The anti-Japan protests that continue to roil China are just another indication of the rise of a potent Chinese nationalism. After a century slowly fomenting among Chinese intellectuals, national sentiment has captured and redefined the consciousness of Chinese people during the last two decades of China’s economic boom. This mass national consciousness launched the Chinese colossus into global competition to achieve an international status commensurate with the country’s vast capacities and its people’s conception of their country’s rightful place in the world.
Rapidly, visibly and inevitably, China has risen. Indeed, this era will likely be remembered as the time when a new global order, with China at the helm, was born.
Competitive national consciousness — the consciousness that one’s individual dignity is inseparably tied to the prestige of one’s “people” — worked its way into the minds of China’s best and brightest between 1895 and 1905.
In 1895, China was defeated by Japan, a tiny aggressor whom the Chinese dismissively called wo (倭,“dwarf”). China was already accustomed to rapacious Western powers squabbling over its riches, but had remained self-confident in the knowledge of these powers’ irrelevance. However, the assault from Japan, a speck of dust in its own backyard, shattered this self-assurance and was experienced as a shocking and intolerable humiliation.
Japan’s triumph in 1905 over “the Great White Power,” Russia, repaired the damage to China’s sense of dignity. From the Chinese point of view, Russia was a formidable European power, one feared by other Western powers. Its defeat, therefore, was seen as a successful Asian challenge to the West, in which China, its intellectuals felt, was represented by Japan.
Japan thus became the focus of Chinese attention. Gentlemen-scholars, who would reform and staff the Chinese army and civil service in the early decades of the twentieth century, went to study in Japan. The Revolution of 1911 in China was inspired by the example of Japan’s Meiji Restoration; and, because early-20th-century Japan was stridently nationalistic, the new China that emerged from its image was constructed on nationalist principles as well.
Thus, Japan became the significant “other” for China, the model that was imitated and the anti-model that was resented. Chinese nationalism borrowed from Japan its concept of the nation, including the very word by which it was expressed (kuomin (國民) from the Japanese kokumin). The Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party, or KMT) was explicitly inspired by Japan and fueled by repeated Japanese aggression.
Paradoxically, but not unexpectedly, former Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) struggle against the KMT was inspired by anti-Japanese nationalism as well. As was the case virtually everywhere else, communism in China was nationalism incarnate. Mao’s speech on the establishment of the People’s Republic plainly expressed the nationalist agenda behind it. Calling the nation “communist” assured the new People’s Republic of China of the Soviet Union’s support, which was viewed by Mao as more reliable than that of the US.
However, neither the Russian nor the Chinese communists were ever unclear about the nationalist nature of their respective projects.
The upper echelons of the bureaucracy and intelligentsia in Russia and China were self-consciously nationalist and, throughout Communist rule, shrewdly pursued the supreme nationalist goal: prestige — the power, naked and otherwise, to impose the nation’s will on others. However, national consciousness, particularly in China, was limited to a narrow elite, leaving the masses almost untouched.
This changed dramatically with the Chinese government’s restoration of a capitalist economy. Much like in Germany in the 1840s, when the appeal to private enterprise converted the entire middle class to nationalism, the explicit definition of economic power as the central pillar of China’s greatness awakened ordinary Chinese to nationalism’s appeal. Hundreds of millions now see themselves as sharing in the nation’s dignity and are eager to contribute to it, as well as to defend it from insult.
Competition for prestige, even when the contest is economic, is not a purely rational undertaking. So it should be no surprise that old injuries are likely to resurface. Some Chinese, especially those who are not economically successful, harp bitterly on Japan’s past depredations. Despite China’s embrace of capitalism and Japanese investment, Japan remains China’s reviled other. A professor in Beijing told me not long ago: “Two in every 10 Chinese dislike the US, but nine in every 10 hate Japan.”
For the West, there is a silver lining in this nationalist rivalry: Neither China nor Japan is a rogue state, and, so long as their quarrels do not lead to the use of unconventional weapons, the West may treat the friction between them as an internal Asian quarrel. Moreover, Japan is likely to let today’s passions over disputed islands in the East China Sea cool down, despite the anti-Japanese outbursts in Chinese cities.
However, the West — and the US in particular — is new to dignity games a la Chinois. If it gets carried away and presumes to talk down to the 5,000-year-old culture of the Sages, the West could become the next object of China’s nationalist resentment.
Liah Greenfeld is a professor of sociology, political science and anthropology at Boston University.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs