As for what you call my “lame sarcastic tropes” and “simplistic buzzwords,” I plead not guilty, certainly on the last score. “Bottom-up” is just shorthand. In any case, a blog comment is not a doctoral dissertation, and I certainly do not intend to worry over questions of diction in the way I do or would when writing an article. If that offends you, so be it.

Indeed, Dave, and that is exactly what you (and Novakant) are doing by insinuating that anyone who does not support an Olympic Boycott must approve of the Chinese regime.

On the issue of whether China is demonised in the Western media (which would not btw rest on any assumption that it is ‘innocent’) you might look at this interesting piece by Daniel Bell.

The same people—same individuals, same organizations, same publications, same blog sites – that ginned up a war with Iraq, and that have supported ginning up a war with Iran, are settling in for a longer term confrontation with China.

These people need to be judged on their track record. And compared with a confrontation with Iraq or Iran, a military showdown with China would be 10 times as unnecessary and 100 times as stupid.

James Fallows

Your post seemed to be drawing a repeated contast between the intentions of elites (which were assumed to be accomodatory toward China and were characterised as self-interested and calculating) and the anti-Chinese “widespread public reaction” which was not characterised in those terms, and so might be inferred to be morally inspired.

This is what came across to me as being simplistic, since, as I said, it seems to me that elites (especially in America) also have an interest in demonising China publicly even while they continue—hypocritically—to do business with it.

I’m sorry that you feel that the last part of my post was ‘batty’. I didn’t think it was all that crazy to suggest that there is currently a great deal of popular anti-Chinese sentiment in the US; in so far as anti-Chinese boycotts are not co-ordinated by organisations such as the Free Tibet movement they partly reflect this sentiment; such anti-nationalist sentiment often does not originate in the population at large but can propagate downwards from elite opinion leaders, and blogs might be one of the channels through which this happens…

The point I was making is that there’s an underlying tendency, here and in a million other places, to behave as if there are only two sides in any affray, and that one of them, and by extension anyone who supports that side, is part of some huge world-spanning empire of capitalist nastiness, while the other, and by extension anyone favouring that side, is entirely innocent/misunderstood/being ‘demonised’ by said evil honky empire.

Sometimes it really isn’t about US foreign policy, sometimes it really is about China being ruled by people who are managing to combine Leninist brutalities with both gangster-capitalism and a frankly pre-1945 level of chauvinistic nationalism. I mean, that’s an impressive achievement, but it’s awful, and it really does have sod-all to do with Iraq. Or Israel. [Unlike most other things…......]

You seem to be hellbent on discrediting human rights protesters as being manipulated and controlled by ‘elites’, while ignoring the, rather obvious, explanation that they might simply be airing legitimate and deeply felt grievances. Not even the Chinese ministry of propaganda is insinuating that Sarkozy, Brown or any other western leader have been inciting these protests, instead they blame the Dalai Lama and “his gang”, which is of course equally false. Do you have access to any information we don’t know of, that would lend some plausibility to your top-down thesis? Else, please let the protesters be.

And what exactly did you mean then when you said that

Indeed, posts and comments on liberal blogs like this one might be one of the many mechanisms by which elite sanctioned views, such as those of establishment ‘public intellectuals’ like Michael Ignatieff, on who is to be the object of moral opprobium du jour perculate downwards…

This is the bit that I meant when I referred to your comment as being rather batty – and it is rather batty, insofar as it means anything at all.

It’s not a sensitivity issue I am talking about. What I say is that when you talk about a political agenda of massive boycott, you also have to think about possible consequences, for logic’s sake. Actually I am pretty with the spirit of protest.

The ‘beating up’ thing has answered by Mikhail, thanks.

One idea might be not to describe them by using simplistic and misleading buzzwords like “bottom-up”.