How to be a fenqing

忿青 fen qing * - "angry youth" - is the term given to Chinese Netizens of a self-righteous and aggressively nationalist tendency. They are mostly young males with nothing better to do with their time than hang out online. They infest the blogs and bulletin boards of the Chinese Internet. And some of the ones with slightly better foreign language skills stalk the foreign China blogs, looking to pick a fight whenever somebody dares to make an observation that appears to be "critical" of China, or challenges the 'orthodox view' on hot topics such as - well, you know, "The Three T's". If you visit The Peking Duck, one of the most popular laowai China blogs, you will often find its comment threads overrun with these dingbats.

I often refer to the fenqing phenomenon as the Chinese Communist Party's 'blowback' from the years of propagandizing it subjects its children to during their schooling. The government occasionally seeks to exploit their hot-headed and xenophobic impulses by whipping up their indignation against a particular country to make a diplomatic point (in an exceedingly undiplomatic way!): the French have been on the receiving end of this a lot over the past year. However, this kind of sentiment is hard to direct and control, and it is more often an embarrassment or an inconvenience to the government than a help; indeed, it could potentially become a threat to the government. The Telegraph recently had a story about the government here suppressing online discussion of a supposedly rather unstatesmanlike outburst by Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping during his visit to Mexico. I can't see that the remark as reported here is actually all that extreme, but apparently it does come across as quite blunt and even a little testy in Chinese. The problem was that the fenqing went nutso over it, celebrating such uncharacteristic straight-talking in international discourse and hoping that it heralded a new direction in foreign policy, an era of telling other nations to just shut the f*** up. And so the story was pulled from the domestic media, and online comments about it were deleted.

However, there may be some hope. This article by thinkweird - a rare Chinese blogger writing in English - claims that he himself was once a fenqing, but has "moved on"; and he suggests that the eventual conversion of fenqing is almost inevitable, as they are progressively exposed to more diverse sources of information (largely over the Internet) and gain a fuller picture of the world.

Last week, while searching for some film of the Tibetan 'Shoe Jintao' game on YouTube, I came upon this slideshow presenting a typical fenqing view of the Tibet issue. It is extremely unpleasant and disturbing - but also unintentionally hilarious. [Unfortunately, YouTube clips and searches involving 'Tibet' are being heavily filtered this week - I wonder why? - so I am not able to embed this at the moment. Please follow the link. Oh, the irony - Chinese censorship inadvertently blocks pro-CCP propaganda!]

In that dumb, nasty presentation you find all the classic characteristics of fenqing. The frequent resort to SHOUTY capitals and exclamation marks. The even more frequent resort to foul-mouthed invective. A staggering naivety and an atrophy of the capacity for analytical thought (this guy seems to believe that he can 'prove' the political status of Tibet at different points in history by showing us Chinese high school wallmaps!). Dodgy spelling, faulty logic, and even an ineptitude in arithmetic (he begins by asserting that China's 'ownership' of Tibet has a history going back "thousands of years", but then bases this claim on Tibet's having been part of Kublai Khan's empire just over 700 years ago; he still brags that this is longer than the combined histories of America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - er, no, if you put those four together, I think you do get rather more than 1,000 years; and so it goes on.....).

As I said, it is pretty unpleasant and objectionable stuff, but horribly fascinating - and very entertaining. Approach with caution. Or avoid, if you're easily offended. But I think it's useful to know your enemy.

* I hope I got the right characters here. I don't entirely trust the MandarinTools online dictionary search. Weeble??

Update 1: I was indeed mistaken about the first character up there. Please see the comments below from my friend The Weeble. I didn't want to change it because I think this is an interesting side discussion in itself. The character I mistakenly selected, 忿, apparently means something like 'vehement' - which seems to me almost more appropriate than 'angry'.

Update 2: Jeremiah, being of an academic bent, felt inspired by my frippery here to write a much fuller and more considered piece on the fenqing phenomenon. Please go and take a look, if you haven't already.

Update 3: Please also take at look at my (equally frivolous, but - I hope - commendably even-handed) follow-up on How to be a fenwai.

Update 4: Now, how did that happen? This post has just been linked to by the celebrated political pundit and pioneer journo-blogger Andrew Sullivan on his blog over at The Atlantic. Since this guy sometimes gets one million visitors a week, I am waiting with some trepidation to see what his recommendation may do to my traffic.

[Disclosure: Andrew and I are lao tongxue - "old classmates" - in that we were contemporaries at Oxford. I was briefly on nodding terms with him back then, but he wouldn't remember now. And even if he had been aware of this tenuous bond of fraternity, I'm sure he wouldn't have let it influence his judgement.]