The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  Unexpected breeds of angry young men have reinforced the CCP’s messages. In the middle of the decade, popular nationalism hit China’s bookshelves in the form of a series of bestselling volumes denouncing the West’s dark conspiracy to ‘contain’ (ezhi) or even ‘enslave’ a rising China. Zhang Xiaobo, one of the co-authors of the earliest of these books, China Can Say No, was an improbable supporter of state orthodoxy: a veteran of the West-worshipping 1980s imprisoned briefly after 1989 for his involvement in the protests. The Plot to Demonise China (an account of the American media’s conspiracy to blacken China) was put together by a group of young, Westernized intellectuals (one a professor at an American university). ‘We were nothing to do with the party,’ protested Zhang – now a highly successful independent publisher ambitious to produce China’s first legal pornographic magazine – more than ten years later.38

  In the late 1990s, as the Internet began to take off in China, George W. Bush predicted blithely that ‘freedom’s genie [is] out of the bottle’. Within another ten years, such optimism was starting to look misplaced, with a bullish Communist government defying Western governments on key issues – the undervaluing of the yuan, multilateral agreement at Copenhagen, freedom of speech – and apparently cheered on by Internet-users who classified each collision as an imperialist plot to keep China down. And the more that the government and its netizens dwelt on Western schemes to intervene in China, the more they fuelled old Yellow Peril fears in British and American minds. In January 2010, after more than three decades of market reforms and a decade of the Internet, Sino-Western relations seemed as haunted by the Opium War syndrome as ever.

  In winter 2007, finding myself in Beijing with some spare time on my hands, I decided to take the temperature of Patriotic Education for myself: to see whether it really was manufacturing furious chauvinists. So I arranged to sit in on some high-school history classes. It was surprisingly straightforward. If I’d been a Chinese researcher trying to do the same thing in England, I would probably have had to wait weeks or months for a Criminal Records Bureau check. A friend – a clever and good-humoured thirty-something teacher with a degree from an American university – contacted a couple of his friends, then rang me back with a handful of phone numbers. ‘Give them a call and they’ll tell you when to come.’

  Arriving at the school early on a November morning, I was met at the gates by another young, smiling history teacher, who took me to the classroom. ‘High-school education’s politically very important,’ she told me as we walked over. ‘That’s where most people get their ideas about modern history from.’ And the class – on the Opium War – did indeed kick off stolidly enough, with an introit about the evils of British drug-smuggling and the damage done to the Chinese people’s dignity, and images of socialist realist sculptures depicting muscular Chinese resistance. The lecture was accompanied – in an emotive touch foreign to the history lessons I remember sitting through as a teenager – by an atmospherically sinister soundtrack. ‘To forget history is treachery’, a PowerPoint slide reminded the students – in case they hadn’t heard it a hundred times before.

  But there were surprises in the fifteen-minute discussion that followed, in which students were invited to debate why China was defeated, and the influence that the war had had on the country. One classroom wag hauled himself to his feet: ‘As Chairman Mao said . . .’ he began, in a deliberate parody of political correctness. Once his classmates’ and teacher’s gusts of laughter had died down, he made his point: ‘We lost because we were too weak, too closed up.’ His classmates agreed: ‘The problem with us Chinese,’ another went on, ‘was that we had no backbone; we were all high on opium the whole time.’ ‘Our weapons were three hundred years behind the West,’ observed a third, ‘and we had no experience of naval war. We were too cowardly, too backward, too isolated.’

  Despite the impressive efforts of the Propaganda Department to construct a China-as-victim account of modern history, commemoration of the Opium War is still saturated with self-loathing. ‘We made The Road to Revival,’ its director (a suave forty-something called Ren Xue’an) told me, ‘because although we’ve solved the basic problem that led to the Opium War – that the isolated will be backward, and the backward will take a beating – there are lots of other things, such as national wealth and strength, democracy, harmony and civilization, that we haven’t achieved yet. We’re not obsessing about this period of history just for the sake of it, but in order to march forward, to tell the Chinese people to keep studying new things . . . the war opened up the rest of the world to us, and we began to learn from it.’39

