Post-355: “Chinese Government of Beijing is Rogue Government”

The Chinese students here (a graduate school in Washington, D.C. at which I study) tend to kneejerkingly defend the Chinese government whenever it is even implicitly criticized in some venue, as if they were paid agents of their state. (Some, of course, will be ‘paid agents of their state,’ government officials and things.) Anyway, this kind of thing is not well received. The Chinese students here, taken as a whole, are generally seen as politically drab “party line” (Communist Party) people. Not all are exactly like this. A large number are. The rest seem to be politically neutral.

So we have a Chinese Student political spectrum ranging from “extremely pro-regime,” to “highly pro-regime,” to “moderately pro-regime,” with a further contingent of “silent.” There are no dissidents.

What must go through their minds when they see actual anti-Communist demonstrations:

This is in front of the White House about May 2017. The head demonstrator of this small platoon, a short woman with poor English syntax and a bullhorn, kept repeating: “Chinese government is mafia! Chinese government is mafia!” She occasionally let ‘mafia’ have a rest and substituted one or the other of the words ‘evil’ or ‘criminal.’

I cannot judge the merits of their issue as I do not understand it. Many neutral onlookers probably saw them as purely cranks or malcontents, especially due to their incoherent sloganeering and grammatical deficiencies; if cranks is what they are, they are far from alone in the civic space in front of the White House. (There is one Flat Earth activist who often shows up with whom a friend and I once talked for a few minutes.)

A policeman came by to silence the bullhorn after a few minutes, but the ‘Beijing is Rogue Government’ squad remained.

I am glad that the street in front of the White House is closed to traffic. Its enormous pedestrian- and bicycle-only space creates a kind of Town Square atmosphere. One anchor of this is the perennial protest tent across from the White House. The main issue has always been nuclear weapons. Over the years that protest tent has accumulated many other issues. It is, today, completely covered in various slogans. I once talked to the guy manning that tent once. He didn’t even know what some of the issues were. One, anyway, it should come as no surprise, is ‘Tibet.’

The Tibet issue is one of the few that unites the entire political spectrum in the USA; to be angrily anti-Tibet puts you in an odd place, as both U.S. Left and Right are pro-Tibet with no domestic U.S. faction I know of (or can imagine) that is anti-Tibet. I have heard Chinese students, though, unaware perhaps of how isolating such talk is within U.S. political discourse, refer to the Tibet movement as a terrorist movement. (The Communist Party approves.)

One day, perhaps it was late 2016, someone in a class told me one of our Chinese classmates was a Communist Party member. I was a little surprised because I didn’t see her as one of these ‘enforcers’ for the Beijing government I have alluded to above. She seemed to me rather one of those ambitious-and-smart-but-somehow-uncurious types (this is, for me, a tragic type). I saw her, further, as someone who who didn’t take strong stands on things, didn’t fully develop independent ideas, didn’t challenge things (she would often ask softball questions to the teacher that I found a waste of time), and she didn’t have the kind of awareness of issues I’d expect an equivalent Westerner to have. She was, though, someone who did always want to show how smart she was. Is this the political type that today’s technocratic China has produced en masse?