Defend Our Homeland

Kin Cheung/Associated Press

Police officers prevented Leung Kwok-hung, a lawmaker and pro-democracy activist, from moving closer to the Olympic flame welcoming ceremony in Hong Kong on Wednesday.

There were no reports of protests but several anti-China activists had already been deported ahead of the torch’s arrival. The torch’s relay through Hong Kong will take place on Friday.

Its arrival in Hong Kong has been depicted as part of a broader struggle over Hong Kong’s evolving role as an autonomous territory of China. It arrived from Vietnam at Hong Kong airport, where it was greeted by a marching band and flag-waving children dressed in red and white tracksuits, The Associated Press reported.

The torch was then taken to a welcoming ceremony at a cultural center.

On Saturday, the Hong Kong government denied entry to three Danish human rights advocates who had hoped to protest at the torch relay, detaining them for six hours and then putting them against their will on a flight to London. A Tibetan monk was stopped on arrival at the airport over the weekend and forced to fly elsewhere, according to the local news media.

On Tuesday, three pro-Tibet activists were deported after they arrived at the airport in Hong Kong, The A.P. said.

In a statement on Wednesday, Amnesty International urged the Hong Kong authorities to allow protesters “to engage in peaceful demonstrations before, during and after the Olympic torch relay”.Despite the deportations, local critics of China’s human rights record are still planning to demonstrate, and more rights advocates from overseas are expected to try to enter the territory of Hong Kong to hold their own protests, notably the actress Mia Farrow, who is now one of the most prominent critics of China’s role in the Darfur region of Sudan.

About 3,000 police planned to guard the torch during its relay on Friday, The A.P. reported.

The Hong Kong police authorities have been making extensive preparations to try to separate critics and supporters of China on Friday. “It has been, and continues to be, the Hong Kong Police Force’s policy to endeavor to facilitate, as far as possible, all peaceful public order activities,” the police said in an e-mail response to questions.

The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, which commemorates the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989 and seeks human rights improvements in Hong Kong, held a small demonstration on Monday to protest the government’s decision to block the entry of the Danish advocates.

“It really hurts the image of Hong Kong as an international city when we start restricting freedom of access,” said Lee Cheuk-yan, a union leader, Hong Kong legislator and vice chairman of the alliance.

Any protests that take place Friday could be an early glimpse of demonstrations to come during the Olympics in August. The International Olympic Committee moved all six Olympic equestrian events from Beijing to Hong Kong after Beijing failed to convince international veterinary groups that horses brought into mainland China could be kept free of equine diseases.

Groups critical of China are considering whether to hold protests at Olympic events here or in Beijing. Hong Kong has a tradition of tolerating peaceful protest, but Beijing will host more Olympic events, so protests there may receive greater attention.

Reached by telephone on Sunday night at her Connecticut home, Ms. Farrow said she had not been aware that rights advocates were being stopped at the airport. She still planned to fly to Hong Kong later in the week.

“I don’t think we have a choice; we have to go,” said Ms. Farrow, chairwoman of the advisory board of Dream for Darfur, a group that criticizes China for its diplomatic, military and commercial ties to Sudan.

The Hong Kong immigration authorities have a policy of not commenting on individual cases. But officials have said in recent weeks that any government has the right to refuse entry to those who may be disruptive, and they have denied suggestions that the city is taking orders from Beijing.

Before Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997, the Chinese government promised to let Hong Kong run its own domestic affairs, including immigration policies, with considerable autonomy until 2047.

Chinese citizens and people of Chinese descent have shown up in large numbers at torch relay events from San Francisco to Sydney and have sometimes scuffled with critics of China’s policies in Tibet. Three Japanese citizens received blows when they tried to unfurl a pro-Tibet banner at the torch relay in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but suffered no lasting injuries, according to the Japanese Embassy there. Pro-China demonstrators also threw rocks, water bottles, and plastic and metal pipes at critics of China during the torch relay on Sunday in Seoul, South Korea.

Official Chinese news media have exhorted citizens in recent days to “defend the torch” in each city on the relay route. “We are worried that we may be confronted by these nationalists,” said Mr. Lee, of the Hong Kong Alliance.

