No Enemies, No Hatred
Page 9
In the 1950s, when China’s economy was weak, and in complete disregard for questions of life and death among the Chinese people, Mao poured resources into supporting the Communist bloc in its Cold War with the U.S. In the 1960s, having decided to compete with the Soviet Union for the position of hegemon in the international communist movement, Mao unveiled slogans about opposing “revisionism” and whipped up fears that war was “inevitable”—when in fact it was not—and in so doing pitted China against both of the world’s superpowers. It was then, too, that Mao came out with his “Third World” theory whereby Maoist revolution would be exported to underdeveloped nations. The idea was that there could be a replay of how China’s own revolution happened. Guerilla war, with “the countryside surrounding the cities,” would be played out on the world stage as Third World countries surrounded the capitalist First World, and the entire globe would be “liberated.”
At bottom, all of the aggressive, expansionist, and bellicose rhetoric, and the fanciful talk of leaping straight to greatness, depended on the complete rebirth of a self-centered mentality of Chinese world domination. It depended, too, on Mao Zedong’s inflated ambition to be emperor and savior of All Under Heaven. For example, in order to enlist the Soviet Union’s aid in developing nuclear weapons to make China into a military superpower, Mao Zedong completely disregarded the death by starvation of approximately forty million Chinese people and continued to export rice to the Soviet Union. On August 19, 1958, Mao proudly told a group of provincial-level leaders that “some day we will draw up a plan for world unification and set up a Committee to Manage the World.”
Mao used his absolute power to implement his personal will, and he incited the Chinese people to hold others in contempt. Mao’s authority at the time truly was as the popular saying has it: “Every word is worth ten thousand words from others.” The Chinese people really did believe him when he said that all reactionaries—including American imperialists and Soviet revisionists—are “paper tigers.” They also genuinely believed that “the East Wind will prevail over the West Wind” and that the Chinese people are destined to liberate all of humanity. Behind all the high-sounding rhetoric, though, lay more primitive, less civilized undergirding: the All-Under-Heaven mentality; ambitions of hegemony; educating people in hatred; a philosophy of “struggle”; and the worship of violence (including superstitious belief in “the barrel of the gun”). These ideas were not only Mao Zedong’s; they came to pervade all of the Chinese people and were embraced especially by the young, in whom they reached a crest during the Cultural Revolution.
These young, the post-1949 generation of Chinese “raised under the red flag,” had been indoctrinated, from childhood on, in the ideas of revenge for historical grievances, worship of violence, “class struggle,” and world revolution. Every word from Mao Zedong, however trivial, was sacrosanct. Mao infused them with passion for violent revolution, then offered them the Cultural Revolution as a stage upon which to practice it. During the Cultural Revolution, swarms of rebellious Red Guards attacked foreign embassies in China, smashing and burning; some specialized in disrupting international rail service; others, in their fanaticism, sought more than violent revolution inside China and set out to “liberate all humanity” by stealing across borders into Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, and elsewhere, throwing themselves into Maoist guerrilla warfare. Some set up their own “educated youth brigades.”
On September 1, 1966, Red Guards at the secondary school attached to Tsinghua University published a statement called “Smash the Old World, Create a New One.” It announced to the whole world, in grandiloquent terms, that “we Red Guards will be the executioners of imperialism, especially American imperialism; we are personally digging the graves of the old world.” In 1967 a long narrative poem, the collective work of a group of Red Guards (one of whom was Guo Lusheng, who later, under the name “Index Finger,” became a founder of the modernist underground “misty poetry”), was infectiously popular for a time. It was called “Dedicated to the Brave Warriors of World War Three,” and it brought the vaulting heroism and deranged visions of liberating the whole world to a new height of absurdity. It tells of Red Guard soldiers who throw themselves into World War Three, hurtle through Europe and eventually help to subdue the world’s two superpowers. Having occupied Moscow and watered their horses in the Don River, they plant the five-star red flag of China atop the Kremlin—similarly to the way the communist armies had hoisted a red flag over Nanjing after capturing the enemy capital in China’s civil war. Then the heroes head off to smoke the tobacco of South America, to drink from the clear waters of Africa, and finally to land in North America, where they capture Washington, D.C., and—as at the Kremlin—install China’s five-star flag atop the White House.
A television series about drug trafficking, called Black Ice, has recently drawn a lot of attention. There is fitting irony in the fact that the kingpin drug dealer in this series is an aging Red Guard who, in his youth, had gone to Burma to throw himself into world revolution. Now he is middle-aged, but he still dresses in military khaki, wears a Mao Zedong badge and—like most of the old Red Guards who refuse to reflect on what they did—feels strongly nostalgic about his years of rebellion. He is vicious, merciless, and has a mind full of dark plots about achieving power and ruling the world. He makes and sells drugs not primarily for the money but to fulfill his youthful drive for power. His rebellions in the Mao era failed to get him power, but now, adapting to the times, he uses the moneymaking methods of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin to pursue the same goals. He embodies in one person the difference between two eras: yesterday’s Red Guard is today’s big drug dealer, and yesterday’s transnational revolution is today’s transnational crime. But certain things are the same: the lust for power, the ambition to rule the world, and no scruples about means in reaching one’s goals.
