By ANDREW JACOBS
BEIJING — As an English-speaking talk show host on China Central Television, Yang Rui likes to think of himself as a bridge between East and West.
He has a soft spot for tweed newsboy caps and Sherlock Holmes-style pipes and takes pride in his communications degree from Cardiff University in Wales. He may exult in China’s growing might, but made sure his son attended college in the United States. His program on the state-run CCTV, “Dialogue,” often includes both foreign and Chinese guests.
“I have to remind myself that I’m not representing myself,” he once remarked. “I’m representing the image of a country.”
But this week Mr. Yang revealed another side of his persona in a torrent of microblog messages that derided some foreigners as “trash” and accused Western men of seducing local women in an effort to spy on China.
“The Ministry of Public Security must clean out foreign trash, arrest foreign thugs and protect innocent girls,” he wrote to his 820,000 followers. “Behead the snakeheads, the unemployed Americans and Europeans who come to China to make money, traffic in people and mislead the public by encouraging them to emigrate.”
Mr. Yang’s comments aggravated what many residents from abroad say is an increasingly palpable rush of anti-foreign hostility that often quietly coexists, paradoxically, alongside effusive admiration for the West. Two ugly situations involving foreigners have helped stoke the antipathy.
In one, a Russian-born cellist with the Beijing Symphony Orchestra was captured on video using boorish language to attack a fellow train passenger who objected to him putting his bare feet on her seat. Despite a videotaped apology, he was fired this past week.
The more serious case involved a drunken British tourist apparently sexually assaulting a Chinese woman on a Beijing street. The video, also posted on the Internet, showed a group of passers-by pummeling the man into unconsciousness.
In the days that followed, the police in Beijing announced a 100-day campaign to rid the country of foreigners who are living or working in China illegally. The initiative, promoted through banners and articles in the state news media, encourages citizens to report those suspected of violating the law to the authorities.
Whether coincidental or not, the campaign dovetails with a fusillade of attacks in the state news media. Xinhua, the state-run news agency, ran an editorial at the top of its home page last week that accused other governments of using reporters from their countries to “tactically control” China’s image in the overseas news media.
On Friday, People’s Daily, the ruling Communist Party mouthpiece and a political weather vane, described Western efforts to export democracy and human rights to China as a new form of colonialism. “They are evil acts that would harm society,” the article said.
Analysts suggest the rising nationalist sentiment may be related to a spate of events that have unnerved the Chinese leadership, including territorial disputes in the South China Sea, a sharply slowing domestic economy and the political turmoil prompted by the downfall of the populist up-and-comer Bo Xilai. Mr. Bo, accused of corruption and violating party discipline, is in detention and awaiting his fate, as is his wife, Gu Kailai, who is implicated in the death of a British businessman. The backdrop for these uncertainties is the once-a-decade change in leadership scheduled for later this year.
While the party has in the past stirred the nationalist caldron during times of uncertainty, some analysts said they thought that following that script today could prove harmful to China when it is trying to burnish its soft power.
“It doesn’t help the party’s image to be retaliating against foreigners during the leadership transition,” said Bo Zhiyue, a Chinese political analyst at the East Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore. “I find the whole campaign puzzling.”
The upshot has been a host of inconveniences for those with foreign passports. In recent weeks, scores of scholars and tourists have had their visa applications rejected by Chinese embassies around the world. In Beijing, foreign journalists are on tenterhooks, wondering whether the expulsion this month of an American correspondent for Al Jazeera is a taste of things to come.
(Mr. Yang, the CCTV host, for one, has called for a crackdown on journalists who “demonize” China. He also cheered the departure of the Jazeera reporter, Melissa Chan, with a word that could be charitably translated as “shrew.” Mr. Yang did not respond to requests for comment.)
On Friday night, a phalanx of three dozen officers made the rounds of Sanlitun, a neighborhood popular with foreigners. After checking passports at a Mexican restaurant, the officers could be seen leading away an African patron.
Western culture has also taken something of a hit. A joint Chinese-American jazz training program scheduled for June was canceled over “visa issues.” Last weekend, the police cited a lack of permits when they forced the cancellation of the musical “Oklahoma!” — which was largely cast with non-Chinese and partly financed by the United States Embassy. The Philadelphia Orchestra, which performs next week at the National Center for Performing Arts in Beijing, has been dismayed to find many of its Chinese corporate sponsors inexplicably backing out at the last minute.
“We’re used to periodic crackdowns, but the atmosphere for foreigners seems to be more hysterical than in the past,” said Jeremiah Jenne, an American researcher and history professor in Beijing who maintains the blog Granite Studio. “This time feels different, because people are being encouraged to dial in and report their neighbors.”
In addition to the consternation and hand-wringing, foreign residents have expressed bewilderment over the rapid shift in public sentiment. It is a seesawing of emotion that can veer from the worshipful to the venomously resentful.
Those conflicting impulses have deep roots. When the British statesman Earl Macartney arrived in China in the late 18th century seeking trading concessions, he was politely rebuffed by the Qianlong emperor, who thought China was sufficiently wealthy and cultured. In the century that followed, as swathes of coastal China were carved up by foreign powers, educated Chinese began wondering whether their civilization might be inherently inferior to that of the West. In the first half of the 20th century, the tensions between those advocating Chinese self-reliance and those seeking modernization through opening up to the West were a frequent source of strife.
Mao Zedong and his Communist Revolution sought to put an end to any lingering self-doubt by banishing most foreign residents — and Western notions of human rights and electoral democracy. The next three decades, which brought famine, political upheaval and economic stagnation, turned out to be disastrous for liberal thinkers.
Hong Huang, an entrepreneur who was one of the few Chinese to study in the United States during the peak of xenophobia in the 1970s, says many Chinese were confused by the sudden change in official attitude that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. Once branded as enemies of the people, foreigners were placed on a pedestal in the 1980s, when Beijing was eager to court Western expertise and capital. In those days, she recalled, foreigners used special currency to shop at well-stocked Friendship Stores and stayed in hotels that were off-limits to Chinese.
“The government made people feel like second-class citizens in their own country and inadvertently created these feelings of massive insecurity,” said Ms. Hong, whose mother taught English to Mao and whose stepfather was foreign minister. “When you have this kind of insecurity, it doesn’t take much for people to turn uncontrollably emotional.”
More recently, many Chinese have come to feel maligned by the West despite the marked contrast between the robust growth in China, even if at a slower pace, and the economic frailties of Europe and the United States.
But apart from the enviable achievements, there is a simmering sense among educated Chinese that something is missing. The self-doubts are fed by corruption, censorship and the widening gap between the haves and have-nots. Even with their weakened economies, Western countries — with their rule of law and sense of security — still have an enduring appeal when contrasted to the vagaries of authoritarian rule.
Dai Qing, a dissident writer who often criticizes the Communist Party, said those long-buried frustrations were awakened when ordinary Chinese saw official favoritism toward foreigners, but felt their own government was unresponsive. “If a Japanese tourist has his bicycle stolen, an entire city department will work around the clock to retrieve it,” she said. “They would never do that for a Chinese person.”
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