by Rob Gifford
Historians say the problem was that China peaked too early. It founded a very successful Confucian system of bureaucracy under an all-powerful emperor and, for a premodern society, attained an amazing degree of stability and relative prosperity. But by the late eighteenth century, China’s population had grown so much that it was putting strain on the land. There was bureaucratic corruption too, of course, and overtaxation, and toward the end of the eighteenth century, China began to sink under the weight of its own success. And then, as we have seen, along came the hairy barbarians from the ocean, and everything that Chinese people previously thought was magnificent and a sign of their superior culture suddenly became a symbol of backwardness and humiliation, as the Ocean People semicolonized China. The legacy of this psychological tension still plays out in the minds of Chinese people and is one of the reasons they are so obsessed with making their country strong today. There is no better place to see the different layers of modern Chinese history, and the evidence of China’s decline, than the ancient capital of Nanjing.
If, like most sensible people, you had driven along the shiny new freeway from Shanghai to Nanjing, it would have taken you only a couple of hours and deposited you at the east gate of the ancient city. If, however, you were determined to take the slow road, you would have seen tombs of missionaries, caught a glimpse of the Yangtze River, and bought a teapot you didn’t need, but you’d have had to scramble through the northeastern suburbs for a while before getting into Nanjing proper.
Route 312 from Zhenjiang has expanded considerably by the time it hits Nanjing, and now it is not the slow road at all but four lanes wide in each direction. You can accuse the Chinese government of many things, but neglecting road building is not one of them.
Nanjing is a very pleasant city, despite being known as one of the three huolu, or furnaces, of central China, on account of its hundred-degree summers. Located mostly on the south bank of the Yangtze River, it has a population of more than 6 million people, and as with Shanghai, the overall atmosphere is one of energy, of people moving and looking forward. The market economy is gaining the upper hand over the planned economy here too. The streets are busy and the shops are full—of food and clothes, of toys and books, of electronic equipment and every brand of cell phone. Many people in Nanjing have now emerged, in twenty-five short years, from the tyranny of poverty into the (admittedly more manageable) tyranny of choice.
The city is less heavily industrialized than the towns such as Kunshan that line Route 312 as it leaves Shanghai, and Nanjing’s main streets are lined with graceful wutong (Chinese parasol) trees. Their silvery trunks divide uniformly in two, and their branches spread over the sidewalks, providing shade from the scorching summer sun.
The name Nanjing (formerly spelled Nanking) means nothing fancier than “Southern Capital.” (Beijing means “Northern Capital.” Tokyo is called Dongjing, which means “Eastern Capital.” There is no Western Capital.) The city rests on layer upon layer of Chinese history within its crumbling fourteenth-century wall.
For centuries, Nanjing was a symbol of China’s strength. It was the capital of the Ming dynasty, founded in 1368, which had kicked the Mongol hordes out of China. Soon afterward, that city wall was constructed, one of the longest ever built in the world, measuring twenty miles in all.
In 1405, it was from Nanjing that the famous admiral Zheng He (pronounced Jung Huh) set off on the first of his extraordinary maritime journeys to Southeast Asia, Arabia, and Africa. This was nearly ninety years before Columbus sailed for America. Chinese sources say Zheng He’s fleet consisted of three hundred boats and some twenty-eight thousand men. The same sources say his flagship was more than four hundred feet long, although some experts question whether it was possible to build such a huge wooden ship at that time. In 1492, Christopher Columbus took just eighty-eight men on his three tiny ships to the New World. His flagship, the Santa María, was just under a hundred feet long.
Historians have long debated the what ifs of Zheng He. What if the Chinese had continued to explore? What if they had become the Ocean People and gone on to conquer other lands? But they didn’t. The emperor who had supported Zheng died in 1424, trouble grew at home, and the maritime expeditions fell afoul of court infighting. In an extraordinary reversal, a later emperor ordered the destruction of all oceangoing ships. The Ming navy of the early fifteenth century went from thirty-five hundred vessels to almost none, a move that would later prove fatal.
Fast-forward to 1842, when Nanjing rapidly became a symbol of China’s weakness. The British Royal Navy sailed up the Yangtze River, and the Southern Capital, with no modern navy to protect it, quickly succumbed, ushering in what historians call China’s “century of humiliation” at the hands of the Western powers. That lasted until the Communist Party victory, in 1949.
Nanjing holds a special significance in this century of humiliation, because of what took place there over seven weeks beginning in December 1937. It was one of the most shocking events of twentieth-century warfare and has come to be known as the Nanjing Massacre.
Soon after the Chinese had refused to open their country to the Ocean People in the 1830s, the Japanese had made the exact opposite decision. They set about major political, economic, and social reforms, pushing education, industrialization, and active engagement with the outside world. Because Japan had borrowed culturally in the past (not least from China), the decision to borrow again (this time from the West) was perhaps not so problematic. Japan did not see itself as the cultural center of the universe, as China did, so it was able to shed a skin. China, on the other hand, was forced to change its soul.
Until 1895, Japan was actually seen as an example by many Chinese reformers. In that year, Japan defeated China militarily and imposed humiliating conditions on Beijing, just as the Western powers had done decades before. The defeat was a huge shock for the Chinese, who saw (and still see) Japanese culture as derivative from, and therefore inferior to, Chinese culture. The defeat was one of a number of humiliations that finally convinced the Chinese court after 1900 that it had to reform. But by then the Chinese revolutionaries were gaining as much support as the reformers, and indeed the wave of reforms after 1900 led not to a reformed imperial state but to revolution and the overthrow of the emperor in 1912.
