The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  The lessons were well marked by Deng Xiaoping. ‘For many years,’ he now sternly observed at a national meeting of propaganda department chiefs, ‘some of our comrades, immersing themselves in specific affairs, have shown no concern for political developments and attached no importance to ideological work . . . Our gravest failure has been in [political] education. We did not provide enough education to young people, including students. For many of those who participated in the demonstrations and hunger strikes it will take years, not just a couple of months, of education to change their thinking.’17 Deng’s second-in-command, Jiang Zemin – who had scrambled up the party ranks on the strength of his muffling of 1989’s Shanghai protests – was keen to show that the pendulum was swinging back. His predecessor, the disgraced Zhao Ziyang, had not even attended annual National Propaganda meetings; Jiang made a point not only of attending every one, but also of making the keynote speech.

  Once the oversight had been acknowledged, though, the question was how to fill the propaganda vacuum. In declaring soon after Mao’s death that ‘practice was the sole criterion of truth’, Deng had implicitly thrown ideology out of the window (perhaps the same one through which all the flies and mosquitoes were coming). The loss of Communist China’s ‘spiritual pillars’ – the political, Marxist thought that glued the place together – had been the result. But now that the guns of the People’s Liberation Army had been turned on the People, lecturing populations on proletarian principles was, realistically, going to be problematic – even though the conservative wing of the party remained in denial about this until around 1992, as they busily tried to orchestrate a return to old-style Maoism.

  Some of the savvier elements in government had another idea: to combine recriminations of the West with a revamped patriotic propaganda drive – to reinvent the post-1989 party as defender of the national interest against Western attempts to contain a rising China. It was an almost improbably audacious plan: how on earth, a matter-of-fact observer might have reasonably asked at the time, was the party going to persuade its people – whom it had openly butchered through June 1989 – that it was, in fact, the country’s saviour from evil Western schemes? The demonstrations’ blood-soaked denouement was an international and domestic PR disaster of the first order: while Western politicians and overseas Chinese called for economic and political sanctions and sinologists contemplated switching discipline in protest, hundreds of thousands of sobbing Chinese people came out in protest in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and Western cities, comparing the PRC to Nazi Germany and spray-painting the national flag with swastikas. Surely, from here, there was no way back.

  But one historical coincidence, at least, seemed to smile on the endeavour. The aftermath of the 1989 suppression fell upon an auspicious commemoration: the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Opium War. And through the months following June 1989, some of the country’s modern historians got to work. While elsewhere in the world Communist states collapsed, academic hacks wrote and organized and wrote some more until, as the new year approached, they were at last ready. In 1990, China’s establishment fought a vigorous campaign to remind the Chinese people of their history of oppression at the hands of West, through literally dozens of articles, conferences and spin-off books about the conflict.

  ‘The Opium War’, went Humiliation and Resistance – the book resulting from just one of the year’s commemorative symposia – ‘was the great event in China’s modern history: not only the beginning of China’s modern history of humiliation, but also the first glorious chapter of the Chinese people’s struggle of resistance against foreign invasion. The War has not only branded an enormous, painful, unforgettable memory on the hearts of countless sons and daughters of China, but has also provided a hugely worthwhile lesson for later generations to reflect upon.’ China’s modern history was the story of the Chinese people suffering from, then resisting, (Western) imperialist aggression, beginning with the ‘shameless’ and ‘filthy’ Opium War, a concerted plot to ‘enslave our people, steal our wealth and turn a great nation that had been independent for thousands of years into a semi-feudal semi-colony.’ The Chinese people were also to remember that ‘between the Opium War and the War of Resistance Against Japan, the Chinese people gradually awoke until, after many failed choices, they eventually chose socialism . . . and the leadership of the Communist Party . . . In recent years, some enemies of patriotism have been shouting about “total Westernization” . . . This is extraordinary . . . To forget history is treachery.’18 ‘Since the Opium War,’ another conference paraphrased, ‘history has shown that . . . only the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is the core power for the victory of the revolution . . . only socialism can save and develop China.’19

