CONCLUSION
The Opium War is a pretty shameful story.
Perhaps it slipped your memory? It certainly hasn’t slipped [China’s] and is
still unravelling.
On 28 December 2009, a prisoner of the
Chinese state was driven through the freezing streets of Urumqi to a Public
Detention Centre. The following morning, around 6.30, he was woken and offered
a breakfast of thin rice porridge, and the opportunity to brush his teeth. By
10 a.m., he was delivered, under paramilitary guard, to a mobile ‘death van’,
strapped to a trolley and given a lethal injection.
In some respects, the whole business was
terribly mundane for the People’s Republic of China, which executes somewhere
between 1,700 and 10,000 people every year. In its superficial particulars, the
sentencing would have looked uncontroversial. Smuggling any quantity above
fifty grams of heroin automatically incurs the death penalty; the condemned man
had brought into the country a suitcase containing over four kilograms of the
drug.
But in other ways, this was an unusual
occurrence. The man, Akmal Shaikh, was an ethnically Pakistani British citizen,
and hence the first European to be executed in China in almost sixty years. He
was, moreover, a Briton whose legal responsibility for the crime in question
was hotly contested by his family and friends. Shaikh, his British defenders
argued, was mentally ill, suffering from bipolar disorder and manic depression.
(He had originally travelled to China in 2007 planning to become a pop star,
bringing peace to the world with his atonal debut single, ‘Come Little Rabbit’;
his personal deposition in the Chinese court was so rambling and incoherent
that his judges laughed at him.) He should, representatives of the British
government had demanded, be given an independent psychiatric assessment by the
Chinese authorities, a request that for months was stonewalled by the judges in
the case.
Shaikh’s death swiftly became a major
international incident. ‘I condemn the execution of Akmal Shaikh in the
strongest terms,’ said the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, ‘and am
appalled and disappointed that our persistent requests for clemency have not
been granted.’ Ivan Lewis, a Foreign Office minister, pronounced himself ‘sick
to the stomach . . . it’s a deeply depressing day for anyone with a modicum of
compassion or commitment to justice in Britain and throughout the world.’2
Chinese opinion responded with similar anger.
The parallels were too obvious: a new British attempt to meddle with Chinese
legal handling of an opiate-smuggling case. The media and Internet bubbled over
with references to 1840 and all that. ‘In China,’ went the official government
response, ‘given the bitter memory of history . . . the public has a particular
and strong resentment towards [drug smuggling]. In a recent web survey, 99% of
the public support the decision of the Court.’3
‘The execution of Shaikh is like the burning of opium stocks in Humen in 1840
during the Opium Wars’, analysed one academic. ‘This time, though, “gunboat
diplomacy” could not work.’4
‘England waged an Opium War against China’, raged an anonymous Internet
commentator. ‘Does it feel “sick to its stomach” about having invaded us? . . .
Lewis stands alongside Charles Elliot and Henry Pottinger: with the enemies of
China.’5
‘The words “England” and “opiate” equal “Opium War”,’ explained a blogger, ‘the
start of China’s modern history of being bullied and humiliated. The English
have forgotten that in 1840 their forebears began blasting open China’s gates
with opium. But the Chinese still feel the pain acutely.’6
‘Kill kill kill kill’, summarized another anonymous commentator.7
The Chinese, it’s worth pointing out, did not have a monopoly on memories of
the Opium War. The same idea came to a handful of British commentators, one of
whom denounced the fuss as ‘hypocritical and insensitive’.8
This was the third piece of alarming news to
come out of China in December 2009. The first concerned the failure of the
Copenhagen Climate Change summit, following which European participants –
bitterly disappointed that their hope for binding agreements on reductions of
emissions had come to nothing – cast around for someone to blame, and found
China. ‘China wrecked the talks,’ one impassioned environmentalist revealed,
‘intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful “deal” so
Western leaders would walk away carrying the blame.’ China’s only aim, he
concluded, was to safeguard its own economic rise (reliant on free use of filthy,
cheap coal), while encouraging the declining West to incinerate itself. The
Chinese premier had not, moreover, even deigned to sit in the same room as
leaders of the Western world – including Barack Obama – but had posted an
underling to relay the negotiations back-and-forth by telephone.9
To anyone with a touch of historical memory, this looked like an ominous return
to the style of pompous, sino-centric diplomacy that had so enraged men like
William Napier and Harry Parkes in the run-up to the first and second Opium
Wars, as the emperor’s officials refused to meet them in person, delegating
instead the hapless Hong merchants.
Then, on Christmas Day, the Communist
government (following months of illegal detention, and despite waves of
international attention) sentenced to eleven years’ imprisonment the celebrated
veteran dissident Liu Xiaobo on charges of ‘state subversion’, as revenge for
his authoring ‘Charter 08’ – an Internet petition calling for democracy and
human rights for China. (Less than a year later, a group of Norwegians would
enrage China by awarding Liu the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize in protest at his
sentencing.) Eleven years earlier, Bill Clinton had lectured the Communist
Party on its human-rights record, in person, in China. We’re on the rise, the
tune now seemed to run out of Beijing, and from now on you’d better get used to
doing things our way.
The British press panicked. The foreign
policy editor at the Daily Telegraph was swiftly grinding out invasion
scenarios. ‘The year is 2050, and a diplomatic dispute between China and
Britain risks escalating into all-out war . . . At the flick of a switch elite
teams of Chinese hackers attached to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) launch
a hi-tech assault on Britain’s computer systems, with devastating
consequences.’ Recent clashes, he concluded, have laid bare ‘the cold reality
of China’s attitude to the outside world.
Rather than being a partner that can be
trusted to work with the West . . . the Chinese have demonstrated that their
default position is that Beijing’s only real priority is to look after its own
interests . . . Much of China’s reluctance to engage constructively with the
West on issues of mutual concern dates back to the psychological trauma the
country suffered during the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, when British
gunboats routinely humiliated the Chinese government of the day . . . To ensure
that there is no repeat of a time when foreign powers could push the Chinese
people around with impunity, Beijing is today investing enormous effort into
developing technology that would render the West’s superior military firepower
useless.10
Drugs, revenge and Chinese plots for world
domination: it was the Yellow Peril all over again.
Beneath the clash-of-civilizations rhetoric,
things were more complicated. British commentators quickly assumed China’s hard
line was exclusively directed at them. But there was a domestic subtext to the
government’s lack of interest in compromising over Copenhagen, Liu Xiaobo or
Akmal Shaikh. China’s rulers are, for good reasons, intensely nervous of doing
anything (such as restricting cheap coal emissions) that will jeopardize
economic growth: their absolutist mandate to rule is predicated on their
ability to deliver prosperity to their 1.3 billion subjects. The CCP’s
nervousness about domestic opposition showed in their grotesque treatment of
Liu Xiaobo: China’s Internet seethes with potential dissent and capacity to
organize against the regime, with Liu only one representative of contemporary
China’s sizeable awkward squad.