  Views are, in fact, very divided about the impact of Patriotic Education. History teachers on the front line of the crusade fret that, despite diligent reminders of the ‘Century of Humiliation’, ‘the youth of today aren’t very patriotic’, as the teacher I saw in action complained. ‘They’re selfish. They have no sense of responsibility – they don’t worry or think about things like Unequal Treaties. Some of them don’t even know what the Boxer Indemnity is! Nothing matters to them, except passing the university entrance examination. If you tell them to be patriotic, they don’t take any notice.’ After one class, a group of Beijing sixteen-year-olds told me they hated modern history – it was so dark and oppressive. ‘They all prefer ancient history,’ their teacher told me. ‘They like the sense of culture and the emperors.’ I also observed some of the new compulsory modern history classes (that replaced older courses in Marxism-Leninism) at Beijing University. Soon, the only way I could keep myself awake was by sitting at the back and keeping a count on all the students who had obviously fallen asleep (some of them in the front rows).

  A tour of some of China’s sites of patriotic education intimated that the lack of enthusiasm was not restricted to students. A case in point was the Sea Battle Museum. The curators have made a stalwart attempt to fan visitors’ sense of grievance through instructive captions (‘the British colonialists attempted to open the door of China by the contemptible means of armed invasion and opium-smuggling . . . the sublime national integrity and great patriotic spirit of the Chinese people displayed during the anti-aggression struggle showed a national spirit that would never disappear’), and three-dimensional artists’ impressions of the struggle: one’s attention is grabbed particularly by a lurid waxworks of the fight for one of the forts, in which an unarmed Chinese man has wrestled to the ground an armed and apparently moribund British soldier, and is about to dash his brains out with a rock.

  On the beach outside the museum, however, day-trippers seemed unperturbed by the events of 170 years past. As they laid out snacks and drinks, threw balls around and kicked shuttlecocks in the shadow of the forts that failed to protect China from British ships, tourists were far more interested in enjoying a few hours at the seaside than in contemplating the national tragedy. The largest and most accessible of the fortifications was Weiyuan Paotai (the Fort That Overawes to a Great Distance) just to the right of the beach: a long seawall regularly punctuated by large cannon, several of which were being straddled by young women in tight shorts who were having their photographs taken. I asked a young man watching his male friends scramble over the guns what he felt visiting the place: ‘I . . . er . . . don’t know. I haven’t thought.’ I tried goading him a little: ‘I’m British, you know.’ ‘Really? I hear Britain’s very advanced.’ I gave him another opening: ‘British as in “The Anti-British Invasion Museum” [another nearby site of Opium War-period patriotic education]. Wouldn’t you like me to apologize?’ ‘Oh, that. That’s just history.’ Even the flagship monument to National Humiliation – the ruins of the Summer Palace – is patchy in its effects. ‘Oh, yes, I’m very angry,’ one male student visitor told me. A few minutes later, he tapped me on the shoulder to ask what country I was from and what opportunities there were for studying law in England.

  For all the success of young Chinese nationalists in periodically grandstanding Western media coverage, almost every Chinese urban
ite I have spoken to is embarrassed by them, refusing to admit they represent the mainstream. And in any case, most of China’s patriots do not draw a clear line between themselves and the West. Significant numbers of China’s angriest cyber-nationalists – denouncers of China’s ‘victimization’ by the West and Japan – rank among the most enthusiastic exploiters of the wealth and opportunities generated by the opening up of post-Mao China to the outside world. A joke circulating in 1999 rumoured that demonstrators outside the US embassy in Beijing were lobbing into the compound stones wrapped in visa applications. Interviews I have attempted to conduct with fenqing have often been distracted by their earnest requests for advice about studying or getting published in the West. In one transcript, my interlocutor’s speech on his readiness to send his army to the British Museum to recover the treasures looted from the Summer Palace is interrupted when he enthusiastically accepts a complimentary cup of Christmas coffee from a Starbucks waitress. Pragmatism, at least as much as patriotism, is the religion of the contemporary PRC.

  Despite its fears that the population is oblivious to Patriotic Education, China’s propaganda establishment is anxious also that the campaign might be too successful: that nationalist anger might prove uncontrollable.

