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On 5 October 2008, the respected 74-year-old historian Yan Chongnian ...was signing copies of his new book, The Kangxi Emperor (Kangxi dadi ...), at the Xinhua Bookstore in Wuxi ... Professor Yan was the founding Director of the Manchu Research Institute (Manxue yanjiusuo ...) at the Beijing-based Academy of Social Sciences, but thanks to a series of popular lectures that had been repeatedly played on the primetime Lecture Room (Baijia jiangtan ...) programme on CCTV-10, he had also become a household name and a wealthy man. When he leaned down to sign a copy of his book, he was suddenly and forcefully slapped in the face twice. As the offender was pulled away he repeatedly shouted "Hanjian, Hanjian" (... ..., Han traitor, Han traitor) before a crowd of shocked onlookers.1
The offender, a mid-30s clothing entrepreneur from Shanghai named Huang Haiqing ..., was fined 1,000 yuan and sentenced to 15 days in the Wuxi lock-up. The day after his release, he posted a rambling justification for his actions on the Hanwang ... BBS site that he helped to moderate. Writing under the web-name "Great Wind of Han" (dahan zhi feng ...), Huang Haiqing argued that Yan Chongnian was whitewashing the brutal and barbaric nature of Manchu rule. Equating Professor Yan with David Irving and other Holocaust deniers, Huang asserted that the professor seemed to relish - with a smug, cheerful expression - the description of blood-soaked Manchu victories over the Han in his CCTV lectures, and even referred to the calculated slaughter of innocent Han subjects during the so-called Ten Days at Yangzhou (Yangzhou shiri ...) as a case of "cultural fusion" (wenhua ronghe ...) between the nomadic and sedentary cultures of China. After being repeatedly snubbed, Huang Haiqing felt he had no other option but to act, lashing out in anger in order to defend the honour of the Han people and seek justice (zhengyi ...) for past wrongdoings.2
The intellectual establishment in China quickly condemned Huang Haiqing as an irrational and disrespectful hooligan. But the wind of online opinion blew differently. Within hours, a witness reported the incident on the popular Tianya ... BBS site, eliciting...