CHINESE NATIONALISM (part 4)

REJECTION OF THE WAIGUO
“The rejection of the foreign was more anxious for the very arrogance that justified it. That is the paradox of the superiority complex: it is intrinsically insecure and brittle. Those who cherish it need it and fear nothing so much as contradiction”. David Landes “Wealth and Poverty of Nations”.

For the mainland Chinese and some increasingly vocal groups of overseas Chinese, it is the CCP that controls the institutional history of China. Much of its success hinges on creating a sense of collective self-victimhood among the people of “Han” descent. After all, who controls the present, controls the past. In the eyes of the young Chinese nationalists, China has some imagined “rightful place” in the world and is being prevented “by the West” from resuming this geopolitical (?) Eden. This main organizing principle draws from the supposed “humiliations” that pre-war China suffered in the hands of Westerners and the Japanese. Never mind that China was never colonized by these foreign (waiguo) powers – the projective blaming for the country’s failures has been among the founding myths of the Chinese chauvinism. Now it’s time to reverse the tide. The government in Beijing stands for the honor and respect of the Chinese statehood and thus should command ethnic support worldwide. But much to the surprise of the most avid believers in the official version of China’s history, their anti-foreign backlash somehow does not trigger automatic outpourings of respect. Occasional kowtow notwithstanding (from US toymakers, a French president or Australian miners) most western reactions range from consternation to fear to ridicule. The Chinese mainlanders’ poor knowledge of the outside world and their sinocentric obsession, when mediated with the messages of anger, jealousy, hatred and implicit inferiority complex appear particularly unattractive to post-modern, increasingly multicultural and polycentric societies in the West.

One could argue that most East Asian societies are all prone to some form of nationalism or at least a somewhat childlike conceptualization of the world in terms of nation-states. Many years ago in Tokyo a Korean friend overheard a conversation I conducted in French with another European. Knowing our respective nationalities, she asked: “what language are you speaking now? Is it Swiss or Belgian?”

There is, however, a critical difference between the aggressive sinocentrism of the fenqing and the surviving forms of nationalism among the Japanese, Korean or Taiwanese urbanites. These wealthy societies have now all developed globetrotting elites increasingly attracted to the cultural achievements of other peoples. The Asian tourists, artists and students admire European churches, study Western music and learn about other countries, as do many curious individuals in other developed countries. But now that the PRC nationals have gained incremental freedoms and begun to travel overseas, a peculiar image is emerging. It is the image of ethnocentric crowds on a conspicuous consumption binge (complete with “killZhang was here” pictures), sparing little, if any interest for the natural wonders or cultural heritage of the visited lands. A Taiwanese friend has recently overheard a group of Chinese tourists standing in front of Stephanskirche in Vienna. Some of them complained loudly that their sightseeing tour was a ‘waste of time’. After all, “the Great Wall is so much older, while these buildings are not even old”. Elsewhere, an Egyptian guide and fluent Mandarin speaker recounted a story of a two-week whirlwind tour organized for a Chinese group in Turkey and Egypt. A day before the departure for Beijing they wound up for the laser show in front of the Pyramids in Gizeh. During the show, a man with a strong Beijing accent picked up his cellphone and shouted: “we are going back tomorrow. We are in Turkey now”.



Could we just dismiss these anecdotes as examples of embarrassing ignorance of first generation nouveaux riches? Does this simply reflect lack of exposure in a country whose government for years has licensed only 20 foreign movies per year (which in dvd era translates into heaps of pirated B-movie trash)? Or is there a deeper message that goes beyond mono-dimensional materialism and naïve solipsism? I frequently sought answers to this among my Mainlander friends. A young woman who had recently returned from Cambodia revealed for me a much deeper dilemma that the confrontation with the outside world represents for this generation. Back in Beijing, I asked her about her impressions in Angkor. Her seemingly contradictory statements initially made little sense – she enjoyed the experience but reacted with malaise at the architectural splendor of the Khmer kings. Pressed to define her emotions, she eventually broke into tears: “I really loved Angkor. It was so beautiful”, she wept. “But here in China, we learn that the Great Wall is the most wondrous construction in the world. And yet, I liked Angkor better. I am a bad patriot. I am a bad person!!!”

Should 1.3 billion people head straight for the couch? Now that’s market potential!

MAINLAND NATIONALISM AND THE (SIGNIFICANT) OTHERS
“Turn barbarians into Chinese”
Border management practice, Qin dynasty

The events of Beijing Spring were a dramatic reminder of the brutal force that communist party cadres will harness to protect their privileges in the name of “stability”. On June 4, 1989, the hopes of China’s democratization were dashed. On the same day, voters in another People’s Republic - of Poland swept the communist party from power, leading to the creation of the first non-communist government in over 40 years. Like Taiwanese people a decade later, the Poles were getting rid of what was perceived not only as an undemocratic, but, importantly, a foreign rule.

The problem with the communist regimes of Soviet Russia and People’s China is that both were dominated by vernacular leaders who adroitly exploited Russian, or Chinese “national pride” to stir popular support. Unattractive Marxian dogmatism, discredited during the decade of the Cultural Revolution, never returned to China. The not-so-egalitarian exhortations of static Confucianism, whose tenets suffered greatly under ideological assault in 1974, were a poor alternative. State chauvinism was, by default, the most natural option in a country embarking on an economic opening. As many literate travelers to China will testify, large-character banners urging class struggle have long been outnumbered by the prickly calls to national “pride”.