Neither should it be forgotten that Akmal
Shaikh’s conviction and execution took place in Urumqi – the epicentre of
violent clashes between Muslim populations and Han migrants in July 2009 that
left 140 dead and many hundreds injured; it remained, as of January 2010, under
tense paramilitary control. For years, China’s preservers of law and order have
connected drug-smuggling into Xinjiang via Central Asia with Islamic separatist
terrorism. And in the couple of months preceding Akmal Shaikh’s execution,
Chinese newspapers were scattered with indications that Communist law and order
was malfunctioning up and down the country: at least five deranged killing
sprees, several of which involved multiple murders of family members – a sign
that under the helm of the CCP, the moral fabric of society seemed to be in
disintegration.11
Look at us now, the Communist Party told their citizen subjects as they stood
firm over Akmal Shaikh, we can keep domestic and international order.
Where the West repeatedly saw deliberate, provocative defiance, the Chinese
government also saw internal security issues. The whole sequence suggested
another Opium War parallel: while seemingly at war with the West, China is also
at war with itself.
It was worrying, though. It showed how edgy
relations are, at base, between the West and a China that is clutching at
superpower status; and how troubled these relations still are by a highly
politicized historical memory.
One of the great clichés of non-specialist
reporting on post-Mao China is that the place is changing, and fast. But
through the transformations of the past thirty years, at least two things have
remained reassuringly the same. One is the Communist Party’s untiring claim to
lead the country. Another is the airless account of modern Chinese history that
the party constructed in the 1920s and 1930s, with significant help from the
Nationalists, to shore up its own legitimacy and demand sacrifices from the
Chinese people: namely, that the history of modern China is a history of
imperialist victimization (from which only the party can save the country).
In the 1980s, though, this familiar narrative
played to something of an empty house. For sure, the textbooks carried the old
tune about ‘the hideous sufferings’ inflicted by the ‘shameful opium trade’,
and ‘the Chinese people’s resolute will to resist foreign invasion.’12
But this was a decade in which the government had trouble persuading anyone
about anything. For many Chinese people, the volte-face from the Cultural
Revolution was too dramatic for the regime to maintain its old credibility –
former enemies of the people were suddenly rehabilitated; the vicious energies
expended in persecuting and humiliating them were dismissed as an unfortunate
mistake; the years that millions of urban intellectuals had spent ‘learning
from the peasants’ were redefined as a waste of time. Even the once-deified Mao
was pronounced in 1981 to have been only 70 per cent right.
A key element of the post-Mao change of heart
was to admit that learning from the West – or parts of it, at least – was
acceptable. But even as the government tried desperately hard to pick and
choose what it imported – foreign investment, science and technology were fine;
democracy less so –
control proved elusive. ‘Once you open the window,’ as Mao’s successor Deng
Xiaoping famously commented, ‘it’s hard to stop the flies and mosquitoes coming
in.’ And when the party tried to block certain imports, ridicule resulted. In
the early 1980s, it focused its energies on eradicating ‘Spiritual Pollution’:
not only pornography and smuggling, but also less obviously criminal
manifestations – long hair, flared trousers, slightly modernist poetry whose
meaning was not as transparent as road-signs. By this point, although such
campaigns could still chill the Chinese people with memories of the Cultural
Revolution, they were far less successful at actually convincing anyone. Many
urban Chinese recall the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign as the single event
that – through its sheer pettiness about things like hairstyles and clothing –
destroyed their final shreds of intellectual respect for the CCP. ‘Where shall
we go and get polluted tonight?’ mocked Yang Xianyi, one of the country’s most
famous literary intellectuals, down the phone to his friends as propaganda
chiefs in the People’s Daily railed against contamination by ‘vulgar
individualism’. Writers targeted by the campaign responded by cultivating
Western support. ‘Everyone I knew was disgusted with China, with the
government’, remembered Bonnie McDougall, a celebrated translator of post-Mao
Chinese writing into English, and a resident in Beijing through the 1980s. ‘I would
be approached all the time by people asking me to get them invitations abroad .
. . they wanted to get out.’13 The West was becoming no longer the root of all China’s problems,
but its saviour.
The authorities also seemed to lose some of
their appetite for brainwashing the populace, through propaganda offensives,
about their own infallibility. Many things were allowed to become publicly
uncertain in the 1980s: how Marxist principles fitted with economic
liberalization; how outrageous the government’s vocal critics would be in their
next essay or public lecture; how much cooking oil would cost next month. But
as China stumbled towards a market economy and as inflation rocketed, one
general conviction grew: the government’s reforms weren’t working and the
leadership had not found a way to persuade the populace that they could lead.
It was a decade in which almost everything and everyone Chinese seemed
vulnerable to mockery and attack, and often from within the establishment. In
1988, as criticism fever ran high, Central China Television screened – not
once, but twice – a six-part historical documentary entitled Deathsong of a
River (Heshang), that scorned thousands of years of Chinese history
and ridiculed the country’s national symbols (such as the Great Wall and the
Yellow River), while extolling Western-style trade, freedom, capitalism,
science and democracy. The most avant-garde rebels – such as the 2010 Nobel
Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo – speculated that China could only experience ‘great
historical change’ if it were colonized as Hong Kong had been.
The Opium War industry went into decline. The
decade was littered with missed opportunities for commemorating Sino-British
conflicts, with the neglected ruins of the old Summer Palace, to Beijing’s
north-west, a perfect example. During the Maoist period, the palace’s pleasure
gardens had become a treasure trove for pilfering farmers, questing for stone
and bricks for pigsties and other useful buildings. Through the 1980s,
administration of the place – crowded, as a couple of visitors noted, ‘with
heaps of rubbish, vegetable plots, pigsties and beancurd presses . . . fly- and
mosquito-infested ditches’ – was so slack that no one could be bothered to
charge an entrance fee.14
Fictionalized memoirs of the 1980s recalled a new, creative use for the
dilapidated precincts: as a trysting location for the privacy- and sex-starved
students of nearby Beijing and Qinghua Universities.
The neglect of political education had a
direct effect on popular views of the CCP’s legitimacy. From the mid-decade
onwards, urban China was given pause, every year, by student protests: over the
lack of government transparency; over the rising cost of food; over the rats in
their dorms. Admittedly, some of these demonstrations seemed to be set off by
anti-foreign feeling: most notoriously, the 1988 riots in Nanjing triggered by
racist fury that African students were consorting with Chinese girls. But at
bottom, these xenophobic eruptions were driven by acute domestic tensions. By
the close of the decade, the leadership was unable to agree even in public on
what it should be doing about the country’s looming political and social
crisis. Between 1986 and 1989, two of the men – Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang –
appointed by Deng Xiaoping to manage his socialist market economy were sacked
for failing to come down hard enough on dissent (what the establishment had now
started calling ‘bourgeois liberalization’). The sudden death of Hu in April
1989 provided a focus for student dissatisfaction that led directly to the
massive demonstrations of that spring and summer. After Zhao blanched at Deng’s
decision to send in the People’s Liberation Army against the demonstrators, he
would spend the next sixteen years (until his death in 2005) under house
arrest, allowed out only for the occasional round of golf on one of Beijing’s
courses.
