There is a good article written by Herald Tribune’s Shaila Dewan today titled Chinese students in U.S. fight image of their home. It gives account on how Chinese students started engaging “discussion” in public to fight the image of their home land. I think one good thing triggered recently is, by the overwhelmingly bias anti-China movement from some western media, that the traditionally silent and mind-own-business type Chinese start raising voices. The era of people like CNN commentator, Jack Cafferty, can freely call the Chinese as “goons and thugs” is ending.

However, the article ends at this sentence, “At that moment, the bottle hit the wall.” It refers to a water bottle was thrown by an angry Chinese student at the one who think and talk differently in that discussion.

When a small group of Tibetan extremists start burning down shops - along with people inside, beating up peoples on the street, pouring boiling water to law enforcement and claiming it was for freedom, the western media cheered. When the violence was suppressed by the law enforcement as every government would do, the western media lashed out the disapprovals under the names of “human rights” and other goodies. Then the Chinese united and stood up. But when the Chinese start throwing bottles, chasing and beating the oppositions (as seen in Korea,) it’s time to call for calming down.

Violence, extremism, fundamentalism and pure ideology are all harmful, doesn’t matter who hold them.

It takes a long lasting, sustainable, peacefully, open minded and moderate approach to correct and influence the bias western media and the brainwashed western society. Lashing out in forums using the deadest words and boycotting certain shop are short live and helping nothing.

Besides, whenever there are conflicts, there will be opportunists. The Chinese, especially the younger generation, should be vigilant about them.

There is a well-known site called anti-cnn, which resides in China. It’s a place started by listing materials demonstrate how western media distorted facts. Now it becomes a congested forum to express angry sentiment by the Chinese, most of them there are so-called the 80s and 90s generation. Lately, the motivation of this site was questioned, especially by another site called National Online, which started by the oversea Chinese in the U.S. Apparently they are rival now, even though they are almost identical and all claim serve the same purpose. National Online claimed and proved that every time its URL was entered into anti-cnn, the URL would be automatically translated into anti-cnn’s URL. At National Online, one of the most pumped and commented topic thread is the one “exposes” anti-cnn. Does it make any sense?

We went out did out own test.

We put out a post in National Online to announce debunk-cnn.com and a comment mentioned our site. Within 5 hours, the post was deleted. Days later, the comment was removed too. The inquiring sent to them has no response.

We don’t want to speculate but we do start questioning the motivation behind all the places where are fueling the flames of extreme nationalism and angry.

Therefore, we want to use our feeble voice to express our wish to all Chinese, “Clam down.”

Categories: Conversation
Tags: chinese, features