The Contest of the Century (24 page)

The new emphasis on National Humiliation History proved hugely popular; its themes were used to frame major political events. During the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from British rule, Jiang Zemin described the occupation of Hong Kong as “the epitome of the humiliation that China suffered.” Speaking to a huge crowd in Beijing two days after the handover, he announced: “The return of Hong Kong marks an end to the 100-year national humiliation.” When a NATO bomb hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, a
People’s Daily
article thundered:
“It is 1999, not 1899.… This is not the age when Western powers plundered the imperial palace at will.… The Chinese people are not to be bullied.… In the veins of the Chinese people circulate the blood of the anti-imperialist patriots over a period of 150-plus years.” The slogan “Never Forget National Humiliation, Rejuvenate China” started to appear on signs in parks. An aerial photo shows a group of Chinese police forming the phrase with their bodies as part of a parade-ground drill. In the aftermath of a 2001 diplomatic standoff between China and the U.S. after China shot down a U.S. spy plane, the government declared a National Humiliation Day in mid-September. Thousands of students turned out to celebrate the occasion at the Summer Palace. “This is the national phrase of China,” says the historian Zheng Wang. “It is the key to [the] cultural and historic formation of Chinese nationalism.”

——

At first sight, it seems an odd sort of political project, to encourage national regeneration by constantly harping on past suffering. Not only is history written by the victors, but it usually dwells on the victories. Instead, China has developed a form of hair-shirt nationalism, the manipulation of the authority that comes from past suffering to forge a permanent sense of victimhood. The Communist Party has faced a slow-burning threat to its legitimacy ever since it dumped Marx for the market and dropped the Mao cult of personality, a threat that was only exacerbated after it turned the army on its own people in Tiananmen. Chinese sometimes talk about their
xinyang weiji
, a crisis of faith which has eaten away at society as the old Confucian or socialist sense of order has eroded. The emphasis on humiliation has helped the Communist Party create a sense of unity that had been fracturing, and to define a Chinese identity fundamentally at odds with American modernity. This strand of nationalism has become an important part of its claim to maintaining a monopoly of political power, a deliberate project to mold the historical instincts of young Chinese.

The crude version of history that is portrayed in Chinese textbooks is scorned in private by Chinese academics, but it is a dangerous orthodoxy to oppose. One of the most dramatic acts of censorship in recent times involved the writing of history—and not just any history, but the story behind the burning of the Summer Palace. In 2006, the authorities closed a magazine called
Freezing Point
after it published an article by Zhongshan University historian Yuan Weishi which took issue with what he saw as the
blind nationalism and anti-foreigner sentiment of school textbooks. The official Chinese histories, he said, completely glossed over the mistakes made in the later years of the Qing dynasty. Professor Yuan did not doubt the official version of how the palaces and gardens at the Summer Palace had been destroyed. But he suggested that China broke its word by arresting the diplomats and killing the soldiers. The Qing rulers, he said, had been asking for trouble. He also objected to the way the Boxer Rebellion was constantly praised as “a magnificent feat of patriotism,” while the violence against foreigners was ignored. “Our youth are still drinking wolf’s milk,” Yuan wrote, a reference to the excuse people gave during the Cultural Revolution for violent excesses. The new generation of textbooks “suggest that the current
Chinese culture is superior and unmatched and that outside culture is evil and corrodes the purity of existing culture.… To use this kind of logic to quietly exert a subtle influence on our children is an unforgivable harm.”

For daring to criticize the official verdict, Yuan Weishi was vilified. He had “attempted to vindicate the criminal acts of the invading powers,” as the propaganda authorities put it. Li Datong, managing editor of the magazine, was fired.
Freezing Point
was later re-opened under new editors, but only on condition that its first issue carry an article entitled “The Main Theme of Modern Chinese History Is Anti-Imperialism and Anti-Feudalism.” Sipping Coca-Cola in a café next to his apartment a couple of years later, Li Datong described to me how control of history had been so central to the party’s hold on power and its legitimacy. He went through a long list of historical subjects, from the decline of science in the Qing and Ming dynasties to the Korean War, about which it was impossible to have an honest debate. “The legacy of a ruling party is the right to define history—they use history to brainwash people,” he said. “The textbooks say that history proved that such-and-such happened, that history chose the CCP to be the ruling party. They think this can convince people how great the CCP is.”

