Stirring nationalism

...I recalled an earlier vision, which I had put out of my mind, of the same young artist standing over a dogeared photograph of his deceased father, a high-ranking officer in the People's Liberation Army, his foot resting on the head of a dead American soldier in North Vietnam...

...makes too much trouble about its trade deficit with China, Chinese officials said...

...One friend with whom I talked, a man who actually had deplored at one time both the Tiananmen massacre and the wanton arrests of dissident intellectuals, now finds himself angry at persistent protesters...

...One 20-year-old student at the Shanghai Drama Institute told me that he is impatient with China's manufacturers for continuing to produce for New York's fashion designers under foreign labels rather than their own...

...If we question their sale of nuclear weapons to "irresponsible" countries, officials point out that the United States has exported such technology in the past with really dire consequences...

...Many Chinese truly believe they are being "dissed," to use the inner-city term...

...What seems to have happened in the seven years since Tiananmen is that, at an unconscious and sometimes even at a self-aware level, the younger adult generation has projected its defiance of immovable authority in domestic society onto the Western powers...

...As I listened to my artist friend's words, I imagined the iconoclasm of his paintings, his fashionable personal appearance, and the Bohemianism of his 17th-century stable-atelier peeling away like a pentimento veneer...

...If China is looking to nationalism to forge national unity and to complement the rocky tides and uncertain promises of rapid modernization, a rallying cry that is hollow at the core and does not convey a sense of national identity will neither legitimate the regime nor provide a necessary sense of transcendental purpose...

...A desperate sort of nationalism has become the political system's new ideology, its triage for the erosion of the Communist party's legitimacy and the decay of Maoist social values...

...sovereignty and artistic freedom dismissively if the glorification of an opposition figure should happen to conflict with China' s policies...

...I did not bother to explain or argue the whys and wherefores of intellectual-property safeguards or the need for the Chinese to acquire education in techniques and marketing—why the fashion capital of the world can't be shifted to Shanghai or any other city overnight...

...A recent bestseller, China Can Say No, written with seeming irony by a young veteran of the 1989 Tiananmen movement, has virtually sold out in Beijing...

...Now, perhaps more than ever since Mao's revolution, the Chinese government is doggedly protective of its sovereignty over the territory and minority peoples in its border areas...

...This issue of national integrity is China's most sensitive nerve...

...Make nationalism the prime ingredient, and the cocktail can easily turn into something more troublesome...

...Foreigners say that we have expansionist tendencies and want to be a model to other countries...

...In the absence of ideals, goals, and behavioral norms that mesh with custom and give order to change, the regime will continue to stand for little but dictatorship...

...David M. Raddock is working on a book on political values and behavior over generations in China...

...The U.S...

...It will bolster the position of the military and public-security apparatus...

...And China "only wants to lead itself...

...As he rails against intellectuals whom at one time he would have praised, he blames the ascendancy of forces of repression in China on U.S...

...And it will either disintegrate into domestic factionalism—or, more worrisome, find an outlet through an escalation of aggressive activity in Tibet, the Taiwan Strait, or elsewhere...

...to do business elsewhere if one of its subsidiaries proceeded with a movie about the Dalai Lama, it was arresting and executing tens of thousands of Uighur minority separatists in its far northwest province of Xinjiang...

...China's new mixed socialist-private economy and the feverish modernization propelled by foreign investment are reminders of how hastily Mao's Communist theory was dismantled to make way for this progress...

...To avoid delegitimation of the regime, Chinese ideologues still cling to the notion of an ideal Communist era in the future, but the desiccation of ideology and any sort of social conscience suggests that "socialism with Chinese characteristics" now stands for little more than a mixed economy with a dash of cultural chauvinism...

...Given China's preoccupation with national integrity and the recovery of territory on its periphery, it comes as no surprise that a young foreign-ministry official would tell me that, in spite of the more conciliatory approach, the willingness to "set aside" differences between nations, the Chinese remain inflexible over Taiwan...

...companies to invest in China and thereby create a market for products and services locally...

...The response was that the United States needed to show more ingenuity in competing in world markets...

...Legitimate pressures from the outside to conform to international rules and criteria of behavior are treated as unreasonable demands on China per se...

