National leaders in big countries like China (and the United States) use
foreign policy to show domestic audiences what strong, capable leaders
they are. They sometimes also use an assertive foreign policy to divert
attention from domestic problems, a tactic that has become known in the
West as “wag the dog.” Chinese leaders are prone to public muscle flexing
because they feel the need to stay out in front of a growing tide of
popular nationalism. What the Chinese leaders fear most is a national
movement that fuses various discontented groups—such as unemployed
workers, farmers, and students—under the banner of nationalism. The
lessons they learned in school about the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911
and of the Republic of China in 1949 have stayed with them. Any Chinese
government that looks weak in the face of foreign pressure is likely to
be overthrown.
The leaders recognize that popular nationalism is intensifying as the
country grows stronger. In fact, they have been largely responsible for this
trend. In schools and the mass media, they have promoted nationalist
themes as a way to bolster the legitimacy of the Communist Party, now
that almost no one believes in Communist ideology anymore.
After Tiananmen, the CCP launched a nationwide “patriotic education
campaign” in schools and the mass media. Scholar Zhao Suisheng
describes it as the CCP’s “rediscovery of nationalism.”72 The CCP began
to tout its patriotic credentials as a way to rally popular support. As Jiang
Zemin said in a 1997 speech to the CCP Central Committee, “The Chinese
Communists are the staunchest and most thorough patriots. The
patriotism of the CCP is the supreme example of the patriotism of the
Chinese nation and the Chinese people.”73 The press was filled with articles
about the importance of cultivating patriotism for maintaining social
stability.74
Beginning in 1994, schools added new courses to stimulate patriotic
loyalty, and students won awards for reading the one hundred patriotic
books and seeing the one hundred patriotic movies chosen by the Party.
Patriotic songs, patriotic books, and patriotic versions of history became
the steady diet of schoolchildren. School tours crowded historical sites
established earlier, now called “patriotic education bases.” The Museum
of Testimony to the Crimes of Japanese Army Unit 731, the Japanese unit
that experimented with chemical weapons on Chinese citizens, located
in the northeastern city of Harbin, received more than three million visitors
a year.75
To Jiang Zemin and his colleagues trying to bolster the Communist
Party’s popularity after the Tiananmen crackdown, it seemed like a good
Domestic Threats 63
idea to bind people to the Party through nationalism now that Communist
ideals had lost their luster. The military and the propaganda bureaucracy
were particularly keen on nationalism because it enhanced their
roles and potentially, their budgets. (The Foreign Ministry was most dubious
because as one diplomat put it, “Those who handle foreign relations
are always suspect as traitors.”)
Nationalism did not have to be entirely “constructed” by the state.76 As
China grew economically and militarily more powerful, nationalist emotions
were spontaneously bubbling up in the popular psyche. All the school
curriculum, media, and billboards had to do was reinforce these emotions
by attaching them to the common script of China’s triumph under
Communist leadership after the “century of humiliation” at the hands of
foreign enemies. The main themes of the story are the atrocities committed
by Japan during its occupation of China, the loss of Taiwan inflicted
by Japanese and American military forces, and America’s hegemonic interest
in keeping China weak and overthrowing Communist rule through
“peaceful evolution.” The century of humiliation will end only when Japan
apologizes sincerely for its wartime atrocities, Taiwan is brought back
into the fold, and America treats China as an equal. Patriotic education
nurtured popular resentments against Japan and America and an expectation
that Taiwan would soon be reunified as a way of strengthening
public identification with the Communist Party.
Once the official line on issues like Japan, Taiwan, and the United
States became assertively nationalistic, ambitious individuals competed
with one another by talking the patriotic talk. “A lot of Chinese nationalism
is just a show that people put on for one another, a kind of political
correctness,” said a Chinese journalist. “But some of it is real.”
Some Chinese intellectuals—and many foreign observers—view contemporary
Chinese nationalism as something “imposed upon the people
representing the will of the leader.”77 But, for most Chinese, nationalism
feels like a healthy act of self-assertion, as Sinologist Edward Friedman
says, “Chinese nationalists experience themselves not as victims manipulated
by political interests at the state center but as pure patriots who
know the truth and will not be fooled.”78
As a U.S. State Department official, I frequently encountered aggressive
questioning about American foreign policy from Chinese students—one of
my roughest goings-over was by a gathering of Chinese students studying at
Harvard who went after me about America’s bombing of Kosovo, arms sales
to Taiwan, and alliance with Japan. President Clinton received similar treatment
from the student audience at Beijing University when he spoke on
campus in 1998. Communist Party members—even at Harvard—prepared
the students to show their patriotism in this manner.
64 china: fragile superpower
But I also have felt the chill of genuine nationalist resentment of America
in spontaneous interactions with Chinese friends. I found myself dining
with a dozen university faculty in Shanghai immediately following the
collision of the Chinese fighter jet and the U.S. EP-3 spy plane. One
professor, a longtime friend who has visited me in my California home,
couldn’t bring himself to utter a word to me, so full of anger at America
was he. The students I talk with express their hatred of Japan, their readiness
to shed blood to keep Taiwan, and their gripes against America with
proud heads held high. Patriotic passions help fill the spiritual void left by
the loss of faith in communism and offer an idealistic alternative to the
commercialism of Chinese society today.
The nationalist mobilization of the 1990s has boxed the CCP and its
leaders into a corner. Once the authorities allow students to demonstrate
outside the Japanese and American embassies, it is a struggle to restore
order without the students turning on them. “The government knows that
demonstrations against Japan can escalate into antigovernment demonstrations,”
one student told me. And if they allow people to trash the Japanese
and American embassies, how can they stabilize relations with these important
countries on which China’s economic growth, and its political stability,
depend? Once people have gotten a taste of freely protesting against
the approved targets of Japan and the United States, how do you contain
their demands to participate in politics? As one PLA colonel said, “Sometimes
people express their domestic dissatisfactions by criticizing foreign
policy. You see that a lot in China.” A Beijing student observed that his
classmates joined in anti-Japanese protests “because they want to participate
politically.” He went on to say, “It’s a way of demanding rights.” Nationalism
could be the one issue that could unite disparate groups like laid-off
workers, farmers, and students in a national movement against the regime. |