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[Hubris Incalculable]

No one today seriously believes in anything but themselves.

More blanket statements, eh? Do you think it's impossible that no one in the (at least western) world still truly believes in a higher power?

You must have led a very sheltered life.

[RedKing]

I wouldn't say that, especially considering the contexts, and the aim of the different protests.

And the Jallianwala Bagh massacre doesn't sound like such an abuse?

I just don't like Gandhi. Dude was racist as hell and possibly (though I admit not definitely) a pedophile. He also went off the deep end on pacifism and told the British they should surrender to the Nazis rather than fight them. There are some situations in which violence is the answer.

Plus, dude ALWAYS sneak-attacks you in Civilization. Bloodthirstiest motherfucker in the whole game.

As for MLK, I even forget what he did for a living. Maybe he was a hip-hop star?

I *really* hope that's a bad attempt at a joke.

No one today seriously believes in anything but themselves. What happens in a godless country, when peaceful protest occurs? Tiananmen Square in China. Peaceful protest is a big wet kiss to the powers that be in most societies. Here are the troublemakers right here. They've thoughtfully concentrated themselves in one area, with no means of defense, and with a finite number of escape routes.

Yeah, because massacres of protesters never happened in religious countries like Egypt or Syria or Libya (or Kent State, OH) 

The strange thing is, what if Communist China had fallen like the USSR? There may have been anarchy that would have been worse for China. Before the protests were put down, no Chinese person would have conceived that his government could turn guns upon its citizens, and leaders of the protesters were hardly as capable of directing government policy as Deng Xiaoping. They were mainly whimsical college students like the Occupiers. Peaceful protest absent a sense of danger in pursuing that path calls out to many unserious and whimsical types that could hardly form the start of a new social order by themselves. The unserious people usually don't know what's best for them anyway. If Occupiers could get their way, they probably wouldn't much like the results. The real results, not the imagination in their heads. Deng Xiaoping probably made the right call when he sent the tanks into Tiananmen. Sadly enough.

....just stop trying to analyze China. You're really, really bad at it.

"no Chinese person would have conceived that his government could turn guns upon its citizens"?? Have you heard of the Cultural Revolution? Have you ever studied history?? The fact that the government can crush you like a bug and that one individual is mostly powerless in a society that vast is kind of a running theme in Chinese history. However, so too is the idea of individual sacrifice for the greater good. That guy standing up to the tank is just following a long tradition of martyrs.

Probably 80% of Chinese girls are virgins at marriage. You have to pay her father about $5000 for the right to marry her. And before you can even show your face to him, you'd better have a house for her. Sound liberal yet? I doubt this will ever change much, either. Especially with the western world tottering on the verge of something bad. Most of the posts in this long thread were sad reading for me as an expat, and the ideas of western liberalism don't seem to have borne fruit in quite such a way that will encourage other cultures to shed their own millennia of social traditions.

Oh now I remember, you're the expat that has felt the elephant's tail and declared it to be a rope. 

Pretty soon, 80% of all Chinese girls (and boys) will be living in cities. Which tends to change social conventions a LOT. The girls I've known weren't the stereotypical "passive Asian female". They were assertive, they were living on their own, they were sexually active, and often their parents had only token sway over them because they're supporting their parents.

More to the point, what the hell does any of this have to do with generational stuff? (Unless we want to get into analyzing generation gaps in other cultures...)

[Trollheiming]

Deng Xiaoping probably made the right call when he sent the tanks into Tiananmen. Sadly enough.

This scares the shit out of me because while I will never agree that he was right, Deng certainly was instrumental in undoing the damage done by Mao and putting China in the position it is now. The situation is filled with too many grey areas for me to comfortably assess.

Still, it's worth making the attempt. The incident is never put in perspective. It's a moment frozen in time. I've never heard anyone opine what China would look like now, if the protestors had succeeded. It could have been like Russia, which was a transition far from pretty, and which involved disintegration and loss of power and prestige that continues to reverberate till today. I doubt that sort of unstable political situation would have made China a compelling place to build a new factory, thus China stays poor and backward.