  Back in 2007, I encountered one of China’s Angry Youth in person: a tall, rangy, mop-haired journalist, whom I will call Wang Ningwen.1 I had first encountered him at a meeting at a small independent bookstore called Utopia (Wuyou zhixiang), just outside the western gate of Beijing University, that had established itself as a gathering place for left-wing nationalists. He was one of a group assembled to discuss the patriotic problems in Li Ang’s Oscar-winning sensation, Lust, Caution – a sex-stuffed tale of Japanese-occupied Second World War Shanghai, in which a female resistance worker ends up sacrificing herself for the political collaborator she is supposed to help assassinate. The discussion started off predictably enough: the film, the speakers agreed, was ‘an insult to the Chinese people’, a ‘Chinese traitor movie’, ‘a sexually transmitted skin disease’. These denunciations out of the way though, things took a slightly surprising turn. What the speakers were really worried about was not the idea of a Hollywood cabal plotting to defame Chinese patriotism, but instead the utter spinelessness of the Chinese government’s response to the film. Why hadn’t they banned it? ‘What did the censors think they were doing?’ one speaker demanded, to enthusiastic applause.40 China’s problems, the group agreed, were the traitors within, not the enemy without: the ‘comprador power-group’ (maiban shili) at the heart of government, who identified with the West and Japan, who thought China would be better off today if it had been a colony for the last two centuries. These Chinese ‘running dogs of capitalism’ were turning China into the West’s ‘concubine’. I was struck by the fact that, although the speakers had no love of the West (Western culture, I learnt from one of them, ‘is bestial – it turns everyone into animals. The West is infantile, savage and destructive; China is civilized’), their main quarrel was with the current Communist leadership. While the assembled had ostensibly gathered to condemn a non-mainland film, their anger quickly bounced back at the Chinese government.

  I made an appointment to meet Wang Ningwen a few days later, to talk a little more about his Weltanshauung. (As a security check, I tested the depth of his anti-Western feeling over the phone by suggesting we met at Starbucks, to see whether his love of multinational lattes would triumph over patriotic principle.) Once we were sitting down over coffee, he poured out his grievances. They began with the West: ‘All China’s problems are connected to foreign invasion, starting with the Opium War . . . the British smuggled and stole – they behaved disgustingly . . . The accounts of history have to be settled . . . China’s obsessed with getting an apology from Japan; they should get one from Britain, too.’ But he was very clear about where the root of the problem lay: in the cowardice and treachery of China’s own government. There was no such thing as patriotic education in China, he told me. ‘It was all so boring we hated it – I called it anti-patriotic education . . . The average highschool student doesn’t remember how badly the West behaved – all they know is that Japanese, American and European things are good . . . mainstream opinion in China today is trying to replace national identity with stuff about how we should be modern and civilized, like the West . . . The entire CCP today is basically a gang of traitors.’41

  He was outraged by Yuan Weishi’s criticisms of Chinese textbooks published in 2006 in Freezing Point: how could a Chinese scholar have allied himself with the Western imperialists? ‘It was pure treachery – he was desecrating his own ancestors’ graves . . . He should have been drowned in rotten eggs and spit . . . or maybe have had his house vandalized. It would have been completely right and proper.’42 But even though Freezing Point was shut down by the government, Wang Ningwen was convinced the two sides were allies in the same conspiracy: ‘Yuan’s article is serving the current CCP, he’s in cahoots with their treacherous bureaucrats.’ At the end of our talk, Wang Ningwen had questions for me, too. The following day, he had been invited to an interview with the British Council for a scholarship to study in the UK, and he was wondering how best to present himself. ‘Try not mentioning the [Opium] War,’ I suggested. He must have controlled himself, for he won the award.43