When a triumvirate of student leaders knelt
on the steps to the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square on 26 April
1989, to present the Communist leadership with a petition demanding democratic
reforms, they had no idea that over the next two months their protests would
fill the square with hunger-striking protestors, infect every major Chinese
city, mesmerize the world’s media and almost bring their Communist government
down, before ending in bloodshed. (As the movement advanced, it became apparent
that the students were clear about few of their aims, including democracy –
many were distinctly lukewarm about the idea of giving the vote to the
country’s uneducated masses.) But whatever they did anticipate, no one could possibly
have imagined – given how much emphasis the traditional Communist narrative of
the Opium War had placed on taking the moral high ground over Western
aggression – that it would be the government’s most public act of violence
against its own civilians (the suppression of the demonstrations on 4 June)
that would restore the Opium War to its old, illustrious position as
Pre-Eminent National Wound.
They were busy days in Beijing, just after 4
June 1989, just after the People’s Liberation Army soldiers had lowered their
rifle muzzles to chest height and begun firing at will on the people of Beijing. The military forces needed
congratulating on national television on their triumph over the
‘counter-revolution’; civilian bodies needed clearing from the streets; leading
protestors who had not managed to smuggle themselves out of the country needed
rounding up. But it was also a time for the leadership to reflect on what had
gone wrong ideologically over the past ten years; on why the Chinese populace
had seemed to stop believing in what the Communist Party told them; on why
urban China had been on the brink of declaring war on the government; on why
even the staff of the government’s mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, had
joined the protestors, parading through the streets waving banners demanding
‘No More Lies’.
Two answers were found – one public, one
private. The public explanation was a reliable favourite: the turmoil was the
result of foreign manipulation. ‘Some political forces in the West’, explained
Chen Xitong, the Mayor of Beijing, ‘always attempt to make socialist countries,
including China, give up the socialist road, eventually bring these countries
under the rule of international monopoly capital and put them on the course of
capitalism. This is their long-term, fundamental strategy.’15
A small group of counter-revolutionaries, he went on, had colluded with
plotting foreigners, who had ploughed hundreds of millions of dollars into
splitting the country.
In their more honest moments, though, China’s
hardliners might have concluded that they had brought it on themselves. Since
Mao began his career in the Nationalists’ Propaganda Office, the Communist
Party had prided itself on its mastery of spin; on its understanding that in
politics, surface is more important than substance. (In 1935, almost as soon as
the ragged, starving remainder of Communist troops on the run from the
Nationalist army limped into a new headquarters in the north-west, Mao had
ordered underlings to get to work telling heroic tales about the trek,
transforming it from a year-long rout into a triumph over adversity: the Long
March.) But through the 1980s, that lesson had been sidelined in the interests
of introducing fresh air into Chinese society: controlling public opinion had
seemed less urgent than the drive towards a vigorous market economy. In spring
1989, as discontent climaxed, the party’s propaganda chief extraordinarily
lifted an initial media ban on reporting the protests, instructing newspaper
editors to present ‘the actual state of affairs’ – to let the people make up
their own minds; following which, journalists streamed into the square to join
the demonstrations.16
The lessons were well marked by Deng
Xiaoping. ‘For many years,’ he now sternly observed at a national meeting of
propaganda department chiefs, ‘some of our comrades, immersing themselves in
specific affairs, have shown no concern for political developments and attached
no importance to ideological work . . . Our gravest failure has been in
[political] education. We did not provide enough education to young people,
including students. For many of those who participated in the demonstrations
and hunger strikes it will take years, not just a couple of months, of education
to change their thinking.’17
Deng’s second-in-command, Jiang Zemin – who had scrambled up the party ranks on
the strength of his muffling of 1989’s Shanghai protests – was keen to show
that the pendulum was swinging back. His predecessor, the disgraced Zhao
Ziyang, had not even attended annual National Propaganda meetings; Jiang made a
point not only of attending every one, but also of making the keynote speech.
Once the oversight had been acknowledged,
though, the question was how to fill the propaganda vacuum. In declaring soon
after Mao’s death that ‘practice was the sole criterion of truth’, Deng had
implicitly thrown ideology out of the window (perhaps the same one through
which all the flies and mosquitoes were coming). The loss of Communist China’s
‘spiritual pillars’ – the political, Marxist thought that glued the place
together – had been the result. But now that the guns of the People’s
Liberation Army had been turned on the People, lecturing populations on
proletarian principles was, realistically, going to be problematic – even
though the conservative wing of the party remained in denial about this until
around 1992, as they busily tried to orchestrate a return to old-style Maoism.
Some of the savvier elements in government
had another idea: to combine recriminations of the West with a revamped
patriotic propaganda drive – to reinvent the post-1989 party as defender of the
national interest against Western attempts to contain a rising China. It was an
almost improbably audacious plan: how on earth, a matter-of-fact observer might
have reasonably asked at the time, was the party going to persuade its people –
whom it had openly butchered through June 1989 – that it was, in fact, the
country’s saviour from evil Western schemes? The demonstrations’ blood-soaked
denouement was an international and domestic PR disaster of the first order:
while Western politicians and overseas Chinese called for economic and
political sanctions and sinologists contemplated switching discipline in
protest, hundreds of thousands of sobbing Chinese people came out in protest in
Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and Western cities, comparing the PRC to Nazi Germany
and spray-painting the national flag with swastikas. Surely, from here, there
was no way back.
But one historical coincidence, at least,
seemed to smile on the endeavour. The aftermath of the 1989 suppression fell
upon an auspicious commemoration: the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the
Opium War. And through the months following June 1989, some of the country’s
modern historians got to work. While elsewhere in the world Communist states
collapsed, academic hacks wrote and organized and wrote some more until, as the
new year approached, they were at last ready. In 1990, China’s establishment
fought a vigorous campaign to remind the Chinese people of their history of
oppression at the hands of West, through literally dozens of articles,
conferences and spin-off books about the conflict.
