protest - The dust settles down

Shanghai last Saturday

One week after the slightly violent anti-Japanese protests it is time for a short wrap-up, as Japan's Koizumi and China's Hu are about to meet. I'm not going to link to all the entries of the past ten days: they are most of my entries over the past ten days cover the anti-Japanese protests and they all link to the major other contributions.
Any ambivalence among the Chinese authorities about the protests, abundant last week, is now clearly over. Both the boycot of Japanese consumer goods in May and more demonstrations for May 4 will not even enjoy tacit approval, reported widely, here in pickp-ups at the China Digital Times.
The rather delicate relationship between China's ruling class and their citizens is mostly, and wrongly, perceived as a simple top-down one by the outside world. Only very few academics, mostly antropolists and sociologists, have been able to capture this difficult pull-and-push process, where both the government is very important, but still cannot get away with everything.
One of the more telling account I still find "The trading crowds" by Ellen Hertz, a fascinating account of the Shanghai stock exchange in the first half of the 1990s. It is one of few studies that not only looks at the Chinese government, but also at "the masses" as they define their own reality, partly by reaction on what the government is doing.
That makes it also very hard to assess what is going to happen in the coming weeks. For the time being I stick to the advice of my history professors: do not try to make any forecasts about what is going to happen, looking back and finding out what has happened is tough enough.

Order "the trading crowds" here