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April 16th 2008
(2) Chinese Patriotism Rears Its Misinformed Head
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Several blogs today report on a current trend with the popular instant messaging program MSN/Windows Live Messenger. 
Chinese internet users are adding a “love China” icon to their screen names in support of their country and in protest to perceived Western bullying seen in recent Olympic protests.
From SushiPanda, linked above:
Over half of my Chinese-Chinese friends on MSN have put the badge on their contact names, in defiance of all the anti-China bullying that they’re undoubtedly reading about in the Chinese newspapers, watching on the Chinese news, and scouring over on the hundreds of blogs and BBS’s peppering China’s cyberscape and devoted to propping up this country’s national pride.
I’ve no problem with patriotism, within limits of course, but we all know that information is manipulated in an unprecedented way in China and it’s a shame that the people - the good people of China - don’t realise why foreigners do protest. It’s nice to see that Chinese internet users can rally together like this, but just a shame they seem to have a misguided view.
[…] As people in the so-called West are protesting against China’s actions concerning Tibet, today protests from Chinese internet users against the ‘bullying’ by the Western media have taken a new form by adding “(L) China” to their MSN/Windows Live Messenger screen names. As my whole MSN looked red in no time, I searched for more information on the internet and I’ve found several blogs describing this phenomenon, which will probably grow even bigger in the next few days. http://shanghaiist.com/2008/04/16/nationalist-netizens-on-msn-messenger-heart-china.php http://home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20080416_love_china_blooms_on_msn_messenger.htm http://www.sushipanda.com/?p=333 http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/16/chinese-internet-users-say-enough-to-international-bullying/ http://myblogposts.com/love-china-love-olympics-show-it-via-msn-messenger/1412/ http://blog.eop.org.uk/422-chinese-patriotism-rears-its-misinformed-head/ […]
More to the point, why doesn’t that person upgrade their version of messenger?