Jill Savitt, the executive director of Dream for Darfur, who plans to arrive here with Ms. Farrow on Thursday, said that it was in the interest of Beijing officials to encourage Hong Kong to allow entry for activists. “They have just called more attention to their repressive policies than letting them in would have done,” she said.

Dream for Darfur had been planning to hold protests in Beijing but is concerned now about the increasingly tough Chinese position toward protesters, and is considering whether to shift demonstrations to the Hong Kong events instead, Ms. Savitt said.

The Chinese government has said repeatedly that it is seeking peace in Darfur, and its top envoy for the region has made a series of trips in an effort to win an agreement among the various warring factions. But groups like Dream for Darfur hold Beijing responsible for providing military, diplomatic and commercial assistance to the government of Sudan, which the activists accuse of allowing and even encouraging widespread murders and other human rights abuses in Darfur.

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Ben Huang challenging a Tibetan monk last Tuesday.

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Min Zhu, center, was removed from an event with a monk at the University of Southern California after a bottle was thrown.

If Tibet was not part of China, why had the Chinese emperor been the one to give the Dalai Lama his title? How did the tenets of Buddhism jibe with the “slavery system” in Tibet before China’s modernization efforts? What about the Dalai Lama’s connection to Hitler?

As the monk tried to rebut the students, they grew more hostile. They brandished photographs and statistics to support their claims. “Stop lying! Stop lying!” one young man said. A plastic bottle of water hit the wall behind the monk, and campus police officers hustled the person who threw it out of the room.

Scenes like this, ranging from civil to aggressive, have played out at colleges across the country over the past month, as Chinese students in the United States have been forced to confront an image of their homeland that they neither recognize nor appreciate. Since the riots last month in Tibet, the disrupted Olympic torch relays and calls to boycott the opening ceremony of the Games in Beijing, Chinese students, traditionally silent on political issues, have begun to lash out at what they perceive as a pervasive anti-Chinese bias.

Last year, there were more than 42,000 students from mainland China studying in the United States, an increase from fewer than 20,000 in 2003, according to the State Department.

Campuses including Cornell, the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of California, Irvine, have seen a wave of counterdemonstrations using tactics that seem jarring in the American academic context. At the University of Washington, students fought to limit the Dalai Lama’s address to nonpolitical topics. At Duke, pro-China students surrounded and drowned out a pro-Tibet vigil; a Chinese freshman who tried to mediate received death threats, and her family was forced into hiding.

And last Saturday, students from as far as Florida and Tennessee traveled to Atlanta to picket CNN after a commentator, Jack Cafferty, referred to the Chinese as “goons and thugs.” (CNN said he was referring to the government, not the people.)

The student anger, stoked through e-mail messages sent to large campus mailing lists, stems not so much from satisfaction with the Chinese government but from shock at the portrayal of its actions, as well as frustration over the West’s long-standing love affair with Tibet — a love these students see as willfully blind.

By and large, they do not acknowledge the cultural and religious crackdown in Tibet, insisting that ordinary Tibetans have prospered under China’s economic development, and that only a small minority are unhappy.

“Before I came here, I’m very liberal,” said Minna Jia, a graduate student in political science at U.S.C. who encouraged fellow students to attend the monk’s lecture. “But after I come here, my professor told me that I’m nationalist.”

“I believe in democracy,” Ms. Jia added, “but I can’t stand for someone to criticize my country using biased ways. You are wearing Chinese clothes and you are using Chinese goods.”

Students interviewed for this article deplored the more extreme expressions of anger, like death threats against the Duke freshman and the tossing of the water bottle, and pointed out that Chinese students had little experience in the art of protest. But, they said, they could also understand them.

“We’ve been smothered for too long time,” said Jasmine Dong, another graduate student who attended the U.S.C. lecture.

By that, Ms. Dong did not mean that Chinese students had been repressed or censored by their own government. She meant that the Western news media had not acknowledged the strides China had made or the voices of overseas Chinese. “We are still neglected or misunderstood as either brainwashed or manipulated by the government,” she said.

