Who is in charge of keeping records around here?

Incorrect. My post was on how animal treatment on China reflects social ills and my reference to fenqing was only tangential in that the first thing a fenqing would do is point at the West and how imperfect treatment of animals are there. YOU were the one that decided to latch eagerly onto that peripheral comment and yank the conversation into an irrelevant direction – as for my policy, I respond to what people say to me, simple as that. So this discussion between you and I has been about you 1) not understanding what I’m typing and subsequently swerving off topic and 2) me consistently addressing whatever points you have to make if they are wrong, incomplete, or presumptuous. Furthermore, you can’t “have your fun” because by doing so you are assuming positions on my behalf that are entirely incorrect – THAT it was the discussion is irrelevant, not necessarily because it is irrelevant to the previous discussion or to the post itself, but because the manner in which you are arguing is fundamentally incorrect to begin with.

“You simply forgot what you said in your comment at 10:59 am. It’s you who came to that sentence first. You assumed that ““Foreigners” don’t understand China.” is my response. It’s not and you completely ignored my explanation.”

Simply put, your response here indicates you did not understand the meaning of the sentence you quoted. I cannot respond to you when you’re indicating you are not understanding the sentences I am typing.

“Haha, this is exactly my response to you. First you assumed what all Chinese think of foreigners’ knowledge and came to the ‘typical responses’ of ‘foreign devil’ thing that Chinese have. Then you used your imagination and ‘think’ the reason behind my response is the same and quoted me wrong. Finally, even I figured out you had quoted me wrongly, you ignored my arguing.”

I didn’t quote you wrongly, you’re simply understanding wrongly.

What happened was I mentioned democracy to illustrate a simple model explaining, in part, the prioritizing of democratic and non-democratic governments, not once advocating or implying that democracy is a solution to China’s problems. However, in your next post you incorrectly replied to my post as if I had said democracy is the solution to China’s problems. In other words you responded to an argument that I did not make.

I said: “Different governments have different priorities. Democracies focus on this, non-democracies focus on this.”
You responded: “DEMOCRACY ISN’T THE PERFECT SOLUTION FOR CHINA BECAUSE BLAH BLAH BLAH.”

Is this simple enough for you? I’m simplifying what I’m saying because on several occassions you’ve shown you’re not understanding my English. The point is, your argument about democracy not being a fit for China DID NOT FOLLOW. There was no logical flow or relationship between what I said and what you said.

This raises the question: why did your response have nothing to do with what was said before? There are two possibilities. One is that you didn’t understand my language, which is a possibility but I doubt it since at that time I was still using simple English. The second possibility is that you are preprogrammed to react defensively whenever a non-Chinese person brings up democracy. No matter WHAT context or for WHAT REASON someone brings up democracy, you MUST, as a good Chinese citizen, launch into a tirade about how imperfect democracy is.

FURTHERMORE, after I made it ABUNDANTLY clear that I wasn’t arguing about the merits of democracy in China – specifically because I personally don’t believe China is socially developed enough to handle democracy – you CONTINUED to go blah blah blah about how democracy has worked imperfectly in Asia. In other words, you CONTINUED to wax on irrelevantly and showed that you were ignoring whatever was being spoken to you. Again, this raises the question, why were you yapping away about an irrelevant, settled, non-disputed topic even though the issue had beend settled? The answer is simple. You are robotically programmed to respond to the word “democracy” that way. You and many others.

“Funny. Where did you read my belief? Did I say anything about ‘dumb, stupid waiguoren’? I see what’s wrong with you logic: when you say something and I don’t agree, you ‘believe’ I already have a model of ‘dumb waiguoren’ and put you into that category because I don’t agree with you.”

I ALREADY SAID, I don’t have to READ anything to ascertain your beliefs, but you didn’t understand the English when I said that previously. You DO have a model of a dumb waiguoren, OTHERWISE, why would you keep on barking incessantly about democracy when I wasn’t even TALKING about democracy in China. I’m establishing a fact: the moment I brought up democracy to illustrate a governmental model, you incomprehensibly and incoherently LAUNCHED into an unnecessary and cliche lecture about how democracy is not the perfect solution. Again, I ask: why did you answer the question “What is 2 plus 2″ with the answer “Strawberries?” The answer is this: because the moment you saw a foreigner merely MENTION the word democracy (ignoring the fact that I wasn’t proposing it for China), you felt an instinctual need to demonstrate to THIS FOREIGNER why democracy wouldn’t work in China. Why did you feel this need? Why did you have to deliver this lesson when this was NOT the topic at hand? Why did you have to deliver this lesson when you have NO idea what this foreigner thinks about democracy in China? The answer is simple: because you are programmed to educate all foreigners on the imperfections of democracy when the topic comes up, no matter what. Why do you have this cliche spiel to deliver when a foreigner mentions democracy? Because, everyone knows, all foreigners are stupid and simply don’t understand China and don’t understand that we can’t unilaterally impose our values on the Chinese people. One’s BEHAVIOR is FAR more revealing than their words. Without coming out and saying “Waiguoren are dumb and don’t understand China,” I can see quite clearly that you think that way by looking at your BEHAVIOR, for example, in this particular discussion your banal, continuous discussion of democracy in Asia when nobody prompted the discussion or asked for it. I “read” your belief in your behavior.