‘The Opium War’, went Humiliation and
Resistance – the book resulting from just one of the year’s commemorative
symposia – ‘was the great event in China’s modern history: not only the
beginning of China’s modern history of humiliation, but also the first glorious
chapter of the Chinese people’s struggle of resistance against foreign
invasion. The War has not only branded an enormous, painful, unforgettable memory
on the hearts of countless sons and daughters of China, but has also provided a
hugely worthwhile lesson for later generations to reflect upon.’ China’s modern
history was the story of the Chinese people suffering from, then resisting,
(Western) imperialist
aggression, beginning with the ‘shameless’ and ‘filthy’ Opium War, a concerted
plot to ‘enslave our people, steal our wealth and turn a great nation that had
been independent for thousands of years into a semi-feudal semi-colony.’ The
Chinese people were also to remember that ‘between the Opium War and the War of
Resistance Against Japan, the Chinese people gradually awoke until, after many
failed choices, they eventually chose socialism . . . and the leadership of the
Communist Party . . . In recent years, some enemies of patriotism have been
shouting about “total Westernization” . . . This is extraordinary . . . To
forget history is treachery.’18 ‘Since the Opium War,’ another conference paraphrased, ‘history has
shown that . . . only the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is the core
power for the victory of the revolution . . . only socialism can save and
develop China.’19
The Opium War’s birthday extravaganza of 1990
was the start of one of the Communist Party’s most successful post-Mao
ideological campaigns, Patriotic Education, a crusade designed – as the People’s
Daily explained in 1994 – to ‘boost the nation’s spirit, enhance its
cohesion, foster its self-esteem and sense of pride, consolidate and develop a
patriotic united front . . . and rally the masses’ patriotic passions to the
great cause of building socialism with Chinese characteristics.’20
The campaign encompassed three big ideas: first, to indoctrinate the Chinese in
the idea that China possessed a unique, glorious, millennia-old ‘national
condition’ (guoqing) unready for democracy; second, to remind them of
their sufferings at the hands of the West; and third, to underline the genius
of Communist leadership. In practice, this meant talking up the ‘great
achievements’ of the Chinese People, Nation and Communist Party, in stirring
films, in feel-good sing-songs, in top-hundred lists of heroes, great events
and battles and in numbing references to China’s ‘century of humiliation’
inflicted by foreign imperialism, always beginning with the Opium Wars, always
passing slickly over the CCP’s own acts of violence (the Maoist famine of the
early 1960s; the Cultural Revolution; the 1989 crackdown). ‘How can we give our
youth patriotic education?’ asked Seeking Truth (Qiushi), the
party’s leading policy journal. ‘By teaching them to understand the historical
inevitability and correctness of choosing the socialist road . . . since the
Opium War.’21
Shortly after 1989, the Central Propaganda Department dubbed modern Chinese
history ‘a meaningful security issue.’22
(In 2001, the official history of the CCP explicitly traced the party’s period
of pre-development back to 1840, ‘in order to explain the historical
inevitability of the CCP’s establishment.’23)
A rash of National Humiliation books erupted: The Indignation of National
Humiliation, A Dictionary of National Humiliation, A Simple Dictionary of
National Humiliation, Never Forget National Humiliation.24
‘High schools didn’t teach students anything about the Opium War until 1990,’ a
veteran author of history textbooks from the People’s Educational Press
recalled in 2007, ‘when they brought it in to improve their patriotic
education.’25
As Francis Fukuyama pronounced the death of ideology, and both specialist and
non-specialist China-watchers were predicting that China’s famed propaganda
system was in crisis, this machinery geared itself up for a new message.
Post-1989 China has bristled with new or
improved tourist destinations commemorating the horrors of foreign aggression.
The government finally mustered the will to capitalize on the propaganda value
of the ruins of the Summer Palace, replacing the pigsties and piles of rubbish
with new signs littered across the gardens reminding visitors of what would
have been there, if the British and French had not burnt or stolen it first.
The ruins of the Qing emperors’ imitation Versailles, of course, were left in
place – a handful of curlicued pillars looming up out of evocatively
disarranged rubble – as if 1860 were only yesterday still. Before their groups
scatter for photo-opportunities, Chinese tour-guides today make sure their
charges have taken the point: ‘This isn’t history,’ I overheard one party being
told. ‘This is a national tragedy.’ After a solemn amble through the palace’s
remains, visitors eventually reach, along a fifty-yard walkway lined by notices
detailing the location of items looted in 1860 in foreign museums (‘the
humiliated soul of the palace’s remains is a constant imperative to reflect on
history’), a courtyard museum in which a fifty-minute documentary film, The
Vicissitudes of the Summer Palace, blares out on continuous loop: a
masterpiece of shrill socialist realism graced by production values from the
1970s. ‘Never forget history!’ hectors its conclusion. ‘Revive China!’
(Naturally, there are no such publicly preserved ruins of the many historical
sites destroyed by Chinese people, with full government encouragement, during
the Cultural Revolution, or published listings of priceless artworks smashed or
stolen by Red Guards.)
Inevitably, the first Opium War also did well
out of the patriotic boom of the 1990s, with the redevelopment of a heritage
trail around Canton and Nanjing. By the end of the decade, a new Sea Battle
Museum rose, like a great barnacle, out of the Guangdong coastline, recounting
British ships’ 1841 destruction of the crucial forts that guarded the riverway
up to Canton. The temple on the outskirts of Nanjing in which China’s first
‘Unequal Treaty’ was agreed on 29 August 1842 had been destroyed during the
Second World War; the site was reconstructed into the Museum of the Nanjing
Treaty, in time for the all-important anniversary of 1990. In 1997, to mark the
Handover of Hong Kong (the British occupation of which, pronounced Jiang Zemin,
‘was the epitome of the humiliation China suffered in modern history’), six
million yuan in public subscriptions were collected to pay for the
forging of a massive ‘Bell of Warning’, which now stood at the entrance of the
complex: ‘to peal long and loud, lest we forget the national humiliation of the
past.’26
That same year, a blockbuster about the Opium War – full of tough, righteous
Chinese officials and cruel, lecherous foreigners – hit Chinese cinemas.27
In 2007, a Central China Television
documentary entitled The Road to Revival chronicled China’s history
since the Opium War, tracing out the horrors suffered before the joys of
Communist victory in 1949. Near the entrance to the accompanying exhibition at
Beijing’s grimly Stalinist Military Affairs Museum, a vast flashing map (‘The
Historical Humiliations of the Chinese People’) boggled visitors’ minds with
statistics about the millions of ounces of silver that the Unequal Treaties
cost the country, while a
video loop juxtaposed pitiful images of naked Chinese children with those of
fully clothed Western soldiers. The briefest of nods to the glitches of
communism were permitted. The exhibition offered one mention of the Great Leap
Forward – Mao’s fanatical 1957 farming revolution that led to some 30 million
deaths in the man-made famine of the early 1960s – and glossed the decade of
the Cultural Revolution with a three-dimensional display of China’s first
successful explosion of an atom bomb. The events of June 1989 were blotted out
with images of happy Chinese people shopping for televisions through the 1980s,
followed by even happier farmers, computers and skyscrapers through the 1990s.
‘Remember our history of humiliation,’ ran the closing display, ‘build a
beautiful future.’
Chen Xitong – Mayor of Beijing through the
spring and summer of 1989 – termed Patriotic Education a ‘systematically
engineered project’; and it seems to have produced results. A survey of 10,000
young people in 1995 already found most of them expecting China’s status to
surge over the next thirty years; that year, patriotism rose to number two in
the list of values important to China’s youth, from number five only ten years
previously.28
In 2003, almost half of a 5,000-strong sample of students surveyed expressed
confidence that in twenty years China should and would be able to become a
leading military world power.29
Popular, anti-Western nationalism has regularly erupted since the mid-1990s. In
May 1999, as the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen confrontation approached,
tens of thousands of Chinese students spilled onto the streets of urban China
roaring not for democracy but for revenge against America for the NATO bombing
of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. ‘Oppose invasion!’ ran one slogan. ‘Blood
for Blood!’ ran another. Horrified apologies by the American government (whose
Beijing embassy was besieged by protestors) that the bombing had been a mistake
caused by CIA bungling and inefficiency meant nothing; the incident had
instantly pressed the Opium War button in a Chinese public now seemingly
conditioned to expect only the worst from the West. ‘This is no longer an age’,
analysed the People’s Daily, ‘in which people can barge about the world
with a few gunboats . . . no longer the era in which Western powers plundered
the Imperial Palace at will . . . and seized Hong Kong . . . The hot blood of
people of ideas and integrity who have opposed imperialism for more than a
hundred and fifty years flows through the veins of the Chinese people. NATO had
better remember this.’30
There was, the instinctive reasoning went, nothing chance about it – it was the
latest manifestation of the old foreign conspiracy against their country.