  Wang Ningwen’s fierce anti-Western nationalism, then, was an odd hybrid. While it had swallowed whole the angry, victimized rhetoric of the Opium War narrative constructed by the CCP, it was far more concerned with opposing the current Communist government itself. Wang – as a graduate of Beijing University, a member of the country’s intellectual elite – angrily attacked the regime’s public monopoly on historical interpretations of the Cultural Revolution and of modern history in general. ‘They don’t want us to remember modern history,’ he commented scornfully of The Road to Revival, ‘they just want to make us realize how great the present is.’44 Ren Xue’an – representative par excellence of the contemporary Communist media establishment so disliked by Wang Ningwen – was disapproving of fenqing nationalism: ‘We should tolerate different voices, but their take on history is wrong. It doesn’t resonate with many people in China today.’45

  One of the reasons that the regime draws so much attention to the ‘Century of Humiliation’ is that it dreads the Chinese remembering man-made disasters of the Maoist period.46 But the popular fury that is diverted into nationalism also reminds the establishment too much of the anarchic civil violence of the Cultural Revolution.47 Ren Xue’an explained to me why commemorating recent domestic traumas was still out of the question. ‘The Opium Wars were international issues, while the Cultural Revolution was an internal problem. China has to deal with internal turmoil in its own way . . . because the Chinese people aren’t educated. If we said, let’s sit down now and discuss the Cultural Revolution, all the settling of scores would mean we’d soon have a new civil war on our hands – it would be like the French Revolution. It would be awful.’48

  For all its promotion of state-defined patriotism, the Chinese government has reason to be nervous of the feelings this can unleash. Attitudes towards Japan offer a good example. It’s obvious that the post-1989 state has, with the help of the Patriotic Education campaign’s emphasis on historical traumas, worked on generating anti-Japanese feeling. Under Mao, ‘peaceful, friendly relations’ with Japan had been state policy – no reparations or apologies required. Through the 1990s and 2000s, by contrast, hostility towards Japan grew in direct proportion to the CCP’s expansion of public commemorations of the Second World War. A 2001 revision of high-school history textbooks toned down the old Marxist, anti-imperialist rhetoric on every one of China’s former aggressors – except for Japan.49 By 2007, textbook coverage of the Opium War had been slimmed down from eighteen pages stuffed with images of evil British plunderers to a sketchier four. Coverage of the Sino-Japanese War, by contrast, remained outraged: ‘Burning, killing, raping, looting – there was no evil that Japan did not perpetrate’, ru
ns a caption directly opposite the photograph of a grinning Japanese soldier standing among massacred Chinese. ‘What sufferings did Japan inflict upon the Chinese people between 1931 and 1945?’ probes an essay question, instructing students to search out victims to interview.50

  Apparently as a result of this patriotic education, in spring 2005 anti-Japanese demonstrations – fanned and organized by Internet activists – broke out across China’s major cities, protesting (amongst other things) the publication in Japan of new school textbooks that hushed up wartime atrocities in China.51 Yet although this movement began life converging with state-sponsored goals of anti-foreign nationalism, it was clear that the demonstrations quickly moved out of official control and into the hands of grass-roots organizations. As the protests spread to a third weekend, an uneasy note crept into the authorities’ pre-emptive announcements: ‘Express your passion in an orderly manner,’ the police instructed would-be demonstrators on the Internet, warning that all street protests must be approved by the authorities and ordering well-known grass-roots campaigners to stay at home. Soon after, a major government newspaper denounced the anti-Japanese demonstrations as an ‘evil plot’ with ‘ulterior motives’ to bring down the Communist Party – an orthodox protest movement had clearly boiled over into civil activism and potential subversion.

  Until 2009, one of China’s most passionate anti-Japanese nationalists (founder of the Greater China Anti-Japanese Alliance) was a former criminal judge turned philosophy professor called Guo Quan, who won instant celebrity in 2005 for vandalizing the tomb of a Ming Dynasty merchant accused of collaborating with Japanese pirates. In 2006, his feelings started to take him in a new, anti-government direction. ‘I am against Japan,’ he wrote on the Internet, ‘but also against the lack of democracy, freedom, and human rights in Chinese society.’ By 2008, he had moved on to call openly for an overhaul of the political system, forming a China New Democracy Party. On 13 November 2008, he was arrested under charges of state subversion, and his computers, bank card and mobile phone confiscated; on 16 October 2009, he was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.52