It's impossible to know for sure, but the alternate to Deng staying in power seems to have bad parallels to the fall of the USSR two years later, which was not so much a revolution as a societal collapse. This is the point. The protesters in Tiananmen didn't really know what they wanted or how to effect it. Unless people are really serious about change, a "whiff of grapeshot" does marvellously at dispersing random malcontents.

But Tiananmen had nothing to do with the fact that the PRC was atheistic, it had a history of violent suppression of political dissent and this situation wasn't really any different. The fact they were peacefully protesting didn't matter because in the eyes of the Politiburo dissent was the same as violence against the state because it was a threat to their power. That's why Deng could refer to soldiers who had died as martyrs. The reason peaceful protest works for Western countries is because they espouse freedom as one of their values, and because governance is given over to the population, and thus the voice of the populace is given credence rather than met with fear.

I think that freedom is an inherent desire in all humans. Every human wants freedom, but freedom is hard to sustain. The history of China is a story of rebellions after rebellions, and the people seeking freedom only to fall into another tyranny.

There are tons of laws in China emanating from Beijing, but few Chinese people ask about those laws. In China, you assume that there's a law against it somewhere, and then you do it anyway. Far more so than in the west, freedom is obtained by simply ignoring the government. If I want to cross the road in China, I just walk calmly out into traffic like other Chinese, ignoring all those traffic laws. If I have rubbish in my hand, I might throw it on the ground like other Chinese people, ignoring environmental laws and littering. There's a lot of instinct for pursuing your own freedom and ignoring the law here in China. But little sense of the responsibility to others that sustainable freedom entails.

If anything, the special thing that makes the western world work is how amazingly people will yield up their personal freedoms by a moral sense of shared responsibility rather than actual laws.  The formula in the west merely allowed true freedom to last longer than in other parts of the world. It isn't the love of freedom, so much as a certain morality behind the scenes. We don't litter, even when we're alone hiking on a mountain trail. The secret to western freedom is morality and responsibility to each other. Can secular humanism replace christianity as a means of instilling that necessary morality? I have my doubts.

No one today seriously believes in anything but themselves.

More blanket statements, eh? Do you think it's impossible that no one in the (at least western) world still truly believes in a higher power?

You must have led a very sheltered life.

Actually, my mother is an evangelical. The statement was obviously not to be taken literally as each and every person currently alive, or put through a minute and thorough inquisition by a grammar nazi. "No one" is being used in a very loose sense, like the famous "It's so crowded, no one goes there anymore!"

If that quirk in my phrasing the only thing that you can isolate as objectionable, then we can agree in principle that very few societies outside of the western tradition allow for peaceful protests to actually work. Please follow with some more personal assumptions about me and my upbringing, based on one sentence in which I was loose with my wording. Those make you sound like an intelligent guy capable of sustaining rational debate.   

[Trollheiming]

As for MLK, I even forget what he did for a living. Maybe he was a hip-hop star?

I *really* hope that's a bad attempt at a joke.

If you have to ask, the punchline is you.

What happens in a godless country, when peaceful protest occurs?

Yeah, because massacres of protesters never happened in religious countries like Egypt or Syria or Libya (or Kent State, OH) 

I'm not sure I would lump all religions together here. Something about Christianity seems specially suited for peacefully demonstrating, for example, maybe that Jesus died during a rather unsuccessful passive protest, which can be exhibit A in how peaceful protests usually don't work.

Kent State... We just finished talking about the British massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, and you waltz in to pretend as though we ruled out violent suppression in the west. It obviously happens; but in the west, it is usually a prelude to losing the favor of the people. Kent State was actually a successful rallying cry despite being a rather underwhelming incident when you examine the details. In other countries, far worse happens and everyone kinda shrugs about it. That's just life, they'll mutter without righteous indignation.

"no Chinese person would have conceived that his government could turn guns upon its citizens"?? Have you heard of the Cultural Revolution? Have you ever studied history??

Do you have problems understanding written words?

I said no Chinese person would have conceived that his government could do that. But I am not Chinese. I can conceive of the Chinese government doing a great many things that Chinese people think is impossible. My struggle is but to decide whether the Chinese government was ultimately right or wrong in doing those things.

