2007 is the Year of the Pig in the Chinese zodiac. As Chinese people celebrate the Chinese New Year on February 18, there won’t be a lot of pigs paraded on state television programs as for the other eleven zodiacs. Since all television stations are state-owned, that means there won’t be a lot of images or references to pigs. You wonder why.
This New York Times article offers some insights:
This year, Chinese propaganda officials have ordered the Chinese news media to play down images or references to pigs ahead of the Year of the Pig in the Chinese zodiac, because China’s Hui Muslim minority considers pigs offensive.
The Times article also provides the context:
The official, Ye Xiaowen, director of China’s State Bureau of Religious Affairs, said in a front-page article in the overseas edition of The People’s Daily that Mr. Bush’s past references to a "crusade" and to "Islamic fascism" were verbal gaffes that revealed his effort to turn the fight against terrorism into a religious war.
Partly as a result, he said, the United States had lost support for the war in Iraq and had frittered away the good will Americans gained after the 9/11 attacks.
"The more they oppose terrorism, the more terror they produce," Mr. Ye said in the article. "How many more troops will they send to die in the meat grinder" of Iraq.
Mr. Ye wrote that Mr. Bush had effectively "hijacked" one religion, Christianity, to engage in a battle against another one, Islam. That has strengthened Islamic fundamentalists and made the war unwinnable, he contended.
I am not here to argue that China has earned the right to criticize the US on religious matters. But let’s give credit where credit is due: China has been right all along on the Iraq War. China, together with France and Russia, were the leading nations opposing the Iraq war at the UN. The Chinese argument at the time was that violence brews violence and there are only political and diplomatic solutions to the problem. How we wish the Bush administration were listening!
China has had a long history of fighting what we would now define as "terrorism". By any measure, China was the leading civilization---the "sole superpower"---during the Tang dynasty (618-907 A.D.). Yet the Han Chinese were terrorized by the Muslim Uighur from the northwest. Instead of fighting all out wars, the Chinese emperors opted to trade, among other things, concubines and princesses, with the Muslin tribes. (Talk about "appeasement"!) Since the 1980’s, China has faced an increasingly restless Hui (Muslim) minority population. Some militant groups have involved in terrorism tactics. China has responded not just with massive crack downs but also by investing a tremendous amount of resources to "win heats and minds" of its Muslin population. The Shanghai Group, including China, Russia, and several central Asian countries, was created in part to collaboratively combat this problem. (Iran has since joined as an observer.)
As Americans are getting bogged down in Iraq and the war of terrorism and the Bush administration is digging holes for itself, and as China rises, I often wonder maybe there are still a few things to learn from the Chinese.