Fun at the Carrefour Protest

Anti-Foreign Hatred Decreasing?

So I spent most of yesterday afternoon hanging around outside the Carrefour in Beijing’s Haidian district waiting for something to happen. When I showed up at around 11:30am, there were a ton of people there, but most of them are sitting around in the shade and in the plaza relaxing on their day off. Lots of uniformed police officers were also chilling and laughing, occasionally escorting small groups of protesters away. There were also a few foreigners, as well as a pair of foreign journalist-looking types, who also seemed to be waiting.

After half an hour, there were a few young students who wandered aimlessly around the plaza waving solitary Chinese flags. One of them got bored, stuck his flag on a sign post, and presumably went home. Eventually, there was a congregation of around twenty students with flags, but the police told them to disperse and… they did. One middle aged lady tried to rile up the crowd by playing the Chinese national anthem on her cell phone while walking in front of me and some construction workers sleeping in the shade, but people just laughed at her after she passed by and called her a ’sha gua’ (silly melon). So for the first hour, nothing really exciting happened, but the weather was decent and it was good to get some sunshine after spending most of my workdays in a cubicle under florescent lighting.

Some time after noon, there was some commotion happening across the street. I ran over there, along with about fifty to a hundred other gawkers and amateur photographers, to see three youths dressed in pro-China t-shirts carrying a giant green rice bag presumably filled with dangerous materials like flags and banners. The police talked to them for a while, explaining that they’re not the enemy and that they’re Chinese people too, but they have to make sure that the area is safe. The police then shooed away us gawkers and escorted the three youths to a police van while the crowd followed them shouting ‘Go China!’ This lasted for about five minutes and then people went back to sleep in the shade.

There were more demonstrators arriving after this time, though they weren’t organized and were looking kind of lonely. This high school kid with a flag kind of stood awkwardly close to me hoping that I would talk to him about something patriotic, but I just told him the weather was pretty nice today. He agreed. I walked around and took random pictures when some lady started screaming at me.

I asked her what’s up and she demanded to know why I took her picture. I checked my camera and I realized that I took a picture… of her forehead. So I told her I didn’t take a picture of her. She didn’t believe me and ‘accused’ me of being Korean of Japanese. Some more people began to crowd around us and they seemed to try and determine whether her accusations were true. So I told her to ‘fuck her mother’, which convinced a police officer that I was Chinese (though most definitely an uncultured one) and then the lady left.

There were a couple ‘anti-riot’ demonstrators who sat down and everybody rushed over to them hoping for leadership or most likely just something to stare at. The police were quick to show up and they were escorted away as well, followed by a few semi-enthusiastic ‘Go China’ cheers. Though the guy who shouted the last ‘China!’ didn’t get a ‘Go!’ response. Poor guy…

Finally, at around 3:00pm or so, there were a couple people with big Chinese flags who ran around and waved it. One guy needed help holding it up so another bystander helped him, but the flag was upside down. The crowd yelled at them and they quickly fixed it. After three minutes or so, the police came and took them away. Then, the crowd started to follow these two foreign journalist-looking couple, but they didn’t say anything. They were talking to a Chinese girl, but I couldn’t hear what she said, though the girl was smiling. Then the police came to escort the two away for presumably safety reasons when this guy wearing a striped purple and black t-shirt with short spikey hair and fairly round and soft features ran up to the journalists and shouted a couple anti-CNN slogans before running away. Some members of the crowd joined in and followed the foreigners, shouting anti-CNN stuff before the police told them to go away.

Then this one middle aged police officer got really angry and yelled at the protesters about how they’re all an embarrassment to China. He said this about five times, sending saliva everywhere, before yelling that he’d arrest that guy who yelled the anti-CNN thing to begin with. He pointed at some guy and accused him of doing it, but the kid said he didn’t. He accused a few more before one of the other police officers calmed him down.

After this, a few people started to pass out Chinese flags and people rushed to snatch them up. I didn’t get a free flag because I was too slow. The guy apologized to me and said he had no more, but I told him “Brother, it ain’t no problem!”.

It was getting hot outside and people were starting to leave, so I went into Carrefour to see if there were people shopping there. It was about half-full with mostly elderly or middle aged families doing their shopping. The cashiers were wearing Chinese Olympic uniforms and there seemed to be no problems. I wanted to buy a soda, but didn’t want to wait in line.

When I got back to the plaza, everyone was gone because the workers started watering the plants and the places where people were sitting got wet. The police were laughing and talking again, the construction workers sat around on the steps, and people were going into the underground shopping mall. So at around 4:00pm, I left and went to play American football with a couple friends in the parking lot outside my workplace.

So it was a nice day in the sun and I took a bunch of pictures which I will upload someday. Overall, it wasn’t too exciting and a few of the more patriotic high schoolers looked pretty dejected as they walked home, but overall, it seems to be that, at least in Beijing’s Haidian district, the ultra-nationalistic youth movement is dying down.