[BretLudwig]

A New Boxer Rebellion?

China's mandarins tap into past to shore up power


By Andrew Redmond

"The recent protests around the Chinese Olympic Torch Relay and China's
reaction are better understood by looking back at Chinese history. Between
1899 and 1901 China saw an outbreak of widescale racial violence directed
against the foreigners who were deemed to be "exploiting" a China only
recently dragged out of millenia of enforced isolation. Rampaging mobs
lynched Western missionaries and their families and slaughtered Chinese
Christian converts in a nationalist campaign that has gone down in history
as the Boxer Rebellion.

The name "Boxers" was a Western translation of the name of a Triad secret
society called the Society of Right and Harmonious Fists, which mixed
traditional Chinese religious beliefs in magic spells and kung fu with the
ethnic nationalist call to overthrow the foreign, ethnic Manchu Qing
(Ch'ing) Dynasty in favor of Han rule. The Han Chinese had long suffered
Manchu oppression; the famous Chinese pigtail was enforced for all Han
males to remind them that they were the "pigs" of their Manchu overlords.

Secret societies, the ancestors of today's feared Tong organized gangs,
periodically led enormous peasant uprisings, and kung fu martial arts
developed largely because Han where not allowed to possess weapons. This
kind of organizing would lead to the eventual overthrow of the Manchus in
1912 and later on would mark both the Nationalist and Communist causes. We
see it today in the Olympic upheavals.

The Qing Empress Dowager Cixi skillfully redirected the anger against her
regime by chanelling it against the white and Japanese trade settlements,
as well as against the earnest Christian missionaries whose humanitarian
efforts led millions of Chinese to abandon their ancestral worship.
Empress Dowager Cixi faced an uprising against her rule in 1898, but
defused it by offering edicts in support of the Boxers' opposition to the
"round eyed foreign devils." Eventually the Boxer Rebellion ended in an
industrial age bloodbath; poorly armed Boxers relying on magic potions
were mowed down by machine guns and disciplined Western resistance, unable
to get close enough to test their king fu skills on the besieged whites.
But the violence was so intense that riots against local Chinese broke out
in San Francisco and the Western diplomatic backlash soon ended Manchu
power forever.

The tradition of mass violence manipulated by a ruling class to redirect
dissent was deeply rooted in Chinese political culture, in a society in
which collective concerns overrule personal interests as a matter of
course. Much later, Communist dictator Mao Zedong harnessed the energy of
the masses in his "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," the GPCR which
destroyed countless numbers of invaluable Chinese artifacts and monuments,
and led to an orgy of destruction whose effects are still felt in China to
this day.

Mao was an absolute incompetent as a statesman. His various campaigns,
like "The Great Leap Forward," when Chinese were forced to "make steel" by
stripping the landscape for fuel and melting their woks and household
implements, caused starvation on a scale that is difficult to imagine. But
while Mao was not a manager, he was a seasoned faction fighter, and by the
middle of the 1960s faced growing opposition within the upper caste of the
Communist leadership. Much of the opposition came from venerable veterans
like Deng Xiaoping, whose programs actually worked (at least by Communist
standards), as well as from younger cadres. As a result, Mao engineered
the Cultural Revolution to "overthrow" the allegedly decrepit elites
inside the Party, who supposedly wanted to "restore capitalism" and were
really the ones responsible for the continuing economic hardships of the
Chinese people. What this meant in practice was that all of Mao's rivals
were taken out in an orgy of carefully constructed national hysteria meant
to break the Chinese from millenia of tradition. The ancient Chinese
respect for age was thrown aside as elderly teachers, authors, artists and
political activists were paraded and humiliated in public. Ancient
monuments and relics were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people
herded into labor camps.

Eventually, Mao's death allowed his rivals to liquidate the GPCR
hardliners around the Gang of Four, who were led by Mao's wife. Deng was
restored to power and today the GPCR is officially denounced by the
Chinese heirs of Deng and Co. as a national catastrophe. But the lesson
has not been forgotten: as Cixi and Mao had both taught, in China popular
unrest is easily re-routed into a tool if handled properly.

Worldwide protests against the Olympic Torch Relay and China's repression
of the Tibetans have ignited a huge campaign against the West inside
China, where "saving face" is paramount. Foreigners have been threatened,
and the French chain Carrefour has seen militant protests and a boycott.
The Carrefour actions stemmed from rumors, largely driven by the internet,
that Carrefour supports Tibetan independence, a stance Carrefour was forced
to deny holding.

