"China has stood up"
Mao Tse Tung (Chinese dictator and poet)
Last night, during the opening ceremony of the Olymipic Games in BJ, China stood up many times. And then it crouched. And then it stood up again. The martial order of the show was somewhat intimidating in size, but this must have been more than an artistic accident. And so, the symbolic cheap Chinese labor kept standing up and kept crouching in celebration of 2008 years since the birth of Jesus Christ, you would naturally be forced to think. There were 2008 stood-uppers and 2008 crouchers, 2008 dancers and 2008 tai-chi masters in white pajamas. Christians around the world can be proud of China’s final acknowledgment of the superiority of Christian tradition and Christian calendar. Because for the revolutionary China it is barely 60 years of recurrent ups and downs.
A friend of mine who lives in one stunningly beautiful corner of Europe has recently complained to me. “Why all the focus on China’s human rights, all this menace spewed from the media? It’s enough. It’s not nearly as threatening as al-Qaeda, is it?”
I suppose that as of recent the Western media have, indeed, been saturated with alarming images from both seasoned and overnight “China experts”. The reason is simple. With the (telling) exception of Tibet, foreign journalists are, temporarily, allowed to travel outside Beijing and engage in interviews with the local people. This is an exciting prospect, given that just about all the people that the regime wanted to remove from the capital have, indeed, been sent away. Some of them are, apparently, holed up in ‘re-education camps’ and therefore not accessible at all. But the very concept of freedom to explore the ‘other’ China without a special permit must be thrilling for Chinese speaking foreign journalists. But don’t you worry – the special permits will be introduced back again once the Olympic gala is over. Hence the sudden media focus on the brutal and self-destructive aspects of China’s changes. Some of the testimonies from the locals are revelatory, as for example one registered by an FT journalist yesterday: “China has been invaded and bullied by you too much. Much of our wealth was robbed by Americans and Japanese (…). We Chinese are very friendly”.
Still, the question whether rabid nationalism numbering hundreds of millions of souls in the Far East is more, or less ‘dangerous’ than religious nihilism of 10’000 potential terrorists with their ideological roots in the Middle East is an intriguing one.
Since 2001, the Western world has been obsessed with the terrorist threat emanating from the Middle East and in particular the Manichean branch of aggressive neo-Wahhabism. Large boreal and eucalyptus forests have been chopped down to exhibit, on paper, various putative hypotheses for the rise of religious extremism in the Muslim world. Less space has been devoted to equally bigoted, though arguably less immediately destructive rise of fanaticist Christian, Hindu or Judaic movements and to their political influence. In direct or indirect consequence of their ‘preachings’, lobbying and communal activism, much destruction has been wrought on innocent populations of Iraq, Gujarat or West Bank. Muslims, rather than Islamist terrorists, have often become the victims of these tragic spillovers. But nearly seven years since the telegenic drama between West Street and Church Street of Downtown Manhattan, it is the Muslims who have born the brunt of murderous actions spurred by pseudo-religious indoctrination, which had laced this monotheistic creed with alien theses of Evil Incarnate and perverted versions of Jihad.
This is not to say that the extremist Sunni no longer pose a threat to the world peace. The drift in Iraq and Guantanamo has certainly contributed to the rise a new generation susceptible to fall under the spell of eschatological fanaticism. John Cloonan, an FBI expert recently confirmed in his testimony to the US Congress that a catastrophic ‘revenge’ against the US was, in fact, “coming”.
Terrorist threats do not exhaust the litany of fundamental cultural, behavioral and economic differences between the theocentric Muslim and secularized Western societies. And, with oil prices remaining stubbornly above $100 per barrel, it is very possible that the Middle Eastern wealth will allow the rulers to marry their non-Western lifestyles and dress codes with ultra-modern, if superficial, urbanism and addiction to luxury.
In which, they will eventually join the Chinese exceptionalism.
Whether the Middle Eastern countries mount a geo-strategic challenge to the Western set of values – spelled out in the sacrosanct rule of law, free flow of information, freedom of association, self-determination and electoral or direct democracy – will depend on how adept they are at pushing the button of self-victimhood. Defining their collective identity in terms of “rights” inherited from the suffering of previous generations does little more than feed a sense of grievance and appetite for revenge. But it blocks successfully the attractiveness of the “values” as defined above.
One can shrug off small nations’ claims to real or imaginary past of persecution. But when large nations or former empires fall victim to such destructive propaganda, the world should listen. When Soviet Union was falling apart in 1991, a Moscovite I knew tried hard to rationalize what Mr Putin later famously labeled as the “greatest catastrophe of the 20th century”. Galina stuck to her conviction that the empire continued to exist in the imaginary borders of Stalin’s expansionism. Painstakingly, she went to great lengths trying to explain to me that there were still no borders between Russia and Kazkakhstan or between Russia and Ukraine. And indeed, Ukraine was, in her words, but a borderland, a nation on the fringe of the great Mother Russia, not a separate nation.
