unforeseen consequences

I just had a really interesting lunchtime conversation with a friend. The topic du jour was the recent Olympic torch protests.

I've been mildly in favor of the protests, just because I think that it's good to get some visibility for the issues that are being raised (Tibet, human rights, Darfur). A Taiwanese friend even raised the possibility of going up there today with a "Taiwanese-Americans support Tibet" sign, and although I didn't go, it was mostly because of a busy work schedule, combined with laziness, rather than any objection to the idea.

However, my friend, who is from China, pointed out that one of the side effects of the protests has been to push the average Chinese person towards greater nationalism. She herself is definitely not a rabid nationalist (I'll vouch for that, having had multiple rational conversations with her about Taiwan) and she said that upon reading about the protests, she felt herself becoming defensive, wondering why the Western media was determined to make China look bad.

I think this is a really unfortunate consequence. The protesters' goal is to give the Chinese people greater human rights, but instead they are being perceived as attacking the Chinese people. One could argue that the protests are aimed at the Chinese government, not the people, but that's a pretty tricky distinction to make, especially through the media lens. If we're not careful, we could wind up with a billion nationalistic Chinese people who are angry at the West, and I'm pretty sure that's not what we (the global community) want.

When I travel, I hear lots of anti-American sentiment, and I don't typically react defensively (especially as I myself often criticize our government), but on occasion I'll be annoyed by some derogatory comment about how "America" has done yet another stupid thing. Chinese culture places a much greater emphasis on not "losing face" and the Chinese people have really been looking forward to hosting these Olympics, so I can understand why they would feel hurt, to some degree.

I guess the moral of the story is to think really hard about the consequences of your actions, because things may not turn out at all like you had expected or wanted.