He initiated the Carrefour boycott. He co-produced one of YouTube’s most watched videos about Tibet, and he has high expectations for the forthcoming Beijing Olympic Games. As one of the growing number of young Chinese whose simple patriotic consciousness was awakened by the dramatic events of 2008, Wu Hao explains what for him it means to be Chinese young and politically aware.
By Wang Yan
“I am not an online leader!” said the young man of 26, who currently works with a website company in east Beijing. Yet to many Wu Hao is just that. Wu, whose online nickname is Shui Ying or literally “Water Baby” in Chinese, has become a star overnight due to his part in the instigation of the online boycott against French retailer Carrefour.
Sporting a pair of black-rimmed glasses, a neat stylish black mustache and goatee, Wu Hao looks less the online leader and more the haughty Musketeer. Dressed casually in an everyday office outfit of pants, sandals and a loosely fitting short-sleeved shirt with light-red patterns, Wu looks every bit the typically relaxed young web executive. How then did the deceptively typical Wu become so politically involved?
A Boycott to Make Voices Heard
The turn of events can be traced back to early April when a number of pro-Tibetan-independence protesters tried to thwart the Olympic torch relay as it passed through Paris. This, along with the ‘Free Tibet’ flag hung at Paris’s Hotel de Ville (city hall), were interpreted by many Chinese including Wu Hao as an affront to China’s national integrity. On April 10, Wu Hao posted a notice on mop.com, a forum website popular among the post-1980s generation, calling on people to stop shopping at the French retailing giant Carrefour.
This marked the beginning of a nationwide boycott, followed by on-the-spot protests in many big cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao, Kunming, and Chongqing.
“As a citizen of China, a sovereign state, I felt humiliated on hearing of the torch relay incident in France. Especially, as France had always posed as a friend of our country, but suddenly it turned hostile towards us, which as I see is wicked,” explained Wu. According to Wu Hao, his original intention in calling for a Carrefour boycott was to speak out and let the world hear China’s voice.
“Since France didn’t handle the diplomatic crisis properly and ignored its harmful effect upon China, it should face the consequence for challenging another country’s dignity and sovereignty.” Wu like many boycotters believes a country’s stance towards China matters much more than the derogatory remarks about China made by CNN, a private media group, and by Sharon Stone, a lone individual who said the earthquake in Sichuan was ‘karma.’
Wu explained, “We’re like a family. Though family members may have small disputes, we will unite in the face of a threat from outside. Ordinary Chinese like us can do nothing in a diplomatic crisis but we can get attention from others by expressing our opinions.”
Wu Hao’s advocating of a boycott ignited a heated debate online. While many vehemently supported the boycott, others coolly reasoned that people should refrain from such actions. Most participants in the online discussion were young Chinese born in and after the 1980s, and were more than willing to give personal views and share their opinions with others.
However, the fierce reaction by some young Chinese protestors, such as brandishing banners in front of Carrefour stores and interfering with the store’s operation were beyond Wu Hao’s expectation. “I myself never advocated nor participated in this kind of activity.”
Wu doesn’t agree with people’s calling him an ‘online leader’ either, “Nowadays, anyone whose ideas are reasonable and representative of the majority will gain immense support from society, and I just served as an outlet for people’s feelings. Yet despite this, my opinions on avoiding extreme forms of action went unheeded.” Reluctant to be referred to as ‘the instigator’ of the protest, Wu continued, “So in the future, if something like this happens I will think twice before doing or saying anything.”
A Defensive Reaction
In fact, the Carrefour boycott was not the first online let-the-world-hear-the-facts movement launched by Chinese netizens. Before the torch relay incident, Chinese netizens had been outraged by what they perceived as biased coverage of the riots in Tibet by some Western media groups.
They found that the German television RTL Aktuell, N-TV, along with the German Bild newspaper and the Washington Post, passed off images of baton-wielding Nepalese police in clashes with protesters in Kathmandu as Chinese policemen in Lhasa, the capital of China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region. The German newspaper Berliner Morgenpost, CNN, Fox TV and BBC also published intentionally edited pictures of the riots and misleading photo captions. They included a photograph on the CNN news network website showing people fleeing from a military truck. The original picture however also showed rioters throwing stones at the truck, which was edited out by CNN.
To help unveil the Western media"s biased coverage of the riots in Tibet, Chinese netizens posted numerous pages of condemnation on the Internet including the website www.anti-CNN.com.
During that time, a video entitled “Tibet WAS, IS, and ALWAYS WILL BE a Part of China” posted on the popular video sharing website YouTube.com quickly became a big hit with web users. The video was actually co-produced by Wu Hao and a Chinese student in Canada. According to Wu Hao, the video was intended as a response to the Western criticism of China"s handling of the disturbances in Tibet. First posted on March 15, the video soon attracted heavy traffic, with more than 1 million clicks in three days, a figure that helped position it near the top of YouTube"s most viewed videos.