students beating up Korean protesters in Seoul and attacking Carrefour supermarkets at home may well have been the last thing Bo Yang, the controversial author of The Ugly Chinaman, saw before he died on Tuesday in Taiwan at the age of 88.

Mr Bo, renowned for his criticism of what he dubbed Chinese cultural tendencies towards authoritarianism, xenophobia and intolerance, spent nine years in prison in Taiwan . But he saved his most scathing criticism for the Chinese Communist party, which he accused of drawing out the worst characteristics of the Chinese people.


For some in China, those characteristics have been evident in the behaviour of the young nationalists known as fenqing, or “angry youth”, behind an aggressive response at home and abroad to the pro-Tibet protests that greeted the Olympic torch relay in places such as Europe and ­Australia.

“These people have been trained in an authoritarian system. They are at the same time victims of an authoritarian system, but they also behave in an authoritarian way towards others and are incredibly self-righteous,” says a Chinese politics professor, who asked not to be named. “We should be more tolerant and respect the right of people to disagree with us but these people do not understand such values.”

The term fenqing has been used in each of the past three generations to describe very different kinds of rebel.

Chinese and proud: the graduate behind anti-cnn.com
Rao Jin, a graduate of Beijing’s Tsinghua University, is proud to call himself a fenqing, or “angry youth”, when it comes to defending his country against foreign media reports.
The 23-year-old budding website entrepreneur, who speaks limited English and can access western news reports only through China’s heavily censored internet, has drawn global media attention over his site, anti-cnn.com.
The no-frills site uses the slogan “Don’t be too CNN”, hitting back at the US-based news network after a commentator referred to the Chinese government as “goons and thugs”.
It mixes polemical video arguments in Chinese and English that support Beijing’s version of recent and historical events in Tibet. Mr Rao comes across as a thoughtful young man, until asked about the violent outbursts by Chinese students against protesters in South Korea during the Olympic torch relay.
“Some Chinese students were provoked into attacking those people in Seoul and some of them were beaten, too. Why didn’t you report that?” he retorts.
In the Cultural Revolution, the word referred to the millions of urban-dwelling students who were sent to the countryside to toil with peasants and became embittered towards a society that had stolen their futures. In the 1980s the term was used to describe the students and intellectuals who shaped the movement for greater social and political freedoms that ended when the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square on June 4 1989. The Ugly Chinaman became hugely popular among that generation of fenqing when it was published in 1985.

In recent weeks the world has seen a glimpse of the modern fenqing – patriotic, xenophobic, nationalistic and, in some cases, violent in their defence of the motherland. This latest incarnation has partly emerged as the result of government policies implemented in reaction to the events of 1989, after which “patriotic” indoctrination became an even more important element of the education system.

There are no indications that the contemporary fenqing are members of the sort of organised nationalist movement seen in places such as Russia, where Nashi, a pro-Kremlin youth group, has had a growing profile in recent years.

Rather, “since the mid-1990s urban educated youth in China have become much more nationalistic rather than angry at the government”, says David Zweig, director of the centre on China’s transnational relations at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “There is a strong sense that the west, led by the United States, is trying to keep China down and stop it from taking its rightful place in the world.”

With limited access to alternative views, the vast majority of Chinese are not aware of the deep resentment many Tibetans feel towards Beijing’s heavy-handed style of governance. They accept without question the official version that recent protests began when a handful of criminals went on a rampage at the incitement of the Dalai Lama.

One widely held belief, even within elite political circles, is that the US Central Intelligence Agency supported and incited the Dalai Lama to launch the recent Tibetan protests, which began on March 10 with peaceful demonstrations and descended into violent riots on March 14.

“People in the west don’t understand the Tibet issue and they are being tricked into attacking China,” says one avowed fenqing who asked not to be named.

But for many outside China the fenqing appear to be looking at the west through the prism of their own society and assuming that governments elsewhere exercise as much control over public discourse as the Communist party does in China.

“China and the Communist party seem to have become fused in the minds of most of the young Chinese I’ve met,” says a Danish student at Peking University, the birthplace of the Tiananmen generation’s fenqing but today a place where the politics of patriotism drown out dissenting voices.

“If you criticise the government it’s like you’re criticising the entire nation of 1.3bn people.”

After a wave of anti-western protests centred around Carrefour supermarkets, the government has mobilised its state security apparatus to tamp down passions.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008