Don’t forget history: not such bad advice. In fact, if you follow it, you’ll discover that the history of Christianity in China stretches further back than Christianity in America: the Nestorians were preaching the good news in the Tang capital Xi’an as early as the 7th century. The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci reached Macau in 1582 and Peking in 1601, and the presence of China’s estimated 70 million practising Christians today can be traced back to the seed planted by Ricci and his fellow Jesuits.
More generally, one could argue that Chinese people today have at least as much in common with us in the West as they do with their ancestors. They wear Western clothes and sport Western haircuts; their favourite cars are German and they live in a style of building once created by Western architects. They live by the Gregorian calendar, they prefer European classical music to their own traditional operas, they trust Western medicine more than traditional Chinese medicine, they write from left to right like we do, instead of vertically as they used to, and if they have the money, they send their children to Western universities.
Xi Jinping himself sent his daughter Xi Mingze to Harvard for four years. The Party, whose rule he would like to extend for eternity, was shaped by advisors from the Soviet Union; and the ideology he has begun to preach again was devised by a German philosopher. Concepts like democracy, freedom, equality and the rights of the individual crept into China at the same time as Marxism, and have had a home in the country ever since. A century ago, they found a platform in the legendary periodical New Youth, which influenced a generation of reformers and revolutionaries, who subsequently turned China on its head. New Youth preached ‘science and democracy’, and in his ‘Rallying cry to the young’, its founder Chen Duxiu railed against the ‘stale air’ of old China and its traditions, stifling the nation and robbing it of its strength. A little while later, Chen became a Marxist, and in July 1921 he was one of the founding members of the Chinese Communist Party.
The modernisers’ greatest enemy was Confucius. ‘Chinese culture is just a feast of human flesh, prepared for the rich and mighty,’ wrote Lu Xun, the greatest writer China had ever had, in 1925. Luckily for him, Lu died shortly before the Communist Party took power in 1949. The CCP and its leader swiftly co-opted the dead author, and he remains one of its saints to this day. This can mean one of two things: either they haven’t read him, or they haven’t understood him.
An old issue of the glossy Guangzhou magazine New Weekly features a woodcut of Lu Xun on the cover. ‘Everything we want to curse today,’ the headline reads, ‘Lu Xun has already cursed.’ This is still as true as it is tragic. A civil war, a communist experiment and tens of millions of deaths later, China is still haunted by the same ghosts. They whisper about the shameless enrichment of a corrupt elite, the abuse of power, and repression. Lu Xun’s words about the ‘man-eating society’ crop up time and again in blogs and comment pieces that have managed to slip through the cracks in the wall of censorship. Today China stands before the same unanswered existential questions: how should it deal with the world; how should it deal with its own citizens?
China is civilisation, and civilisation is China – that’s what the Confucians taught. After all, China was the Middle Kingdom, the heart of the civilised world. The ruler of China brought order to the world and peace to his empire, and put the peoples in the further reaches of the world under his spell with the sheer force of his charisma. The Confucians also taught that ‘The ruler is the ruler; the subject is the subject.’ When everyone knows his place, harmony will reign. The communists once burned Confucius. Now they’re pulling his books out of the ashes – collections of Confucian maxims have become bestsellers – and erecting altars to him once again. Confucian schools are opening all over the country.
Lu Xun and his contemporaries hated the Confucians. Or rather, they hated what China’s state thinkers and rulers had turned Confucius into over the course of more than two millennia: a thinker whose philosophy had been robbed of its humanity, leaving only a tight corset of ritual and hierarchy. The rage of these reformers was directed first and foremost at that spirit of subservience based in Confucian philosophy, and the despotism, disguised with empty words about ‘humanity’, under which the Chinese people had been forced to their knees for more than two thousand years. Lu Xun attacked the ‘slave mentality’ of his people, and in 1919 the pioneer of liberal thinking Hu Shi called for people to ‘tear down Confucius and Sons!’ Nowhere would you find more radical haters of Confucius than in the ranks of the Communist Party, whose Great Helmsman Mao Zedong boasted that he had outdone even China’s first emperor. Qin Shi Huang, he proudly declared, had only had 460 Confucians buried alive; Mao had a thousand times that number on his conscience.
