Return-Path: <sentto-279987-1183-988806075-fc=all.net@returns.onelist.com> Delivered-To: fc@all.net Received: from 204.181.12.215 by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-5.1.0) for fc@localhost (single-drop); Wed, 02 May 2001 08:44:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 10332 invoked by uid 510); 2 May 2001 14:44:57 -0000 Received: from hn.egroups.com (208.50.99.199) by 204.181.12.215 with SMTP; 2 May 2001 14:44:57 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: sentto-279987-1183-988806075-fc=all.net@returns.onelist.com Received: from [10.1.4.55] by hn.egroups.com with NNFMP; 02 May 2001 12:21:15 -0000 X-Sender: dcowhig@public3.bta.net.cn X-Apparently-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_1_2); 2 May 2001 12:21:13 -0000 Received: (qmail 29889 invoked from network); 2 May 2001 12:20:33 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l9.egroups.com with QMQP; 2 May 2001 12:20:33 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO public3.bta.net.cn) (202.96.0.193) by mta2 with SMTP; 2 May 2001 12:20:32 -0000 Received: from public3.bta.net.cn([61.135.6.152]) by public3.bta.net.cn(JetMail 2.5.3.0) with SMTP id jm1a3af01e1c; Wed, 2 May 2001 12:20:21 -0000 Message-ID: <3AEFFBFC.FB09FBDB@public3.bta.net.cn> X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en]C-NSCPCD (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en,zh-CN,fr To: iwar@yahoogroups.com From: David Cowhig <dcowhig@public3.bta.net.cn> Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list iwar@yahoogroups.com Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:iwar-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com> Date: Wed, 02 May 2001 20:22:20 +0800 Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com Subject: [iwar] Self-centeredness, Extreme Nationalism and Kiddie Hacker Wars Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit The April 27 issue of the chinese language overseas email magazine Huaxia Wenzhai (available at http://www.cnd.org) has an aticle "Opinions: Dirty Words & Extreme Nationalism on the Net by. MU Fan (an academic at a U.S. university) about the temper of the people who have been participating in BBS discussions following the recent mid-air collision. Mu's article focuses on the relationship between self-centeredness of some young students and their extreme nationalist attitudes. Bearing directly on the nature of the current hacker war among hacker hotheads in the U.S. and China is one paragraph in that article. The scene is Chinese police interrogating some high school students about their attack on Japanese web sites. The Chinese students think that we are patriotic, we didn't do anything wrong. The current hacker war is likely largely a contest between U.S. and Chinese high school students plus a few people a year or two out of high school. They must enjoy all the media attention they are getting. The China.com military affairs bbs forum has some information about the state of the hacker wars. The URL is http://bbs.china.com/bbs.jsp?boardid=57 Here is a URL to a Chiinese press report on the hacker wars: http://news.163.com/editor/010501/010501_168631.html This news report from Netease quotes a Guangdong Province security engineer as saying that these days there are 40 - 50 attacks daily on websites in the USA and China where as before there only two or three per day. Acccording to "sources" security experts tracked a U.S. hacker aged about 20 years of age who successfully attacked 30 Chinese websites. The U.S. hacker used unsophisticated, widely available methods on websites that did not have any special security protection. According to the report, most of the attacks by U.S. hackers are on edu.cn or ac.cn Some Chinese hackers were outraged by this and discussed on the web how to respond to the malicious attacks from the United States. -------------------------- Strange Contrasts: Chinese Psychology Reflected in Online Forum http://talkshow.163.com/comments.php3?COMMENTS[commentID ]=987581803&category=news&articleID=news_51&topmax=70 BEGIN TRANSLATION By Wolf Man (211.100.71.159) April 18, 2001 04:16 PM I have been reading this forum for a month. Having read many postings, I can see that this discussion is not representative of popular opinion. I expect that this is because so many of the participants are young people with advanced degrees. Nonetheless, the forum does give us an opportunity to get a deeper understanding of the mass psychology of Chinese people. (Note: Chinese people here means Chinese people in general and relative to the characteristics of the people of other countries. I am not referring to particular individuals so I hope this will not draw unreasoning attacks on me.) 1. Chinese people are subject to bouts of unreasoning fury (kuangre) : The reaction everybody has to certain events goes far beyond what I might have expected and quickly develops to the point of unreasoning fury. Suddenly the Americans have become the rat that must be beaten to death as it scampers across the street. The passionate feelings wrapped up in all this are astonishing. The words used seem to furiously boil out of people. 