基督教科学箴言报中国的少数批评者不代表中国民意China\' ...

【原文地址】：http://www.csmonitor.com/Comment ... -the-Chinese-people
【译者】：李世默


政治上被压制的一些中国知识分子，将近期的动车事故描述为中共缺陷的标志，还警告快速增长的经济危机四伏。然而，这些以网络为阵地的精英们是在发泄私愤，并非在为中国民众的意愿呐喊。

　　动车事故后，突然间整个中国政治体系似乎被置于审判席上，其经济发展模式也颜面尽失。在势不可挡的微博力量助推下，西方评论家开始试图拉倒中国奇迹。有人甚至想象，火车将空无一人。然而，要用事实来说话。京沪高铁开行首月发送旅客525万人，这是无可争议的数据。上座率虽遭质疑，但最保守的统计也达 50%。甚至那些最猛烈抨击铁路的人也承认，常规铁路系统的上座率几乎与以前一样接近满员。

　　为什么会有反差？因为这是少数人的喧嚣。过去10年，互联网快速增长创造出一个数字广场，凶猛成为其独特现象。中国网民大多将网络用以消遣和商业，少部分人却利用它发泄对生活、社会和世界的不满，用最大声音对不满意的事表达最强烈的情绪。

　　互联网的特性导致这些情绪被放大并呈现出主导一切的表象。而这种表象基于片面而非全貌、具有极端性而非代表性。难怪任何偶然进入这个数字广场的人，都会看到一个充斥着最极端民粹主义和民族主义的中国。

　　了解这种媒介特性的人都知道，此类表达方式远不能反映普通网民的观点，遑论普罗大众。它充其量是舆论的晴雨表之一。最坏的情况则是美国《外交政策》近期将其称为“谣言人民共和国”。

　　中国近几十年的崛起给千百万普通民众带来繁荣，却让一个特殊群体——伪知识分子陷入精神真空。当代中国是由广大民众建立的。如今管理国家的是政治和商业技术专家——而非文人，他们的能力尽管不够完美，却显而易见。这令伪知识分子陷入尴尬。

　　这群人表达不满的叙事方式并非真实可靠。我们此前已多次目睹类似场景：围绕对三峡大坝建设的不满被解读为对大坝工程本身的普遍强烈反对；世博会被攻击为不受上海居民欢迎的挥霍工程，所谓的证据五花八门，比如针对地铁建设引起的建筑乱局的不满。但如今，任何一名地铁乘客都会告诉你，每天好不容易才能挤进地铁车厢。

　　伪知识分子称：中国人普遍对近30年来的经济发展不满；高速发展引发的贫富差距和腐败等的代价大于所带来的好处……然而，中国民众似乎并不认同他们的观点。每次客观的舆情调查都表明中国百姓对持续的快速经济发展非常满意，对未来持前所未有的乐观态度。中国仍将沿着与其自身文化背景契合的政治轨迹前行，而非跟从西方模式。

　　中国有句古话：水能载舟亦能覆舟。舆论就是水。那些寻求理解中国并预测其未来进程的人不应错判民众的声音。而对中国的统治者来说，错误解读声音带来的危险比干脆不读还要大。


【原文】

China's politically-stifled intelligentsia has painted the recent train accident as a symbol of the Communist Party's failings, warning against the perils of rapid economic growth. But these Internet-wielding elite are venting personal frustration, not voicing the will of the Chinese people.


Two trains collided and 40 people died. The transportation accident seems to be riveting the Chinese nation and dominating its newspaper pages, TV screens, and the Internet. It has claimed prominent spaces in leading international media outlets.

All of a sudden, the entire Chinese political system seems to be on trial, its economic development model – with the high-speed rail project its latest symbol – discredited; the Chinese people are in an uproar; and Western commentators are again pronouncing a sea change that this time, with the overwhelming force of microblogs, will finally begin to bring down the Chinese miracle. One would imagine, at the very least, the trains would be totally empty.

Yet again, reality is intervening.

The Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail line finished its first month of operation having carried five and a quarter million passengers – a number not in dispute. The percentage of capacity number is very much in dispute because of differing statistical models, but even the most conservative interpretations would have the trains half full. This is not shabby for such a large-scale project in its first month, during which a much publicized fatal accident occurred. In the rest of the regular rail system, where the accident actually happened, even the fiercest critics of the railway project are admitting that the trains are nearly full as usual.