The Party’s rehabilitation of Confucius, then, was no small thing. It began under Xi Jinping’s predecessors, with the sudden rise of the old Confucian concept of harmony, hexie: the new high-speed trains were all christened ‘harmony’. (‘Welcome to harmony!’ a voice would breathe in both Chinese and English over the loudspeaker, as the Beijing-Shanghai train departed. When it reached its final destination, the voice would bid you farewell with ‘Goodbye in harmony!’) The propaganda apparatus celebrated the ideal of the ‘harmonious society’, meaning the harmony between order and obedience above all else. In 2011, to many people’s surprise, an enormous bronze statue of Confucius appeared on the edge of Tiananmen Square, just a stone’s throw from Mao’s mausoleum. The creator of the reborn Confucius, incidentally, was Wu Weishan, who sculpted the Trier Karl Marx. The giant philosopher vanished just three months later without explanation: perhaps a sign that Confucius’s return was still somewhat controversial.
It would not be until Xi Jinping became Party leader that the controversy would be put to bed. Not only did Xi pull off the feat of putting Mao and Marx back on the front row in the communist ancestor-worship shrine; he successfully brought Confucius to stand at their side. Xi was the first head of the CCP to follow in the footsteps of the old emperors and go on a pilgrimage to Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius. There he attended a celebration to mark the 2,565th birthday of China’s most influential philosopher. In a speech to an audience of Confucius scholars, Xi explained why his party’s policies were the logical and inevitable results of the thought of old China. The ideology and culture of China today, he said, couldn’t be seen as anything but ‘the continuation and refinement of traditional Chinese ideology and culture.’84 Confucianism, he added, is the key to understanding the ‘special characteristics’ of China that the CCP so frequently invokes. And naturally, the Party officials themselves are the ‘inheritors and upholders of the country’s fine cultural traditions.’85
The speech had a certain chutzpah in light of the ecstatic orgies of destruction perpetrated by Mao’s Party against anything with a whiff of culture or tradition about it. The same Party over which Xi Jinping now presides literally wiped out an entire generation of people who were upholding China’s fine cultural traditions: artists and poets disappeared into labour camps, professors were forced to muck out pigsties, upper-class patrons and collectors were executed and writers were driven to suicide. Meanwhile, the Red Guards burned books and demolished Confucian temples. The wonderful thing about Confucius, however – at least, according to Xi Jinping in Qufu – is how he has ‘changed over time and adapted to each new set of circumstances’. In other words: how each ruler of China manages to gut the old philosopher to serve his own ends. Today, that might be easier than ever: the break with tradition and history forced on the country in the Party’s first four decades of rule was so radical, and people’s amnesia and ignorance are now so deep-rooted, their fear so great, that the weirdest and most absurd characters can be painted on that virginal sheet of paper with very little protest.
Xi Jinping has made it clear that he sees his rule as analogous to the mighty dynasties of old. His ‘China dream’ is the ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,’ restoring it to its former glory. At first it might seem su
rprising that the communist Xi Jinping, of all people, has taken to deploying nationalist reactionary rhetoric (a strategy not seen in China since Chiang Kai-Shek) and invoking ancient Chinese thinkers, especially Confucius. The purpose of this doctrine, though, is to inject stability and morality into a directionless Chinese society. If everyone knows his place in the family, society and the state, then order will assert itself.