Outside China, sizeable overseas Chinese communities, some allegedly
helped financially by the Chinese government, have mounted staged protests
against the Dalai Lama and in favor of the Olympics. "Love China" tags have
been added to emails and websites, and YouTube even hosts pro-China rap
songs. The Beijing Olympic slogan, "One World One Dream" was amended on
signs carried by pro-China groups on the relay route to read "One World
One Dream One China," a reference to the Communist Party's claim that
Tibet is an integral part of a united China which the West seeks to
disintegrate. The idea of Western interference in Chinese affairs goes
back to long before the Boxer Rebellion.

An exiled Tibetan living in Utah was subjected to an orchestrated campaign
of phone harassment after being falsely identified online as one of the
people who attempted to wrest the torch from Jin Jing, an amputee who was
part of the relay in Paris. (Jin is also the subject of a syrupy YouTube
video and has become the best known new face in China, where state run
media hails her as a heroine.) Irrelevant as usual, a leftist groupuscle
even came out to "support China" in San Francisco, where the relay had to
be hidden from view and the farewell ceremony witched to a secret location
at the airport in the face of huge protests.

It goes without saying that none of the protests inside China could have
happened without some level of government approval. A source even reported
that one Carrefour protest miraculously ended within minutes after the cops
had a word with the organizers. Certainly, outside China the torch relay
has had official support, not only from the allegedly paid
counter-protesters but from an army of paramilitary goons kung fu chopping
demonstrators. Inside China, the media reports glowingly about the great
love for China expressed by the teeming crowds who come out to greet the
relay.

What we are seeing in the Chinese Olympics campaign is part of the same
tradition that forged the Boxer Rebellion. China faces serious problems
that are bound to only get worse. Deng Xiaping's market reforms forged a
new economic structure that mixes state intervention with private
enterprise and partnerships with transnational corporations, taking
advantage of globalization, with the lid kept on by a ruthless police
state. As a result, the basic (notional) "gains" of the Communist
Revolution have been abrogated: guaranteed work and wages, schooling,
healthcare and housing.

With the cracking of this "iron rice bowl" has come serious social
dislocation. Annually, millions of peasants flee the countryside for life
in shantytowns in the urban east, where they are confronted with the sight
of serious economic inequality. China's "one child" policy has given China
a surplus of sons, who are now reaching marriageable age. Russia fears
that China may look for mates to its west, colonizing Siberia and its
women. And the vagaries of the free market have much greater impact when
one considers the sheer size of China's population, and the problems
associated with feeding, clothing and housing it.

While China's rulers keep a mailed fist on the population, the free market
has also led to freer minds. One such consequence was the Falun Gong (Falun
Dafa), a New Age tai chi cult that, free of government control, has led to
a state backlash that pales in comparison even to the West's treatment of
Branch Davidians, polygamists and others. Falun Gong "practitioners" are
regularly arrested and subjected to organ harvesting, but despite this,
both it and other religious groups are thriving, underlining the loss of
control the Communists have in China.

One effect has been a Maoist resurgance from Party loyalists sick of all
this liberalism and the globalization they say is behind it and anxious to
bring China back to the Marxist straight and narrow. Apart from demands for
internal change, the hardliners call for a return to the "Theory of Three
Worlds" of Mao, which holds that the Third World, led by China, must be
revolutionized and eventually wage war on the First World -- the West. To
this end it has openly supported Maoist insurgencies in India -- long a
rival of China -- as well as the very serious uprising in Nepal. There the
Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has waged a "people's war" against the
monarchy in the Himalayan kingdom that is close to winning. The Chinese
hardliners are in direct opposition to the official Beijing stance, which
has said that the Nepalese CPN(M) insurgents "misuse the name of Chairman
Mao, which impairs the image of the great leader of China and could serve
as an excuse for the international anti-China forces to create troubles."
Beijing is especially paranoid about "anti-China forces" attacking its
human rights record, ongoing occupation of Tibet, threats to Taiwan, organ
harvesting, widespread abuse of animals and various economic problems, such
as the recent food scares and use of slaves.

All of this comes against a backdrop of Chinese aggression overseas. Apart
from the allegedly paid "ringers," China increasingly tightens its
interests in Africa's natural resources, sparking allegations that it is
propping up the Sudanese regime and arming the Zimbabwean "government." A
number of recent cases have exposed Chinese espionage offensives against
the United States, and even the recent concerns about lead poisoning from
Chinese toys may have a military component.

In short, the upheaval we see in China now, while it has a "patriotic"
face, may be a consequence of the larger social changes gripping China.
Napoleon once warned about China as a "sleeping giant," which as the
result of the treasonous globalization of Western governments on behalf of
corporations, now has access to the wealth that may someday soon threaten
us all."

http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4328


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