Fact is, Chinese people don't know about the Cultural Revolution. They don't know about Tiananmen. They are angry because foreigners have held them back from taking their true place in the world. That's why they dragged a Chinese man out of his Japanese car last August in Xi'an and beat him to death in the street for supporting the Japanese economic oppression that has kept Chinese people from reaching their true potential. They're called Angry Youth here in China, and they'd fuck your shit up in a flat nanosecond if you breathed a word of what you think is Chinese history.

Oh now I remember, you're the expat that has felt the elephant's tail and declared it to be a rope. 

Pretty soon, 80% of all Chinese girls (and boys) will be living in cities. Which tends to change social conventions a LOT. The girls I've known weren't the stereotypical "passive Asian female". They were assertive, they were living on their own, they were sexually active, and often their parents had only token sway over them because they're supporting their parents.

Yep. That's me. And you're the dude that claims to speak fluent Chinese with a Shanghainese accent. I imagine we can have a good little discussion about China. Maybe in Chinese?

Anyway, those girls are rare. Shanghai isn't the rest of China. I've visited many cities, and these are all city girls that I'm talking about. I've ridden a bicycle out into the countryside and watched farmwives washing their clothes in irrigation canals. Nice quaint place to ride a bike through, but I don't fancy living there. Assume everything I say is about city life. I know the girls that flock to western men and go to the clubs, and appear to be westernized to you on your brief trip to China, but that's the 20% that I mentioned by omission. What happens when they turn 30 and are 剩女? Chinese couples often meet through family or friends that know each well. What kind of Chinese man are they going to settle down with when they have a reputation? Chinese women still care about these things. It's not the freewheeling atmosphere of the West where you go clubbing and hook up. I was in Xi'an before it even had a single bar. Then I was expelled from that bar after fighting with another westerner over a girl. He was jealous of my moves, and rightly so. I'm motherfucking pretty.

And now we're talking about generational gaps in China, so quit whining.

[RedKing]

Calling bullshit on so many things I don't know where to begin. But this isn't the thread for it.

[Trollheiming]

Calling bullshit on so many things I don't know where to begin. But this isn't the thread for it.

Calling bullshit on your bullshit calling. Hello from Xi'an. Tell me about China whenever you happen to have the spare time.

[fqllve]

It's impossible to know for sure, but the alternate to Deng staying in power seems to have bad parallels to the fall of the USSR two years later, which was not so much a revolution as a societal collapse.

Deng didn't necessarily have to lose power anyway. Zhao Ziyang supported the protesters and he was Deng's closest ally.

I think that freedom is an inherent desire in all humans. Every human wants freedom

...Of course every human desires freedom. You are missing my point entirely, the PRC does not espouse freedom in the same way that the US government does. Anyway, the main thrust of that point, which you seem to have ignored, is that the West is pro-democratic in a way the PRC isn't, so the opinions of the people are taken more seriously. Doesn't mean they aren't still met with violence, but they aren't met with violence to the same degree.

There are tons of laws in China emanating from Beijing, but few Chinese people ask about those laws. In China, you assume that there's a law against it somewhere, and then you do it anyway. Far more so than in the west, freedom is obtained by simply ignoring the government.

You act like that isn't done in the West. If the West didn't do that to a ridiculously huge degree we wouldn't have the drug problems we do.

Fact is, Chinese people don't know about the Cultural Revolution. They don't know about Tiananmen. They are angry because foreigners have held them back from taking their true place in the world. That's why they dragged a Chinese man out of his Japanese car last August in Xi'an and beat him to death in the street for supporting the Japanese economic oppression that has kept Chinese people from reaching their true potential. They're called Angry Youth here in China, and they'd fuck your shit up in a flat nanosecond if you breathed a word of what you think is Chinese history.

So because Chinese Nationalism is on the rise they don't know about the Cultural Revolution? Especially, because Chinese Nationalism is on the rise now they didn't know about the Cultural Revolution in the 80s?

[PanH]

There are tons of laws in China emanating from Beijing, but few Chinese people ask about those laws. In China, you assume that there's a law against it somewhere, and then you do it anyway. Far more so than in the west, freedom is obtained by simply ignoring the government. If I want to cross the road in China, I just walk calmly out into traffic like other Chinese, ignoring all those traffic laws. If I have rubbish in my hand, I might throw it on the ground like other Chinese people, ignoring environmental laws and littering. There's a lot of instinct for pursuing your own freedom and ignoring the law here in China. But little sense of the responsibility to others that sustainable freedom entails.

