What, so this is news today? Well, news in China is always of the form “event+internet reaction,” which itself is some kind of recursive phenomenon, especially when there are naked or scantily clad people involved–with violence, corruption, repression following behind that.

So when Gong Li became a Singaporean, as they tell us she has (her husband is Singaporean, I believe), there was a bunch of internet hotheads that started the usual flame wars about her not loving her country, and these venal movie stars, know they nothing of loyalty, etc. One writer says it quite simply though: there are certain rights and freedoms that only a certain kind of passport can get you and those freedoms and rights are probably of some use to people of Gong Li’s profession and station in life.

I am not sure why they made such a hubbub about it this time, since as many articles point out Chinese movie stars, directors, and celebs have been doing this often and that doesn’t begin to mention all the Chinese students that end up emigrating and naturalizing in western countries.

The usual arguments are hashed and rehashed so there’s no need for me to repeat them here. However, I do think that this specious patriotism is not just some internet malcontents spewing off: this kind of danger is built into the so-called “healthy” type of patriotic education, perhaps in a way, i dont know, that Enlightenment Reason produced the Holocaust (cf. Horkheimer/Adorno). OK, that’s a bit half-baked, but when I am trying to get at is that they are flip sides of the same coin, and that by drilling into students and impressionable young people that you have to, by necessity, love your motherland, and give it your undying and unflinching loyalty and never renege on it, even when another passport could get your lower taxes and better shopping conditions, you create this kind of reflex, this kind of automatic association that occurs before life, experience, books, and a generally tolerant and cosmopolitan attitude can generally install something better in its place. And when you have that kind of intellectual–or shall we say, more accurately, *non-intellectual* reflex in place–you are going to savage anything that is critical or worse yet may even vitiate those tenets and sacred cows.

But then again my attitude towards sacred cows has always been: massacre the fuckers.

One of the writers linked above mentions “freedoms and rights” and all the social elites–the top students–that go abroad each year and effectively, don’t come back (at least in terms of nationality). Brain drain is something i first encountered as a topic in high school debate practice, but of course i, and most other azn-amerikkkans, have an intimate knowlege of brain drain because some of those brains are the ones that begat us. My father, as a scientist, never regrets moving to the US–where else would you want to go, what with all those jobs, the money, and that academic freedom tripe that everyone’s been telling me about?

Reading another unrelated blog post on Chinese internet censorship, i came across a point that most people who have lived here and talked to Chinese people know–they don’t give a shit about not reading the “truth” on TAM square in 89, because they are too busy having fun on the internet wacking off, buying stuff, and dissing people anonymously to care. However, I do think that people who decide to leave China–and who work in these generally intellectual-type professions–must, to some degree, care about this kind of freedom. Sure, their research might not be ideological in nature, which means that in some sense you could do it in China as well, but still, there is so much bureaucracy and other stuff from Chinese society that seeps into academe, and that is why the intellectual cultures of different countries are so different. That’s why the US, UK, Canada, Australia all sport different intellectual and academic cultures as well. And of course, not many CHinese writers are going to state this point, when talking about Gong Li who is, as we know, inconsequential to the fate of the Chinese people and the Republic for which they stand–and that point is that there are people that prize the kind of intellectual freedom that they can get in the West–to do the kind of research they want, to fulfill themselves as human beings–and they can’t get that in China. And there are reasons that they cannot get it. And to figure out what those reasons are, and to see what the Chinese ought to do about them, is, by far, much more pressing than the passport of middle-aged Loreal representative.