Wang Qianyuan (Grace Wang) is a Chinese student at Duke University. Because of her efforts to mediate between "patriotic" Chinese students and Tibetan advocates, she has been called a "traitor." Not only has she received death threats, but even her family members in China have been under attack. On China-based Web sites, Wang's main crimes are 1) writing on the back of a Tibetan advocate that she supported freedom in Tibet, 2) making a hand gesture that resembled the Olympic hand gesture of "One World, One Dream," and 3) accepting an interview by U.S.-based National Public Radio.
During an interview, when asked about Tibet, Wang said, "I think Tibet is absolutely a part of China. Precisely because it is an indivisible part of China, we need to treat its people as our own brothers and sisters. We can't treat them with the same approach we treat outsiders. You can ignore outsiders or be tough with them, but to our own brothers and sisters, since they are family, we need to be more rational and communicate our feelings better. We need to be more considerate when talking with Tibetan people. It's not simply a matter of a few years or decades, and certainly not the few weeks during the Olympics. Our relationship with them has spanned over hundreds or thousands of years, and will continue to do so."
Yet this 20-year-old girl was slapped with all kinds of unflattering labels for expressing her opinion. She was called "Shame of Shandong Province, Shame of China." Even teachers from her high school, who at one time was very proud of her, have "exposed her ugly history." The most extreme comment was the desire to "cut her into 10,000 pieces."
The experience of another young girl was even stranger. Jin Jing, a disabled athlete in the Olympic Torch Relay, was praised as a national hero for protecting the torch's flame in Paris. During an interview with Chinese media, she said that protestors would have to take the flame from her "over my dead body."
Only two weeks after becoming a "national hero," she was called by angry Chinese youths "slave of the French" and other derogatory terms, simply because she expressed a word of caution about a boycott of Carrefour, a French-branded grocery store chain in China, since most of Carrefour's employees are Chinese.
The tales of these two girls are representative of the insane level of nationalism in China. Yet we are able to learn a lot from it. First, such hysterical outbursts preclude any possibility of rationality. Once such pure nationalistic thinking has become the mainstream value of a society, the situation is extremely dangerous and critical. We have seen many precedents in history.
Secondly, the foundation for such nationalism is often an abundance of social problems. The presence of its fervor shows the lack of stability in society. Although Wang is quite young, she has unique, unconventional views on this issue. She said, "When other rights of the Chinese people have not been well protected, not everyone feels great [about the way things are], and they need an outlet." Both Wang and Jin have been treated as cheap outlets, and Western media, including the CNN, are not spared, either.
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