No Enemies, No Hatred

by Liu Xiaobo

  First, some important events took place right before the new century began. The return of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997 had great symbolic power for the rebuilding Chinese national confidence. It seemed the righting of historical wrongs had been achieved. Then in 1999, when NATO missiles accidentally struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, that event stimulated the greatest anti-American, anti-Western upsurge since the beginning of the reform era and was a shot in the arm for the passions of China’s bellicose patriotism. It was at this juncture that the low-key foreign policy profile of “concealing strength and biding time” began to give way to “great power diplomacy” and to the prospect of “the rise of a great nation.”

  Second, some happy successes arrived together in 2001—some soccer wins, admission to the World Trade Organization, and above all winning the 2008 Olympics bid. The Chinese people suddenly had the feeling that a whole new century lay before them, awaiting their imprint. The prediction that “the twenty-first century will be the Chinese century” seemed ready to come true, and people were bursting with pride. The Olympics bid, to be sure, did have down sides: It would not bring the Chinese people much wealth and power in a material sense, and would give the corrupt power elite some great opportunities for profiteering; moreover it would provide a politically correct pretext for the government to put “stability above all,” to stress economics over social justice, and to spend extravagantly, in essence wasting the people’s wealth while trampling their human rights. But it would also give the government an opportunity to stage a spectacular show about national revival and new wealth and power. When three generations of Chinese Communist Party leaders joined the huge celebration of the successful bid in Beijing, appearing together at Tiananmen Square, over a million residents of the city took to the streets and the revelry lasted all night. This happened not only in Beijing but in other major cities. The world could see a resurgent China filled with self-confidence.

  Third, expressions of admiration from the West began playing an important role. China’s state-run media not only tooted China’s own horn but also took advantage of admiring international comments on China’s rise to Great Power status. In this effort the English scholar Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China became important, as did Napoleon’s prediction that China was a sleeping giant that “when it awakes, will shake the world.” All kinds of favorable comments on the Chinese economy from Western governments and international organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund became psychological resources for the building of national pride. The constant refrain of these voices, as reported in China’s state media, was that the Chinese economy “is the best of all”; that “a very powerful China is on the rise”; and that “by 2015 or 2020 China’s economy will surpass Japan’s.” Even negative comments from the West about “the China threat” were turned around to be evidence of China’s new strength. Headlining these stories with words like “astounding,” “unimaginable,” and “miraculous,” the Chinese media led the Chinese people into an extremely dangerous illusion—that the former “sick man of East Asia” is turning into the “mighty giant of the East” and that China has already risen to be the one “great power” in the world that can resist the United States.

  Fourth, some important trends in international relations in the early 2000s seemed unfavorable to China. Russia, at the time, was turning toward the West; relations between the U.S. and India were improving; the U.S. was making inroads into Central and West Asia; China was embroiled in spats with neighboring countries over maritime rights; the issue of North Korean refugees to China was causing diplomatic squabbles; and, most importantly, the Koizumi government in Japan was refurbishing its military and appearing more hostile toward China. All of these trends made the Chinese leaders feel more and more that they were surrounded by an unfriendly world, and xenophobic sentiment became a natural response. Because of the way events were reported in the Party-controlled press, that response tended to harden into hatreds and thirst for battle.

  Of all such issues, the rivalry with the U.S. was most important. After the end of the Cold War, the Chinese Communist regime stood as the world’s exemplar of dictatorial government, while liberal America stood as the world’s only superpower. It seemed that a final struggle between the rival political systems would open up between China and the United States. The government of George W. Bush, when it first came to power, seemed to take China as the biggest potential adversary of the U.S. and pursued an overall strategy of containing the Chinese Communist regime. Bush was the American president most friendly toward Taiwan in all the thirty years since the U.S. and China resumed diplomatic relations. He approved an increase in military sales to Taiwan and took every public opportunity to emphasize America’s commitment to Taiwan. Ignoring past taboos, he stated plainly that America would protect Taiwan if it came under military attack. Even on a visit to China, in a speech at Tsinghua University, Bush gave no face at all to the Chinese Communists in saying, again, that the United States would abide by its commitments to Taiwan under the “Taiwan Relations Act.” Setting aside warnings from the Chinese government, the U.S. strengthened its relations with the Taiwan military and, in a move unprecedented in thirty years, invited the Taiwan Minister of Defense Tang Yaoming to visit the U.S.

  It was in this tense atmosphere of China–U.S. relations that, on April 1, 2001, a midair collision occurred between a U.S. EP-3E surveillance plane and a Chinese J-811 fighter plane off Hainan Island in southern China. The resultant media hoopla stimulated a vast new outpouring of hatred toward the United States.

  The 9/11 attacks that arrived a few months later led to a temporary relaxation between the governments of China and the U.S. The two sides cooperated, in a limited way, on “counterterrorism,” but the U.S. did not—at least not right away—retreat from its policies on human rights, freedom of religion, nuclear proliferation, and the Taiwan question. Among supernationalists in the Chinese populace, however, the success of Osama Bin Laden’s surprise attack provided an opportunity to vent invective toward the U.S. and stood, moreover, as a model of what could be achieved if scruples were set aside. A book called Unrestricted Warfare by two senior colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, first published in 1999, found a new burst of popularity. For some Chinese, 9/11 showed American vulnerability, and it bolstered their confidence that China would be able to subdue the world’s most powerful nation.

