The mid-air collision between a Chinese jet and U.S. EP-3 surveillance aircraft that forced the American plane to make an emergency landing on a Chinese airfield on Sunday has triggered an outpouring of nationalist sentiment similar to the emotional outbursts that erupted after NATO’s May 1999 bombing of Beijing’s embassy in Belgrade.
The most outspoken exchanges? They’re in cyberspace, where a proliferation of online bulletin boards now offer a freewheeling alternative to China’s mainstream media-and the closest thing the country has to free speech.
These chatrooms have been exploding ever since the plane’s forced landing became public. Warned one posting on the popular portal sina.com: “Are you ready? This is war.” Another participant, writing on Beijing University’s online bulletin board, concluded: “This whole thing is not an accident, it’s just a challenge from the United States.”
In fact, many Chinese draw on a deep reservoir of positive feelings about America and Americans. But they worry increasingly about what one chat participant calls “hardliners and hawks in the U.S. administration, such as the vice president and the Secretary of state.”
The outpouring of vitriol also has its roots in Chinese history. Many ordinary citizens believe their nation has been bullied and humiliated by Western powers not just for years, but for centuries. During the 19th-century Opium Wars, foreign forces carved out chunks of Chinese turf (like Hong Kong) that were ruled under the principle of extraterritoriality-meaning that foreign, not Chinese, laws and authority reigned.
That experience has left deep-seated feelings of resentment. Even hip young Chinese can be extremely prickly when it comes to issues of sovereignty. That’s one reason why the bombing of Beijing’s embassy in Yugoslavia-which left three Chinese citizens dead-triggered such violent anti-Western protests outside U.S. diplomatic buildings two years ago. “The smoke hasn’t cleared from our bombed embassy in Yugoslavia and now the Americans provoke us again,” declared one chat participant this week, “We should have shot down the U.S. plane.”
As Beijing sees it, the United States has targeted China with all sorts of recent espionage efforts. Military and intelligence officials were especially alarmed when a senior Chinese colonel defected to the United States in December. Since then, the conservative Ministry of State Security, in charge of counterintelligence, has detained two U.S.-based ethnic Chinese scholars who were visiting the mainland. Both Gao Zhan, a U.S. permanent resident and American University researcher, and U.S. citizen Li Shaomin, have been in detention since February. Gao has been accused of working for a “foreign intelligence service.”
Some of the chatrooms’ current stridency can be attributed to the fact that many Chinese do not know that U.S. surveillance flights, such as those undertaken by the EP-3, take place as a matter of routine. One participant urged the Chinese government to “seize the American plane, put the crew pilots on trial and expel the crew after stripping them of everything but essential provisions to ensure they don’t take any intelligence away.”
Another participant in a Chinese Navy online bulletin board exhorted Chinese to “kill all the American personnel and confiscate the spy plane.” A more measured voice, however came from someone writing under the cybernym “Science:” “This is quite an ordinary military case. It’s just an accident. Why are you guys talking about war and democracy? They have nothing to do with this case.”
Against this backdrop, many online comments reveal a lingering inferiority complex, and the reverberations of China’s rapidly modernizing (and Westernizing) society. “Why do Americans dare treat Chinese so badly? Because the U.S. believes that with the impact of Hollywood films and Kentucky Fried Chicken that we have lost our nationalist spirit,” said the Beijing University participant who called for brainwashing and killing the American crew. “Decent and honest Chinese don’t want simply to survive, but to live with respect. OK, I understand that our navy battleships and our airplanes cannot match those of the U.S.-but we can still use our nuclear bombs.”
In the world of diplomacy, Chinese President Jiang Zemin’s reaction to the spy-plane crisis sounds hardline. He reiterated that the United States is to blame (“we have full evidence,” he said) and called for an end to the American spy flights. His government has also asked America to apologize-something Washington is not inclined to do, according to Joseph W. Prueher, the U.S. ambassador to Beijing. Jiang and other Chinese officials no doubt feel compelled to make such demands to soothe China’s current tidal wave of nationalistic sentiment. But if the jingoistic chat is any measure, those efforts may not be enough.