“The mottos matter. Even you think one of them (the ‘getting rich is glorious’ by Den Xiaoping) seriously.”

Precisely. The fact that everyone loves “To get rich is glorious” by Deng Xiaoping EXACTLY PROVES that mottos DO NOT MATTER. Why? Because “To get rich is gloroius” is “the exception that proves the rule.” People follow the mottoes that they WANT to follow. They “cherry pick” whichever mottoes they please them. “To get rich is glorious” is a motto people WANTED to hear. Because people want to be rich. If people already WANT something to begin with they will suck up the motto that validates that. However, if people find the motto stupid, irrelevant, and unconnected to their desires, they’ll ignore it. How many people take the “Three Represents” seriously? Who the hell can tell you what “Harmonious Society” is supposed to mean? These mottos do not appeal to the people, like “Get rich” does. They’re jokes and everyone makes fun of them, with stuff like 戴三个表 and 河蟹社会. The mottos are a joke. “To get rich is glorious” doesn’t show that mottos are important. People didn’t make money BECAUSE Deng Xiaoping said that. Deng Xiaoping merely vocalized a human desire everyone had to begin with.

“Yes, internet censorship is one of the worst sh1t in China but “internet censors, which are run by the government”? Most censorship was taken at low level and the censors are usually forum masters, blog owners or web administrators. It’s self-censoring. What kind of speech will be censored mostly depends on how people who are running the website think of its seriousness.”

Yes, it is self-censoring. However, the government determines the standards as to what should be allowed and what shouldn’t be. Just because the government has outsourced the censoring to web administrators doesn’t downplay its political significance, it just means that the Chinese government hasn’t gotten smarter about how to implement a political policy. In fact, that citizens are the main executors of the censorship just goes to further show how complicit many “average Chinese citizens” are in maintaining one of the worst information control societies in the history of mankind. Also, what is censored indeed is deteremined by what the administrators think is serious, HOWEVER, what the adminstrators think is serious IN TURN is determined by what the censors make clear is allowed and isn’t allowed. I think you pointing out citizen involvement in censorship only further validates my original point of the sickness of the Chinese social fabric. I would rather have Uzbekistan, where government thugs are in charge of censorship but the people themselves resist, than China, where the government is more gentle and streamlined with its censorship but that’s so because the people themselves are active players and “think it’s good for them.

“Does that mean pornography has more influence to government’s policy before the censoring? Thus using government non-censoring of fenqing’s words as a prove of their political influence is invalid.”

Baloney. Comparing apples and oranges. First of all, pornography DOES scare the Chinese government. The Chinese government has to maintain this ridiculous ideological self-image in front of its citizens that it is the guardian of all things right and moral and therefore the hundreds of millions of Chinese people are justified in obeying them even though they were not elected or chosen. The Chinese government’s war against pornography is all lights and dazzle to dupe people into thinking that they are guardians of morality because “everyone” can agree that porn is “bad.” You snidely make an analogy to porn as if you’re establishing a valid point, but you’re not, as dirty you think porn is the pornography industry does play a role in the greater, nobler concept of “free speech” as its presence indicates the government cannot arbitrarily use the standard of what is “obscene” and “not obscene” to implement censorship. That’s point number 1; you may giggle and cover your mouth in reference to pornography but for peoples who take free speech seriously – like in my country – the very edges play an important diagnostic role in evaluating the health of free speech and as much as I hate neo-Nazis and pornographers and hate-mongering extremists the moment their right to voice their black ideas is threatened in my country is the first step against government dominion over thought expression.

Secondly, pornography and political speech, though both fall under the rubric of free speech, are of fundamentally different natures. Proof of the political influence of the fenqing is NOT found in the state of online pornography. Instead, it is found in the treatment of OTHER forms of political speech. If you want a valid comparison, you have to see what kinds of POLITICAL SPEECH are deemed acceptable by the government.

Let’s take the political sentence “Down with _____!”, a politica act expressing dissastisfaction with a political authority.