——

Totalitarian regimes are able to completely invent their own histories. North Korea can get away with claiming that Kim Jong-il wrote fifteen hundred books and composed six operas because no one can say otherwise. But China is no longer that sort of regime. Though dictatorships censor their histories, they cannot create them in a vacuum. The CCP may have manipulated the idea of “national humiliation” after Tiananmen for its own ends, but it did not make it up. To understand the force of modern Chinese nationalism, it is important to recognize that the CCP has helped revive an older intellectual tradition that had its roots in the early years of the Chinese republic and the attempt to forge a modern nation-state after the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912. The patriotic-education campaign has been so influential in part because it taps into a long-standing emotional reflex about what it means to be Chinese. As the historian William Callahan puts it:
“It would not be an
exaggeration to say that when the idea of ‘modern history’ took shape in China in the 1920s, it was guided by the history of national humiliation.”

The seminal event in the early years of the republic was the May Fourth Movement, a youthful protest which encapsulated the new country’s search for a place in the modern world. The ideas behind May Fourth came to be characterized by the slogan “Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy,” but it was also steeped in the nationalism of bruised pride. At the end of the 1919 Versailles Conference, which awarded Germany’s possessions in China to Japan, Chinese students who were living in Paris surrounded the hotel of the Chinese delegation to prevent them from leaving to sign such a humiliating treaty. On hearing the news from France, a group of around three thousand students in Beijing met at Tiananmen Gate on May 4 and decided to march on the house of Communications Minister Cao Rulin. According to one of the demonstrators, a student named Luo Jialun, the crowd started cursing Cao as a “traitor to the country” when they arrived at his door. They then proceeded to storm into his house. Cao changed into a policeman’s outfit and escaped over the back wall, injuring his leg along the way. Zhang Zongxiang, a former minister to Japan who had been visiting that day, was not so lucky: he was beaten with iron rods torn from an old bed and left nearly dead. Cao’s house was then burned to the ground. The historian Rana Mitter summed up the launch of the May Fourth Movement this way: “The combination of these factors—
youth, internationalism, and violence—would shape not just the day of the demonstrations, but much of the path taken by twentieth-century China.”

As republican China struggled to find its way in the 1920s and 1930s, the feeling of injured national honor was a powerful political reflex among the new urban middle classes being established in cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Political leaders used this aggrieved nationalism as a way to appeal to the new constituencies and social organizations that were developing. When Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists asserted control over the country in 1927, they decreed a National Humiliation Commemoration Day. It is worth noting that the controversial “nine-dash line” map of the South China Sea was drawn up during this period, one example of the way China’s current territorial claims are wrapped up in this mentality of restoring injured pride.

Chiang Kai-shek kept a daily diary for two decades, and at the top right corner of each page he wrote the same words—
xue chi
, “wipe out humiliation.” The weaker he got politically, the harder he pushed the humiliation narrative. Shortly before he lost the Civil War to the Communists, he published a book called
China’s Destiny
, which blamed much of the country’s ills on foreigners. The text was scorned even by the Chinese intellectuals who still supported his regime, but it was priced cheaply and proved a huge hit. “During the past hundred years, the citizens of the entire country, suffering under the yoke of the unequal treaties which gave foreigners special ‘concessions’ and extra-territorial status in China, were unanimous in their demand that the national humiliation be avenged, and the state be made strong,” he wrote. When this nationalist potboiler was released, his wife, Meiling, happened to be in the U.S., trying to raise money for the anti-Communist cause, and Chiang himself was about to be awarded the Legion of Merit. An English-language version of the book was first shelved and then heavily edited to take out the fire-breathing passages. Lest Chiang’s views about the West gain too wide a circulation,
the State Department classified its copy of the Chinese original as “top secret.”