In April 2008, a similar outburst of Chinese
nationalism was triggered by furious responses to Tibetan Independence
demonstrations during the Olympic torch relay. While anti-Chinese protests
spread through Tibet, China Daily blamed the unrest on British invasion
following the Opium War.31
On 7 April, when pro-Tibet protestors in Paris tried to grab the Olympic flame
from a wheelchair-bound Chinese paralympian, the French leg of the relay broke
down only half an hour after starting out from the Eiffel Tower. Around ten
days later, civilian nationalists had mobilized protests around the French
embassy in Beijing, and outside French supermarkets in at least five different
Chinese cities. ‘Protect Our Tibet! Bless Our Olympics! Boycott Carrefour!’ ran
banners displayed at demonstrations on the north-east coast. ‘Say No to French
Imperialists! Strongly Protest Britain and France Invading China in 1860!’ As
popular Chinese outrage grew about perceived anti-Chinese bias in Western
reporting on the riots in Tibet, more than ten members of the Foreign
Correspondents’ Club of China received death threats. ‘People who fart through
the mouth will get shit stuffed down their faces by me! Foreign reporters out
of China!’ a posting on a popular news site owned by the People’s Daily
responded. ‘These bastards make me want to throw up,’ ran another. ‘Throw them
in the Taiwan Strait to fill it up. They’re like flies – disgusting.’32
Those without first-hand experience of or interest in China now encountered
(either physically or on prime-time news slots) files of red-flag wavers in
Australian, American and European cities occasionally prepared to kick and
punch advocates of Tibetan independence. Things looked particularly ugly in
clashes between Chinese and pro-Tibetan demonstrators at Duke University in the
US, where one Chinese student who suggested dialogue between the two sides
received death threats from compatriots. For a while – until the Sichuan
earthquake revived global sympathy for China – dyspeptic chauvinism looked set
to become the international face of this imminent superpower.
In the course of all this, a brash new
persona in Chinese public life has emerged: the fenqing – angry,
intensely nationalistic (predominantly male) youth.33
Although they periodically spill out onto the streets, the favoured habitat of the
fenqing is the Internet. One of the most impressive aspects of the CCP’s
post-1989 Patriotic Education campaign has been its ability to adapt new
technology to its purposes. For sure, plenty of young Chinese nationalists’
minds have been fed on old-fashioned, traditional media: on what one Chinese
academic in 2006 controversially called the ‘wolf’s milk’ of the PRC’s
nationalistically selective textbooks. The youngest self-proclaimed fenqing
that I have encountered was a sixteen-year-old from Beijing, who told me that
he had first learnt to become angry aged thirteen, in his modern Chinese
history classes at junior high school. ‘Our schooling taught us that China’s
misery was imposed by Western countries’, observed one twenty-three-year-old in
2006. ‘We were all strongly nationalist . . . We were bound to become fenqing.’34
But the Internet in China has also become a crucial virtual meeting place for
new extreme patriots: every nationalist flashpoint since the late 1990s has
been stoked by, or organized over, the Internet.
For well over a decade, the Chinese
government has been one of the world’s most assiduous censors of the Internet,
controlling the public’s access to information through its ‘Great Firewall’: a
handful of servers guarding the gateways at which the Chinese Internet meets
that of the outside world, in order to block sensitive foreign sites.35
Yet despite the regime’s nerves about the Internet offering a free forum for
exchange of political information and views, it has tolerated and even encouraged outbursts of angry
nationalism, in the hope that anti-foreign sentiment will blur into
state-defined patriotism. And on the face of it, the gamble has paid off. After
the 1999 protests, the People’s Daily set up the ‘Strong Nation Forum’:
an official outlet for nationalistic postings. After the 2001 collision between
a Chinese fighter plane and an American spy plane off the coast of southern
China, the site raged with anti-US comments on the incident.36 Aware that a great many Chinese
Internet users are primarily interested in games, the propaganda department has
ensured that rising generations can spend their leisure hours refining their
patriotic instincts. In 2000, for example, an officially sanctioned news site
featured games in which web-users could thump Lee Teng-hui (the President of Taiwan
who oversaw the island’s first democratic elections in 1995), stick silly noses
on him or shoot at him as he jumped out of a plane. As the Hong Kong Handover
approached in 1997, a software company launched an Opium War game whose players
fought the British virtually: ‘Let’s use our wisdom and courage’, ran the
manual, ‘to exterminate the damned invaders!’37
Unexpected breeds of angry young men have
reinforced the CCP’s messages. In the middle of the decade, popular nationalism
hit China’s bookshelves in the form of a series of bestselling volumes
denouncing the West’s dark conspiracy to ‘contain’ (ezhi) or even
‘enslave’ a rising China. Zhang Xiaobo, one of the co-authors of the earliest
of these books, China Can Say No, was an improbable supporter of state
orthodoxy: a veteran of the West-worshipping 1980s imprisoned briefly after
1989 for his involvement in the protests. The Plot to Demonise China (an
account of the American media’s conspiracy to blacken China) was put together
by a group of young, Westernized intellectuals (one a professor at an American
university). ‘We were nothing to do with the party,’ protested Zhang – now a
highly successful independent publisher ambitious to produce China’s first
legal pornographic magazine – more than ten years later.38
In the late 1990s, as the Internet began to
take off in China, George W. Bush predicted blithely that ‘freedom’s genie [is]
out of the bottle’. Within another ten years, such optimism was starting to
look misplaced, with a bullish Communist government defying Western governments
on key issues – the undervaluing of the yuan, multilateral agreement at
Copenhagen, freedom of speech – and apparently cheered on by Internet-users who
classified each collision as an imperialist plot to keep China down. And the
more that the government and its netizens dwelt on Western schemes to intervene
in China, the more they fuelled old Yellow Peril fears in British and American
minds. In January 2010, after more than three decades of market reforms and a
decade of the Internet, Sino-Western relations seemed as haunted by the Opium War
syndrome as ever.
In winter 2007, finding myself in Beijing
with some spare time on my hands, I decided to take the temperature of
Patriotic Education for myself: to see whether it really was manufacturing
furious chauvinists. So I arranged to sit in on some high-school history
classes. It was surprisingly straightforward. If I’d been a Chinese researcher
trying to do the same thing in England, I would probably have had to wait weeks
or months for a Criminal Records Bureau check. A friend – a clever and
good-humoured thirty-something teacher with a degree from an American
university – contacted a couple of his friends, then rang me back with a
handful of phone numbers. ‘Give them a call and they’ll tell you when to come.’