Where is the disconnect?
Loud minority voices

In the past decade, rapid growth of the Internet has created a digital public square, and its ferocity has become a unique phenomenon. While the vast majority of China’s 480 million netizens use the Internet for entertainment and commerce, a smaller group uses it to vent dissatisfaction about life, society, and the world. They express their most intense feelings about what they are most dissatisfied with in the loudest voices possible.

The nature of the Internet is such that these sentiments are amplified and assume a semblance of dominance. Its manifestation is by definition partial but not holistic, extreme but not representative. Little wonder that any casual visitor to the Chinese digital public square would find a China filled with the most extreme expressions of populism and nationalism.

Those who understand the nature of this medium would know that these expressions, while legitimate, are far from reflecting the general views of average netizens, much less the population at large. When put into an objective analytical framework, it is, at best, but one of the barometers of public opinion, and certainly not the most significant. At worst it is what Foreign Policy magazine has recently termed the “People’s Republic of Rumors.”
The frustration of the pseudo-literati

Now enter the pseudo-literati. China’s dramatic ascendancy in the last 60 years has brought prosperity to hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese people, yet has left this particular group in a psychological vacuum. For centuries, the literati, or Shidafu, have dominated imperial China’s politics through the meritocratic Keju exam. They belonged to the intelligentsia but were effectively China’s ruling class through a vast bureaucracy. Their claim to moral authority was in accordance with the Confucian ideal that they ruled for the benefit of the people.

The narrative goes like this: The Chinese people are generally dissatisfied with the rapid economic development of the last 30 years; the benefits of speedy development are not worth the costs of its byproducts, namely the wealth gap and corruption, just as an accident discredits the entire infrastructure undertaking of the high-speed rail project. Every disaster, whether natural or due to human error, is proof that the current political system has lost the trust of the people.

And who is to represent the will of the people to overturn all this injustice? Of course it’s them, and the media is somehow ordained to lead this revolution. The opinion piece in the immediate aftermath of the accident by a respected commentator essentially repeats this storyline for Westerners in English.
The Chinese people support growth and ride the train

There are only two problems with this plan. One, the Chinese people don’t seem to be in on it. Just about every credible public-opinion survey points to strong satisfaction of the Chinese people with the rapid economic development that has been taking place, and they look to the future with unprecedented optimism. The pseudo-literati are loudly demanding a dramatic slowdown in GDP growth. If the Communist Party acceded to their demand, would the Chinese people tolerate that?

Two, China is moving along a political trajectory that is uniquely suitable to its own cultural context and not following a Western model in which the media is an independent forth estate. China will never have its own Rupert Murdoch.

The victims of this terrible train accident will be properly mourned and their families fairly compensated with respect and dignity. The cause of the accident must be thoroughly investigated and prevented for the future. The country will move on.

This author predicts that, in a few years’ time, China’s high-speed railways will be transporting hundreds of millions of people and bringing enormous economic and social benefits to the Chinese people, just as the Three Gorges Dam is delivering much-needed electricity to tens of millions of ordinary families and Chinese industry, and the Shanghai subway built for the World Expo is providing efficiency and convenience to 20 million Shanghai residents.

There is an old Chinese saying: The people are like water and the ruler is a ship on that water; water can carry the ship, water can overturn the ship. Chinese vox populi – that is the water. What is the vox populi saying? Those who seek to understand China and predict its future course should not misjudge the people's voice. For those who rule China, misreading that voice carries greater peril than not reading it at all.

Eric X. Li is a venture capitalist in Shanghai and a doctoral candidate at Fudan University’s School of International Relations and Public Affairs.

© 2011 Global Viewpoint Network/Tribune Media Services. Hosted online by The Christian Science Monitor.

Much of China’s political and literary history had been written to reflect the triumphs and sufferings of generations after generations of aspiring and practicing literati. Ever since the fall of imperial China, the Chinese intelligentsia has never ceased to identify itself as the inheritors of the Shidafu mantle with a rightful claim to political power. During the Mao era they were kept completely on the sidelines and sometimes brutally repressed. Since Deng’s reform 32 years ago, they have seen their livelihoods improve and liberties expanded significantly.