Lack of political will to redefine Russia’s place on the world’s map from a neo-imperialistic entity jealous of its “spheres of influence” into a modern nation embedded within a functioning network of partnerships is, as I am writing this, beginning to claim lives in what is quickly becoming the first international military conflict in Europe since 1945. Despite a complex ethnic and political situation in South Ossetia, the Russian Goliath should not expect much sympathy from the West, nor will it receive any from Postjudice.
Russian intervention in Georgia illustrates that the cherished illusions of national victimhood and imperial nostalgia bring little more than human tragedies. The affluent West has learned this lesson - from the Dutch obstructionism in Indonesia to the French brutality in Algeria. But contrary to the claims of anti-Orientalists and their left-wing aficionados, imperialism has not been an exclusively Western phenomenon. What has kept the Russian and Chinese imperialism different and in many ways more durable was their unwillingness or incapacity to project seaborne military power. Instead, the Russians and Chinese states forcefully co-opted and then populated the vast swaths inhabited by very distinct populations. In both cases, they could not help looking down on the exotic populace, labelling the locals, respectively, as inorodtsy (“those born different”) or yemanren (“the wild ones”). With a sense of racial and cultural superiority, actual military might and an economic surplus that facilitated extraordinary fertility of the dominant ethnic group, Russian and Chinese states crawled outward and remained more resilient than any of the “colonial” empires built by the Western nations. The so-called Russian Far East – the only part of East Asia durably colonized by the white man, and the Chinese rule in Turkic and Tibetan parts of Central Asia are the main remnants of that past expansionism, long ripe for an overdue historical correction.
The danger that my European friend severely underestimates is that the last sentence of the previous paragraph will generate an instant reaction in the arteries of a nationalistic Russian or Chinese reader. His or her adrenal glands, located just above the ‘Chinese’ or ‘Russian’ kidneys will have instantly released hormones into the bloodstream, potentially deregulating the bodily electrolyte balance. Their limbic system, which originally evolved to evaluate smells, will have been activated and their indoctrinated minds will create an absurd wall of emotional rejection. “It is ours!”, exclaimed angrily a Korean friend of mine a decade ago, referring to a disputed rocky outcrop somewhere between Korea and Japan. “Tibet is part of China”. “Crimea is part of Russia”. The imaginary walls of nationhood flare up easily, but are doused with utmost difficulty.
Self-victimhood, nationalist nostalgia and theories of humiliation are historically selective and have to overcome many contradictory historical facts and counterfacts. This is true of nationalisms everywhere. Many Israelis prefer to claim that the first two Aliyas brought their ancestors to what was then an “empty” land. Hindutva nationalists would selectively extend the historicity of their claims beyond the Vedic culture into the Indus Valley’s pre-history, even though it bears no relation to the Sanskritic heritage and defies the claims to indigenous sufficiency of the “Hindu” culture. Serbian leaders plunged their subjects into a national tragedy by trying to overcome the contradiction between the populist claims (Serbia is where Serbs live, e.g. Bosnia) with historical grievances (Serbia is where Serbia once historically was, e.g. Kosovo). Interestingly, all these nationalists emote for the past humiliations and the officialdom often glorifies them. Serbs actually lost the much celebrated battle of Kosovo in 1389. Russians celebrate the overthrow of “Latin” (i.e. Polish) rule in Moscow – an episode (1610-1612) virtually unknown elsewhere and hardly meaningful in light of the horrors that Russian and Soviet expansionism wrought on various nations of Europe, Caucasus and Asia in the following centuries. And in China, there is even a special National Humiliation Day, not yet explicitly referring to any specific failure, with some hesitation between commemorating the Opium War (1840-42) and Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931.
Since the Tienanmen massacre, revanchist nationalism has been the Chinese Communists’ favorite bulwark against the insidious influence of Western values. Young Chinese are now more aware of the historic “humiliations” and are quick to list a myriad of grievances encapsulated in the self-serving term bainian guochi (“100 years of national humiliation”). Anything that does not conform to the nationalist dogmatism will “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people” – be it a foreign movie, a comment by a foreign newscaster, an athlete wearing a protective mask in Beijing, a company employing a film star critical of China's support for the Sudanese regime. This thirst for respect is open-ended as so are the continued demands for expressions of guilt. Both desires can never be fully satisfied and are easily frustrated. The paranoia over China’s “rightful place” cannot be easily reversed. Regrettably, historic parallels indicate that there are only two ways out of this cul de sac – large scale re-education or a national calamity. The former is impractical for the current regime and could undermine its own position. The latter is simply too apocalyptic to muse on it here.
Both groups - Chinese nationalists, who suffer from this unattainable aspiration to superiority, and poor madrassa kids, whose intellectual horizon will be confined to Qur’an, Hadith and Sirah, remain inherently insecure in their own self-image. Both groups are oversensitive to any semblance of slight and are prone to overreaction. Their ultimate goals may be diametrically opposed – hyper-materialist in one case, escapist in the other. But the relative success of both is steadily eroding the outreach and influence of the “Western” values, generating a genuine dilemma for the decision makers of the free world. Especially for those decision-makers who see beyond their immediate commercial interest and have decided not to sweat like pigs in 90 degrees Fahrenheit among the stands of an otherwise grandiose Beijing stadium.
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