II. The Cynical Patriotism of the Deng Xiaoping Era: “Hiding Strength and Biding Time”
During the Deng years, pragmatism replaced Utopian illusions, economic development replaced class struggle, military downsizing replaced military expansion, civilian spending replaced military spending, and a “defensive patriotism” replaced aggressive patriotism. In foreign relations, Deng abandoned the three pillars of Mao’s foreign policy—drawing lines based on ideology, leadership of the Third World, and preparation for World War Three—and replaced these with policies that put practical national interests first, built better relations with the developed countries, cut the armed forces by one million, and did what it could to preserve a peaceful international environment.
The Chinese people in the 1980s were seeking desperately to escape the poverty and strife of the Mao era. When the door to the outside world suddenly opened to us, political reform became a hot topic. The outside world’s wealth and colorful variety made us all the more aware of our own backwardness and poverty. Countervailing feelings welled in us simultaneously: a feeling of national shame along with a strong desire to catch up; envy of the wealthy West along with pride in our ancient culture. Even as the government increasingly stressed patriotism in its new ideology, and even though the prediction that “the twenty-first century will be the Chinese century” had already begun to appear in the debate over a “clash of civilizations” between East and West, these trends were held in check by a preference for the open-minded thinking that continued to arrive from the West and that took increased freedom as its main goal. Our sense of backwardness and inferiority at the time did give rise to emotions, but the emotions were mostly yearnings for the things the West had and a desire to learn from the West—not, primarily, hatred of the outside world or expansionism.
After the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, world opinion condemned the brutal killings and Western governments imposed sanctions on the Chinese Communist regime, whose standing in the eyes of Western governments fell to a low point. Then, in an effort to stabilize its rule and to divert attention from its unpopularity, the leaders of the regime reverted to Mao Zedong�
�s policy of looking for external enemies. They charged that the 1989 pro-democracy movement had been orchestrated by “anti-China” forces overseas; they even said it had been a remote-controlled plot to overthrow the Chinese government and that it was the latest proof that the desire to destroy China among Western capitalists, especially American hegemonists, had never died out. Accordingly China’s core ideological mission had to be, they said, to oppose liberalization and “peaceful evolution” of China in a Westward direction. This was their new domestic policy.
In foreign policy, they turned toward a low-key posture that was captured in Deng Xiaoping’s phrase “concealing our strength and biding our time, and never taking the lead.” They did this because the great massacre in Beijing had plunged China back into diplomatic pariahhood, and the 1989 collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe had only worsened the international reputation of Communist rule. But on the other hand, China’s economic growth could not do without the markets, capital, and technology of the developed nations. To lie low and get what one needed was only prudent.
But for a dictatorship like this one to promise “never to take the lead” is little but a nasty lie. Properly understood, the phrase has no moral content at all; it is an utterly practical device, aimed only at maximizing self-interest in the long run. The ultimate goal of the “biding time” policy is the same as that of earlier policies: to restore China to the center of the world and other peoples to tribute-bearing status. The policy rests on a faith in ebb and flow in world power; one place gets its turn, then another. When the regime is temporarily weak, it “endures humiliation and suffers in silence”—but simultaneously plans a return and sketches blueprints for revenge. Once back, it will “wipe out humiliation through acts of revenge,” as the heroes of Chinese opera do, and stand as master of a powerful China at the center of the world stage.
The deceitful strategy of “concealing strength and biding time” is attributed to Deng Xiaoping, but in a larger sense it rests in the thinking of Mao Zedong.
In the era of “reform and opening,” the first big outburst of Chinese nationalism came in 1993 when Beijing lost its bid to host the 2000 Olympic games. It was a devastating blow to the regime’s sports diplomacy, but in another sense it helped the regime. It helped because the decision deeply wounded China’s national pride, and to China’s rulers, who were still in dire need of some way to recoup legitimacy after the Tiananmen massacre, that injury to national pride came as a wonderful opportunity. They seized it. If the Chinese people had not believed that the 1989 movement was instigated by “anti-China” forces in the West, now they might; if they did not believe that the massacre was “necessary” in order to protect national interests, now they might. The evidence that anti-China forces in the West had ruined Beijing’s Olympics bid now lay right before their eyes. No room for doubt. Here was fresh evidence that the century of China’s humiliation by foreigners, and their anti-China subversion, was still going strong.
This is how the first major wave of radical ultra-nationalism in the reform era got under way. It was a complaining, compulsive sort of nationalism, rather like that of a jilted lover. As in the Mao era, now it became acceptable, once again, to distort history, even to fabricate it, so long as the goal was to recount the dastardly crimes that Westerners had committed in China in the last century or more, and to show how they had humiliated the Chinese race.