Online, you will never see, in significant numbers:

“Down with Hu Jintao!”
or
“Down with the Communist Party!”
or
“Down with the perpetrators of the 1989 massacre!”
or
“Down with the incompetent party rules responsible for shoddy construction in Wenchuan!”
or
“Down with the oppressors of the Tibetan peoples!”

However, you WILL see in significant numbers sentences like:

“Down with Koizumi!”
or
“Down with the Japanese dogs!”
or
“Down with the American imperialists!”

This is just a simple example – for your sake, since increasingly it seems like you’re not comprehending what I’m saying. But the point is that these are ALL acts of political speech, and in this example ALL of them are STRUCTURALLY the same, yet the Chinese government applies an inconsistent standard in permitting some of these to survive and some not to. The government permits talk that falls into the fenqing mentality, but do NOT permit almost everything else. Because the government CONTROLS expression, we can see what they take seriously and what they respect and what reflects their ideological program but looking at what is permitted and what is not permitted. Among all the various types of “hate speech” that are prohibited on the Chinese internet, the fact that hate speech by fenqing is permitted indicates an important status on its behalf.

“In personal blogs or small forums, fenqing’s words usually result into immediate deletion by webadmins since people naturally dislike those comments. In large forums such as Tianya, one fenqing’s comment can be followed by ten counter-attackings, though some are full of personal attacks to fenqing.”

This behavior is admirable but it still doesn’t explain the lack of governmental disapproval for this type of speech. Furthermore, as I’ve been continually saying even if the majority of Chinese people “disapprove” of the fenqing agenda, their desires are NOT reflected in the government leading China because China is not a democracy and these “counter-attackers” you are mentioning do not have voting power to offset the destabilizing potential of the fenqing. Furthermore, in specific global contexts, the people who “disapprove” of the fenqing are more inclined to join with them, creating an even bigger mass of angry individuals. For example, I cite the Torch Relay, whose dismal global reception was so catalzying that most Chinese individuals who wouldn’t give a damn, or even disapproved of the fenqing, instead flew into a nationalistic ferver. Where were the fenqing counterattackers when Grace Wang tried to mediate between the Chinese students and the Free Tibet people at UNC?

“I agree that no one can speak on behalf of all Chinese people and that’s not what I intended to do. However as a Chinese who has been living in China for more than 20 years, I can voice on behalf of many Chinese.”

No, you can’t. You just think so because your education system trains you to believe that the Chinese people are more united in thought and tradition than they actually are. If we take only the Han ethnicity alone, and look at Han individuals from different socio-economic classes and regions, we would see so much variation that it would be a joke to think that any one individual could speak on behalf of even 10% of them. Through in the other 55 ethnicities and speaking representatively is utterly impossible. Are you suggesting with your claim that you can speak on behalf of “many Chinese” that “many Chinese” think in the same way and have the same beliefs and values and morals (namely, yours)? How can you be arguing against stereotypes of Chinese people thinking the same and then make a claim implying that Chinese people think the same at the same time? That’s stupid. I think the Chinese people are just as diverse if not more so than a ad hoc melting pot like the United States. My concern about the stability of China rests on its non-democratic priority making and ideological groups like the fen-qing who choose to subscribe to a certain set of beliefs. This is different from the category “Chinese” which is NOT an ideological category; it is determined by the accident of birth.

“That’s why I said government can tolerate fenqing ‘to some degree’. When it’s out of control, government crash them down as the same as they did to activists.”

The government has YET to “crash down” on the fenqing to the SAME DEGREE that they “crash down” on democracy activists and people like the ones who signed Charter 08. Should the fenqing ever get out of the control to the point that the government has to make a crucial decision, they can either “crash down” or “go with the flow.” Take, for example, the anti-Japan riots. The energy of those riots eventually subsided and so the government was simply left with a close call. However, assuming the energy DIDN’T subside, if the government “crashed down” it would’ve risked being accused of not representing the interests of the Chinese people, if it “went along with the flow” then China-Japanese relations would’ve been strained to a dangerous point. Either outcome demonstrates what potential power the fenqing had at that time.

“Now I agree with your way of using ‘qi hu nan xia’ this time since the explanation is much better. Sure, anti-Japan sentiment is a card CCP played in international and domestic politics but not all people who went to protest against Japan are fenqings. Some Japanese politicians still refuse to accept the atrocities their soldiers did as a fact in WWII, and some people in China are angry at such madness.”

See, I got you. You had such a narrow definition of fenqing in the first place. I lived in Nanjing. I know how atrocious the history was. But if fenqing hatred is strong enough to seep into most other normal people and utterly disrupt Chinese-Japanese relationships today then I consider that significant influence. I like how you think the fenqing are all a bunch of idiots until the “fenqing topic” we are discussing is something you agree with and then suddenly you’re all sympathetic.