Arriving at the school early on a November
morning, I was met at the gates by another young, smiling history teacher, who
took me to the classroom. ‘High-school education’s politically very important,’
she told me as we walked over. ‘That’s where most people get their ideas about
modern history from.’ And the class – on the Opium War – did indeed kick off
stolidly enough, with an introit about the evils of British drug-smuggling and
the damage done to the Chinese people’s dignity, and images of socialist
realist sculptures depicting muscular Chinese resistance. The lecture was
accompanied – in an emotive touch foreign to the history lessons I remember
sitting through as a teenager – by an atmospherically sinister soundtrack. ‘To
forget history is treachery’, a PowerPoint slide reminded the students – in
case they hadn’t heard it a hundred times before.
But there were surprises in the
fifteen-minute discussion that followed, in which students were invited to
debate why China was defeated, and the influence that the war had had on the
country. One classroom wag hauled himself to his feet: ‘As Chairman Mao said .
. .’ he began, in a deliberate parody of political correctness. Once his
classmates’ and teacher’s gusts of laughter had died down, he made his point:
‘We lost because we were too weak, too closed up.’ His classmates agreed: ‘The
problem with us Chinese,’ another went on, ‘was that we had no backbone; we
were all high on opium the whole time.’ ‘Our weapons were three hundred years
behind the West,’ observed a third, ‘and we had no experience of naval war. We
were too cowardly, too backward, too isolated.’
Despite the impressive efforts of the
Propaganda Department to construct a China-as-victim account of modern history,
commemoration of the Opium War is still saturated with self-loathing. ‘We made The
Road to Revival,’ its director (a suave forty-something called Ren Xue’an)
told me, ‘because although we’ve solved the basic problem that led to the Opium
War – that the isolated will be backward, and the backward will take a beating
– there are lots of other things, such as national wealth and strength,
democracy, harmony and civilization, that we haven’t achieved yet. We’re not
obsessing about this period of history just for the sake of it, but in order to
march forward, to tell the Chinese people to keep studying new things . . . the
war opened up the rest of the world to us, and we began to learn from it.’39
Views are, in fact, very divided about the
impact of Patriotic Education. History teachers on the front line of the
crusade fret that, despite diligent reminders of the ‘Century of Humiliation’,
‘the youth of today aren’t very patriotic’, as the teacher I saw in action
complained. ‘They’re selfish. They have no sense of responsibility – they don’t
worry or think about things like Unequal Treaties. Some of them don’t even know
what the Boxer Indemnity is! Nothing matters to them, except passing the
university entrance examination. If you tell them to be patriotic, they don’t
take any notice.’ After
one class, a group of Beijing sixteen-year-olds told me they hated modern
history – it was so dark and oppressive. ‘They all prefer ancient history,’
their teacher told me. ‘They like the sense of culture and the emperors.’ I
also observed some of the new compulsory modern history classes (that replaced
older courses in Marxism-Leninism) at Beijing University. Soon, the only way I
could keep myself awake was by sitting at the back and keeping a count on all
the students who had obviously fallen asleep (some of them in the front rows).
A tour of some of China’s sites of patriotic
education intimated that the lack of enthusiasm was not restricted to students.
A case in point was the Sea Battle Museum. The curators have made a stalwart
attempt to fan visitors’ sense of grievance through instructive captions (‘the
British colonialists attempted to open the door of China by the contemptible
means of armed invasion and opium-smuggling . . . the sublime national
integrity and great patriotic spirit of the Chinese people displayed during the
anti-aggression struggle showed a national spirit that would never disappear’),
and three-dimensional artists’ impressions of the struggle: one’s attention is
grabbed particularly by a lurid waxworks of the fight for one of the forts, in
which an unarmed Chinese man has wrestled to the ground an armed and apparently
moribund British soldier, and is about to dash his brains out with a rock.
On the beach outside the museum, however,
day-trippers seemed unperturbed by the events of 170 years past. As they laid
out snacks and drinks, threw balls around and kicked shuttlecocks in the shadow
of the forts that failed to protect China from British ships, tourists were far
more interested in enjoying a few hours at the seaside than in contemplating
the national tragedy. The largest and most accessible of the fortifications was
Weiyuan Paotai (the Fort That Overawes to a Great Distance) just to the right
of the beach: a long seawall regularly punctuated by large cannon, several of
which were being straddled by young women in tight shorts who were having their
photographs taken. I asked a young man watching his male friends scramble over
the guns what he felt visiting the place: ‘I . . . er . . . don’t know. I
haven’t thought.’ I tried goading him a little: ‘I’m British, you know.’
‘Really? I hear Britain’s very advanced.’ I gave him another opening: ‘British
as in “The Anti-British Invasion Museum” [another nearby site of Opium
War-period patriotic education]. Wouldn’t you like me to apologize?’ ‘Oh, that.
That’s just history.’ Even the flagship monument to National Humiliation – the
ruins of the Summer Palace – is patchy in its effects. ‘Oh, yes, I’m very
angry,’ one male student visitor told me. A few minutes later, he tapped me on
the shoulder to ask what country I was from and what opportunities there were
for studying law in England.
For all the success of young Chinese
nationalists in periodically grandstanding Western media coverage, almost every
Chinese urbanite I have spoken to is embarrassed by them, refusing to admit
they represent the mainstream. And in any case, most of China’s patriots do not
draw a clear line between themselves and the West. Significant numbers of
China’s angriest cyber-nationalists – denouncers of China’s ‘victimization’ by
the West and Japan – rank among the most enthusiastic exploiters of the wealth
and opportunities generated by the opening up of post-Mao China to the outside
world. A joke circulating in 1999 rumoured that demonstrators outside the US
embassy in Beijing were lobbing into the compound stones wrapped in visa
applications. Interviews I have attempted to conduct with fenqing have
often been distracted by their earnest requests for advice about studying or
getting published in the West. In one transcript, my interlocutor’s speech on
his readiness to send his army to the British Museum to recover the treasures
looted from the Summer Palace is interrupted when he enthusiastically accepts a
complimentary cup of Christmas coffee from a Starbucks waitress. Pragmatism, at
least as much as patriotism, is the religion of the contemporary PRC.
Despite its fears that the population is
oblivious to Patriotic Education, China’s propaganda establishment is anxious
also that the campaign might be too successful: that nationalist anger might
prove uncontrollable.
Back in 2007, I encountered one of China’s
Angry Youth in person: a tall, rangy, mop-haired journalist, whom I will call
Wang Ningwen.1
I had first encountered him at a meeting at a small independent bookstore
called Utopia (Wuyou zhixiang), just outside the western gate of Beijing
University, that had established itself as a gathering place for left-wing
nationalists. He was one of a group assembled to discuss the patriotic problems
in Li Ang’s Oscar-winning sensation, Lust, Caution – a sex-stuffed tale
of Japanese-occupied Second World War Shanghai, in which a female resistance
worker ends up sacrificing herself for the political collaborator she is
supposed to help assassinate. The discussion started off predictably enough:
the film, the speakers agreed, was ‘an insult to the Chinese people’, a
‘Chinese traitor movie’, ‘a sexually transmitted skin disease’. These
denunciations out of the way though, things took a slightly surprising turn.
