Scholars studying China are quite familiar with themes like national humiliation, nationalism as a new source of regime legitimacy vis-à-vis communism, and China’s anti-US and anti-Japan polemic. Zheng Wang’s book Never Forget National Humiliation captures the interrelated nature of these themes in a skilful manner and is a valuable addition to the study of Chinese nationalism. Wang analyses the commonly shared thinking of the Chinese about their place in the world and their view of how the world sees them (p. xii). His analysis attempts to explain the ultimate aim and implications of China’s rise. He underscores that China’s ‘historical consciousness’ revolves around ‘myth’ and ‘trauma’—the dominant features of China’s contemporary national thinking shaping its national identity. The ‘historical consciousness’ defines its national interests and tunes its motivations behind its international interactions, and is necessary to understand China’s present foreign policy. Thus, the author discusses two variables in this context: historical consciousness and national identity in China’s contemporary foreign policy. The central question of the book is how the Chinese, particularly the youth, have come to be ranked ‘among the most patriotic’ and ‘establishment supporting’, from the earlier Mao’s Red Guards and later ‘the anti-dictatorship Tiananmen Generation’ of the 1980s (pp. 1–2). Answering the question, the book discusses the communist regime’s cultivation of a new national identity from 1991 onwards, based on ethnic patriotism. This would be done by constructing a new historical consciousness, through government interventions, that strengthens the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s legitimacy. The book describes the Chinese government’s selective but systematic usage of memories to fulfil its legitimacy requirements and create the kind of nation it wants (pp. 6–7). Wang points out that the Chosenness-Myths-Trauma (CMT) complex, which the regime has carefully created over the past two decades, constitutes China’s contemporary mainstream historical consciousness. The CMT contains belief in the ancient glory of China—belief in divine chosenness, cultural superiority and a civilisation boundless (best expressed in the concept of 天下 Tianxia, ‘the realm under heaven’) (pp. 42–43)—and memories of China’s defeat at the hands of foreign powers after the first Opium War (1839–42) until 1945, when the Japanese withdrew from China after a prolonged Sino-Japanese war. In the CMT complex, China’s earlier defeats are ignored as the invaders at that time, the barbarians, became civilised by assimilating with the Chinese culture. The invaders, the devils, after the first Opium War, knockeddown Tianxia. Similarly, other tragedies—those pertaining to the civil war or the catastrophic famine in the late 1950s or the political tragedy of the Cultural Revolution—are ignored by the CCP. Thus, only the selective simulation of the defeats and consequent unequal treaties during the said period make up the traumas in CMT. While the remembrance of the ancient mythical or historical glories boosts Chinese society’s self-esteem, the selective traumas seek to ‘mourn and/or reverse’ national humiliation and contribute to forming a strong national identity (p. 68). Wang describes the contemporary patriotic surge in China’s textbooks and entertainment industry as the post-Tiananmen development. He reminds us that in spite of occasional sharing of political slogans in their joint fight against the warlords and the Japanese invasion, the CCP generally used class-oriented language describing China’s humiliation as part of a global trend, unlike its narrative today. Conversely, the Kuomintang (KMT) spoke essentially a Confucian nationalist language. Later, the communists produced a ‘victor discourse’ and the narrative of history full of socialist idioms after 1949 in which, as Wang underscores, ethnic patriotism was absent (pp. 82–91). The class distinction defined the political identity of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as representing only the workers and peasants, discarding ethnicity during the Maoist era. Ethnic patriotism found no sympathy in Mao’s internationalism and ‘progressive’ China. For them, the Chinese civil war and the Japanese and other foreign aggressions were class wars. Moreover, the communists’ ‘victor’ sense after 1949 and their claim of liberating China from the hands of oppressors—their source of legitimacy—had no place for stories on national humiliation. Besides, the CCP was not in a position to ratchet up their claims about the victory over the Japanese beyond a certain point, as the hard fact was that it was the KMT, whom the