Salient

Protests Galore II

By Tristan Egarr | 26 Apr, 2008

Today, somewhere between 500 and 1000 young Chinese people marched from Pipitea campus to Civic Square. VUWSA International Officer and CSAVUW (Victoria Uni Chinese Student’s Association) leader William Wu only began organising the rally a week ago. The solidarity between Chinese students, and their organizational abilities, puts every other VUW students’ protest I’ve attended to shame. Furthermore, although the leaders asked me (as one of the only “Kiwis” i.e. whities around) if the police would mind them marching on the road, and I replied that there was no way the police would stop 300 people (my impression of the crowd at that early stage) from marching, when the march actually took place, its leaders confined it to the pavement – so not only was this rally weirdly well-organised (when compared to most marches), it was also stunningly polite.

The organizers told both Salient and Fairfax reporters that the rally was non-political: they were not arguing that China should rule Tibet, rather they were merely voicing support for the Olympics and arguing that the Western media has shown a bias against China, for example in showing anti-Chinese protests along the London torch route, but not the simultaneous pro-Chinese rallies.

However, this message became confused, because a large number of marchers held “One China” banners, such as “China: 56 ethnicities, one family.” So underlying the main, keep-politics-out-of-the-Olympics message, was a distinctly political current. However, as William said, they were hardly going to stop people on the march from expressing their opinions. But it is worth noting that when some marchers raised the chant “One China! One family!” almost everyone joined in, so describing this as a non-political protest is not entirely accurate.

My favourite of their chants was the following:
“What do we want? Olympics!
What do we love? Friendship!
What do we hate? Protestors!”
Certainly a strange chant to heard from what ostensibly looked like a protest march.

The chant “Welcome to Beijing! Welcome to China!” was often followed up with “New Zealand people are awesome,” and the young Chinese marchers waved a few NZ flags alongside their red Chinese ones. Many will no doubt snubb their noses at this protest and remind us of Tibet. And of course we shouldn’t forget Tibet, but we also shouldn’t forget that, at the moment, the level of human destruction the US is enacting on Iraq is greater than that inflicted by China on Tibet, which is more about cultural swamping than bombs. And we should remember not to be so arrogant about China’s crimes, given that the West isn’t spotless. So the one point the Chinese rally is absolutely right on is that we must first become “friends” with China if we want its people to listen when we suggest changes.

There were absolutely no Falun Gong or Free Tibet protestors in sight, which I found very odd. One guy at Vodafone Homegrown tried to chant “free Tibet,” but his girlfriend put her hand over his mouth. Then some rocker chicks joined in the march for a minute to have their photos taken. When we got to civic square one guy kept saying he wanted to protest for Tibet, but I guess he felt outnumbered (see last photo).

[Edit] - William has just informed me that the protest was intended to be 50-100 people, and he is slightly concerned both that so many people showed up in such an organised manner, and that they used the march to send out a political message. So the plot thickens…