2. Chinese people are irrational: When strong passions take hold, Chinese people become irrational and start to make extreme judgments as they see things as all white or all black. If something (such as the United States) is seen as black, if someone says that there is some white within it, then nobody will believe you or nobody will be willing to believe you. You will be excluded from the group. Conversely, if something (such as Mao Zedong or Lei Feng) is seen in the light of furious passions to be all white, then even if you believe that there is some black in it, then you, nobody will dare to say so. 3. There is little diversity in the opinions of Chinese people. Once I was discussing the differences between Chinese and Americans with an American. One of his ideas gave me a lot to think about. He said, Chinese people are all of the same opinion but Americans each have their own opinion. Chinese people also have differing opinions but it is usually nine people holding one opinion versus one holding another opinion whereas among Americans the ratio is more like 4.5 : 5.5 or 1:3:2:4. 4. Chinese people can hold views, especially very passionate, emotional views that are very different from their actual actions or even totally opposite to their actions. On the web I have seen many people who sneer at America but among them are many people who tell me that I should emigrate to the United States. (My English is adequate and I have a technical background). They say that conditions in America are difficult, but in the end it is better to go to America. Nobody ever told me that America is a land full of devils and it would be best to drop some atomic bombs on it. Their actions are very practical, but they will find for themselves a high, impassioned reason for what they do. They are like Wang Jingwei (during the War of Anti-Japanese Resistance) --- he wrote in his diary that he had founded his puppet government for the good of the Chinese people. Today Chinese who go to the United States say the same thing. “I want to come back to repay my motherland” all the while nervously hoping that the U.S. consular officer will be foolish enough to believe them. The same thing applies on the corruption issue. Everybody with righteous words harshly criticize corruption but when they themselves have an opportunity to bribe their superiors, to go in through the back door, or to be corrupt themselves, they will do it themselves without any hesitation. They may even be even more ravenously corrupt than the people they criticize. From the discussion in the net forum we can understand who it is that China had a Cultural Revolution – that episode of mass insanity. That event was inextricably tied to the mass psychology of the Chinese people. It also explains why their could have been such a big traitor army (Wang Jingwei has six million troops) although everyone had learned from childhood that it is bad to be a traitor. This also sheds light on the difficulty of building democracy in China. If China irrationally divides into two crazed groups, as in the Cultural Revolution, China is certainly finished. This also shows us why it is so difficult to control corruption in China. The Chinese way of stressing the practical and making such a great separation between reality and one’s ideals will have to make it much more difficult in other countries to inspire people through calls to morality to suppress corruption. Response from Zhou Shao April 19 at 8:59 AM: -- I strongly agree. Only a national of individuals can be creative. The old imperial system lives on it the blind passions of the Chinese people. That is the sorrow of China today. END TRANSLATION ------ [Translator’s note: The Chinese sociologist Cao Jinqing in the September 2000 book “China Along the Yellow River” (p. 535) compared the Chinese people to the Yellow River --- usually calm and gentle but extraordinarly passionate and violent as it reaches flood stage. While discussions of Chinese society from the aspect of national characters might not be entirely persuasive, putting these points in these observations about psychology into their social, political and media context --- and the policy environment that these psychological, social, political and media environments create for Chinese leaders makes them more powerful. For example, the frequent exhortations for people to be in line with the “third generation of China’s leadership with Jiang Zemin at its core”, the uniformity of opinions presented in the Chinese media on the most sensitive issues, and selective reporting of news to create the desired overall impression would all tend to reinforce pressures towards homogeneity in public opinion. See for example the article by Qinghua University sociologist Li Qiang in the March 2001 issue of the Chinese journal “Sociological Research” summarized at http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/english/sandt/surveyreliability.htm and an examination of the political dimension and the role of the “people’s democratic dictatorship” theory in maintaining uniformity in “The Four Cardinal Principles Reconsidered” at http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/english/sandt/fourprinciples.html End note. ] ------------------ http://all.net/ Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
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