Anti-elitism may have worrying backlash
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After being burgled last week, the Forbidden City has endured a spate of embarrassments. Given its questioned security failure and reported secret plan to build a private "rich club" for VIPs, its management is now facing claims of illiteracy.
During a public event to praise the police's swift success in solving the theft, the deputy curator of the Forbidden City Museum unveiled a silk banner, which contained a wrong character that changed the intended complimentary slogan into a message akin to "thanks for jeopardizing our national prosperity."
Forbidden City's clumsy public relations campaign has backfired. It tried to remedy its blemished reputation but instead became a pillory for online abuse.
However, it does not deserve such a wide scale of ridicule, as typos do accidentally occur, and the administrative staff that made the banner do not represent the broader academic level of the Forbidden City Museum.
What should be noted is that a sense of anti-elitism has pervaded online discussion, with the mocking of the Forbidden City merely the latest example thereof. The Forbidden City epitomizes the cultural establishment of China. Thus its ineptitude in basic Chinese spelling makes the accomplished museum elites and experts look foolish. This is exactly the kind of element that attracts netizens' malicious interest.
The growing anti-elitist contempt has firstly appropriated the meaning of words such as "elite" and "expert" and turned them from descriptive terms into derogatory ones.
As the reputation of people in these categories plummets, mistrust and disbelief ensue. From a certain perspective, elites are now arrogant knowledgeable people who are out to dupe the public, rather than to represent their interest. In particular, experts and scholars' association with enterprises or interest groups casts them as suspicious.
Anti-elitism is inevitable as a by-product of progress and development. As more and more people become richer and delve further into news, the mysterious veil of the elite classes unravels and their advantages dwindle. The public may feel closer to elites, and their respect will ebb. Both sides start misunderstandings with each other, however, with the public viewing elites as oppressive, and the lofty thinking the masses irrational.
Obviously an emerging China has to have an elites class, as economic and public affairs become more complicated and specialized. The nature of economic specialization requires elites to provide professional advice across every industrial sector.
Society perhaps has to pay a price for an anti-elitist dominance. Although it is far from being at this point now, the trajectory is worrisome. The public might be more intolerant toward rationality, if blunt voices, and somehow populist demagoguery may succeed in manipulating opinion.
The Forbidden City might envy its counterparts in Europe, such as the National Gallery in the UK and the Louvre Museum in France, which are held in awe.
It seems that in China, it is rare for people to cherish the cultural establishment because they think it is a symbol of elitism. This should be corrected.