If anything, the special thing that makes the western world work is how amazingly people will yield up their personal freedoms by a moral sense of shared responsibility rather than actual laws.  The formula in the west merely allowed true freedom to last longer than in other parts of the world. It isn't the love of freedom, so much as a certain morality behind the scenes. We don't litter, even when we're alone hiking on a mountain trail.

Not really, no. In Europe, we litter on purpose. We're that badass

In terms of citizens, China is not Japan, but still more law-abiding than some/most western countries.
Also, Tian'anmen wasn't about to put a new government in place. It was about reforms. They even sang the Internationale. It was the effect of the political division in the Party : conservative or reformer.
Deng decision was made because he wanted reforms, but thought that the situation should be stable.
And Tian'anmen was hugely broadcast (at least in the beginning), even in China. I doubt all the Chinese that lived at this time already died.

and leaders of the protesters were hardly as capable of directing government policy as Deng Xiaoping. They were mainly whimsical college students like the Occupiers

And many party members were former student and protesters.

[Scoops Novel]

Trollheiming, you have served your purpose. Please go away, or provide proof.

Yes, we should discuss generational gaps in other country's. It will be important ground.

[RedKing]

Calling bullshit on so many things I don't know where to begin. But this isn't the thread for it.

Calling bullshit on your bullshit calling. Hello from Xi'an. Tell me about China whenever you happen to have the spare time.

西安不是中国. 你认为中国人都下很大的无知云, 可是你可以看到从最高的山吗？

Like a great many things in China, people know the things that are supposed to be unknown. Like how to get around the Great Firewall. Like which party officials are on the take. Like Falun Gong. Like porn and homosexuality and AIDS. And the government knows that people know. It's an intricate charade. Everyone breaks the law in little ways that don't create social unrest, and the governnment turns a blind eye. Everybody feels like they've gotten away with something.

Likewise, people know about Tiananmen. People know about the Cultural Revolution. People know about the "Great Leap Forward" and the millions that starved to death as a result. They just don't make a big deal about it, because THAT'S when the government gets involved. And that's never a good outcome. I'm actually somewhat in agreement with you in regards to Tiananmen, in that I have a much more ambiguous take on whether it was "bad" or not. It was certainly regrettable, but I understand the thought process that was behind the response.

I'm quite aware of the 愤青, but they're still a small minority. Just because they have a myopic view of their own history doesn't CHANGE history or mean that everyone else is ignorant of it. That's akin to saying that just because the US has some angry skinhead Holocaust deniers, the whole US is anti-Semitic.

But where I take the strongest exception is in this notion that you have that all bad things in China come from a certain amorality that you ascribe to not having "found Jesus". You're looking at China with the eye of a missionary and a foreigner. You might live there, but you're still a laowai. Worse, you seem to be a laowai who holds himself apart from the people he's surrounded by -- the spiritual descendant of the sort that lived in the Concessions in Shanghai, and put up signs like "No Dogs or Chinese Allowed". Maybe I'm wrong in that assessment, but you haven't given much evidence to the contrary.

[Trollheiming]

It's impossible to know for sure, but the alternate to Deng staying in power seems to have bad parallels to the fall of the USSR two years later, which was not so much a revolution as a societal collapse.

Deng didn't necessarily have to lose power anyway. Zhao Ziyang supported the protesters and he was Deng's closest ally.

Drawing parallels to the USSR two years later, what we think we can achieve quickly derails into the unexpected in situations like these. Gorbachev also thought he could remain in power and be at the helm of gradual reforms. That belief didn't stop the collapse of the USSR and the disintegration of its economy and territorial integrity.

...Of course every human desires freedom. You are missing my point entirely, the PRC does not espouse freedom in the same way that the US government does. Anyway, the main thrust of that point, which you seem to have ignored, is that the West is pro-democratic in a way the PRC isn't, so the opinions of the people are taken more seriously. Doesn't mean they aren't still met with violence, but they aren't met with violence to the same degree.

