Peter Hays Gries's China's New Nationalism
Friedman, Edward
THE VENGEFUL nationalism that pervades China under Communist Party rule is explored in Peter Gries's study, China's New Nationalism. The discourse of this nationalism identifies the forces...
...The CCP shows consistent disdain for the historical record, inventing a past in which Japan is a uniquely evil force...
...Meanwhile, a deadly poison spreads inside the Chinese body politic...
...Many progressive ChiDISSENT / Winter 2006 107 nese preferred the Japanese government to China's corrupt, police-state/warlord coalition led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, perpetrator of an infamous anticommunist White Terror...
...There is realpolitik calculation here: with Japan understood as China's main competitor in Asia, the goal is that "The 21st century will be China's...
...That is also how Japan's defeat of Russia was celebrated in 1905, all the way to Muslim West Asia...
...In contrast to 2004, leaders of the 2005 Japan-bashing movement were arrested...
...The CCP has greatly magnified Japanese inhumanity (which is not to deny its reality...
...HOW DID THE new nationalism arise...
...In 1919, at the Versailles Peace Conference, Japan obtained German holdings in China, sparking a nationwide, patriotic May 4 anti-imperialist movement that gave birth to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP...
...Anti-Japan nationalism was still so weak in the early 1930s that it was not easy to organize a boycott after Hirohito's Showa-era imperial military wantonly bombed civilian Shanghai...
...But the major power threatening Chinese territory was Britain, not Japan...
...Repression is intensifying...
...Sun saw Japan as a PanAsian ally of yellow races ridding Asia of invading whites...
...Nationalism from below, purist, racial populism, first generated by the CCP, now is used to discredit the CCP as a selfish and greedy ally of the barbarous enemies of the Chinese people...
...The new popular nationalist discourse challenges both the state's own nationalism and the state's "softness" on Japan, America, and Taiwan...
...The new nationalism legitimates authoritarian CCP rule inside of China, Chinese predominance in Asia, and China's global challenge to America...
...Although any Chinese government, authoritarian or democratic, can probably contain this infection, politics is a contingent arena...
...Therefore these analysts support the repressors as the lesser evil...
...A long history reveals the immoral, antiChina actions of an inhuman Japanese nation...
...The CCP interpreted the implosion and democratization of Leninist states from 1989 to 1991 as an American plot to remove the CCP from power, leaving China prey to Japan as in 1937...
...Chinese "know" that ever since an incursion into Taiwan in the 1870s, a cruel Japan has been trying to rise in Asia at the expense of China...
...The Chinese people were the key determining influence in defeating Japanese imperialism...
...How, given this hateful adversary, dare one call for moderation in stopping it...
...Gries's understanding of the policy implications of nationalist ideology foreshadows the outbreak of racist Japan-bashing a year after his book was published...
...Sun, of course, was anti-imperialist...
...The number of Chinese dead from Japan's 1937-1938 massacre in Nanjing was also raised...
...It has created purists who believe that their rulers are compromising with evil— for China's rulers actually want the economic benefits of normal relations with America, Japan, and Taiwan...
...Whereas the accepted figure for Chinese killed by Hirohito's military, as calculated at the end of the Second World War, was around ten million, the CCP, after the traumatic events of 1989 to 1991, raised "the number of war casualties...
...In 1894-1895, China lost a war to this murderous Japan...
...Responding to a nationalist rage it has itself spawned, the CCP is trying to control and co-opt the new nationalism...
...O]riental culture is superior to Western culture and bound to dominate the world...
...It was reported as "more than the death toll at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined...
...Having learned back in the Mao era that a century of humiliations by imperialists lost China its central place in Asia and the world, Chinese are now learning to demand that their government act to reclaim its rightful place— against Japan, which, above all, is considered an unrepentant militaristic nation...
...But what is most worrisome to Gries is that the "CCP is losing its control over nationalist discourse...
...More and more Chinese ask, shouldn't their rulers be doing far more to defeat the Japanese beasts, Taiwanese troublemakers, and American devils...
...But, as with the Saudi promotion of Wahhabism, which was intended to legitimate the regime at home and was certainly not meant to spread terror abroad or create a force seeking to topple the Saudi rulers, the socialization of the Chinese people to imagine Americans and Japanese as subhumans, "oppressing us, invading our motherland, and even killing our countrymen" has real and dangerous consequences...
...Imagining his collaboration as in line with Sun's proJapanese Pan-Asianism, Wang Jing-wei helped Japan rule much of China...
...I believe, on the contrary, that a democratic China would have to give priority to the painful problems created by the CCP regime—a rich-poor gap worse than Russia's or India's, pervasive and cruel corruption, the absence of social safety nets, murderous environmental degradation, and so on...
...At the start of the 1930s, this expansionist Japan savagely bombed Shanghai...