But modern China was established by the Chinese masses, led by the Communist Party, and today is run by political and commercial technocrats who are pointedly not literati and whose competency, though not perfect, is rather obvious. This has left this self-identifying and self-selecting group of people in a most awkward place: They are members of the intelligentsia living comfortably but without political power to which they feel a special entitlement based on long historical tradition. They have become pseudo-literati.

Not being able to go into politics, many pseudo-literati have over the years gone to work in China’s highly fragmented media industry. In that, they found themselves even more frustrated. Their desire to influence politics is restrained and sometimes repressed by the political authority of the central government. Such is China’s political system.

In their frustration they have bought into the Western ideological notion that the media must be independent of political authority and has the moral responsibility to check the power of the state. Combining this ideological conversion with their feeling of lost entitlement to power, they have appointed themselves as the rightful opposition to Communist Party rule. And they have found the partiality and extremism of the digital public square their most fertile soil. They have sought to interpret the venting of dissatisfaction on the digital public square as representative of the will of the people.
The narrative of dissatisfaction isn't real

We have indeed seen this movie many times before. The dissatisfaction expressed around the dislocations caused by the building of the Three Gorges Dam was interpreted as a strong general opposition to the dam project itself. The Shanghai World Expo was attacked as a wasteful project unwelcome by the residents of Shanghai. One of their pieces of evidence was the loud expression of dissatisfaction many netizens expressed online about the construction chaos caused by the building of the large-scale Shanghai subway as a part of the Expo. They widely publicized the empty trains during the initial months of the new subway lines’ operation as proof.

But of course, any rider today will tell you that now one would have to squeeze into these trains every day – an interesting replay of what is being said about the high-speed railways.

What is central to all this is that the pseudo-literati, in their effort to carve out a moral space for themselves in the Chinese political landscape, have taken the expressions in the digital public square and created an Orwellian 1984 of Chinese public opinion. They are writing in their newspapers and spreading through their microblogs a virtual and parallel reality of Chinese society.【原文地址】：http://www.csmonitor.com/Comment ... -the-Chinese-people
【译者】：李世默


政治上被压制的一些中国知识分子，将近期的动车事故描述为中共缺陷的标志，还警告快速增长的经济危机四伏。然而，这些以网络为阵地的精英们是在发泄私愤，并非在为中国民众的意愿呐喊。

　　动车事故后，突然间整个中国政治体系似乎被置于审判席上，其经济发展模式也颜面尽失。在势不可挡的微博力量助推下，西方评论家开始试图拉倒中国奇迹。有人甚至想象，火车将空无一人。然而，要用事实来说话。京沪高铁开行首月发送旅客525万人，这是无可争议的数据。上座率虽遭质疑，但最保守的统计也达 50%。甚至那些最猛烈抨击铁路的人也承认，常规铁路系统的上座率几乎与以前一样接近满员。

　　为什么会有反差？因为这是少数人的喧嚣。过去10年，互联网快速增长创造出一个数字广场，凶猛成为其独特现象。中国网民大多将网络用以消遣和商业，少部分人却利用它发泄对生活、社会和世界的不满，用最大声音对不满意的事表达最强烈的情绪。

　　互联网的特性导致这些情绪被放大并呈现出主导一切的表象。而这种表象基于片面而非全貌、具有极端性而非代表性。难怪任何偶然进入这个数字广场的人，都会看到一个充斥着最极端民粹主义和民族主义的中国。

　　了解这种媒介特性的人都知道，此类表达方式远不能反映普通网民的观点，遑论普罗大众。它充其量是舆论的晴雨表之一。最坏的情况则是美国《外交政策》近期将其称为“谣言人民共和国”。

　　中国近几十年的崛起给千百万普通民众带来繁荣，却让一个特殊群体——伪知识分子陷入精神真空。当代中国是由广大民众建立的。如今管理国家的是政治和商业技术专家——而非文人，他们的能力尽管不够完美，却显而易见。这令伪知识分子陷入尴尬。

