Thinking for themselves

When Jiang Zhongming, 30, studied abroad in New Mexico several years ago, he admired the patriotism the U.S. national anthem evoked in Americans. Personally, Jiang didn’t feel that same kind of patriotism for his home country of China.

While he knows a small number of very nationalistic Chinese citizens, he’s found that in general his peers are apathetic about the Chinese government as they focus on their own lives, jobs, and families. His experience contradicts a common narrative in Western media that portrays Chinese youth as more nationalistic than their parents.

Some reporters focus on pro-China internet trolls called fenqing, or “angry youth,” but a 2017 study examined the question of Chinese nationalism using survey data of Beijing residents. From 2002 to 2015, the study found, the proportion of people who “strongly agreed” with the statement “Even if I could choose any other country in the world, I would prefer to be a citizen of China than any other country” dropped from 55 percent to 38 percent. (The number of people who “somewhat agreed” with those statements increased.)

The difference is even more stark when examining the younger generation born after 1978: Between 2007 and 2015, the percentage of this group that “strongly agreed” with the statement dropped by more than half, to 24 percent. What about among urban Christians? I posed the question to the five young adults I interviewed for WORLD’s story about Chinese Christian millennials (see “Taking the narrow path,” April 1, 2017), as well as a pastor, and they largely agreed with the report’s assessment. Most are apathetic or disillusioned with the government, and don’t consider themselves patriotic, since loving the country is intertwined with loving the Chinese Communist Party.

Jonny Fan, 31, finds his peers not very interested in politics because the government tells citizens what to do and they have no choice but to comply. “It’s not like in America where if you are informed and have an opinion, you can do something about it,” Fan said. “In China it doesn’t make a difference.”

Fan sees three types of people: those who love the country because they believe everything the Communist Party says and profit from it, those who hate the party because they know its history, and those who don’t care about the party as long as they can take care of their own. “They think what happens to the country doesn’t affect them,” Fan said of the third group, which he believes describes a majority of the Chinese people. “All a change of leadership means is a new boss, but they face the same pain, the same taxes, and they see no real change.”

It’s difficult to escape apathy when the government whitewashes history starting in grade school. Jiang said his teachers and textbooks never covered events like the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, except to parrot the party line, which claims former Communist leader Mao Zedong was 30 percent wrong in his policies, but 70 percent right. Jiang’s true history lessons came from listening to his grandmother and her siblings tell stories of what they lived through.

In college, a friend handed Jiang a copy of a banned documentary about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, and after the three-hour film, he finally started to understand what had happened. His father never spoke about the event as Jiang was growing up, even though they lived on the Sichuan University campus, where students participated in protests in Chengdu before the police cracked down. Only much later did his father share what he had seen: “When they came back from the protests, everyone was covered in blood. Many of the students were arrested, but others were allowed to remain at the school.”

Social media and smartphones allow young people to tap in to more information about the outside world than previous generations.

Today, information in China has dramatically increased thanks to the internet, yet many citizens remain in the dark about parts of history and current events that place the government in a bad light. While savvy millennials use virtual private networks to scale the “Great Firewall” and find unbiased information, the government is working hard to shut down such networks. When Jiang tried using WeChat to post info about a talk he was hosting with a San Francisco photographer who had photographed the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Chinese social networking app recognized the sensitive keywords and would not allow him to publish the post.

Even with the censorship, social media and smartphones allow young people to tap in to more information about the outside world than previous generations. Pastor Wang Yi of Early Rain Reformed Church in Chengdu believes this causes college students today to become less satisfied with society and the Communist Party.

For instance, young people in Chengdu turned out in protest in December 2016 as the air quality reached dangerously unhealthy levels. In December, dense smog closed down the city’s international airport for 10 hours due to lack of visibility. A week later, residents held small-scale demonstrations by placing face masks on sculptures in downtown Chengdu. Others took to social media, taking selfies in face masks with placards that read, “Let me breathe.”

Police quickly clamped down on the protests, arresting demonstrators and cordoning off Tianfu Square in the center of the city. They questioned pedestrians wearing face masks around the area, and schools forbade parents from sending their children to school in masks. The local propaganda office ordered journalists to submit all stories about pollution to the Chengdu environmental protection bureau before publication.

Wang noted the protesters were all born after 1990. “No one born in the ’70s or ’80s would be brave enough to do that,” he said. “But you see that this type of dissatisfaction of China is getting stronger.”

He paused, then added, “This is good soil for evangelism.”