THE MYTH OF CHINESE UNITY
“There is no problem. We are all Chinese”.
(A Chinese entrepreneur in response the owner of “Ice Cream Factory” in New York’s Chinatown. The owner confronted him after discovering that the logo, the name and the business model of the decades-old “Ice Cream Factory” were perfectly copied by the newcomer several blocks away from the original shop).
The myth of national unity, as a guarantor of China’s “strength”, is particularly noxious for the development of critical thought. Although Chinese civilization’s most lasting contribution to human intellectual treasure dates back to the era when no single state could claim the monopoly of “Chineseness”, the perverse conclusion perpetuated by authoritarian rulers has been that groupthink is the measure of the (Chinese) man (and woman). The system is always in place to reduce the challenges to authority and breed conformism, not to resolve the underlying problems of the society. Creative thinking would require experimentation and conjure up the dreaded image of chaos (luan).
One of the tragedies of China’s history lies in the entrenched belief that the success in maintaining the ruling regime is the proof of the rulers’ righteousness. Combating the historical discontinuities – both temporal and geographic - Chinese historians fall prey to this perverse form of historicism. The rise to power and the increase in prosperity are identified as a measure of moral excellence of the rulers and the system they represent. This transforms history into a morality tale. But while centralism and appeals to “unity” prevail, maladaptive forms of social organization fester – at least for as long as the ruling dynasty remains in place.
Owing partly to the structure of their languages, the Chinese have a particular weakness for the argument ad verecundiam – appeal to the authority of moral proverbs or sayings. Mao’s shih poetry, Deng’s exhortations and Jiang’s “three representants” have, with various results, accrued an aura of mystical wisdom. Some of these absurdities has even been readily digested by foreign executives and then regurgitated whenever it suited them in the boardrooms full of clueless, but awed septuagenarians. Witness the reference ad nauseam to Deng’s “black cat/white cat” (not a Velvet Underground song). But reliance on these “wisdoms” is slippery. All involved have to be extremely selective when resorting to quotations. If the classic Lao Zi might please a red mandarin with the moral parallelism: “A good man does not argue – he who argues is not a good man”, it will seriously upset him with the political admonition “the greater the government’s power, the more chaotic the nation would become”.
Proclivity for semantic elasticity has been one of the defining features of Chinese propagandists all along its history. Qing emperor Kangxi dealt with the floods in one of the provinces not by damming the rapids, but by renaming the river from “the Uncertain One” (wudinghe) to “the Certain One” (yongdinghe). Watching the patriotic captions Chinese TV provides in its coverage of the tragic earthquake in Sichuan one wonders if anything has changed. These days, Chinese communists cannot quite cover up the drama in Sichuan the way they did in the wake of the 1976 Tangshan tremor. But they can, and do transform the meaning of the event that could threaten the Mandate of Heaven. On the TV screens, the exercise is, again, full of pride in national unity – zhong zhi chang chang, (“Our Wills Unite Like a Fortress”).
This unity of the “nation” is often portrayed as analogous to the harmony and unity of the family. But an extension of family analogy to non-primary groups, such as the state, is a perilous proposition. The occasional pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong are routinely met with patronizing language of Beijing propagandists. Family analogies and meioses may be effective in indoctrinating the subjects, but they “settle” significant empirical questions with a rhetorical sleight of hand. Many dysfunctional forms of social organization have survived too long because of linguistic manipulation of such suggestive, though not demonstrative, family analogies.
WHITHER THE HUAQIAO?
“(In a Chinese man) there is very often a set of superiority and inferiority complexes stirring within those who have constant or occasional contacts with foreigners. He constantly persuades himself of his unexplainable superiority over the foreigner, but frequently has to rationalize in order to disperse the inferiority complex” (Hong Yuan, "The China Critic", 1930).
With the exception of the Taiwanese, whose pluralistic political culture has now critically diverged from the chauvinistic sinocentrism, many communities of overseas Chinese (huaqiao) are to varying degrees susceptible to the identification efforts deployed by Beijing propaganda. Although much of the reference to People’s Republic is apolitical, the undeniable economic success of the PRC has made the 37m strong diaspora, obsessed with material success, much more responsive to the themes of “national pride”. Because the institutional and linguistic identification is often beyond the reach of most overseas Chinese, the racialist belief in their otherness from the surrounding – Malay or white - majority appears to be the most prevalent and most easily manipulated. Since at least the date of Hong Kong handover in 1997, much of Huaren wenhua (sinitic culture, to which, in various degrees, most people of Chinese origin “belong”) has moved closer to Zhonguo wenhua – the “patriotic” culture of China.