  The Opium War’s birthday extravaganza of 1990 was the start of one of the Communist Party’s most successful post-Mao ideological campaigns, Patriotic Education, a crusade designed – as the People’s Daily explained in 1994 – to ‘boost the nation’s spirit, enhance its cohesion, foster its self-esteem and sense of pride, consolidate and develop a patriotic united front . . . and rally the masses’ patriotic passions to the great cause of building socialism with Chinese characteristics.’20 The campaign encompassed three big ideas: first, to indoctrinate the Chinese in the idea that China possessed a unique, glorious, millennia-old ‘national condition’ (guoqing) unready for democracy; second, to remind them of their sufferings at the hands of the West; and third, to underline the genius of Communist leadership. In practice, this meant talking up the ‘great achievements’ of the Chinese People, Nation and Communist Party, in stirring films, in feel-good sing-songs, in top-hundred lists of heroes, great events and battles and in numbing references to China’s ‘century of humiliation’ inflicted by foreign imperialism, always beginning with the Opium Wars, always passing slickly over the CCP’s own acts of violence (the Maoist famine of the early 1960s; the Cultural Revolution; the 1989 crackdown). ‘How can we give our youth patriotic education?’ asked Seeking Truth (Qiushi), the party’s leading policy journal. ‘By teaching them to understand the historical inevitability and correctness of choosing the socialist road . . . since the Opium War.’21 Shortly after 1989, the Central Propaganda Department dubbed modern Chinese history ‘a meaningful security issue.’22 (In 2001, the official history of the CCP explicitly traced the party’s period of pre-development back to 1840, ‘in order to explain the historical inevitability of the CCP’s establishment.’23) A rash of National Humiliation books erupted: The Indignation of National Humiliation, A Dictionary of National Humiliation, A Simple Dictionary of National Humiliation, Never Forget National Humiliation.24 ‘High schools didn’t teach students anything about the Opium War until 1990,’ a veteran author of history textbooks from the People’s Educational Press recalled in 2007, ‘when they brought it in to improve their patriotic education.’25 As Francis Fukuyama pronounced the death of ideology, and both specialist and non-specialist China-watchers were predicting that China’s famed propaganda system was in crisis, this machinery geared itself up for a new message.

  Post-1989 China has bristled with new or improved tourist destinations commemorating the horrors of foreign aggression. The government finally mustered the will to capitalize on the propaganda value of the ruins of the Summer Palace, replacing the pigsties and piles of rubbish with new signs littered across the gardens reminding visitors of what would have been there, if the British and French had not burnt or stolen it first. The ruins of the Qing emperors’ imitation Versailles, of course, were left in place – a handful of curlicued pillars looming up out of evocatively disarranged rubble – as if 1860 were only yesterday still. Before their groups scatter for photo-opportunities, Chinese tour-guides today make sure their charges have taken the point: ‘This isn’t history,’ I overheard one party being told. ‘This is a national tragedy.’ After a solemn amble through the palace’s remains, visitors eventually reach, along a fifty-yard walkway lined by notices detailing the location of items loot
ed in 1860 in foreign museums (‘the humiliated soul of the palace’s remains is a constant imperative to reflect on history’), a courtyard museum in which a fifty-minute documentary film, The Vicissitudes of the Summer Palace, blares out on continuous loop: a masterpiece of shrill socialist realism graced by production values from the 1970s. ‘Never forget history!’ hectors its conclusion. ‘Revive China!’ (Naturally, there are no such publicly preserved ruins of the many historical sites destroyed by Chinese people, with full government encouragement, during the Cultural Revolution, or published listings of priceless artworks smashed or stolen by Red Guards.)

