Our Desk | Fresh flowers or tanks

Aries Un

While Beijing’s high-profile military extravaganza on September 3 triggered myriads of speculation over its underlying intentions on the world stage, it also set off a heated online debate amongst students at the University of Macau as to which one was the most appropriate way to commemorate post-war peace: fresh flowers or tanks.
A cover picture bearing the Chinese slogan of “to remember warfare with fresh flowers, not tanks”, posted by the university’s elected student union on its Facebook page on the same day, drew hundreds of comments instantaneously from university students.
Such a politically suggestive stance blatantly announced by the student body essentially placed the students into four cliques, namely the people who lambasted the group members for imposing a personal viewpoint on the rest of their colleagues; the people who appreciated the group’s rare act of courage in freely expressing their views; the people who favored the content in the picture, and finally the people who expressed strong disgust at the idea suggested by the slogan.
In fact, no clique would be the ultimate winner in the dispute as different parties view Beijing’s muscle flexing based on their own rationale and self-interpretation of the history, just the same as most political commentators.
It sounds absolutely legitimate for one nation, which has been victimized and downtrodden during foreign aggression, to flaunt their whole arsenal on an occasion marking the victory over its former oppressor after 70 years. Aside from promoting the clichéd message of peace, how could the nation’s leader miss out on such an opportunity to tell the world something more under the spotlight?
Likewise, the student union’s motive behind the contentious phrase is equally comprehensible and justifiable, and it has an absolute right to voice their own views towards the military review just as much as the opposition students have a right to impeach the group in Macau – one of the few Chinese cities with a scrap of democracy.
Furthermore, we surely don’t need someone’s comments on Facebook to remind us of that flowers do not help on the battlefield, and that we should instead have some kind of daily emblem reminiscent of the fallouts from warfare and atrocities in order not to return to violence. The only message that came into my mind upon reading the slogan was the sheer promotion of peace, as simple as that. If there is a wider picture to look at, why bother with the comparatively irrelevant minutiae.
No matter how one tries to defend his or her political standpoint, objectors will always remain against it, given the disparity of respective perception and being from different milieus. It is always encouraging to see productive and constructive discussions among students, yet a section of that Facebook debate among the university students was simply disappointing.
Scrolling down the comments list on the cover picture reveals nothing more than a catfight where some local students even made ad hominem attacks against mainland students who in return fought back with derogatory remarks.
It is true that critical and objective thinking is not always necessary nowadays when it comes to online debates. Yet trying to out speak others without solid arguments on a social-networking platform where a certain amount of personal information is available to public is seriously not a wise move, especially when much of it is done by students from a so-called first-class university, which prides itself on producing well-rounded graduates every year.