Why did the Chinese government escalate some international crises, such as the 1999 US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and not others, like the 1998 attacks on ethnic Chinese in Indonesia? Why did Chinese youth go from standing in front of tanks in 1989 to becoming the country’s staunchest patriots defending the 2008 Olympic flame in capital cities around the world? Zheng Wang’s book, Never Forget National Humiliation, looks at a particular dimension of China’s socio-political culturehistorical memory, to solve a number of puzzles about the country’s international and domestic politics that the mainstream, realist tradition of International Relations theory has a hard time explaining. Combining insights from the liberal and constructivist traditions, Wang examines Chinese foreign and domestic policies since Jiang Zemin’s ‘patriotic turn’ in the 1990s. Employing historical memory as the main explanatory variable, Wang’s analysis identifies the causal relationship between China’s official historical narrative, the country’s collective identity construction and its foreign policy. The stated aim of the book is to delineate with precision the extent to which ideational factors bring about conflict behaviours. Wang’s original theoretical framework directly links identity to political outcomes, locating three causal pathways in which ideational factors influence policy behaviour: as road maps, as focal points and as institutions. Although this framework heavily draws on insights that most constructivist and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) approaches have already incorporated, namely how cognitive constraints and biases can affect foreign policy-makers, Wang distinguishes himself by giving pride of place to memory. Examining the impact of historical memory and identity on cognition allows him to make sense of some otherwise puzzling instances of Chinese foreign behaviour like the ones mentioned above. Wang’s analysis of how China chooses to remember its past has great relevance for the present. It sheds light on topical questions about the political implications of national historiography, and the role that history education plays in a country’s domestic and foreign relations. Wang offers a map of the meanderings of Chinese historical memory, illustrating the Chinese Communist Party’s ideological evolution from communism to nationalism over the course of the last three decades. This transformation is set against a broader background of the change in China’s self-image during its millenary history.
The book details China’s Patriotic Education Campaign since the early 1990s and through to its latest developments in the twenty-first century, focusing on the content and objectives of the history curriculum. Wang sees historical memory both as a trigger of the country’s nationalistic education and as its product, placing it at the heart of China’s search for identity as a nation-state. His approach to the study of nationalism has both advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, Wang accounts for several of the dimensions of Chinese nationalism and avoids the classic top-down bottom-up dichotomy, by describing it not only instrumentally as a state-led ideology or political technique but also as a sentiment pervading civil society and originating from shared memories. Regrettably, the discussion occasionally suffers from a rather muddled understanding of the main terms used in nationalism studies. This severely undermines Wang’s attempt to redefine Chinese nationalism in the last chapter. Nonetheless, overall the discussion remains pertinent, empirically accurate and illuminating. The book benefits from research in primary sources ranging from educational texts and official documents to cultural and popular material, introducing new material to the English-speaking academic debate. Cases are cogently argued and empirically substantiated. An instance of this is the discussion of the change in the description of well-known historical figures reflecting an official change in historical perspectives: General Zuo Zongtang of the Qing dynasty went from being a peasant-suppressing devil in the old textbooks to being a foreign-defeating hero in the new ones. Never Forget National Humiliation appeals to a broad readership, ranging from scholars and students of international relations, nationalism and history, to policymakers and anyone interested in the internal workings of China’s worldview. Accessible to non-specialists thanks to its clarity, Wang’s book does at the same time provide a rigorous contribution to the theoretical debate about the role of national identity in shaping political outcomes. Finally, the book takes on an advocacy position in the controversial debate of textbook writing in East Asia. Describing China’s ‘deep culture’ of national humiliation as articulated in a narrative of chosen myths and traumas, Wang’s book explores the genesis of a self-victimising historical narrative. Far from endorsing it, the book promotes changes in the intellectual discourse on history so that the power of collective memory can foster reconciliation and understanding between China and other countries, especially Japan and the US, rather than conflict. This element of idealism rests on Wang’s solid background in conflict resolution, which lends credence to the book’s proposed ways to deflate the nationalistic animosities currently destabilising China, its region and the world.
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