The Contest of the Century (27 page)

The Olympics were supposed to provide the catharsis from this psychological burden, to show that China could move from victim to victor. Instead, the buildup to the Games made many Chinese feel that the country was being subject to a series of damning judgments, as if the West did not yet believe China was good enough. After all the changes and successes of the last three decades, many Chinese felt that the country was still not considered truly respectable. This was another reason to be furious at the Tibetans: they had tried to spoil the party. Beneath their bureaucratic exterior, the Tibetan riots exposed a kind of emotional rage among Chinese leaders, who experience such setbacks as a form of personal humiliation. At the same time, the contortions to avoid an open discussion about Tibet led even the more sensible members of the Chinese bureaucracy to take the most addled, paranoid positions. On one occasion, a very senior Chinese official was asked to explain why foreign journalists were banned from visiting Tibet except on carefully organized tours. Journalists could not be trusted, she said, because all the photos of the Dalai Lama hanging on the walls of homes and offices in Tibet had been brought in by foreign reporters. Tapping her finger on the table for emphasis, she repeated: “Every single photo.”

SHALLOW AND INTENSE

Li Yang was about halfway through a three-hour teaching session at the English-language boot camp when he started calling attention to me. “We have an important guest, Jiefu, from a British newspaper,” he announced, using a Chinese transliteration of my name. I was sitting at the back, and all the students turned round to look at me. They laughed when Li told them, “He has come down here to taste our
jiaozi
[dumplings].” Gradually, more and more of his comments seemed to be aimed in my direction. “The best place to teach English would be in church, but I do not think that Comrade Hu would allow this—don’t you think, Jiefu?” he said, smiling.

Li insists that his entire routine is improvised, even when some of the sessions last for hours. To prove it, after a while he decided to summon me to the stage. Several hundred young Chinese students looked around at me with an expectant gaze, perhaps suspecting some sport might be in the offing. It would have been extremely rude to refuse, so, somewhat embarrassed, I wandered onstage. Li started questioning me about my life in China. Then he asked me what I thought to be the most impressive thing about China. I mumbled something, I believe, about the striking ambition and energy of ordinary Chinese people to improve their lives. “
Wow!
” thundered Li. “Listen to this. Jiefu, say that again. Repeat that, please, Jiefu. Everyone, listen closely.” My onstage ordeal continued for another ten minutes, during which Li anticipated one of my strongest reactions—and something that has also been a persistent criticism of his school. Looking out at the rapt audience hanging on his every word, with red flags lined up all across the auditorium, and monitors in army fatigues standing in the aisles to watch over the students, Li turned to me and said, “Jiefu, you must think this is a lot like the Cultural Revolution.”

Class eventually broke for dinner, a school meal served on metal trays with four different compartments, one each for the meat dish, vegetable, rice, and fruit. The Chinese New Year was only a few hours away, which the students would spend in a class, but there was time for one more entertainment: a torch rally. The students assembled in drill formation on an adjacent sports field to watch some fireworks and to listen to a short speech by Li. Then, with their monitors each carrying a torch, they marched in formation around the campus, chanting slogans in English about “Success” and “Achievement.” I watched, unsure what to think. If there had not been so much laughter in the air, if the students had not been so charming and curious, and if these kids had not been sacrificing the most important holiday of the year to learn a foreign language, then there might have been something just a little fascist about the spectacle.

After two days in his company, I still could not decide whether Li Yang was really tapping a deep vein of nationalism, or whether his anti-American shtick was just performance art, a ritual about humiliation and sacrifice that his students understand and laugh at but which they do not really believe. That is the broader challenge in trying to understand
Chinese nationalism. The last decade has seen a series of angry fits at the rest of the world, full of bitterness and bile, but these have quickly subsided. Is there a volcano of resentment waiting to explode, or are these just tantrums that will ease, the growing pains of a new great power adjusting to its place in the world? One of the most important questions about modern China is whether the nationalist chorus is relatively small, a rump of 10 percent of the population, who get more attention than they deserve, or whether it is the reflection of a set of attitudes that are ingrained into the national DNA.

Prasenjit Duara, an Indian scholar of China now based in Singapore, described the mood of some of the young Chinese nationalists this way: “Day 1: Eat at McDonald’s; Day 2: Throw rocks at McDonald’s; Day 3: Eat at McDonald’s.” There is, he says,
“a simultaneous superficiality and depth of nationalist feelings” in modern China. In each of the big nationalist outbursts, the Communist Party has for a moment looked vulnerable, as if the events might spin out of control, but it has then managed quickly to turn off the tap. After a NATO bomb hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, hundreds of Chinese students spent the next few days protesting outside and vandalizing the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. The atmosphere was feverish. Western residents of the city at the time said that for a couple of days they felt under threat if they stepped outside. And then the protests stopped. A Chinese friend of mine who was at university in Beijing at the time recalls turning up for class one morning to be told by a teacher to get on a bus, which dropped all the students off outside the U.S. Embassy. The next day, the bus was there again to take them to the embassy. On the third day, lectures went on as normal.

