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swordfish

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Nationalism is out of control.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-10-16/patt-morrison-kenneth-pomeranz-nba-china

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tweet by a general manager of a pro basketball team sets China afire with reaction. And maybe that’s not quite so well understood here. Why was it so incendiary?

There are a bunch of things you have to remember. One is that most people in China are not seeing the Hong Kong story that you were seeing if you’re watching American television or reading the Western press. They’re getting a heavily censored view in which they see things like protesters desecrating a Chinese flag. But they don’t get anything like the full story of why those protesters are so upset in the first place. There’s also a larger story, which is that Chinese nationalism today is a nationalism that is in many ways built around the idea of overcoming or avenging what’s called national humiliation.

This is essentially the idea that from roughly the beginning of the Opium Wars in 1839 until the Chinese Communist Party takes power in 1949, China suffers one insult after another at the hands of imperialism, and that the great achievement of the Chinese Communist Party is that they have, in Mao Tse-Tung’s words, “China has stood upright” — that it’s now pushing back and mostly winning in a battle to undo this century of humiliation.

It was there for a long time and it’s partially based in truth. I mean, horrible things were done. Massive amounts of opium imports into China, foreign atrocities during the suppression of the Boxer uprising in 1899, 1900, the Japanese invasion in 1937 to 1945, which may have cost as many as 20 million Chinese lives.

It’s been turned into the absolute lodestar of not only nationalist sentiment, but the Chinese government’s own legitimacy. The Communist Party, which once upon a time said that what it was doing is that it was leading the peasants and the workers in their triumph over capitalism — it doesn’t say that very much anymore.

Jiang Zemin, who was premier, said in his 2001 speech to the party congress that the Communist Party’s greatest contribution was, quote, ending national humiliation.

And Hong Kong, which the British acquired by force after the Opium War, has a particular symbolic place in that story.

Regaining Hong Kong was this tremendous moment of pride and a sort of sign that the bad old days were almost entirely over now.

And so in the eyes of many Chinese, for Hong Kong people to not be patriotic Chinese is a sort of sign of ingratitude, that they’ve been liberated by the Chinese from imperialism and now they are ungrateful.

With that probably goes some sense that even for people in major Chinese cities, which are fairly prosperous these days, I think most of them probably know that Hong Kong is especially prosperous, and they’re kind of — what’s wrong with these people?

So there’s all of that. And for an American in particular to be seen as encouraging Hong Kong to defy what many Chinese see as legitimate Chinese authority is for many of them like a stick in the eye.

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