“I’m not thinking the ‘silence’ is a good thing but only stated the fact.”

You stated the fact to prove a point of mine wrong. However, since the silence is a bad thing you have failed to prove my point. Even if a majority of Chinese people are not fenqing their silence enables the fenqing to peddle their agenda.

“Yes, I do think they wanted in 30s. Japanese military expension started much earlier before 1930s. Korea and Taiwan were occupied 40 years before WWII and average Japanese did support the millitary occupation. They had many chances to avoid the crimes in China but they didn’t stop. It’s not that their ‘silence’ to military occupation was the sin, but their fever. And such ghost of fever still exist in some Japanese politicians’ mind. That’s much serious than few fenqing’s shouting.”

You didn’t answer my question. The Japanese military expansion occured not necessarily with the direct APPROVAL of the Japanese masses but rather with their APATHY. My point is that what happened in Japan could easily be reproduced in China, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, where a non-elected government is forced to submit to an extremist agenda. Also, I’d like to point out that you’re going into “robot knee-jerk reaction mode.” I’m not arguing whether or not Japanese atorcities were right or not. I’m only pointing out Japan as an example of an extremist minority hijacking an unelected government. However, you are pre-programmed to respond in a certain way whenever someone brings up Japan, just like you are pre-programmed to respond in a certain way whenever someone brings up democracy. Free your mind. Read what I’m saying, now what you want me to say.

“That’s the point. They will grow older. The reason, that most elder people who were born before the reform are not fenqings even they received same information as angry youths do, is because they are mature enough to reason and they have families and other things to worry about. The fact that fenqings don’t have a solid and systematic political view and their blind nationalism fever will fade when they grow up, is a proof that their influence to China’s policies today or in near future is limited.”

This idea rests on the rather stupid assumption that people abandon their radical ideas SIMPLY because they get older. This is incorrect. The reason why a lot of older people in China are mellow today is because things like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution SUCKED the political will out of these people, not JUST because they “got older.” These people were filled with such hateful thought that it took an utter ORGY of violence, murder, and genocide before they “mellowed out.” The fenqing won’t get more mellow ONLY because they get older. Perhaps, like the mellow older people of today, the fenqing will drop their extremist views only AFTER a cataclysmic even occurs which saps them of their strength. And THAT is why I respect the fenqing. Because Chinese History has shown that when you have millions of angry youths (Cultural Revolution) it’s hard to stave off their energy until you’ve got millions of dead bodies piling up. My hope is that the fenqing won’t cause the same to happen again. That average Chinese people – like YOU – don’t take the fenqing seriously, that is one of the ways they can grow in power.

“I admit my English needs improvement. You don’t require someone who only used English for few years and dealt with mathematical formulas and data tables in most of his non-puberty life can write a nice English essay in politics, do you?”

Actually, YES, I do. If you’re going to come into an English speaking community and attack an English speaker’s ideas, I DO expect you to use coherent English to continue the discussion and to understand what is posted. You dropped your “English as second language” excuse the moment you started attacking what I said. What would you think if I went to Tianya, used my Chinese abilities to attack Chinese people there, and when these Chinese people responded with detailed, intricate arguments I didn’t understand, I played the “Wah wah I only studied Chinese in college” card? You’d probably think I was a big baby and by going into a Chinese community and attacking Chinese people with the Chinese language, I was asking for it. If you’re going to fall back on “Well I speak English pretty well for a Chinese person, can’t you forgive me for that?” then you shouldn’t attack someone’s comments. If you attack someon’s comments you hold yourself responsible for the ability to back up your attacks and counter whatever that person has to say.

Rock on!

Man, that’s depressing.

That was their way to drum up tourists. Wow.

——

“South China Morning Post – Wednesday December 24 1997 http://www.scmp.com/news/
by SHIRLEY KWOK

Animal welfare workers yesterday urged a boycott of a Shenzhen zoo after the South China Morning Post exposed its ill-treatment of animals.
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the International Fund for Animal Welfare urged tourists and travel agents not to visit Shenzhen Xili Safari Park.

The appeal was made after the groups, alerted by a Sunday Morning Post report, visited the park and found animals, including endangered species, being exploited.

The Post toured the park last month and saw bloody horse fights, a parade of bears with their nostrils ripped open by metal rings and monkeys forced to dance on tightropes.

Some of the animals came from the old Lai Chi Kok zoo.

The groups said that the park’s bosses had refused to meet them.
A safari park spokesman denied it had abused animals and that horse fighting had been stopped.

‘The appeal for a boycott is too radical. Animals will be the final victims if fewer visitors come to our park,’ he said.”

http://www.aapn.org/zoopage2.html

The quoted part is about 2/3 the way down.