The anti-Japan protests in 2005 followed the same path. The week before the big Shanghai demonstration, there was a large protest in Beijing, and the week after, Guangzhou and Shenzhen held demonstrations. Then the movement fizzled, and the students returned to their classes. When we left Shanghai three years later, the cigarette shop on our block still had Japanese characters in the window. Duara’s observation also captures the central ambiguity at the heart of the Li Yang phenomenon, the simultaneous fascination with and distaste for the West. The generation of Chinese who have been through “patriotic education”
is the same generation that is exposed to the world through the Internet in ways that their parents could never have dreamed of and is attracted to all the same symbols of American consumerism. A year or so before I left Beijing, a new Apple Store opened, which I must have walked past fifty times. But I never once entered, for the simple reason that there was always a queue outside to get in.

Yet, at the same time, each cycle of nationalist spasms seems to get a bit bigger and a little more autonomous, further outside the control mechanisms of the state. Nationalist pressure has been an important factor in some of the disputes in the South China Sea, and has become increasingly influential in the argument with Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. In both cases, the populist online pressure found common cause with the sections of the military that want to take a more confrontational approach. As the protest waves become more intense, the leadership finds its room to maneuver more limited. The events that have produced demonstrations in recent years have been relatively minor—a stray bomb, a handful of textbooks, some unruly protests during an Olympics torch relay—yet each managed to create a paroxysm of angst that left the country temporarily off-balance. It begs the question of what might happen in the event of a major international incident—a 9/11-style terror attack, or a genuine confrontation with the Japanese navy in the East China Sea. The raw, popular nationalism does not dictate Chinese foreign policy, but at the very least it makes it hard for the government to back down or make concessions.

For the U.S. and other Western countries, the broader lesson is that they have to be aware that there will always be this emotional tension in the background of their relations with Beijing, a trauma which has yet to be fully resolved, and which makes its leaders at times hair-trigger sensitive to perceived slights. One of the most difficult tasks for American politicians will be to find a way to engage with the Chinese people over sensitive issues, from political reform to territorial disputes, in a way that does not step on any of these trip wires. At the same time, the U.S. has a responsibility to pressure its ally Japan to, at the very least, refrain from provocative gestures that revive historical tensions. By inflaming South Korea as well as China, such stunts harm not only Japan’s influence in the region, but also that of Washington.

Chinese liberals argue that it is the political system that nurtures the particular virulence of today’s nationalism. Hard-line views are very much a minority, they suggest, but, because political and historical debate is so curtailed, there is no room for nuance or context, and emotions are easily manipulated. Japan has a nationalist right wing whose views are often toxic, but their impact is diluted and absorbed by a more open political debate. If that liberal view is correct, then it is possible to imagine that, in the long run, political reform might draw some of the poison from Chinese nationalism. The anger of a small minority can multiply in strength under an authoritarian government that does not want to appear weak; but in a more open system, shrill voices find it harder to dominate the debate.

That is the theory, at least. Maybe a democratic China would have a more comfortable sense of its own identity and place in the world, as liberals and many in America hope. But it is equally possible to imagine a very different scenario, in which a loss of control by the Communist Party leads to even stronger nationalist pressures. The students who have taken part in anti-U.S. or anti-Japanese protests know one basic truth, that this is almost the only way they can safely take part in popular demonstrations. The Communist Party’s most vulnerable flank is at the nationalist, populist right. A party that loudly claims the mantle of national salvation cannot afford to look weak in the face of perceived slights. If the Communist Party’s grip on power ever did start to loosen seriously, it is not too hard to imagine an embattled Chinese leader searching for an anti-America or anti-Japan cause and placing it at the center of his agenda.

HARMONIZING THE WORLD

THE LARGE NEON SCREENS
on the corner of New York’s Broadway and Seventh Avenue are among the most visible and prestigious advertising sites in America. The signs are sixty feet high by forty feet wide and are seen by many of the half-million people who daily pass through Times Square. The spaces have been rented by Coca-Cola and by the Prudential insurance company; HSBC had its name in lights for a decade. The new name on the signs is not quite so familiar to most New York tourists: Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, the propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party. As well as renting the neon advertising screen, Xinhua has also taken the top floor of the forty-four-story skyscraper at 1540 Broadway—only a block away from the sumptuous new
New York Times
building designed by Renzo Piano with silver birch trees in the atrium.

The financial pressures that are slowly strangling many of the world’s media groups do not appear to be hampering Xinhua. In 2010, the agency opened a new twenty-four-hour English-language news channel called CNC World, which the group’s president, Li Congjun, described as an attempt to “present an international vision with a Chinese perspective.” Beijing has long complained of unfair treatment from what it
calls “the Western media.” Officials believe that if the world could just find out more about the reality of China, about its history and progress, then people would think very differently about the country. They want more good news, and if the BBC and CNN will not provide that service for the world, then Xinhua and the other arms of the official Chinese media will.

A decade ago, China was thought of as an inward-looking, developing country with modest international ambitions, whose leaders cared about little other than the next month’s GDP figures. But it is hard to think in quite the same way about a country that has such grand global ambitions for its media groups. China wants to crack the Western monopoly on news. According to several informed reports, China spent around $8.7 billion in 2011–12 on the overseas operations of just four news organizations—Xinhua, Chinese Central Television (CCTV), the English-language
China Daily
, and China Radio International. The entire budget for the BBC World Service is around $400 million a year. With big budgets come big goals. Beijing mainly wants to improve China’s image in the world, but it also hopes that Chinese news organizations can loosen the grip that American values of democracy, individualism, and human rights have on the international media business.
“While our media empires are melting away like the Himalayan glaciers, China’s are expanding,” Orville Schell, the director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, was quoted as saying—in the
New York Times
.