  Fifth, a new, more vigorous challenge was appearing from Taiwan. Chen Shuibian and his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won the 2000 presidential elections in Taiwan, and in 2001 the DPP won again in the elections to Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan. These elections not only demonstrated that democracy in Taiwan had matured to a stage where political parties could hand power back and forth in a peaceful manner; it also marked the rise of genuinely indigenous political forces in Taiwan. After the DPP took power, its series of moves toward “de-Sinification” and “rectifying Taiwan’s name” (i.e., replacing “China” with “Taiwan” in the country’s name) caused Taiwan and the mainland to drift further apart. Hatred for Chen Shuibian and his DPP deepened among parts of the Chinese populace, and there was stronger popular support for a military solution to the Taiwan question. Bellicose Chinese nationalism reared its head in a torrent of battle cries on the Internet: “Better to pound Taiwan into a barren island than to allow it to secede from the fatherland!”; “We’re ready to tear Taiwan down and build it up again, but not to let it go independent”; and so on.

  Together these five factors intensified feelings of bravado—still grounded in inner insecurity—among many parts of the Chinese populace. This duality of insecurity-plus-bravado has operated from the beginning of the Communist years in China, and it finds expression in a variety of face-saving tactics.

  When a people like ours, who struggle with feelings of inferiority, have to face the facts of inadequate national strength, or of less than full respect from others, one way we try to fe
el better is to grab onto any piece of historical material that can make us proud. It is even all right to exaggerate a success wildly, so long as it contributes to an image of “number one” for the group. If it is hard to deny that we are inferior to others materially, we can claim, as Mao did, that we are superior spiritually. If we are not as good as others now, we can build a myth that we are bound to be the most powerful nation some day, because we certainly were in the past.

  China’s ruling group capitalizes on this psychology. In the state media, China’s military, economic, scientific, and even athletic successes since 1949 are all spun as signs that China is on its way to world domination. Fighting the U.S. to a standstill in Korea in the early 1950s was spun as a one-sided victory of China’s “volunteer army.” When America sank deeper and deeper into the quagmire of its war in Vietnam, and eventually had to withdraw, this, too, became a great “victory” for China in 1975; there were never any clear winners in China’s border skirmishes with India in 1962, the Soviet Union in 1969, and Vietnam in 1979 (and in each case there were heavy casualties among Chinese soldiers), but each time the Chinese Communists told the Chinese people that they had achieved great victories.

  The achievements of Chinese people living in the West are reported and exaggerated on a similar principle. The people who are praised might be foreign citizens, but if they are ethnically Chinese, their accomplishments are touted as proof of the power of the nation and the superiority of the race. This happened when C. N. Yang and T. D. Lee won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957, and even when the Taiwanese scientist Yuan-Tseh Lee won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986. All such examples are trumpeted as the pride of the Chinese race.

  Worse still, facts themselves cannot stand in the way when claims of national pride are at stake. Utterly phony “news stories” will do. One of the more famous examples is a report that the United States Military Academy at West Point erected a large photograph of China’s heroic superpatriot Lei Feng (whom Mao had promoted as a model) and that American cadets were “learning from” him. Another said that U.S. soldiers fighting in the Pacific War all carried a copy of Sunzi’s Art of War (sixth to fifth centuries BCE), which is why the Pacific War was won on tactics rooted in ancient Chinese wisdom. Yet another report tells how a Chinese woman named Wu Yang went to Oxford University, became the top student, and, amazingly, received a doctorate in only her second year; then she received a scholarship of 60,000 British pounds, which was the first time such a thing had occurred in Oxford’s 800-year history.

  A group of elite young economists (Yang Fan and others) have announced: “For more than a thousand years China was always the world’s superpower; China’s defeats have come only in the last 150 years.” Or, as Lin Yifu, the economist who became famous for defecting from Taiwan to China in 1979, put it: “In the two thousand years before the Industrial Revolution, Chinese culture and civilization were indeed the most advanced in the world, and the most deserving to be called the world’s highest achievements … people from all over the world made pilgrimages to the Central Empire.”

  IV. Blaming and Complaining Turns into Patriotism-as-Violence

  Excessive self-confidence and passions of blind hatred have led many mainland “patriots” to reject universal values. Cursing and shouts of “kill!” drown such values out.

  Talk of armed attack on Taiwan and declaration of war on the U.S. has become fashionable in government think tanks, among intellectual elites, and in parts of the population as well. In the writings of the elites, this bellicose patriotism is presented as two major principles: first, “a great rejection” of Western hegemony, and second, preparation for “a great attack.”

  The “great rejection” idea is upside-down theory in the sense that it begins with a neat formula and then fills in facts to suit it. It says: in politics, reject Western “political hegemony” and oppose “peaceful evolution” in a pro-West direction. In military affairs, prepare for confrontation with American “military hegemony,” and call for a multipolar international order. In economics, prevent “capital hegemony” from controlling China, and retain our people’s economy as the indisputable top priority. In the cultural realm, prevent “Western discursive hegemony,” which is also “cultural colonialism,” and advocate the indigenization of scholarship.