The British Empire wasn't terribly pro-democratic, either. No one back then was saying that the opinions of average Indians were worth taking seriously as equal members of the British commonwealth. Back then, the homegrown class barriers in London alone would have made an American weep. Lady Chatterly slept with a commoner! How scandalous! Ban that book!

There was something else involved in why Gandhi's form of resistance resonated in the west. It wasn't a unique affinity toward viewing everyone as equal and valuing democracy, because that wasn't universally true back then. It was a respect for passive resistance and sacrifice, standing up to government authority, undergoing the rituals of martyrdom. Gandhi even fasted. The western media ate that shit up like it was gravy. It resonated because of a similarity to Christianity's beginnings.

You act like that isn't done in the West. If the West didn't do that to a ridiculously huge degree we wouldn't have the drug problems we do.

Well, it's worse than that. By orders of magnitudes. Every small law and regulation is broken if you can get away with it. Even if adhering to the law is perfectly sane. You can routinely see a woman with a stroller hanging out in the middle of the street as cars whiz past in both directions. Drug laws ironically are well-kept in China, because the dealer gets swift death.

So because Chinese Nationalism is on the rise they don't know about the Cultural Revolution? Especially, because Chinese Nationalism is on the rise now they didn't know about the Cultural Revolution in the 80s?

Not that I'm aware. My wife was born in 1986, and I don't feel comfortable talking about these things with other Chinese that don't have a vested interest in keeping me healthy as a revenue stream. She hadn't heard of the Tiananmen incident at any point in her life. She dimly knows that there was a famine in the 1950s and that's why everyone greets their friends today with "Have you eaten?" instead of "Hello" but why this famine happened is pretty vague. It certainly wasn't because of Mao. She knows that Mao was 3 parts wrong and 7 parts right. Deng corrected the parts that were wrong. Everything's cool now. The end.

The top 5% of every graduating class automatically is inducted into the Chinese Communist Party, so my wife--being a good little student feverishly studying 17 hours a day--is a card-carrying chi-com by dint of her grades. But she doesn't know these things.

Old people have their stories, but the puzzle pieces here in china don't fit together. Mao is on all of the money except the small change, and he's a national hero. The cultural revolution probably wasn't any better known or understood in the 80s than it is today. A million personal anecdotes simply never congealed into a popular understanding of what was happening back then. Most people got their first televisions in the 1990s and its was still black and white.

Not really, no. In Europe, we litter on purpose. We're that badass

In terms of citizens, China is not Japan, but still more law-abiding than some/most western countries.
Also, Tian'anmen wasn't about to put a new government in place. It was about reforms. They even sang the Internationale. It was the effect of the political division in the Party : conservative or reformer.
Deng decision was made because he wanted reforms, but thought that the situation should be stable.
And Tian'anmen was hugely broadcast (at least in the beginning), even in China. I doubt all the Chinese that lived at this time already died.

That's awesome. What european country? I've often wanted to shrug off my middle-class American upbringing and do as the Chinese can, reveling in my environmental sacrilege. Unfortunately, I can't do it. We generally don't litter, if we're well-raised middle class that watched cartoons on Saturdays. "Give a hoot, don't pollute." I still carry my trash for several city blocks until I find a rare trash bin.

Again, about Tiananmen, I think everyone underestimates how completely the government controlled the media during that incident.  No chinese person has seen tankman. He is not a recognized icon of protest in China.

Crime in China is different, but common enough. It tends toward less violent crimes, but a Chinese co-worker just got her purse stolen last month by a man riding a motorbike, who grabbed it while racing past her. I've been pickpocketed twice in buses in Xi'an. My empty suitcase was stolen in Yuncheng when I left it at the deposit counter in a department store. Once a chinese cabbie drove me out to the countryside and demanded money, or he'd leave me there. I was tea-scammed at the Forbidden City. That's a great tale, btw.

Yeah, it's pretty bad here.

[Pnx]

Well I'd thought that the reason Ghandi's whole movement worked so well was because that the Brit's that were for keeping India in the empire were of the opinion that this was for their own good on account of them being uncultured, violent, barbarians, that needed British rule... But then these savage barbarians were making peaceful, well organised protests, and they had a leader that made very passionate, reasoned, arguments, then some dick of a general decided to start shooting the peaceful protests... and this made people ask questions like, "Are we really the ones that are savages here?"

