Behind China's Anti-Foreigner Fever

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"CNN, the Beijing Olympics does not welcome you," wrote one blogger on popular Web site Sohu.com on Apr. 23.

The government has promoted the idea of the Olympics as a coming-out party where their fast growing country should take its rightful place on the world stage. "The Beijing Olympic Games meets the aspiration of the Chinese people for the past 100 years and is also the common expectation of people worldwide," said Chinese President Hu Jintao on Apr. 10. "The events of the 2008 Olympic torch relay and the Western media's biased coverage of China has forced us all to face a new test of patriotism," wrote the China Daily on Apr. 22 following the intervening protests in London and Paris. "The hysterical protests the anti-China agitators staged in order to obstruct the torch relay and the way Western media reviled China show the true colors of Tibetan separatists and their sponsors," the editorial continued.

There are signs that Beijing now intends to reel in the anger, much as it did in earlier protests against the U.S. and Japan. In 1999 when the U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and again in 2001 when a U.S. spy plane made an emergency landing on Chinese soil, Beijing used its state-controlled media to order students to stop protesting outside the U.S. embassy. That happened again in 2005 when demonstrators targeted Japanese businesses to protest textbooks that whitewashed Japan's role in World War II. Already on Apr. 20 the official People's Daily ran a front-page editorial that called on Chinese to "cherish patriotism while expressing it in a rational way." It continued: "As citizens, we have the responsibility to express our patriotic enthusiasm calmly and rationally, and express patriotic aspiration in an orderly and legal manner," the commentary said.

Not Willing to Accept Foreign Criticism

But it is unlikely to be so easy to tamp down the resentment against the Western media this time around. That's in part because of the timing—following years of double-digit economic growth and a growing recognition of China's rise toward superpower ranks, Chinese simply aren't as willing to accept criticism from overseas. But it is also the result of the rapid growth of the Internet, whose mainland users have surged from 111 million three years ago to 210 million today.

That digital medium has served as the primary platform for the Chinese to disseminate criticism of the Western media and is much harder for Beijing to control than traditional media outlets. "The Western media always report problems that have occurred during the development of China and turns a blind eye to all the accomplishments China has reached," wrote one Chinese blogger called Yi Shuihan on Apr. 23 on Web site bokee.com. "Apart from their arrogance, selfishness, and stupidity, [the Western media] has nothing else."

Roberts is BusinessWeek's Asia News Editor and China bureau chief.