  Some of these thinkers have gone further and advanced the idea of “system hegemony” in the international order. This idea is that both the rule-making and decisions about rule-following in today’s world are monopolized by the strong while the weak have no right to doubt them. In world trade, for example, the developed countries make the rules and the end result of the global circulation of capital is that the profits go mainly to the developed countries. The pattern extends to international organizations and even to the rules and standards used for international awards and prizes. They are all governed by “Western” values. Thus we have, in politics, the United Nations; in economics, the World Trade Organization; in military matters, NATO; in culture, the Nobel Prizes, Europe’s three major film prizes, and the American Academy Awards; in sports, the Jesse Owens Prize; in music, the Grammy awards; in art, the Venice Biennale; and so on. Western rules and standards are everywhere. In the view of the hegemony theorists, the “system hegemony” of the West is unfair. It did not come about because Western culture and Western systems are superior to others or because they are intrinsically more “universal.” It came about because the West has been economically, technologically, and militarily more powerful. Material differences, not value differences, put it where it is.

  In the reform era, as Deng Xiaoping’s emphasis on economic growth gradually replaced Mao Zedong’s policies of “taking class struggle as the key link,” and as people began to enjoy more decent standards of living, the Mao-era “enemy mentality” gradually dissipated in Chinese society. But the one-party dictatorship, with its paranoia about maintaining power, still needed an “enemy mentality” for use in maintaining control and still relied on its revolutionary faith that “political power grows from the barrel of a gun.” The main difference is that the “enemy mentality” now has an exclusively overseas target, whereas under Mao the enemies were both domestic and foreign. (Today, only “a tiny minority” of people in China—who happen to be the country’s best political thinkers—are called “agents of anti-China forces.”) In the years since Mao, public hatred has shifted from class-based hatred to nation-based hatred, and Mao’s maxim that “political power grows from the barrel of a gun” has gained the corollary of “national unity and dignity grow from the barrel of a gun.” The xenophobic psychology, enemy mentality, and gun-worship of the Mao years have all found new life under the guise of “patriotism.” Internally, this tool of “patriotism” has been useful to the Communist Party as a new ideology with which to control the nation after the total collapse of any belief in communism; externally, it has been useful in issuing military threats against Taiwan and the U.S. In the minds of the “bellicose patriots,” the only language that American “hegemonists” and Taiwan-independence “elements” understand is the sound of ballistic missiles exploding. But it would be a mistake to take this hyperbolic language as empty talk. Someday it could well be a basis for action. Thuggery in language and thuggery in life are related.

  The worship of violence marks a reversion to barbarism for human civilization. This reversion happens most easily inside autocratic political systems, and the extent of the return to caveman impulses is in direct proportion to the barbarity of the autocracy within which it takes place: the more barbaric the dictatorship, the more devoutly its people will worship violence. In recent world history, the worship of violence has always found convenient pretexts: for colonialism, the expansion of Western “civilization” was the rationale; during the Second World War, the efficiency of Fascism was the rationale; during the Cold War, it was the Communist ideal of one-world harmony; and now, for China, it is ultra-nationalism. In our new century, when freedom, democracy, and peaceful develop
ment have become the main tendency throughout the world, “ultra-nationalism” stands naked as nothing but a euphemism for the worship of violence in service of autocratic goals—be they the terrorism and holy war of Islamic fundamentalists or the refusal of dictatorial systems to accept political democracy.

  China’s Communist rulers, who can see the world’s drift toward freedom and democracy as clearly as anyone, and who know that they are actually much weaker in the world than they would like to be, have no choice but to recognize the world’s present course as one of “peace and development.” On the other hand, as long as the Party refuses to accept political democratization, it will never be able to let go of its primitive barrel-of-the-gun mentality. Moreover, the people of mainland China, inured for decades to the ways of Communist dictatorship and with centuries of imperial experience lying behind that, carry within them habits of violence-worship whose poison will not be easy to eradicate. Every day the dictatorship continues is a day that this poison cannot be purged, and a day that “patriotism” continues to serve as an acceptable reason to tolerate bloodthirsty language that could, some day, turn into barbaric action. When a population gives its majority support to narrow nationalism in preference to the universal values of human freedom and dignity, it turns “patriotism” into an argument for despotic government, military adventurism, and thuggery.

  In its actual power today, the Chinese regime is still far behind the U.S., and there is no chance of its becoming a world hegemon any time soon. The real costs at stake are domestic, in the national psychology of the Chinese people, who are being misled by a dictatorial system, for purposes of its own power, to embrace a thuggish version of nationalism and a pipe dream of world domination. All of this is profoundly corrosive of the universal values of human dignity and freedom. The mentality of world domination, to say nothing of the thuggish outlook, has not served the Chinese people well, either now or in earlier centuries. What these ideas have actually brought to the common people of China, past and present, has not been peace, success, honor, health, or a vigorous society, but bloodshed, defeat, ruin, humiliation, dismal lives, and societal collapse.