  Inevitably, the first Opium War also did well out of the patriotic boom of the 1990s, with the redevelopment of a heritage trail around Canton and Nanjing. By the end of the decade, a new Sea Battle Museum rose, like a great barnacle, out of the Guangdong coastline, recounting British ships’ 1841 destruction of the crucial forts that guarded the riverway up to Canton. The temple on the outskirts of Nanjing in which China’s first ‘Unequal Treaty’ was agreed on 29 August 1842 had been destroyed during the Second World War; the site was reconstructed into the Museum of the Nanjing Treaty, in time for the all-important anniversary of 1990. In 1997, to mark the Handover of Hong Kong (the British occupation of which, pronounced Jiang Zemin, ‘was the epitome of the humiliation China suffered in modern history’), six million yuan in public subscriptions were collected to pay for the forging of a massive ‘Bell of Warning’, which now stood at the entrance of the complex: ‘to peal long and loud, lest we forget the national humiliation of the past.’26 That same year, a blockbuster about the Opium War – full of tough, righteous Chinese officials and cruel, lecherous foreigners – hit Chinese cinemas.27

  In 2007, a Central China Television documentary entitled The Road to Revival chronicled China’s history since the Opium War, tracing out the horrors suffered before the joys of Communist victory in 1949. Near the entrance to the accompanying exhibition at Beijing’s grimly Stalinist Military Affairs Museum, a vast flashing map (‘The Historical Humiliations of the Chinese People’) boggled visitors’ minds with statistics about the millions of ounces of silver that the Unequal Treaties cost the country, while a video loop juxtaposed pitiful images of naked Chinese children with those of fully clothed Western soldiers. The briefest of nods to the glitches of communism were permitted. The exhibition offered one mention of the Great Leap Forward – Mao’s fanatical 1957 farming revolution that led to some 30 million deaths in the man-made famine of the early 1960s – and glossed the decade of the Cultural Revolution with a three-dimensional display of China’s first successful explosion of an atom bomb. The events of June 1989 were blotted out with images of happy Chinese people shopping for televisions through the 1980s, followed by even happier farmers, computers and skyscrapers through the 1990s. ‘Remember our history of humiliation,’ ran the closing display, ‘build a beautiful future.’

  Chen Xitong – Mayor of Beijing through the spring and summer of 1989 – termed Patriotic Education a ‘systematically engineered project’; and it seems to have produced results. A survey of 10,000 young people in 1995 already found most of them expecting China’s status to surge over the next thirty years; that year, patriotism rose to number two in the list of values important to China’s youth, from number five only ten years previously.28 In 2003, almost half of a 5,000-strong sample of students surveyed expressed confidence that in twenty years China should and would be able to become a leading military world power.29 Popular, anti-Western nationalism has regularly erupted since the mid-1990s. In May 1999, as the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen confrontation approached, tens of thousands of Chinese students spilled onto the streets of urban China roaring not for democracy but for revenge against America for the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. ‘Oppose invasion!’ ran one slogan. ‘Blood for Blood!’ ran another. Horrified apologies by the American government (whose Beijing embassy was besieged by protestors) that the bombing had been a mistake caused by CIA bungling and inefficiency meant nothing; the incident had instantly pressed the Opium War button in a Chinese public now seemingly conditioned to expect only the worst from the West. ‘This is no longer an age’, analysed the People’s Daily, ‘in which people can barge about the world with a few gunboats . . . no longer the era in which Western powers plundered the Imperial Palace at will . . . and seized Hong Kong . . . The hot blood of people of ideas and integrity who have opposed imperialism for more than a hundred and fifty years flows through the veins of the Chinese people. NATO had better remember this.’30 There was, the instinctive reasoning went, nothing chance about it – it was the latest manifestation of the old foreign conspiracy against their country.