　　这群人表达不满的叙事方式并非真实可靠。我们此前已多次目睹类似场景：围绕对三峡大坝建设的不满被解读为对大坝工程本身的普遍强烈反对；世博会被攻击为不受上海居民欢迎的挥霍工程，所谓的证据五花八门，比如针对地铁建设引起的建筑乱局的不满。但如今，任何一名地铁乘客都会告诉你，每天好不容易才能挤进地铁车厢。

　　伪知识分子称：中国人普遍对近30年来的经济发展不满；高速发展引发的贫富差距和腐败等的代价大于所带来的好处……然而，中国民众似乎并不认同他们的观点。每次客观的舆情调查都表明中国百姓对持续的快速经济发展非常满意，对未来持前所未有的乐观态度。中国仍将沿着与其自身文化背景契合的政治轨迹前行，而非跟从西方模式。

　　中国有句古话：水能载舟亦能覆舟。舆论就是水。那些寻求理解中国并预测其未来进程的人不应错判民众的声音。而对中国的统治者来说，错误解读声音带来的危险比干脆不读还要大。


【原文】

China's politically-stifled intelligentsia has painted the recent train accident as a symbol of the Communist Party's failings, warning against the perils of rapid economic growth. But these Internet-wielding elite are venting personal frustration, not voicing the will of the Chinese people.


Two trains collided and 40 people died. The transportation accident seems to be riveting the Chinese nation and dominating its newspaper pages, TV screens, and the Internet. It has claimed prominent spaces in leading international media outlets.

All of a sudden, the entire Chinese political system seems to be on trial, its economic development model – with the high-speed rail project its latest symbol – discredited; the Chinese people are in an uproar; and Western commentators are again pronouncing a sea change that this time, with the overwhelming force of microblogs, will finally begin to bring down the Chinese miracle. One would imagine, at the very least, the trains would be totally empty.

Yet again, reality is intervening.

The Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail line finished its first month of operation having carried five and a quarter million passengers – a number not in dispute. The percentage of capacity number is very much in dispute because of differing statistical models, but even the most conservative interpretations would have the trains half full. This is not shabby for such a large-scale project in its first month, during which a much publicized fatal accident occurred. In the rest of the regular rail system, where the accident actually happened, even the fiercest critics of the railway project are admitting that the trains are nearly full as usual.

Where is the disconnect?
Loud minority voices

In the past decade, rapid growth of the Internet has created a digital public square, and its ferocity has become a unique phenomenon. While the vast majority of China’s 480 million netizens use the Internet for entertainment and commerce, a smaller group uses it to vent dissatisfaction about life, society, and the world. They express their most intense feelings about what they are most dissatisfied with in the loudest voices possible.

The nature of the Internet is such that these sentiments are amplified and assume a semblance of dominance. Its manifestation is by definition partial but not holistic, extreme but not representative. Little wonder that any casual visitor to the Chinese digital public square would find a China filled with the most extreme expressions of populism and nationalism.

Those who understand the nature of this medium would know that these expressions, while legitimate, are far from reflecting the general views of average netizens, much less the population at large. When put into an objective analytical framework, it is, at best, but one of the barometers of public opinion, and certainly not the most significant. At worst it is what Foreign Policy magazine has recently termed the “People’s Republic of Rumors.”
The frustration of the pseudo-literati

Now enter the pseudo-literati. China’s dramatic ascendancy in the last 60 years has brought prosperity to hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese people, yet has left this particular group in a psychological vacuum. For centuries, the literati, or Shidafu, have dominated imperial China’s politics through the meritocratic Keju exam. They belonged to the intelligentsia but were effectively China’s ruling class through a vast bureaucracy. Their claim to moral authority was in accordance with the Confucian ideal that they ruled for the benefit of the people.

The narrative goes like this: The Chinese people are generally dissatisfied with the rapid economic development of the last 30 years; the benefits of speedy development are not worth the costs of its byproducts, namely the wealth gap and corruption, just as an accident discredits the entire infrastructure undertaking of the high-speed rail project. Every disaster, whether natural or due to human error, is proof that the current political system has lost the trust of the people.