communists shunned, that essentially fought the war against the Japanese (pp. 86–88). Consequently, the National Library of China had ‘no books on the subject of “national humiliation” published in China between 1947–90’. The Maoist era ‘consciously suppressed’ the ‘historiography of the Nanjing Massacre’ (p. 86). The 1989 Tiananmen episode symbolised the culmination of the ideological crisis of the official socialist ideology losing sync with the changing economic orientation of China. The crisis had been building up since the late 1970s. Deng Xioping accepted that ‘[t]he biggest mistake for the CCP in the 1980s was that the party did not focus enough attention on ideological education … we did not tell them about what China was like in the old days and what kind of a country it was to become’ (p. 96). China needed a new ideology. In the light of Deng’s guiding directive, Jiang Zemin undertook a massive project to rewrite the textbooks of history, to create a new historical narrative and to introduce a new curriculum in order to overhaul China’s political and ideological education (pp. 100–104). Wang argues that Jiang, who is mainly known for his successes on the economic and foreign policy fronts, implemented a silent revolution in the educational arena, which is his most enduring legacy (p. 136). Jiang transformed Mao’s ‘victor’ China into ‘the victim’ China. The old narrative of the Sino-Japanese war being a class war was changed to an international ethnic conflict with ‘considerable credit to the KMT’s military resistance’ (p. 102). Now the claim of legitimacy for the CCP is that it ended the era of national humiliation and unequal treaty, not the liberation. The Chinese state has employed various instruments such as rewriting the textbooks, making history a compulsory subject for students in various ways, subsidising and promoting movies and television serials based on war themes and building monuments for war heroes to sell its version of history. Evoking memories of the Sino-Japanese war by the leaders has become fashionable. According to Wang, the aim of all this is to ‘rejuvenate China’, which for many Chinese means reclaiming ancient glory, not aspiring to anything new. This massive exercise has not only established nationalism as a new source of legitimacy but has redefined the role of the CCP too. Jiang’s ‘Three Represents’ principle (‘advanced productive forces, advanced Chinese culture and the fundamental interests of the majority’) signifies the end of the class character of the Chinese state for many. The author points out that the success of the project was witnessed during the Beijing Olympics in 2008 when the patriotic demonstrations by the overseas Chinese, particularly by students abroad, overwhelmed and outperformed pro-Tibet and other pro-human rights demonstrations in the backdrop of the Olympic Torch relay to Beijing. Wang identified the 1995–96 Taiwan Strait Crisis, the 1999 NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia and the EP-3 incident in 2001 as the three major incidents after the end of the Cold War in which China’s reaction had direct links with the nationalism project it had undertaken in the 1990s. He argues that in view of the US’s conciliatory approach, China’s reaction was disproportionate and not normal during these episodes. He is of the view that China exploited these incidents to ‘activate’ the memories of past injustice by foreigners. His core argument is that ‘emergency (accident or unexpected events) incidents that cause Chinese suffering and a dispute with a country that historically has had troubles with China’ provide an opportunity to ‘activate Chinese historical memory’ (p. 200). China’s insistence on seeking apology—for example in the case of the EP-3 incident from the US and from Japan about the atrocities committed on the Chinese during its invasion of China and about the Japanese history textbooks—serves its victim righteousness and satisfies the moral superiority as part of its nationalism project. Wang cautions that the kind of anti-foreign nationalist path China has chosen to tread is quite dangerous. It does help the regime to keep its authority legitimate and stable by avoiding internal political animosity, but it can also create complications in policy making. Sometimes, mass hysteria about past injustices may not recognise its limits and may build a momentum of its own, beyond CCP control (p. 191). In conclusion, the book is illuminating, engrossing and highly recommendable. It is a high-quality scholarly work that very lucidly unravels many entwined themes and does full justice to the subject it discusses.
Prashant Kumar Singh
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