The Globe and Mails
GEOFFREY YORK
March 25, 2008

BEIJING -- Two weeks of often violent Tibetan protests have triggered a surge of angry nationalism across China, helping the Communist Party maintain its grip on the country but also sharply limiting its ability to offer any compromise.

Chinese websites, blogs and newspapers are full of anti-Western fury these days. Many of them say that the West has financed the Tibetan protests of the past two weeks in an evil conspiracy to sap China's strength.

"The Tibetan monks were all paid by the United States of America to weaken China," one person wrote on the Web forum of China Daily, the state-owned propaganda newspaper.

Said another: "Let's face it, Tibet is just the trial balloon not only for the Dalai Lama but for the West as well. They just wanted to find out again how far they can go to destroy and balkanize China."

 The government has deliberately fuelled such xenophobic rage, blaming external forces for the Tibetan protests and using its propaganda organs to force-feed a steady diet of inflammatory images to the nation. It accuses its enemies of trying to "sabotage" the Beijing Olympics. But now it is riding a tiger of emotion that won't be easy to dismount

In many ways, it is a repeat of the Chinese nationalist anger that has exploded repeatedly in recent years, including 2005, when massive anti-Japanese protests were held, and 1999, when mobs attacked U.S. diplomatic offices in China after an American bomb hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

When the Tibetan protests first turned violent on March 14 in Lhasa, the Chinese authorities allowed only a few terse reports in the state media. But over the past few days they have ratcheted up the publicity, orchestrating a media campaign with repeated images of knife-wielding Tibetan protesters, the torching of the Chinese flag and the charred bodies of Chinese victims of the Lhasa riots.

An outpouring of nationalist vitriol has followed. A deluge of angry phone calls and faxes has flooded into the Beijing office of CNN, which China has accused of "dishonest" reports on the Tibet story. The vast majority of Chinese citizens have no access to CNN, which is often censored or blocked in the few places where it is available, but Chinese bloggers and websites have convinced most people that the U.S. television network is unfairly biased against China.

The Foreign Correspondents Club of China has warned Western journalists in China to be "vigilant" of their personal safety because of the widespread Chinese anger at the Western media.

At least one Western media organization in Beijing has received hate messages by telephone and fax, the FCCC said in a statement, without naming the media outlet. "The organization has adopted extra security measures," it said.

China's state-run news agency, Xinhua, says "tens of thousands" of Chinese Internet users have "condemned" CNN and other Western media.

Pro-Tibet activist groups in London and New York, meanwhile, have been bombarded with harassing phone calls and virus e-mails. One activist said he got abusive calls every two minutes on his cellphone from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. last Tuesday and also at his office. The calls often contained patriotic Chinese music, he said.

Tibetan activists have also been targeted by a sophisticated campaign of cyber attacks, which send out viruses in well-disguised e-mails. The attacks have been traced back to Chinese-based computer systems.

The virulence of the verbal attacks has alarmed some observers. In an open letter on the weekend, a group of 29 Chinese dissidents warned that the "one-sided propaganda" was stirring up "inter-ethnic animosity" in China. "We appeal to the Chinese people and overseas Chinese to be calm and tolerant," the letter says. "Adopting a posture of aggressive nationalism will only invite antipathy from the international community and harm China's international image."

Analysts say the Communist Party has mobilized nationalist themes - in the media and in "patriotic education" classes at school - as a way of bolstering its legitimacy and ensuring social stability at a time when Communist ideology has been widely discredited. But this nationalism has boxed the government into a corner, leaving it few options in a crisis.

"Chinese leaders are prone to public muscle-flexing because they feel the need to stay out in front of a growing tide of popular nationalism," U.S. scholar and former diplomat Susan Shirk wrote in a book published last year.

"Whenever the public pays close attention to an issue, leaders feel they have to act tough to show how strong they are. Like Chinese Clark Kents, they abandon their usual mild-mannered international demeanour and reveal themselves as nationalist superheroes."