But this jilted-lover variety of nationalist passion, in which complaint and accusation were the main components, carried within it the seeds of the Mao-style “bellicose and thuggish” nationalism that was about to make a return in the first years of the twenty-first century. The effort to popularize the Maoist reprise began with the release in 1996 of the book China Can Say “No,” which really had everything: ambition for Great China, ultra-nationalist hatred, Mao-style romantic-but-bloodthirsty lyricism, and garden-variety street obscenities. The book recounts a vast spate of crimes against China committed by American hegemonists, tells its readers that Americans—and Chinese people who like America—are nothing but “vulgar trash” fit only to shut up and “not even fart,” and so on. Its apparent aim is to whip up hatred and bellicose nationalism. “If conciliation fails,” the book’s authors write, “we call upon the Chinese people to remember how to hate [and] to seek revenge!” Let a “virtual wailing wall be built” in the Taiwan Straits. “We solemnly recommend that authorities in Washington D.C. build a wall much higher and wider than the Vietnam War Memorial to accommodate the names of soldiers who will die in the future.” The wall can serve as well as a “tombstone of the American spirit.” Meanwhile the “finest paragons” of the Chinese nation are “destined to rise” from the glorious battlefield, fulfilling their mission that China “lead the twenty-first century” while American hegemony and its running dogs are “done for!”
In sum, we can see how the low-key formula of “concealing strength and biding time” was the incubator for high-flown rhetoric about the resurgence of Great China, and how the jilted-lover variety of nationalist passion incubated the passions of bloodthirsty revenge.
III. Background to the Rise of Thuggish and Bellicose Patriotism
To whip up bellicose, expansionist patriotism in times of war might be easy. To do it in times of peace is not easy, but the following conditions help:
(1) A history of feelings of disdain for the world and a powerful feeling of vanity that the Son of Heaven once ruled All Under Heaven;
(2) A long history of having suffered humiliation at the hands of foreigners and the buildup of popular sentiment for revenge and settling scores;
(3) Pressure on people’s livelihood because of an extremely large population and natural resources that are insufficient to support it;
(4) Rising diplomatic and military power in the present day;
(5) A solid record over an extended time of education-for-hatred in school curricula and the misleading of public opinion in controlled media;
(6) A national psychology that regularly alternates between extreme self-abasement and extreme self-aggrandizement; and
(7) A dictatorial regime that can manipulate the aggregate power of the preceding six conditions.
Condition number 7 is the most important one; it integrates all the others, ferments them into a brew and congeals them into a unity. This is because a dictatorial system has monopoly power over the most important of society’s resources; it can use one-sided indoctrination in the controlled media to stir up patriotic sentiment; it can focus education on a certain kind of patriotism; it can build up the military without asking the opinions of the citizenry; and so on. Condition 7 is especially crucial in a large, poor, and technically backward nation. In a liberal society, even if a country is large and poor, conditions 1–6 by themselves will likely not be able to bring about a unified national psychology. If peaceful tolerance is the norm and ideas rise and fall in the give-and-take of open debate, bellicose nationalism will dissipate and eventually disappear.
The Seventeenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1997 marked China’s transition from the Deng Xiaoping era to the Jiang Zemin era. All seven of the above conditions were in place in China at the time, which meant that Jiang Zemin, who was not content with Deng’s recumbent foreign policy of “not taking the lead,” could now come out with his more bellicose “Great Power diplomacy.” Chinese nationalism, no longer content to “conceal strength and bide time,” was looking forward to world hegemony after a possible “fight to the finish” with the U.S.
Meanwhile many Chinese people in recent years—whether influenced by Deng-style pragmatism, by the extreme relativism of postmodernism, or by Li Zongwu’s “Thick Black Theory” [a kind of amoral Machiavellianism that Li advanced in the early twentieth century, and whose popularity surged at century’s end—Ed.]—have developed a second nature that is wonderfully free of principle and ready to pursue any opportunity. No scruples are needed—arrogance toward the weak is exceeded only by fawning toward the mi
ghty. This kind of utterly unprincipled cynicism guides the foreign policy of the Chinese Communist Party as much as it pervades the official nationalism that the Party sponsors. The proud banner of a Chinese “economic miracle” and the expansion of the regime’s diplomatic and military power have revived the primitive version of Mao-era “patriotism.” Under the guise of restoring national honor and national “essence,” thuggish language that unabashedly celebrates violence, race hatred, and warmongering passion now haunts the Chinese Internet. It appears as commentary on particular incidents. But what is at stake, in the background, is a major new turn in the abnormal nationalism that has beset China over the past one hundred years. This is a turn from the defensive nationalism that arises from mixed feelings of inferiority, envy, complaint, and blame to an aggressive “patriotism” that is based on blind self-confidence, empty boasts, and pent-up hatred.
The major cause of the new turn is a reversion to the China-is-center mentality. As China endured a century of foreign humiliation, deep-seated arrogance became the key element in its nationalism. The on-again, off-again feelings of inferiority that have appeared are alternate psychological expressions of this same underlying arrogance.
As our country entered the twenty-first century, there were five main factors that led many Chinese people to move in the direction of bellicose patriotism.