In this eye-opening study of national identity and foreign-policy making, Zheng Wang argues that since the CCP government launched a so-called “patriotic education” campaign in 1991, ruling groups have self-interestedly tapped into and mobilized deep cultural memories which produce what Adam Michnik calls an “egotism of suffering.” Selective remembering and selective mourning, as with European fascism, create an agenda of destroying foreign enemies so that the nation supposedly can live and be restored to greatness.
Wang hopes that the foreign policy dangers detailed here, which flow from policies premised on this CCP worldview of the nation as victim even as China in fact becomes a superpower, will be staunched by democratization. But realism requires that observers take the war-prone forces illuminated by Wang's rich and compelling exploration of Chinese foreign policy seriously, rather than imagining their impending end from some deus ex machina.
That is, if peace is to have a chance, then, as reconciliation in post-war Europe required that France and Poland welcomed positive relations with the democratic successors to the Nazis in Germany, so China has to abandon a policy of vengeance toward a democratic Japanese nation, none of whose people under the age of 70 experienced the era of Hirohito's militarism. Yet Wang's data show how the CCP's quest for patriotic legitimation – with the Party presented as the one and only imaginable protector of the Chinese people – makes policies of peace and conciliation from Beijing unlikely. Indeed, “the government needs to be tough” (p. 189) because, despite recent assertiveness, CCP rulers are “perceived as soft by much of its domestic audience” (p. 191).
A tension exists between Wang's claim that Chinese passions of “outrage” are “genuine” (p. 2) and his persuasive description of how CCP leaders have constructed a particular national identity to serve their narrowest interest of entrenching their monopoly of arbitrary power. Wang does not mention the contradiction between China asking Vietnam and India to forget Chinese invasions so as to build a better future together and Beijing's demand for ever more apologies and respect (submission) from Tokyo. Nor does he mention the fact that Berlin no longer apologizes for past German crimes but instead focuses on Germans as victims of the war era.
Yet nationalism is mutable. Mao Zedong, Wang reports, dismissed anti-Japan nationalism in China as KMT ideology. How deep is the new hate-filled culture of nationalism? In 2012, anti-Japanese demonstrators in China seemed an embarrassment to many educated urban dwellers.
Wang's book shows that Chinese nationalism has changed. The late Mao's national enemies were Tito, Khrushchev and the new tsars, with the Russians portrayed as having seized the most territory from the expansionist Manchu empire. The target of Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary nationalism in 1911 was the Manchus. They had conquered Sinicized Ming territories and slaughtered Han Chinese. After all, the Han nationalism that surged after the Meiji defeated the Manchus in 1895 was not, as today's myth has it, an “encounter with the Western powers” (p. 74). Later, KMT nationalism took Japan as the enemy.
Perhaps Wang is a bit too much inside of today's Chinese nationalism to highlight that the invaders of Sincized lands were mainly Manchu, Russian and Japanese and not so-called Western imperialists (“From 1904–1905, Russia and Japan fought a war over Manchuria....” [pp. 55–56]). The CCP constructed an enemy called the West largely to make so-called “Western” democracy appear alien to the Chinese people, obscuring that it was an American-led coalition that freed China from Japanese occupation. The enemy that most worries CCP authoritarians actually is a Chinese people seeking freedom and human dignity.
Consequently, Wang's claim that today's Chinese national identity “is heavily shaped by what happened in the ‘century of humiliation’” (p. 41) is suspect. The official story of the Opium War turning the Chinese into an addicted and weak people is a fiction. Because of widespread addiction to opium grown in China, the Qing banned opium over a century before the Opium War. Reform leader Deng Xiaoping insisted that Chinese weakness and backwardness were caused by imperial policies after the death of Ming emperor Zhu Di who had backed the Zheng He voyages: subsequent rulers pulled back from oceanic exchange. Deng found the Opium War narrative a way for Maoists to continue those self-wounding policies, denying the nation the benefits of world progress and keeping China weak and backward.
Wang's version of history misses much that is important. He claims that “Before 1840, China considered itself the only true civilization” (p. 68), a view which ignores the vicissitudes of the notion “Zhongguo.” When Buddhists went to India in search of the wisdom of the sutras, India was considered zhongguo, the central source of civilizational wisdom. Buddhism, originating in India, was treated as a shared culture under-girding the Pan-Asianism which spread in India, China and Japan starting in the 19th century. When Buddhist Manchus conquered the Sinicized Ming, Koreans then considered themselves zhongguo, the civilizational centre of a Confucian way of life.
A few misleading simplifications aside, Never Forget National Humiliation is a vivid and well-informed study of post-Mao nationalism and Chinese foreign policy, which I will make a required text when I teach courses on Chinese foreign policy. Yet I am not persuaded by Wang's description of deep culture as a master explanation of post-Mao chauvinism producing “blind nationalism and close-minded anti-foreignism” (p. 113). At times, Wang comes too close to normalizing the danger that most of his book illuminates. He blandly reports a horrible 2006 event at MIT merely as “strong protests” against images “deemed to humiliate China” (pp. 54–55). Actually, hate-filled Chinese students threatened the lives of the family of a professor with a Japanese surname involved in a visual culture project meant to expose racism in Japanese nationalism. Police protection was required. In like manner, Wang errs in inventing 2008 “attempts to ‘protect’ the Olympic torch” (p. 144) in San Francisco and in ignoring the hooliganism of Chinese students in Korea who violently attacked Koreans seeking human rights for Tibetans.
The key point is that it is not clear that it is “primordial” (p. 227) “deep culture” (p. 154), rather than politics, that creates such war-prone behaviour at the societal level. In a fascinating sketch of China and the Olympics, Wang tells of the Athens gold medal winner in the hurdles, Liu Xiang. Liu became a national hero. He declared, “My victory has proved that athletes with yellow skin can run just as fast as those with black and white skin” (p. 153). Yet after Liu's 2012 failure, despite the racialist appeal, Liu no longer was a hero.
In sum, dangerous post-Mao attitudes are not immutable. Unexpected events and hitherto unimaginable political and popular responses can produce rapid changes for better or for worse, which would not be expected if one believed that today's nationalism was a necessarily persistent matter of deep culture.