Drawing on Confucius et al. is a tactic, intended to give the population back the identity and values it has lacked in recent years. It also helps Xi in his quest to promote the notion that China and its national circumstances are ‘unique’, and thereby to immunise the country against the temptations of Western values and practices. Today universities up and down the country are not only turning with renewed vigour to the study of Marx and Lenin; they are simultaneously setting up large institutes for guoxue (‘national learning’), which mine Chinese traditions for calendar mottos and other nuggets to aid the ruling dictatorship.
It is rare to hear voices like that of the historian Li Ling from Peking University, who accused academic colleagues of taking an approach that ‘religionises, politicises, commercialises, simplifies and vulgarises Chinese culture,’ with the sole aim of satisfying ‘some confused leaders’.86 In 2017, the CCP and the government published their own document on ‘implementing the project to spread and develop the great traditional culture of China’.87 Culture and tradition, it says, are ‘the blood vessels of a people and the home of its spirit.’ The unique ideas and the wisdom of Chinese culture give the Chinese people pride and self-assurance. They therefore make an essential contribution to building ‘a mighty socialist state with Chinese characteristics, to the cultural Soft Power of the state and to the realisation of the China Dream of the great rebirth of the Chinese nation.’
For a leader, however, there is some risk involved in converting to Confucianism: people might remember the old Confucian ideal of the noble philosopher king. According to this ideal, a ruler is so wise, virtuous and just that his charisma alone inspires people and brings order to society. ‘He who rules through moral strength is like the pole star,’ it says in the Analects of Confucius. ‘He stays in his place and all the other stars circle about him.’ For the Confucians, a good king is no autocrat, pursuing power without limits; and a good government neither intervenes excessively in society, nor doles out punishments. Ministers and scholars have not only the right but the duty to contradict the ruler if he strays from the correct path. By these measures, Xi’s rule is anything but Confucian. In this respect, too, Xi is like most of the old emperors: they all had Confucius on their lips, but their hands were firmly clasped on the dagger of draconian laws and punishments.
While we’re on the subject of the past, let’s not forget the incessantly repeated mantra of ‘5,000 years’ of Chinese history. When I first went to study in China (less than 2,000 years ago) ceremonial speeches only ever mentioned 3,000 years. These 3,000 years are historically proven: the oldest Chinese dynasty for which we have archaeological evidence is the Shang Dynasty, probably originating in the 16th century BC. But at some point the CCP leadership must have heard about Egypt and its 5,000 years of continuous history – and Beijing doesn’t like to come second in anything.
The propaganda machine tries to salve the pain of the West’s technological superiority over the past hundred years with memories of China’s glorious age, when the country invented paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass. These are the ‘four great inventions’, to which state-sponsored researchers are always adding further discoveries: in 2016 a team of more than a hundred academics announced that it had discovered China was also responsible for the invention of the stirrup, the rocket, the decimal system, the crossbow – all in all, 88 scientific and technological breakthroughs. The icing on the cake was that the team took eight years to make their findings – by the happiest of coincidences, the Chinese regard eight as the luckiest number.
The continual discovery of historic Chinese inventions has been a popular sport among the Party press for many years. They have long since reclaimed football and golf for China, and announced that China also ‘invented Lassie’, as one newspaper headline put it, following new information on the domestication of dogs 16,000 years ago.
Nationalism is a powerful tool. Wherever it takes root, as the British scholar Ernest Gellner once wrote, it easily retains the upper hand over all other modern ideologies.88 Since it was founded in 1921, the Chinese Communist Party has also been a nationalist party; many of the early revolutionaries were attracted to communism as the force that would raise their country up again and make it strong. After the de facto death of communism in the 1980s, the Communist Party searched for new sources of legitimacy for their power and found two: one was the promise of material prosperity, and the other was nationalism. Patriotic pride in China’s great cultural past – the poets of the Tang, the philosophers of the Song, the artists and authors of the Ming – was now no longer forbidden (as it had been under Mao). On the contrary, it was encouraged.