No matter what China does, these students say, it cannot win in the arena of world opinion. “When we have a billion people, you said we were destroying the planet./ When we tried limiting our numbers, you said it is human rights abuse,” reads a poem posted on the Internet by “a silent, silent Chinese” and cited by some students as an accurate expression of their feelings. “When we were poor, you thought we were dogs./ When we loan you cash, you blame us for your debts./ When we build our industries, you called us polluters./ When we sell you goods, you blame us for global warming.”

Rather than blend in to the prevailing campus ethos of free debate, the more strident Chinese students seem to replicate the authoritarian framework of their homeland, photographing demonstration participants and sometimes drowning out dissent.

A Tibetan student who declined to be identified for fear of harassment said he decided not to attend a vigil for Tibet on his campus, which he also did not want identified because there are so few Tibetans there. “It’s not that I didn’t want to, I really did want to go — it’s our cause,” he said. “At the same time, I have to consider that my family’s back there, and I’m going back there in May.”

Another factor fueling the zeal of many Chinese demonstrators could be that they, too, intend to return home; the Chinese government is widely believed to be monitoring large e-mail lists.

Universities have often tried to accommodate the anger of their Chinese students. Before the Dalai Lama’s visit to the University of Washington, the campus Chinese Students and Scholars Association wrote to the university president expressing hopes that the visit would focus only on nonpolitical issues and not arouse anti-China sentiments. According to a posting on the group’s Web site, the university president, Mark A. Emmert, told them in a meeting that no political questions would be raised at the Dalai Lama’s speech. A spokesman said the university, which opened an office in Beijing last fall, had prescreened student questions before the Chinese students voiced their concerns.

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

A lecture by a Tibetan monk at U.S.C.

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

The lecture drew Chinese students who angrily questioned him and handed out fliers opposing the Dalai Lama.

Some experts say that colleges feel constrained from reining in the more extreme protests through a combination of concerns about cultural sensitivity and a desire to expand their own ties with China.

“I think there tends to be a great deal of self-censorship,” said Peter Gries, director of the Institute for U.S.-China Issues at the University of Oklahoma, “and not just among American China scholars but among the whole web of people who do business with China, including school administrators.”

At the U.S.C. lecture, the Chinese students arrived early to distribute handouts on Tibet and China that contained a jumble of abbreviated history, slogans and maps with little context. A chart showing that infant mortality in Tibet had plummeted since 1951, when the Communist Chinese government asserted control, did not provide any means for comparison with mortality rates in China or other countries.

One photograph showed the Dalai Lama with Heinrich Harrer, author of “Seven Years in Tibet” and a one-time member of the Nazi Party — hence the question about the Dalai Lama’s connection to Hitler, who died when the Dalai Lama was nine. The question about slavery referred to the feudal system in place in Tibet until the mid-20th century. Another photograph purported to show a Tibetan drum that, according to the caption, was covered with “a virgin girl’s skin.”

The students said they were frustrated by a sense that many accounts of the recent riots did not reflect the violence and destruction by the Tibetan protesters, who vandalized shops owned by Han Chinese (the ethnic majority in China). According to official Chinese news sources, 22 died in the rioting.

Much of the anger has the tenor of disillusionment. During the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, the Western news media was seen as a source of otherwise elusive truth.

“We thought Western media is very objective,” said Chou Wu, a 28-year-old working on his doctorate in material science, “and what it turned out is that Western media is even more biased than Chinese media. They’re no better, and even more, they’re against us.”

Students argue that China has spent billions on Tibet, building schools, roads and other infrastructure. Asked if the Tibetans wanted such development, they looked blankly incredulous. “They don’t ask that question,” said Lionel Jensen, a China scholar at Notre Dame. “They’ve accepted the basic premise of aggressive modernization.”

That may be, some experts suggest, because the students whose families can afford to send them abroad are the ones who have benefited the most from China’s economic liberalization.

Spring Zheng, 27, another graduate student at U.S.C., dismissed the notion that her patriotism stemmed from the government’s efforts to use the schools to instill national pride, particularly after Tiananmen Square.

