Hostile Forces by Jamie J. Gruffydd-Jones;

Author:Jamie J. Gruffydd-Jones;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Perceived Hostility

So what explains this wide variety in reactions? Anger certainly played a role. On women’s rights, some of our interviewees were evidently irritated when they read that the United States had criticized China. Take Wang, a forty-year-old businessman: “Women are treated better in China than anywhere around—these words are completely false. The United States just wants to target China for anything it can, to try and bring China down. Chinese women have nothing to do with them—they should look after their own women. It makes me angry.” Even those who agreed that women’s rights needed to be improved said that they found the criticism one-sided and politically driven. As Xiao Dong, a postgraduate researcher in his mid-twenties, said: “These politicians don’t care about women in China; they’re always using human rights as an excuse to attack China, to try and poison international public opinion. It’s just politicians being politicians; they always behave like this. I’m bored of it to be honest.”

Overseas interviewees agreed. Huang said that the United States was using human rights to target China: “I always hear that America is criticizing China but treating other countries with tolerance. At the moment with Trump, he is always condemning China; it seems unfair. Because of Sino-US relations, the US needs to compete with China, and so to increase its competitiveness it feels it has to criticize China.” Mike agreed, in part: “I think the US does care to some extent, but I do think there is a deeper interest-driven motivation. There might be some issues in Tibet, but I think the US is criticizing China because it wants to exert some influence.”

Some overseas students explicitly linked supposed American hostility to their own beliefs about human rights in China. According to Wei Tai, fifty-three: “This criticism of China is driven by prejudice. I believe that China does have areas it needs to improve, but we are definitely not as bad as America says.” Feng Shuo, thirty-three, said that as far as he was concerned, “I don’t think the US actually cares about human rights, but rather is using this issue as political fuel on the international stage to attack China.” He went on to insist that “China doesn’t have issues with free speech, because we can speak freely. So other countries cannot criticize China on such matters.”

These comments were not just limited to human rights. Upon hearing that the United States had called on China to ban the ivory trade, Liu Jin, a factory worker, said that it was doing so “to attack the Communist Party,” while Li, a software engineer, said that the United States “did not care about animals. As China’s economy is developing and China is getting stronger, they’re using it to cause trouble, so that every country focuses on China.” Student Zhao was more equivocal: “Criticism is fine; every country needs it. I don’t like the attitude in these comments though; they seem to hold some prejudice against China.”

Interviewees were not just concerned with American hostility, but also its hypocrisy.

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