The axiomatic assumptions of nationalism source this collective “pride” in the imagined past. The past somehow legitimizes all the excesses of the present, provided, however, that this past can be appropriated as “Chinese”. Not only are the Tungus-speaking Manchus now “Chinese” (as a separate ethnic group the 1 million strong Manchus disappeared even before the fall of the Qing), but even Genghiz Khan and his Mongol hordes are slowly being enlisted as “Chinese”. This is just a new sequel to not-so-novel efforts to extend the continuity of Chinese history both in time and in space. It does not matter that the Mongolian language bears no relation to Chinese and that the ancestors of the Mongolian minority within the PRC were as “Chinese” as the forefathers of US-dwelling Chinese were “American”. A Nazi-type renaissance of interest in anthropometry has been an important ally in the claims of Mongolian belonging to “the Chinese race”.



That could be more complicated in the case of the “Northern Wei” dynasty, whose elongated features grace us from the 5th c. sculptures. The descendents of these Turkic rulers of China continue to live today in Russia and are commonly referred to as the Chuvash. We do not know yet when the Beijing “historians” bestow on them the status of “Chineseness”. After all, the acceptance of Mongolians into the cultural “fold” of China is a precious gift that some people, like the ever ungrateful Vietnamese, although occupied for a 1000 years, do not deserve. Sending PLA packing in body bags in 1979 certainly did not help.

Our knowledge of the Mongolian military tsunami in the 13th century usually attracts a combination of awe with revulsion at the acts of genocide that these horse-mounted hordes inflicted on the peoples from Beijing to Baghdad to Budapest. However, the re-defined “Chineseness” of crimes against humanity makes them acceptable in the eyes of selective history worshippers. But beware. Should the Han people perish under the yoke of a people that refused to accept the value of sinocentrism, their wrath would be carefully nurtured and instilled as a key component in the Chinese education system. Such is the plight of the Japanese –the most odious of rulers in the eyes of the Chinese. Unlike the Mongols or the Manchus, the Japanese did not become anymore sinified, even though some Chinese still believe in the curious myth that the Japanese language is but “a dialect” of Chinese. Irritatingly, the Japanese technology and military prowess proved superior to China’s, albeit with tragic consequences for both countries. Today, Japan’s post-modern society offers a powerful model for many Asian societies. Still, most mainland Chinese have little knowledge of contemporary Japanese society and its entrenched pacifist attitudes. But you could do worse than reminding your Chinese friends that the Japanese do not “steal” Chinese technology – an incredible, but not uncommon allegation in some Chinese cities. Mention to your Chinese interlocutors that Mao’s crimes far outnumber the tragic victims of the Japanese occupation and brace for lengthy fulminations. Although Japan is not quite China’s alter ego, anti-Japanese allergy smacks of collective projection. Beijing’s recurrent insistence on Japan’s “apology” for the 2nd World War crimes comes from the mouths incapable of uttering an apology for any of China’s own violent acts.

But this visceral, anti-Japanese nationalism rarely troubles the Western observers. Yes, analysts and diplomats do take note of the increased level of “hatred” against the Japanese among the younger generation of Chinese. They deplore the early age indoctrination reinforced by the self-styled “museums” of Japanese occupation that expose Chinese children to the recreated scenes of torture. But the unresolved question of decentralized Japanese school manuals leaves Western observers somewhat indifferent to these manufactured emotions: since both sides seem at fault, there is little to complain about.



Importantly however, the Japanese are not the only Asian nation stubbornly resistant to Chinese cultural and institutional imports. Tibetan Buddhists are the other. Indeed, for all the potential problems with Chinese Muslims, it is the Tibetans who represent ‘the Other’ in China. Repeatedly portrayed as backward, feudal, liberated but recalcitrant, ungrateful, ‘splittist’, racist, unintelligent, superstitious and unscientific, Tibetans have committed the gravest of sins. They are a paramount example of the ethnic divergence between the rulers and the ruled. They have so far refused to dilute themselves in the cultural ocean of Chineseness, despite a supposedly common origin in the “Qiang” race. The “patriotic” education, economic progress “offered by the CCP to the Tibetan people”, urbanization, a train line, repeated destruction of the monasteries and infiltration of the monastic system, imprisonment, executions, forced sinification, rewritten history of the Tibetan state, ferocious vilifications of the Dalai Lama - all these ‘achievements’ have left most Tibetans not more Chinese than they were 50 years ago. Worse, the failure of these policies has turned the Chinese population strongly against the “Tibetan minority”. In the current anti-Tibetan fervor, the very few who do recognize the dilemma that the situation on the plateau constitutes do not dare to speak up. It is striking to encounter - even among overseas Chinese - the widespread belief in the ‘Beijing version’ of Tibetan history – a Chinese province populated by descendants of the Han settlers in Gansu and Qinghai who never aspired to an independent statehood outside of the Motherland. And were it not for the Dalai Lama “the splittist”, the PRC could have happily finalized the terms of the ancient adage: “yihua bianyi”, turn barbarians into Chinese…

But this monistic and uniform vision of Chinese history, so cherished by Beijing’s rulers, may, after all, be wrong. Periodically, contacts with other centers of “civilization” did leave a lasting impact. Several years ago a stunning exhibition of artifacts from Tang dynasty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York left the visitors puzzled. “Is this China?” wondered New York Times. The archeologists’ bounty revealed a country of rich material and non-material exchanges with Sassanian Persia, Hellenistic middle east, Nestorian Christianity and, above all, with India and its religious exports. There lay the strength of China.