The emphasis on humiliation and suffering in these histories actually has even deeper roots. China celebrates many of the usual sorts of historical heroes—brave generals and great thinkers. But it also reserves a special place for Goujian, the king of the state of Yue in the Warring States period (around the fifth century
B.C
.), whose story strikes a very different emotional chord. Having been captured by the rival king of Wu, Goujian set about trying to be as submissive as it was possible to be. He slept amid the horse manure of the rival king and even tasted the king’s excrement. When he was eventually freed and allowed to return home, he spent the next two decades submitting himself to one humiliation after another in order to keep his desire for revenge intense. The Chinese phrase
woxin changdan
(“sleeping on brushwood and tasting gall”) stems from Goujian’s nightly exercise in self-flagellation, when he would sleep on a bed of brushwood and lick a gallbladder full of bile. It was this regimen of suffering and self-victimization that gave him the strength finally to defeat the king of Wu. The story of Goujian is
“as familiar to Chinese schoolchildren as the biblical stories of Adam
and Eve or David and Goliath are to American youngsters,” wrote Paul Cohen, the American historian who has brought the mythical story to the attention of a wider Western audience. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Goujian story was particularly popular in the 1920s and 1930s, when National Humiliation History began to take off. It also gained another lease on life in the 1990s and 2000s.

——

Though it is always tempting to think that everything in China is mapped out by an all-powerful Communist Party, the reality is that modern nationalism is very much a two-way process. The Communist Party has been happy to fan the sense of victimhood to buttress its own legitimacy. Yet the foundational myths that are at the heart of today’s nationalism have their origin well before the Communists took power, and will not disappear if they should ever fall. At the same time that the party has been pushing its own “patriotic education,” the themes of victimhood and resentment at the U.S. have flourished in their own right among young educated Chinese. The publishing industry has had a series of huge successes with potboiler polemics, in the Ann Coulter style, raging against the West. They started with the 1996 hit
China Can Say No
, written by a group of young intellectuals, which warned that China risked being “culturally strangled” and turned into a “slave” if it did not resist its infatuation with America. Two of the authors had taken part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, but in the book they turned their ire on activists such as Fang Lizhi, the astrophysicist who inspired some of the 1989 protesters and ended up an exile in the U.S. after spending a year in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

Chinese intellectual life in the 1980s had been dominated by a fascination with the West and a thirst for political experimentation, but in the years after Tiananmen there has also been a strong counter-reaction, a popular clarion call that China needs to stand up for itself and to find its own path, resisting the temptations of the West. A string of popular anti-American titles have been released in recent years, with titles like
The Plot to Demonize China
. In 2009, the authors of
China Can Say No
published a follow-up, this time called
Unhappy China
, which was just as big a hit. Detailing a long list of tales about continued Western condescension
toward the Chinese, the book urges China’s leaders to turn the nation into a hegemon, or be cast aside. The writers and audience for these books, mostly young, are not party apparatchiks. They see themselves as loyal to a China that is a great and respected nation, not to the Communist Party.

The most famous megaphone of modern Chinese nationalism is the
Global Times
, the third-most-popular newspaper in the country. With a mix of conspiracy and indignation that has echoes of Fox News,
Global Times
has built a huge successful franchise by fanning the flames of any perceived slight to China and by criticizing the weaknesses of the U.S. and Japan. It has come to dominate the market for full-throated populism. Hu Xijin, the paper’s dynamic editor, once described Chinese liberals as “the cancer cells that will lead to the demise of China” and “a key tool in the hands of the Americans who want to topple China.” However, it can also be quite critical of the government, especially concerning Beijing’s dogged support of North Korea. In a way,
Global Times
is the perfect example of the two-way nature of Chinese nationalism. It is published by the same group that produces the
People’s Daily
, the party’s mouthpiece and distiller of official truths, which gives it an official stamp of approval. But it is also far more interesting and controversial than the dreary
People’s Daily
, projecting its own abrasive worldview and building its own constituency among the public.
Global Times
does not provide the official China line, but it is the Communist Party’s nationalist alter ego. That alone makes it essential reading.