At the heart of the nationalist propaganda, however, there soon emerged a poisonous variant: the narrative in which the Chinese people are first and foremost victims. Schools, museums, speeches, films and TV series present Chinese history as an endless series of humiliations by foreign powers, from which only the Communist Party has brought salvation. In this narrative, China is a nation with 5,000 years of great history, but the corruption of the Manchu dynasty (who were also foreign rulers) combined with the barbaric aggression of the Japanese and ‘the West’ brought a ‘century of humiliation’, starting with the Opium War instigated by the British in 1839. China was only saved from this age of indignities by the glorious victory of Mao’s communists. After the Party had instructed the army to shoot its own citizens in the massacre of 1989, the need for fresh legitimation became even more pressing, and greater emphasis was placed on ‘patriotic education’. Henceforth, China’s children were to be injected with nationalism from a young age.
The victim mentality and the memory of humiliation by foreign powers are assiduously kept alive. A whole industry has sprung up around the hatred of Japan in particular. For a time it was impossible to switch on a TV without seeing Japanese soldiers committing murder, arson and rape, before being dismembered, beheaded or blown up by heroic resistance fighters. These series played on dozens of channels at once, at all hours of the day and night. In March 2013 the Southern Weekend, at the time still the country’s bravest newspaper, counted no fewer than 48 TV crews all filming anti-Japanese TV series at the Hengdian World Studios.
One of the principal propaganda arguments of recent years is the one that says that the West is still out to sabotage China’s rise, and it fits seamlessly on top of the old story. The message has been put out in numerous different ways – with a series of cartoons, for example, in which a sweet little rabbit (China) is persecuted by an American bald eagle. According to this narrative, any criticism of the Party or of the governance of China is purely an attempt to weaken the country. To make this argument stand up, the Party must claim perfect equivalence between itself and the nation: the Party is the people, it is China. Foreigners who flatter the Party may then be honoured with the title ‘friends of China’ the more critical ‘do not understand China’ or ‘are hurting the feelings of the Chinese people’. If you’re Chinese and you love your country, it follows with an iron logic that you must love the Party. Anyone who criticises it is a traitor.
Meanwhile, China has outwardly hung on to the slogan of the country’s ‘peaceful ascent’ all these years. China needs the rest of the world for its economic miracle; and it needs stability and peace on its national borders. In the last two decades China has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of globalisation, it is the country’s aspiring middle classes who have profited most. This class may have swallowed and parroted the state-sponsored nationalism, but their growing prosperity helps to explain why so far they haven’t turned against globalisation. Chi
na’s cities, and the millions of workers in the export factories on the coast, know well what they are gaining from cooperation with the world and an open economy.
Xi Jinping has added fuel to this nationalism. The ‘China dream’, zhongguomeng, which he made his personal trademark on taking office, had been the title of a nationalistic bestseller two years previously.89 Its author, Liu Mingfu, a retired colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, calls for the bolstering of the Chinese army and prophesies a growing rivalry with the USA, at the end of which China will be number one in the world. Ian Buruma, an expert on China and Japan, has written in the New Yorker that the Asian renaissance described in China Dream sounds ‘remarkably like the Japanese propaganda in the 1930s’.90
The Party is playing with fire. The victim mentality it has nurtured, and the idea of seeking refuge in the lap of the motherland, have become a reflex even in everyday life – as demonstrated in January 2018, when in the space of a single month, three Chinese tourist groups abroad attempted to summon the strong hand of their great nation. One party was stuck at the airport in Tehran, and had not been allocated the accommodation its members were expecting. In a video circulated online, you can see several hundred Chinese people venting their anger at this turn of events by chanting: ‘China! China!’ Something similar had taken place a few days previously at Tokyo airport: after their flight home to Shanghai with a Japanese budget airline had been delayed by 24 hours, the tourists began a raucous rendition of the Chinese national anthem in protest as they tussled with Japanese police officers. A choir of frustrated Chinese passengers also belted out the national anthem at an airport in Sri Lanka.
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