What the speakers were really worried about was not the idea of a Hollywood
cabal plotting to defame Chinese patriotism, but instead the utter
spinelessness of the Chinese government’s response to the film. Why hadn’t they
banned it? ‘What did the censors think they were doing?’ one speaker demanded,
to enthusiastic applause.40
China’s problems, the group agreed, were the traitors within, not the enemy
without: the ‘comprador power-group’ (maiban shili) at the heart of
government, who identified with the West and Japan, who thought China would be
better off today if it had been a colony for the last two centuries. These
Chinese ‘running dogs of capitalism’ were turning China into the West’s
‘concubine’. I was struck by the fact that, although the speakers had no love
of the West (Western culture, I learnt from one of them, ‘is bestial – it turns
everyone into animals. The West is infantile, savage and destructive; China is
civilized’), their main quarrel was with the current Communist leadership.
While the assembled had ostensibly gathered to condemn a non-mainland film,
their anger quickly bounced back at the Chinese government.
I made an appointment to meet Wang Ningwen a
few days later, to talk a little more about his Weltanshauung. (As a security
check, I tested the depth of his anti-Western feeling over the phone by suggesting we met at Starbucks, to
see whether his love of multinational lattes would triumph over patriotic
principle.) Once we were sitting down over coffee, he poured out his
grievances. They began with the West: ‘All China’s problems are connected to
foreign invasion, starting with the Opium War . . . the British smuggled and
stole – they behaved disgustingly . . . The accounts of history have to be
settled . . . China’s obsessed with getting an apology from Japan; they should
get one from Britain, too.’ But he was very clear about where the root of the
problem lay: in the cowardice and treachery of China’s own government. There
was no such thing as patriotic education in China, he told me. ‘It was all so
boring we hated it – I called it anti-patriotic education . . . The average
highschool student doesn’t remember how badly the West behaved – all they know
is that Japanese, American and European things are good . . . mainstream
opinion in China today is trying to replace national identity with stuff about
how we should be modern and civilized, like the West . . . The entire CCP today
is basically a gang of traitors.’41
He was outraged by Yuan Weishi’s criticisms
of Chinese textbooks published in 2006 in Freezing Point: how could a
Chinese scholar have allied himself with the Western imperialists? ‘It was pure
treachery – he was desecrating his own ancestors’ graves . . . He should have
been drowned in rotten eggs and spit . . . or maybe have had his house
vandalized. It would have been completely right and proper.’42
But even though Freezing Point was shut down by the government, Wang
Ningwen was convinced the two sides were allies in the same conspiracy: ‘Yuan’s
article is serving the current CCP, he’s in cahoots with their treacherous
bureaucrats.’ At the end of our talk, Wang Ningwen had questions for me, too.
The following day, he had been invited to an interview with the British Council
for a scholarship to study in the UK, and he was wondering how best to present
himself. ‘Try not mentioning the [Opium] War,’ I suggested. He must have
controlled himself, for he won the award.43
Wang Ningwen’s fierce anti-Western
nationalism, then, was an odd hybrid. While it had swallowed whole the angry,
victimized rhetoric of the Opium War narrative constructed by the CCP, it was
far more concerned with opposing the current Communist government itself. Wang –
as a graduate of Beijing University, a member of the country’s intellectual
elite – angrily attacked the regime’s public monopoly on historical
interpretations of the Cultural Revolution and of modern history in general.
‘They don’t want us to remember modern history,’ he commented scornfully of The
Road to Revival, ‘they just want to make us realize how great the present
is.’44
Ren Xue’an – representative par excellence of the contemporary Communist media
establishment so disliked by Wang Ningwen – was disapproving of fenqing
nationalism: ‘We should tolerate different voices, but their take on history is
wrong. It doesn’t resonate with many people in China today.’45
One of the reasons that the regime draws so
much attention to the ‘Century of Humiliation’ is that it dreads the Chinese
remembering man-made disasters of the Maoist period.46
But the popular fury that is diverted into nationalism also reminds the
establishment too much of the anarchic civil violence of the Cultural
Revolution.47
Ren Xue’an explained to me why commemorating recent domestic traumas was still
out of the question. ‘The Opium Wars were international issues, while the Cultural
Revolution was an internal problem. China has to deal with internal turmoil in
its own way . . . because the Chinese people aren’t educated. If we said, let’s
sit down now and discuss the Cultural Revolution, all the settling of scores
would mean we’d soon have a new civil war on our hands – it would be like the
French Revolution. It would be awful.’48
For all its promotion of state-defined
patriotism, the Chinese government has reason to be nervous of the feelings
this can unleash. Attitudes towards Japan offer a good example. It’s obvious
that the post-1989 state has, with the help of the Patriotic Education
campaign’s emphasis on historical traumas, worked on generating anti-Japanese
feeling. Under Mao, ‘peaceful, friendly relations’ with Japan had been state
policy – no reparations or apologies required. Through the 1990s and 2000s, by
contrast, hostility towards Japan grew in direct proportion to the CCP’s
expansion of public commemorations of the Second World War. A 2001 revision of
high-school history textbooks toned down the old Marxist, anti-imperialist
rhetoric on every one of China’s former aggressors – except for Japan.49
By 2007, textbook coverage of the Opium War had been slimmed down from eighteen
pages stuffed with images of evil British plunderers to a sketchier four.
Coverage of the Sino-Japanese War, by contrast, remained outraged: ‘Burning,
killing, raping, looting – there was no evil that Japan did not perpetrate’,
runs a caption directly opposite the photograph of a grinning Japanese soldier
standing among massacred Chinese. ‘What sufferings did Japan inflict upon the
Chinese people between 1931 and 1945?’ probes an essay question, instructing
students to search out victims to interview.50
Apparently as a result of this patriotic
education, in spring 2005 anti-Japanese demonstrations – fanned and organized
by Internet activists – broke out across China’s major cities, protesting
(amongst other things) the publication in Japan of new school textbooks that
hushed up wartime atrocities in China.51
Yet although this movement began life converging with state-sponsored goals of
anti-foreign nationalism, it was clear that the demonstrations quickly moved
out of official control and into the hands of grass-roots organizations. As the
protests spread to a third weekend, an uneasy note crept into the authorities’
pre-emptive announcements: ‘Express your passion in an orderly manner,’ the police
instructed would-be demonstrators on the Internet, warning that all street
protests must be approved by the authorities and ordering well-known
grass-roots campaigners to stay at home. Soon after, a major government
newspaper denounced the anti-Japanese demonstrations as an ‘evil plot’ with
‘ulterior motives’ to bring down the Communist Party – an orthodox protest
movement had clearly boiled over into civil activism and potential subversion.
