Good news and bad news

A strong sense of nationalism among the Han Chinese has surfaced in many ways recently. Supporters of Tibet are challenged, such as an incident at the University of Southern California, where Chinese students shouted down a Tibetan monk who came to speak, and recently a boycott has been organized in China against French retailers like Carrefour and Louis Vuitton after French President Sarkozy pledged to boycott the Olympics. And of course, there are the CNN boycotts that I mentioned earlier and the counterprotests at the torch relays in San Francisco, London, Paris, and Hong Kong.

I have started to notice some people wearing “I love China” T-shirts. More specifically, the shirts say “I [heart] China” next to a map of a red China that includes Taiwan.

While the nationalism seems out of hand at times, the government is showing signs of increasing multilateralism and open diplomacy.

The Chinese President Hu Jintao traveled to Japan recently to meet with the Japanese prime minister, which is the first such meeting in a decade.

In addition, the first high-level meeting between the governments of China and Taiwan since 1949 took place last month.

Chinese officials and representatives of the Dalai Lama also meet recently, though little was resolved regarding the spring riots.

Maybe the Olympics and the heightened attention on China this year are helping to persuade the government to initiate more dialogue with their adversarial neighbors.

And in case you haven’t heard about it already, there was a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in the western Sichuan province. It happened in the middle of the afternoon today and was supposedly felt in Shanghai, but I didn’t sense anything here; it’s maybe one thousand miles away from me. It’s still too early to know how bad it was. I thought only the islands of Taiwan and Japan were at risk of earthquakes.