China’s “century of humiliation”

By Sushil Seth

 

There is no other power in the world than China with an obsessive desire to seek recognition and approval of its great power status. The recent Olympic bonanza was an exercise in this direction.

The problem, though, is that even the slightest critical scrutiny, as happened with the Tibetan protests on the eve of Beijing Olympics, tends to seriously rattle the composure and self-confidence of an otherwise resurgent China.

And Beijing blames this on the outside world, particularly the West (and Japan) for still conspiring to deny it its rightful place in the world; invoking images of China’s “century of humiliation” under Western domination and occupation.

The fact, though, is that China is increasingly getting its due acclaim as a rising economic and military power. But, like any other country, it also gets its due share of critical scrutiny on a host of issues for its blemishes and transgressions.

But China wants and needs uncritical acclaim to deal with its own historical insecurities. Which is not to deny its sufferings under colonial rampage and Japanese aggression.

As Chen Shi-Zheng, director of the film, Dark Matter (based on the story of a Chinese graduate student in the United States who went on a killing spree of his American thesis supervisors and a fellow Chinese graduate student in 1991), told Professor Orville Schell: “We Chinese carry the burden of our history with us and the question of Western humiliation is always unconsciously inside us.”

Elaborating, Chen said, “ Thus, we feel sensitive to any kind of slight and often have a very sharp reaction to perceived unfair treatment or injustices.”

Putting it in today’s context, Chen told Schell, “On an emotional level we cannot help but associate treatment in the present with past injuries, defeats, invasions, and occupations by foreigners.”

And he added, “There is something almost in our DNA that triggers automatic, and sometimes extreme, responses to foreign criticism or put-downs.”

In other words, China requires constant affirmation of its great power status without any qualification whatsoever. Which becomes a serious problem for its relations with other countries, especially in the West and Japan where China’s historical humiliation is embedded.

This deep sense of humiliation and outrage has shaped China’s politics, and continues to do so even today. Because in all China’s internal political battles, its humiliation at the hands of the West and Japan has been a recurring theme.

And when the civil war ended in communist victory, Mao Zedong proudly declared in 1949 that, “Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation” and that China has “stood up.”

In other words, Mao seemed to rate China’s communist victory, above all, as a nationalist enterprise to face up to a hostile world.

But in the process of creating a new revolutionary China, Mao personified all its contradictions and insecurities. He not only saw danger from outside but also from within the country and his own party.

Which led to an orgy of periodic purges, with the longest one of Cultural Revolution lasting a decade until his death in 1976.

And it was not until Deng Xiaoping glorified riches (‘to be rich is glorious’) that China found a steady hand with a new direction, however ideologically dubious.

And because it was an ideologically dubious proposition of moral vacuity in which making money stumped all other values, it created a movement opposing the growing linkage between the Communist Party hierarchy and the new business class it was sponsoring with a strong stench of corruption all around.

The democracy movement, led by students, challenged the Deng order seeking greater transparency and broadening of the political system. And as we all know this was cruelly crushed by the use of military force in 1989.

Under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, the ruling junta has sought to broaden the social base of the one party rule by letting in people from the business class and other non-working class segments as party members.

(But it doesn’t include the vast mass of the rural population of about 800 million people. China’s rural sector has been held down to subsidize the urban industrial economy. But that is another story.)

Apart from greed, nationalism (often bordering on jingoism) is the guiding strategy/philosophy of this new class. And this is supposed to override China’s internal contradictions.

China has neither been able to resolve its external resentment towards the West and Japan, nor has it been able to sort out its internal political contradictions. The one continues to feed and reinforce the other.

Since the one-party rule is projected as China’s national nirvana for the foreseeable future, any attempt at creating an alternative political dialogue immediately becomes suspect and hence anti-national.

And in the process, the Party and the nation tend become indistinguishable.

The narrative of national humiliation has thus become the bedrock of China’s resurgence, with virtually no scope for any robust debate about a positive new direction, where past is important without being overbearing.

As Orville Schell says, in his review of the film Dark Matter and a few books on China in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books: “…despite China’s stunning [economic] accomplishments, few Chinese of my acquaintance, at least, have yet allowed themselves to be psychologically convinced by China’s success, to embrace a new national belief in China’s establishment as a leading nation…”

And they seem comfortable with, as William A. Callahan has noted, “…the national-humiliation narrative …painstakingly reproduced in textbooks, museums, popular history textbooks, virtual exhibits, feature films, dictionaries, journals, atlases, pictorials and commemorative stamps.”

It is not surprising, though, as the country’s ruling oligarchy finds in this narrative an important source of legitimacy.

As a result China finds itself in an endless quandary of feeling a sense of comfort and security (as well as anger) in a narrative of ‘heroic’ national humiliation.

Which isn’t allowing China to come out of its shell to take its due place as a responsible and self-confident power.

 This is not a hopeful augury for the future, with a sullen and self-absorbed China in a perpetual state of “China-as-victim syndrome.”