...Why put pressure on us...

...China will choose other bidders" if the U.S...

...The tragedy of such nationalism is that not only does it fire jingoistic emotions toward outside nations and peoples, but it fosters repression internally...

...The more fundamental individual battle of China's citizens for upward mobility and respect is being fought less on home ground now and more at a societal and national level...

...It is as much directed against Japan as against the United States...

...Its persecutors are no longer perceived as intractable fathers in the household or dismissive and repressive leaders who fail to yield to cries from below for greater freedoms and legal guarantees...

...support for Taiwan in 1995...

...cannot corner the market," one high-level official told me...

...We just want to develop into a self-reliant nation...

...Routinely, China resorts to petty bullying, like delaying visas and detaining merchandise at customs, in retaliation for the failure of the United States to behave as it wants...

...China will continue to treat U.S...

...Although South China would benefit economically from a Disneyland-like facility, it has the political will to halt negotiations by denying Disney's right to film a movie about the life of the Dalai Lama...

...Any complaint, any obstruction that impedes China's entry into the mainstream of international commerce, is considered hostile to China as a nation...

...When he was asked simply about China's making some effort to redress the balance of trade with the United States, Wan Guoquan, chairman of the People's Political Consultative Council, offered this curious rejoinder: "We don't hold a grudge against the Americans for occupying parts of China in the last century and a half...

...Even some of my intellectual friends, erstwhile humanists and cynics in their late thirties and forties, are moved by these nationalistic writings...

...We want more cooperation and fewer sanctions from the United States," the vice chairman said...

...A member of the Standing Committee and Finance Committee of the National People's Congress, nibbling on a delicate morsel of pine-cone fish at a banquet table, admonished our delegation to inform U.S...

...In it, Americans are described as incapable of leading anyone but themselves...

...The people's standpoint is that through trade sanctions the United States has been trying to hinder China's development...

...But I was startled when an avant-garde artist in Shanghai, like a true believer, repeated to me President Jiang Zemin's warning that the positive resolution of the Taiwan question was inevitable: Taiwan will be despatched, one way or another, by negotiations, blockade, force of arms, or nuclear attack ("That means no Taiwan at all...

...China urgently requires an ideological cement to hold itself together geographically and bind its people together with some sort of common purpose...

...On a trip to China in November, I was told by both a vice foreign minister and the vice chairman of an organization of non-Communists that China is being treated unfairly by the rest of the world, that it is being encircled by Western powers and its very sovereignty is being threatened...

...The official posture toward the industrialized countries, and the United States in particular, reverberates with a latent anger I detected in conversation in November with members of the post-Tiananmen generation of young Chinese...

...The overarching attitude resembled the ancient dynastic perspective of treating international trading partners as bearers of tribute to the Zhongguo (literally, the Middle Kingdom...

...As the specialist accompanying a high-level American delegation of politicians to Beijing and Shanghai, I was struck by how consistently the Chinese politicized everything we Americans said, and yet felt free to deny that any other entity could think and act toward China in terms of its own subjective interests...

...His most recent book is Navigating New Markets Abroad...

...In China, the xenophobic blaming of outsiders resonates with the broad-based memory of two centuries of imperialist depredations, isolation, and efforts to drive foreign aggressors from Asia...

...The Chinese regime harnesses among its people a subcurrent of xenophobia and a strain of narcissistic cultural pride to depict the new China as the unjustly vilified victim of powers like the United States and Japan...

...my friend sneered...

...The Chinese regime's unofficial position is that, out of fear, jealousy, and prejudice, foreign powers are trying to contain the People's Republic of China both economically and politically...

...A former undersecretary of state during the Reagan administration pleaded with the Chinese officials he met on every occasion to help close the trade gap between our two countries...

...This new nationalism, devoid of substance and limited by resentment, can stir the Chinese in the short run—particularly as a diversion from underemployment and unemployment and the other pitfalls of rapid modernization and conversion to a more privatized economy...

...In the absence of a consistent and positive ideology, the Chinese are mixing a cocktail with unpredictable results...

...Tweak it or impinge on it even indirectly, and the Chinese authorities will react heavy-handedly, even irrationally...