Over the past few months, China’s given a few lessons in how not to do public diplomacy, whether it’s nationalist students abroad or Party officials at home. Orville Schell has a piece in this week’s NYRB that’s worth a look for some of the backstory, exploring a sense of persistent historical humiliation that he argues is central to modern China’s self-image.
It all began, he argues, with 19th century colonial humiliations such as the Opium Wars. More recently, when the Treaty of Versailles gave Germany’s concessions in China to Japan, the expression “wuwang guochi” – “never forget our national humiliation” – became a popular slogan.
And so it went on. When the PRC was founded in 1949, Mao said “Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We…have stood up.” When Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, Jiang Zemin said that “the occupation of Hong Kong was the epitome of the humiliation that China suffered in modern history”. And in 2001,
…the National People’s Congress even passed a law proclaiming an official “National Humiliation Day.” (However, so many historical dates were proposed that delegates could not agree on any one, and thus, no day was designated, although one of the leading candidates is now September 18, the day in 1931 that Japan began its invasion of Manchuria.)
And so we come to the Olympics. Already, Schell argues, the protests that disrupted the passage of the Olympic torch have played straight into the humiliation narrative:
While patriots from other countries would doubtless also have felt affronted by the sight of such a potent symbol of their nationhood under assault, the response of many Chinese to these confrontations revealed in dramatic fashion how sensitive China still was to foreign insult. What these Chinese at home and abroad chose to see on television was not oppressed Tibetans seeking a redress of grievances, but China again under siege and again being demeaned in the most public of ways.
Part of the root problem, he continues, is that: “for much of the past hundred years Chinese themselves have also been engaged in a series of assaults on their own culture and history”. At first, it was Chinese reformers “denouncing traditional Confucian culture” at the start of the 20th century. Then it was the nationalists who came under attack, with Chiang Kai-shek and his wife seen as too westernized and American. Then came Mao and the Cultural Revolution, followed by Deng Xiaoping “to perform yet another act of demolition, this time on Mao’s revolution itself”. Schell concludes:
The cancellations of these successive efforts at self-reinvention have left Chinese with an uncertain sense of cultural or political direction. The country has tended to swing from one experiment to another, seeking refuge in a series of large-scale, but never definitive, makeovers. It is therefore perhaps understandable that a more robust sense of cultural and political self-confidence has remained elusive.
So, partly in shock, and partly in disappointment, China responded to the demonstrations against its Olympic torch with incensed outrage, rejecting any suggestion that its own actions could have contributed to, much less have ameliorated, Tibetan demands … what made these demonstrations against the torch such an affront to so many Chinese was the way in which they intruded just when they had allowed themselves to imagine that their national identity might actually metamorphose from victim to victor, thanks to the alchemy of the Olympic Games.
Problem is, as I first noted back in November last year, so much could go wrong with the games themselves – making the torch disruption look like a trailer for the main feature. Let’s hope not.