Then of course there was World War 1 and 2, they were both fighting against Austrian/German imperialism/oppression, and after going to such great lengths and such great losses, it was a little difficult to then turn back and keep supporting British imperialism and oppression, especially after India fought on their side.

Seriously, the whole Martyrdom angle played a part but there was a much bigger picture here.

[RedKing]

Getting scammed is a rite of a passage for *every* expat in China. I dodged the tea-scam but got art-scammed. Which I didn't really see as a scam so much as false advertising. I mean, yeah...it wasn't really an art show, and those cute girls didn't actually do those paintings, and yes 400 yuan was more than I would have haggled for normally. But it was still a nice painting.

I'll agree that folks pretty much ignore every law they can, traffic laws especially. But yet things still function, and you don't see fiery crashes or vehicular homicide all that often. It's beautiful chaos.

Your wife might be of the first real generation too young to remember the Maoist era (and that's where the fenqing draw most of their membership from), in the same way that you now have a young generation in Russia that thinks fondly of Stalin, because they weren't around to know first-hand what a bastard he was. But there are still a lot of younger Chinese who get past the Wall, who have read about Tiananmen and Falun Gong and democracy and all the other stuff. They may not feel as strongly about it because it's secondhand to their experience, and there's always a certain apprehension of "Is this for real, or just foreigners saying these things to make us look bad?" but the knowledge is out there.

There's also the fact that for many of them, it's mostly irrelevant. They look at the US and see a lot of the pitfalls of democracy. Or, they're more interested in getting a good job and a car and an apartment and don't need or want the added burden of having to help govern the country (that's more common, I find). Political apathy is hardly an American monopoly.

[PanH]

Again, about Tiananmen, I think everyone underestimates how completely the government controlled the media during that incident.  No chinese person has seen tankman. He is not a recognized icon of protest in China.

Bullshit. The 4th June events even made it into the 19h CCTV (the 2 animators being fired after that, ofc). The media oppression started after and because of Tian'anmen.
There was also similar demonstrations in the whole country, reactions to the 4th June (for example, in Xi'an) and commemorations.

Tankman is not widely known because he was taken as a symbol by the Western media.

[fqllve]

There was something else involved in why Gandhi's form of resistance resonated in the west. It wasn't a unique affinity toward viewing everyone as equal and valuing democracy, because that wasn't universally true back then. It was a respect for passive resistance and sacrifice, standing up to government authority, undergoing the rituals of martyrdom. Gandhi even fasted. The western media ate that shit up like it was gravy. It resonated because of a similarity to Christianity's beginnings.

Honestly, I'm not well-versed in Gandhi's movement, but I would be more inclined to suggest it was the wave of anti-Imperialism following WW2 that gave him success, considering he worked for more than 20 years before India got independence, and success coincided with one of the lowest points in the UK's history and the release of many their other colonial holdings.

Well, it's worse than that. By orders of magnitudes. Every small law and regulation is broken if you can get away with it. Even if adhering to the law is perfectly sane. You can routinely see a woman with a stroller hanging out in the middle of the street as cars whiz past in both directions. Drug laws ironically are well-kept in China, because the dealer gets swift death.

People still do that here too. Maybe not on the same scale, but the populations of China and Western countries aren't even close to the same scale.

Not that I'm aware. My wife was born in 1986, and I don't feel comfortable talking about these things with other Chinese that don't have a vested interest in keeping me healthy as a revenue stream. She hadn't heard of the Tiananmen incident at any point in her life. She dimly knows that there was a famine in the 1950s and that's why everyone greets their friends today with "Have you eaten?" instead of "Hello" but why this famine happened is pretty vague. It certainly wasn't because of Mao. She knows that Mao was 3 parts wrong and 7 parts right. Deng corrected the parts that were wrong. Everything's cool now. The end.

I don't really think the testimony of one woman who was three years old at the time is sufficient evidence for what the Tianamen protesters did and did not know. The Red Guards were active until 68, but unlike Tiananmen Square it wasn't confined to one geographical area but Red Guard abuses happened all over China. Even if personal anecdotes never coalesced into a true understanding of what happened, which I'm inclined to believe actually, that doesn't mean the students were completely unaware of the violence the PRC could enact against its own citizens.