Rather, Ms. Zheng said, “We have witnessed with our own eyes about the rapid change of China. China is developing fast, and Chinese people’s lives” are “becoming better and better, fast.”

As the U.S.C. session wound to a close, the organizer, Lisa Leeman, a documentary film instructor, pleaded for a change in tone. “My hope for this event, which I don’t totally see happening here, is for people on both, quote, sides to really hear each other and maybe learn from each other,” Ms. Leeman said. “Are there any genuine questions that don’t stem from a political point of view, that are really not here to be on a soap box?”

At that moment, the bottle hit the wall.

SHUANG MIAO, China — Li Rifu packed a lot of emotional freight into his first car. Mr. Li, a 46-year-old farmer and watch repairman, and his wife secretly hoped a car would improve the odds of their sons, then 22 and 24, of finding girlfriends, marrying and producing grandchildren.

A year and a half later, the plan seems to be working. After Mr. Li purchased his Geely King Kong for the equivalent of $9,000, both sons quickly found girlfriends. His older son has already married, after a short courtship that included a lot of cruising in the family car, where the couple stole their first furtive kisses.

“It’s more enclosed, more clandestine,” said Li Fengyang, Mr. Li’s elder son, during a recent family dinner, as his bride blushed deeply.

Western attention to China’s growing appetite for automobiles usually focuses on its link to mounting dependence on foreign oil, escalating demand on natural resources like iron ore, and increasing emissions of global warming gases.

But millions of Chinese families, like millions of American families, do not make those connections. For them, a car is something both simpler and more complicated.

J. D. Power & Associates calculates that four-fifths of all new cars sold in China are bought by people who have never bought a car before — not even a used car. That number has remained at that level for each of the last four years. By contrast, less than a tenth of new cars in the United States are purchased by people who have never bought a new car before, and fewer than 1 percent of all new cars are sold to people who have never bought a new or used car before.

China’s explosive growth in first-time buyers is the driving force behind the country’s record car sales, up more than eightfold since 2000. It is the reason China just passed Japan to become the world’s second-largest car market, behind the United States.

One change in Chinese attitudes is already clear and likely to have broad implications worldwide: even first-time buyers are becoming more sophisticated and want better cars.

China’s domestic carmakers like Geely and Chery, once feared by Detroit and European automakers as eventual exporters to Western markets, have watched their sales gain modestly, stagnate or drop in the last year — even while the overall Chinese market has continued to grow roughly 20 percent a year.

The beneficiaries have been the joint ventures of multinationals that sell cars here that are designed overseas, like the Buick Excelle, Volkswagen Jetta and Toyota Camry. Practically every auto expert had expected the multinationals to lose market share rapidly to low-cost domestic automakers.

Instead, Chinese car buyers, including first-time buyers, have become more discriminating about the comfort, styling and reliability of the cars they buy. As a result, instead of planning to conquer overseas markets, local manufacturers are having to redouble their efforts in this market.

“Customers are moving up, they want the bigger, more established brands,” said Michael Dunne, the managing director for China at J. D. Power. “They’d rather wait, save and buy higher on the ladder instead of buying a smaller car.”

Back in the fall of 2006, the Li family did not want to wait, especially Mr. Li.

When the Li family bought their car, they agreed to extensive interviews with each family member in Shuang Miao, a rural village in east-central China’s Zhejiang Province. They later agreed to follow-up telephone interviews over the last year and a half and then a long family dinner in Shuang Miao last week to review their experience as first-time car owners. What emerges is a portrait of the rapidly expanding role of cars in the fast-changing ways in which China’s people socialize, marry, raise families and, possibly, die.

Li Rifu was so excited on the day that he bought his first car in September 2006 that he woke before dawn. He fixed breakfast for his wife and two grown sons, then climbed on his white motorcycle for a short trip he had been anticipating for many years.

Mr. Li had spent most of his life here in his ancestral farm village, nestled at the base of a steep hill. The embodiment of China’s version of the American dream, he is largely self-taught. He learned to fix watches, and got a job as a foreman in a coal mine in nearby Anhui Province by fixing the mine owner’s watch. After saving some money, he came home to start a successful business that now employs five peasants raising flowers for landscapers.