And who is to represent the will of the people to overturn all this injustice? Of course it’s them, and the media is somehow ordained to lead this revolution. The opinion piece in the immediate aftermath of the accident by a respected commentator essentially repeats this storyline for Westerners in English.
The Chinese people support growth and ride the train

There are only two problems with this plan. One, the Chinese people don’t seem to be in on it. Just about every credible public-opinion survey points to strong satisfaction of the Chinese people with the rapid economic development that has been taking place, and they look to the future with unprecedented optimism. The pseudo-literati are loudly demanding a dramatic slowdown in GDP growth. If the Communist Party acceded to their demand, would the Chinese people tolerate that?

Two, China is moving along a political trajectory that is uniquely suitable to its own cultural context and not following a Western model in which the media is an independent forth estate. China will never have its own Rupert Murdoch.

The victims of this terrible train accident will be properly mourned and their families fairly compensated with respect and dignity. The cause of the accident must be thoroughly investigated and prevented for the future. The country will move on.

This author predicts that, in a few years’ time, China’s high-speed railways will be transporting hundreds of millions of people and bringing enormous economic and social benefits to the Chinese people, just as the Three Gorges Dam is delivering much-needed electricity to tens of millions of ordinary families and Chinese industry, and the Shanghai subway built for the World Expo is providing efficiency and convenience to 20 million Shanghai residents.

There is an old Chinese saying: The people are like water and the ruler is a ship on that water; water can carry the ship, water can overturn the ship. Chinese vox populi – that is the water. What is the vox populi saying? Those who seek to understand China and predict its future course should not misjudge the people's voice. For those who rule China, misreading that voice carries greater peril than not reading it at all.

Eric X. Li is a venture capitalist in Shanghai and a doctoral candidate at Fudan University’s School of International Relations and Public Affairs.

© 2011 Global Viewpoint Network/Tribune Media Services. Hosted online by The Christian Science Monitor.

Much of China’s political and literary history had been written to reflect the triumphs and sufferings of generations after generations of aspiring and practicing literati. Ever since the fall of imperial China, the Chinese intelligentsia has never ceased to identify itself as the inheritors of the Shidafu mantle with a rightful claim to political power. During the Mao era they were kept completely on the sidelines and sometimes brutally repressed. Since Deng’s reform 32 years ago, they have seen their livelihoods improve and liberties expanded significantly.

But modern China was established by the Chinese masses, led by the Communist Party, and today is run by political and commercial technocrats who are pointedly not literati and whose competency, though not perfect, is rather obvious. This has left this self-identifying and self-selecting group of people in a most awkward place: They are members of the intelligentsia living comfortably but without political power to which they feel a special entitlement based on long historical tradition. They have become pseudo-literati.

Not being able to go into politics, many pseudo-literati have over the years gone to work in China’s highly fragmented media industry. In that, they found themselves even more frustrated. Their desire to influence politics is restrained and sometimes repressed by the political authority of the central government. Such is China’s political system.

In their frustration they have bought into the Western ideological notion that the media must be independent of political authority and has the moral responsibility to check the power of the state. Combining this ideological conversion with their feeling of lost entitlement to power, they have appointed themselves as the rightful opposition to Communist Party rule. And they have found the partiality and extremism of the digital public square their most fertile soil. They have sought to interpret the venting of dissatisfaction on the digital public square as representative of the will of the people.
The narrative of dissatisfaction isn't real

We have indeed seen this movie many times before. The dissatisfaction expressed around the dislocations caused by the building of the Three Gorges Dam was interpreted as a strong general opposition to the dam project itself. The Shanghai World Expo was attacked as a wasteful project unwelcome by the residents of Shanghai. One of their pieces of evidence was the loud expression of dissatisfaction many netizens expressed online about the construction chaos caused by the building of the large-scale Shanghai subway as a part of the Expo. They widely publicized the empty trains during the initial months of the new subway lines’ operation as proof.

But of course, any rider today will tell you that now one would have to squeeze into these trains every day – an interesting replay of what is being said about the high-speed railways.

What is central to all this is that the pseudo-literati, in their effort to carve out a moral space for themselves in the Chinese political landscape, have taken the expressions in the digital public square and created an Orwellian 1984 of Chinese public opinion. They are writing in their newspapers and spreading through their microblogs a virtual and parallel reality of Chinese society.