...The discourse of this nationalism identifies the forces threatening China's return to glory and describes what must be done to defeat that threat and restore the nation's dignity...
...Had Lu Xun, China's great writer who resided in Shanghai and counted Japanese among his closest friends, lived but a few years longer, he could not have been honored posthumously by Mao...
...Instead, it was a fight between a progressive Meiji empire in Japan and a reactionary Manchu empire that had conquered Ming dynasty China in the seventeenth century, massacring Sinicized resisters...
...China's role in defeating Japan was, in fact, greater than America's...
...EDWARD FRIEDMAN is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison...
...Identifying with the defeated Ming, Sun supported the dynamic Meiji and celebrated the defeat of the decadent Manchus, imagined as slaughterers of the Han...
...The CCP vision of the future is "a Sinocentric order . . . in which barbarians [nonSinicized peoples] humbly pay tribute to a superior Chinese civilization...
...With Japanese portrayed as "beasts" and Americans as "devils," a benign CCP is leading the Chinese race, descendants of the Yellow Emperor, to resume its rightful place in the world order...
...It was the May 30 movement of 1925, which targeted Britain...
...China is a great power today, but its people are being taught that they are a victim nation that must stand up, strike back, and end its victimization...
...In 2004, the CCP silenced Chinese who sought reconciliation with Japan...
...The 1894-1895 war was not seen by Sun Yat-sen, leader of the major Han Chinese movement to overthrow the Manchu empire, as a struggle between us (China) and them (Japan...
...The political party leading the struggle against Britain was the KMT (Nationalists), headed by Sun and Chiang Kai-shek, with whom the CCP temporarily allied itself...
...The nationalist narrative recited above was also intended to trace anti-Chinese policies back to Japan's 1870s incursion into Taiwan, legitimating China's annexation of that small democratic country as another step in the CCP's anti-imperialist struggle, thereby ending an age of humiliation...
...Given the unpalatable alternatives, many Chinese rejected a call for "fighting the Japanese...
...How, in this narrative that celebrates Confucian authoritarianism and treats democracy as an alien threat, could a democratic America be virtuous...
...This lack of popular support for antiJapan politics was captured in Lao She's great short story "The Lin Family Shop," which shows the superior power of parochial interests over nationalism...
...Knowing nothing of the history sketched above, Chinese under CCP control learn to see Japan as a unique source of evil, making "Japan bashing . . . ascendant and unquestioned...
...None...
...At the same time, millions of impoverished farmers fled for succor to the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo to escape the chaos, exploitation, and misery of Chinese-ruled China...
...This "history" also obscures the role of the American-led coalition in defeating Hirohito's Japan...
...Pro-Japanese Chinese forces were led by a left-wing colleague of Sun...
...Three books by him on China were published in 2005: Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (Yale), China's Rise, Taiwan's Dilemmas, and International Peace (Routledge), and Asia's Giants: Comparing China and India (Palgrave...
...China will soon replace America as the world's number one super108 DISSENT / Winter 2006 power...
...The future is not guaranteed...
...Lu Xun would have had to be labeled a "traitor to the Han" to accord with the policy that made traitors of all Chinese who did not accept the CCP line on Japan...
...Embracing a popular Chinese mythos, some hoped that, as it had with previous Mongol and Manchu invaders, a superior Chinese culture would eventually Sinicize and civilize the Japanese barbarians...
...Nationalism is a very late development...
...Even when Imperial Japan launched its allout offensive in 1937, many patriotic Chinese who comprehended the evil that was StalinismLeninism did not see Mao's CCP as a superior alternative...
...to 35 million," perhaps seeking a number larger than the tally of innocent Chinese who died because of the policies of Mao...
...DISSENT / Winter 2006 109...
...Actually, there is no truth in the anti-Japan narrative just sketched...
...Patriotic Chinese responded by boycotting Japanese goods...
...Therefore, the CCP stepped up efforts to marshal the past, hoping that nationalist mobilization would trump democratic legitimacy...
...If not, how can this CCP claim to be a legitimate ruler of the virtuous yet victimized Chinese people...
...The first nationwide antiimperialist movement was not the May 4 movement of 1919...
...As with Islamic countries, many analysts worry that, given the hatred that official propaganda has created, a transition to democracy would unleash a war-prone nationalist force...
...Gries's rich and reliable study provides the sad details...
...China, in the nineteenth century, was ruled by the Manchus, who did not put much value on a distant Taiwan full of cannibals, whose troublesome Austronesian first settlers autonomously ruled much of the rugged island...
...porters of democratization...
...The CC P's rewriting of history to legitimate itself as the savior of a continually threatened Chinese people intensified "after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre" of sup*Unattributed quotes are from Gries's excellent translations of a wide array of Chinese writings...
...Many observers think, as I do, that the party has the power to do that...
Vol. 53 • January 2006 • No. 1