  In April 2008, a similar outburst of Chinese nationalism was triggered by furious responses to Tibetan Independence demonstrations during the Olympic torch relay. While anti-Chinese protests spread through Tibet, China Daily blamed the unrest on British invasion following the Opium War.31 On 7 April, when pro-Tibet protestors in Paris tried to grab the Olympic flame from a wheelchair-bound Chinese paralympian, the French leg of the relay broke down only half an hour after starting out from the Eiffel Tower. Around ten days later, civilian nationalists had mobilized protests around the French embassy in Beijing, and outside French supermarkets in at least five different Chinese cities. ‘Protect Our Tibet! Bless Our Olympics! Boycott Carrefour!’ ran banners displayed at demonstrations on the north-east coast. ‘Say No to French Imperialists! Strongly Protest Britain and France Invading China in 1860!’ As popular Chinese outrage grew about perceived anti-Chinese bias in Western reporting on the riots in Tibet, more than ten members of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China received death threats. ‘People who fart through the mouth will get shit stuffed down their faces by me! Foreign reporters out of China!’ a posting on a popular news site owned by the People’s Daily responded. ‘These bastards make me want to throw up,’ ran another. ‘Throw them in the Taiwan Strait to fill it up. They’re like flies – disgusting.’32 Those without first-hand experience of or interest in China now encountered (either physically or on prime-time news slots) files of red-flag wavers in Australian, American and European cities occasionally prepared to kick and punch advocates of Tibetan independence. Things looked particularly ugly in clashes between Chinese and pro-Tibetan demonstrators at Duke University in the US, where one Chinese student who suggested dialogue between the two sides received death threats from compatriots. For a while – until the Sichuan earthquake revived global sympathy for China – dyspeptic chauvinism looked set to become the international face of this imminent superpower.

  In the course of all this, a brash new persona in Chinese public life has emerged: the fenqing – angry, intensely nationalistic (predominantly male) youth.33 Although they periodically spill out onto the streets, the favoured habitat of the fenqing is the Internet. One of the most impressive aspects of the CCP’s post-1989 Patriotic Education campaign has been its ability to adapt new technology to its purposes. For sure, plenty of young Chinese nationalists’ minds have been fed on old-fashioned, traditional media: on what one Chinese academic in 2006 controversially called the ‘wolf’s milk’ of the PRC’s nationalistically selective textbooks. The youngest self-proclaimed fenqing that I have encountered was a sixteen-year-old from Beijing, who told me that he had first learnt to become angry aged thirteen, in his modern Chinese history classes at junior high school. ‘Our schooling taught us that China’s misery was imposed by Western countries’, observed one twenty-three-year-old in 2006. ‘We were all strongly nationalist . . . We were bound to become fenqing.’34 But the Internet in China has also become a crucial virtual meeting place for new extreme patriots: every nationalist flashpoint since the late 1990s has been stoked by, or organized over, the Internet.

  For well over a decade, the Chinese government has been one of the world’s most assiduous censors of the Internet, controlling the public’s access to information through its ‘Great Firewall’: a ha
ndful of servers guarding the gateways at which the Chinese Internet meets that of the outside world, in order to block sensitive foreign sites.35 Yet despite the regime’s nerves about the Internet offering a free forum for exchange of political information and views, it has tolerated and even encouraged outbursts of angry nationalism, in the hope that anti-foreign sentiment will blur into state-defined patriotism. And on the face of it, the gamble has paid off. After the 1999 protests, the People’s Daily set up the ‘Strong Nation Forum’: an official outlet for nationalistic postings. After the 2001 collision between a Chinese fighter plane and an American spy plane off the coast of southern China, the site raged with anti-US comments on the incident.36 Aware that a great many Chinese Internet users are primarily interested in games, the propaganda department has ensured that rising generations can spend their leisure hours refining their patriotic instincts. In 2000, for example, an officially sanctioned news site featured games in which web-users could thump Lee Teng-hui (the President of Taiwan who oversaw the island’s first democratic elections in 1995), stick silly noses on him or shoot at him as he jumped out of a plane. As the Hong Kong Handover approached in 1997, a software company launched an Opium War game whose players fought the British virtually: ‘Let’s use our wisdom and courage’, ran the manual, ‘to exterminate the damned invaders!’37