Pandora's Chinese Puzzle Box

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind:

Unquestionably, nationalism is intended to be cool in China these days. Indeed it has become the replacement for communist ideology as the Chinese Communist party seeks to maintain its hold on power while embracing capitalist economics. The government is ritualistic in its fanning of the flames of this nationalism--the "spontaneous" anti-Japanese protests in Chinese cities on the first three weekends of April bore the unmistakable marks of Beijing's stage management. As
student protestor Sun Wei told Joseph Kahn of the New York Times, "I felt like a puppet." The rally in Beijing ended when police told the crowds they had "vented their anger" long enough, shuffled them on to busses back to their campus. "It was partly a real protest and partly a political show," Sun declared.

The protests began in the city of Chengdu, in southwest China, April 2, but when they hit Beijing a week later they grew in size and seriousness; they were the biggest to take place in China since 1999, when huge crowds expressed their anger over the inadvertent bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade during the war in Kosovo. That the demonstrations continued into a third weekend is a measure both of the depth of Chinese anti-Japan sentiment and the level of official tolerance of such feelings. In Beijing, units of police and interior ministry troops were mobilized as protection for the Japanese embassy and the Japanese ambassador's residence, but they didn't prevent the crowds from throwing stones and bottles, or from looting Japanese businesses.