We have reached a point at which the Chineseness in each person of mainland East Asian ancestry is becoming a question of an absolute. The Chinese no longer are offered any choice between liberalism, nationalism, communism, legalism or a reformed Confucianism. In order to be recognized as Chinese, one has to identify with China qua PRC and its racist policies that the rest of the world finds so questionable. There is little alternative offered to the vigorous trading outposts of successful Fukenese, Cantonese and Hakka communities in the Pacific Basin. The inevitable strengthening of the separate Taiwanese identity has deprived many Chinese of the intellectual alternative that Taipei could still provide a generation ago. In this highly divisive process, the inhabitants of Hong Kong and Macau were left with a stark identity choice – maintaining some links to their institutional, i.e. Western past, or fall into the orbit of aggressive nationalism. To the dismay of their numerous Western friends many have opted for the latter.
The cultural repertoire based on the racialization of the Other is, however, at its most acute among mainland Chinese whose stay overseas is limited both in time and space. The Chinese students, regardless of their actual personal experience, routinely generate a defensive expectation of humiliation and victimhood within a racially alien environment whose numerous aspects they often find alluring. After all, these students head most often to the countries whose educational system they admire. The feelings of alienation are particularly strong among the males who cling to their linguistic group and often lead lives of virtual celibacy. Anecdotal evidence would indicate that this experience is not necessarily shared by highly competitive young Chinese women, who appear less socially anxious and interact more readily with the majority white population. The fact that the existence of mixed couples is itself a proof of the integrative nature of many host societies does nothing to destabilize the racialized feelings of self-manufactured inferiority of the young Chinese men.
This last observation is important. Ever since the population explosion of the Ming dynasty, the size of the Chinese mandarinate has been frozen in proportion to the overall size of the population. Today, merely 2% of the PRC population attends tertiary studies, as opposed to 6% in India and 25% in Japan. University studies, especially overseas, and a good command of English catapult a young Chinese professional to an elite status in PRC. The CCP and the government structures are simply not capable to ideologically co-opt and materially incentivize a larger elite, but the socially frustrating experience of Chinese men abroad will guarantee strong adherence to nationalistic dogmatism nonetheless. This mechanism seems to be underestimated among American scholars. An expert in Chinese studies who started her career at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs recently expressed her amazement at the vigorous reaction of Chinese students, who, unlike people living in the mainland, “were not under the influence of PRC propaganda”. To make such a statement is to dismiss the formative role that nationalist indoctrination plays in the lives of young Chinese between the age of 4 and the age of puberty. No amount of tertiary brain cramming in Sydney or Durham will change these hardened attitudes.
As this darker side of the PRC is becoming more immediately familiar, not only on the streets of Paris or Seoul, but also in Africa and South America, the backlash could have unintended consequences. The network of mainland Chinese students overseas, interacting with established huaqiao communities increasingly “proud of their ancestry” may constitute a marginal phenomenon within the host societies of the prosperous West, but could potentially endanger the career prospects of ethnic Asians in selected domains of public service or in sensitive industries. Such defensive attitudes, should they arise, would have to be combated with vigor. The collective punishment inflicted in the 1940s on Americans of Japanese Ancestry constitutes a sobering precedent.
But the huaqiao, at least those who care about their ancestral land, also have a role to play. This is not a role of deferential kowtow to whoever exercises power in Beijing, however brutally. On the contrary, the risks of the Chinese nationalism derailing Asia’s prosperity are real.
The mass migration of Chinese peasants to the fast expanding megalopoles has been a contributing factor in the cultural homogenization of urban China. Laterally insulated agricultural communities are an unlikely vanguard of nationalist movements, but their role changes the moment they set their feet in the booming towns. The intricacies of the land reclassification system, which allows government officials to speculate on land assets, offer the prospect of ultimate material advancement that the rural folk are deprived of. Unsurprisingly, every year, at least 16m people move permanently to the Chinese cities, where this literate but poorly educated workforce is squeezed into factory and construction site landscapes. With organized religion still being frowned upon by the regime, these masses are prey to any ideological aberration and emotional excess. The numerically male-dominated mass may constitute a potentially explosive force when confronted with the irredentist young student returnees and their xenophobic messages.
It is here that the educationally privileged, bi-cultural huaqiao can assist the 21st China, a country burdened by simmering gender asymmetry and intergenerational displacement. The bi-cultural sino-westerners should help China graduate from its cultural aphasia and join the mankind as a generator of novel ideas and re-distributor of its newly found wealth. Despite the strong path dependency in Chinese history, there is nothing inevitable about its future.
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