Until 2009, one of China’s most passionate
anti-Japanese nationalists (founder of the Greater China Anti-Japanese
Alliance) was a former criminal judge turned philosophy professor called Guo
Quan, who won instant celebrity in 2005 for vandalizing the tomb of a Ming
Dynasty merchant accused
of collaborating with Japanese pirates. In 2006, his feelings started to take
him in a new, anti-government direction. ‘I am against Japan,’ he wrote on the
Internet, ‘but also against the lack of democracy, freedom, and human rights in
Chinese society.’ By 2008, he had moved on to call openly for an overhaul of
the political system, forming a China New Democracy Party. On 13 November 2008,
he was arrested under charges of state subversion, and his computers, bank card
and mobile phone confiscated; on 16 October 2009, he was sentenced to ten
years’ imprisonment.52
The curious thing about contemporary China’s
most intemperate nationalists, then, is how easily their anger turns against
their own government and people. Public discontent about Japan’s refusal to
apologize for the Second World War, or claims to the Diaoyu Islands, often
spirals into fury at the Chinese government for failing to defend the country’s
honour, or contempt for the indifferent general public. The government’s tough
stance on Freezing Point in 2006 was motivated at least in part by a
desire to soothe cyber-nationalists outraged by the offending article’s
iconoclastic liberalism. Two days after the Carrefour protests erupted in 2008,
the Chinese authorities moved to dampen their nationalistic ardour. ‘Internet
users are in an intense mood toward Western countries’, noted government
censors. ‘Such information has shown a tendency to spread and, if not checked
in time, could even lead to events getting out of control’.53
‘It’s good your hearts are patriotic,’ one group of fledgling
anti-Tibetan-independence demonstrators were told by Public Security, ‘but you
can’t compromise social order and traffic flow.’54
Chinese patriotism today must not imperil social stability, or frighten off
foreign investment – the key to achieving post-1989 China’s economic miracle
and to persuading the population to keep trusting in the wisdom of the
Communist Party. For China’s current rulers, the Century of Humiliation is a
tricky balancing act. Properly controlled, public memory of the Opium War and
later acts of imperialism provides a politically correct pressure valve for
venting strong feelings in the PRC’s tightly controlled public sphere.
Carelessly managed, these same feelings spill out into something dangerously
subversive.
Contemporary China and its current surge of
nationalism, then, are not as stable or monolithic as the CCP would ideally
like. In the summer of 2009, Martin Jacques’ carefully illustrated When
China Rules the World suggested, over the coming decades, the decline of
the West (with its model of liberal democracy) and the inexorable rise of a
probably authoritarian, racist China that views itself as a
‘civilization-state’: homogeneous, unchanging over (at least) the past 2,000
years, and convinced of its own superiority over the rest of the world. But
while political editorialists worried at the prospect of ‘the rise of the
middle kingdom and the end of the Western world’ (the book’s subtitle), other
China-watchers saw things differently. Six weeks after the book was published,
the political and environmental journalist Isabel Hilton pointed out, the
Muslim-dominated north-western province of Xinjiang erupted into racial
violence in which hundreds of Han Chinese settlers were killed or wounded;
tense paramilitary control descended, and a communications cordon was drawn up
around the region, cutting off Internet and mobile-phone connections. Hilton
argued against ‘a story that the Chinese government likes to tell: that China
is the world’s oldest continuous, unchanging civilization (the dates vary,
according to the exuberance of the moment, from 2,000 to a mythical 5,000
years) . . . A more accurate description would be that it is a recently expanded
land-based empire struggling to justify itself.’55
For there is plenty of social and political volatility disturbing the
twenty-first century’s supposed new superpower (in the form of the tens of
thousands of ‘mass incidents’ – strikes, street demonstrations and so on – that
take place each year; an estimated 58,000 in the first quarter of 2009 alone);
and around the patriotism that seems to be fuelling its confident rise.
China in the third millennium possesses (as
it did in the nineteenth century) about as many reasons to fall apart as it
does to stick together: banks riddled with bad loans, the challenges of finding
employment and pensions for a massive, rapidly ageing workforce, severe social
inequality (which, according to Chinese estimates, reached potentially
destabilizing levels as early as 1994), government corruption (at the end of
2009, a Chinese newspaper directly blamed the country’s rash of mass incidents
on officials ‘blindly pursuing profit’ through ‘expropriating land and
demolishing houses’), environmental degradation.56
There is general agreement that the country has grown extraordinarily, and with
relative ease, over the past three decades. Consensus on what will come next is
non-existent.
For 170 years, the Opium War and its
afterlives have cast a shadow over Sino-Western relations, both sides tampering
with the historical record for their own purposes. Influential
nineteenth-century Britons worked hard to fabricate a virtuous casus belli out
of an elementary problem of trade deficit: to reinvent the war as a clash of
civilizations triggered by the ‘unnaturally’ isolationist Chinese. Joining this
blame game, twentieth-century Chinese nation-builders in turn transformed it
into the cause of all their country’s troubles: into a black imperialist scheme
to enslave a united, heroically resisting China. The reality of the war itself,
by contrast, illuminated deep fault lines in the messily multi-ethnic Qing
empire, as China’s rulers struggled unsuccessfully to rally its officials,
soldiers and subjects against a foreign enemy.
The West’s public stance of
self-justification over the war overlaid a moral guilt that has subsequently
fanned further fears of, and tensions with, the Chinese state and people. Opium
became a symbol both of Western malfeasance and of a sinister Chinese
pollution, generating irrational clouds of Yellow Peril suspicion that arguably
still haunt our media coverage. In China, meanwhile, opium, defeat and
imperialism have manufactured an unstable combination of self-pity,
self-loathing and pragmatic admiration for the West that continue to coexist
uneasily in Chinese patriots.
Whether Western nations such as Britain have
attacked the Chinese for their arrogance in refusing to pay them enough
attention or respect, lambasted themselves for what they did or obsessed paranoically about Chinese
retribution, one misconception has remained constant: that the West is central
to China’s calculations and actions. But both back in the nineteenth century
and now, China’s rulers have been primarily preoccupied with domestic affairs,
rather than foreign relations. This refusal to look at matters from the
perspective of the Chinese state’s own prerogatives helped drive Britain
towards war in the nineteenth century, and risks pushing relations towards
confrontation in the early twenty-first.
In 1839, the Qing court was too distracted by fears of social unrest to come up voluntarily with a pragmatic response to Western trade demands; Britain interpreted this political paralysis as inveterate xenophobia. In 2010, the situation did not look so very different, with the government infuriating Western states over its rejection of climate-change legislation that might slow growth, its harsh stance on social control and its aversion to compromise on international-trade issues, such as strengthening the yuan relative to the dollar (thereby making exported Chinese manufactures more expensive, foreign imports less so). ‘The current leadership’, China-watcher Jonathan Fenby observed in January 2010, ‘just want to get to retirement without the country collapsing. And their caution sometimes leads them into conflict with the West. Take the question of revaluing the yuan. There’d be plenty of advantages: less danger of a trade war with the US, cheaper imports. But they’re nervous of jeopardizing economic growth or looking like they were capitulating to the West – the public outcry in China might be too great.’57 For the noisy anti-Western nationalism that the state has programmatically engineered since the 1920s (and with renewed energies after 1989) regularly threatens to mutate into anti-government dissidence.
From the age of opium-traders to the
Internet, China and the West have been infuriating and misunderstanding each
other, despite ever-increasing opportunities for contact, study and mutual
sympathy. Ten years into the twenty-first century, the nineteenth is still with
us.