That September morning, Mr. Li rode down the dirt alleys of his village and over a muddy, bamboo-lined stream where local women washed clothing on rocks jutting out into the sluggish current. He reached a four-lane paved road, then a six-lane road, and puttered on to his destination in the nearby city of Taizhou: a car dealership.

Over the course of the half-hour journey, Mr. Li was too excited to heed the persistent and unexplained pain at the base of his back.

He had really wanted a black car. But his sons preferred white, saying that it was a more popular choice for their generation, and Mr. Li had given in before he ever set out for the dealership.

“Without this car, my two sons wouldn’t be able to find wives — the girls would not marry them,” he said, recalling that when he courted his wife in the early 1980s, he needed only a bicycle. He ruined a half-dozen tires carrying her on the back of the bicycle for their outings.

Mr. Li took a white Geely King Kong compact sedan for a short test drive, then returned to the dealership and climbed three flights of stairs to a cashier’s office. He pulled a stack of currency thicker than a brick out of a black shoulder bag and paid the equivalent of $9,000 for the car; he would later pay an additional $1,000 for a license plate.

“The next few days, everyone will want to drive it,” he said proudly, a prediction that proved true. Mr. Li talked of his dream of someday driving across China to visit Beijing and Tibet, while acknowledging he would need more driver’s education classes before those days-long journeys would be possible.

Car ownership helped Mr. Li bid for bigger contracts for more flowers. “My customers said, ‘Wow, you came to visit me in a car’ — it puts the negotiation on a whole different level,” he said.

Several months after he bought the car, Mr. Li’s elder son, Fengyang, did indeed find a girlfriend, Jin Ya, a beautiful young saleswoman for China Mobile, a cellphone service. In the space of five months, they had gone to the local marriage registry and been legally wed. Today, both say they want a child someday.

At the family dinner this week, Ms. Jin bridled at the idea that young women in China consider a man to be marriage material only if he can take them on dates in a car.

“Not me, not me!” she said passionately, before reluctantly acknowledging that “other girls do say that you need a car.”

But as their Geely King Kong was bringing the Li family new joy — Mr. Li’s increased business, Fengyang and Ya’s courtship — tragedy struck: Li Rifu and his wife, Chen Yanfe, were each found to have cancer.

Ms. Chen’s reproductive tract cancer has gone into remission after $7,000 in medical bills. But Mr. Li’s fist-size malignant prostate cancer tumor — which turned out to be the cause of the mysterious back pain that was bothering him when he first bought the car — has resisted two operations and four rounds of chemotherapy. The cost: more than $40,000.

With payments from the local health insurance fund capped at $4,300 a person per year, Mr. Li has had to sell many of his possessions, and still he has had to go into debt. He wore a cap to the family dinner this week, self-conscious about the loss of his hair from chemotherapy.

In two weeks, he will go to a leading hospital in Shanghai for more surgery, a five-hour drive to the north, followed by two more rounds of chemotherapy. But he will not be going in the family car: he sold it for nearly $8,000 last year to help cover his medical expenses.

It is a common occurrence in this country, nominally communist, but with little or no safety net. While many families are scrambling into the middle class and buying cars, others are falling out of the middle class because of business reversals, medical bills or other problems, and are unable to buy replacements for their first car.

Zhu Jinyung, a machinery repairman who lives close to Shuang Miao, said that his family had bought a cheap domestic car in 1994 after enjoying initial success in the plastic injection molding business.

“The business didn’t work out,” and the car had to be sold, he said.

Sadly, the Li family has known new tragedy recently. Their younger son, Fengwei, had also found a girlfriend with the help of the family car, the daughter of a manager at a large factory, an impressive person to Li Rifu. But the girlfriend’s father was killed two weeks ago when a construction crane at the factory accidentally dropped its load on him after a steel pin broke.

Despite it all, Li Rifu tries to remain optimistic. He now dreams of regaining his health, earning back the money he has spent on medical care and then — like a growing number of his countrymen — buying a bigger, more impressive car than the Geely compact he had to sell.

“If I get another car,” he said, “I’ll get a better-quality car, with even nicer seats and better steering.”