The leader of the revolutionaries was a Western-educated doctor called Sun Yat-sen, who wanted China to become a modern, liberal republic. Sun laid out his goals in what he called the Three Principles of the People. These principles are often translated as People’s Nationalism (that is, making China strong), People’s Livelihood (that is, putting food in their stomachs), and People’s Rights (that is, giving them rights). There was just one problem. No one in the country had any experience of governing a modern, liberal republic. As the Soviet Union found out eighty years later, and the United States found in Iraq in 2003, it is much easier to overthrow an old order than it is to establish a new one. So when the emperor abdicated, in 1912, Sun and the other revolutionaries had none of the mechanisms of modern government with which to rule the new republic. In 1916, one by one, the provinces declared independence from the capital, and the country simply fell apart.
So the revolution led by Sun Yat-sen was really only half a revolution. The old order was swept away, but the building of the new order failed. China descended into chaos, presenting resource-poor Japan with an opportunity to expand into its resource-rich neighbor. And that is exactly what happened.
“The Japanese troops used to have competitions to see who could kill the most Chinese civilians in a day,” says the tour guide matter-of-factly.
She is standing in front of about fifteen Chinese tourists, pointing to a pit that is separated from the visitors by a sheet of glass. Lying in the pit, still encased in the soil in which they fell, are dozens of human skeletons.
“See that skeleton over there?” The guide points. “That’s a middle-aged woman with a bullet in her skull. Over here is a child with its skull smashed.”
> The Nanjing Massacre Memorial is in the southwest of the city, close to the southern bank of the Yangtze River. It is built upon one of the sites where Japanese soldiers, in an orgy of violence, executed some of their victims. Known as the Pit of Ten Thousand Corpses, the site spares no detail of the killings. Silence reigns among the crowd of Chinese visitors.
After fifteen years of collapsed central government in China and amid continued internal chaos, the Japanese invaded Manchuria—that’s northeast China—in 1931, and this became a full-fledged invasion in 1937, with Japanese troops landing at Shanghai that summer. Nanjing was then the Chinese capital, so the city was a special prize for the Japanese soldiers, who when they reached it in December, embarked on seven weeks of murder, torture, and rape. Casualties were hard to measure, and the number may be lower, but the figure seared into the minds of all Chinese people is 300,000 killed by the Japanese. The number is carved in huge figures in the courtyard of the Massacre Memorial.
The museum is especially disturbing to me, because only nine months before, I had visited Japan and interviewed the infamous right-wing mayor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, who had denied to my face that the Nanjing Massacre ever took place.
After the pit comes an exhibition that contains photos of Japanese troops burying Chinese victims alive and using live Chinese prisoners for bayonet practice.
A man of about thirty is loitering at the back of a group being led through the exhibition. He is wearing a jacket, despite the heat, and large glasses, and is standing very close to the pictures, squinting slightly, seeming to search the details of each one.
“What do you think about the Japanese now?” I ask him.
The man may be moved by the exhibition, but he is pragmatic. He pauses, then shrugs. “Of course we should not forget the past,” he says, “but it is impossible to ignore the Japanese in this globalized world.”
“But do you have Japanese friends? Could you have Japanese friends?”
“I could be friends with a Japanese if he admitted the past. If he didn’t, it would be difficult,” he says slowly. He tells me his name is Wu. He is on business from Beijing and has taken the opportunity to visit the museum.
The wounds of the massacre are still raw for Chinese people for two reasons. First, most of the victims were civilians. Second, the Chinese don’t believe that the Japanese have apologized sufficiently for what they did. The Japanese have in fact expressed regret and remorse many times, but certainly they have not been as repentant as the postwar Germans. And the fact that former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and other senior politicians have continued to visit the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where several Class A war criminals from World War II are enshrined, makes the Chinese apoplectic with rage. “What if German leaders paid respects at Hitler’s tomb?” they ask.
It is no coincidence, though, that the upswing in anti-Japanese sentiment in China has coincided with the decline of Communism as an ideology. The ideological glue that held the Chinese people together under Mao has disappeared, and the Communist Party’s legitimacy has become largely economic. Now nationalism, especially virulently anti-Japanese nationalism, is providing another bond among Chinese people, and a new legitimacy for the government, which casts itself as the champion of Chinese nationalism.
The Communist Party is very good at controlling the official Chinese memory, playing up Japanese crimes against the Chinese people, and playing down the Party’s own crimes against its own people. It never allows street demonstrations on other issues, but it permitted protests in the spring of 2005 in opposition to the publication of a Japanese textbook that the Chinese say whitewashes the history of the war. Allowing anger at Japan is a useful way of channeling frustration over domestic issues away from the Party itself and toward an outside enemy.
“This is the reason why China must grow strong,” says Wu, standing in front of a particularly gruesome photo. “So that this never happens again.”
When you see the exhibition, you can begin to understand the Chinese obsession with becoming strong. You can also understand why many Chinese put up with the Communist Party. There is a mountain of problems in modern China, many of them caused by the Communist Party itself. But after all the humiliation, it is clear that the Party, for all its faults, has gained China a lot more respect in the world.
The debate about Japan is as much about the future as it is about the past. Asia has never had a strong China and a strong Japan. The Japanese talk about becoming a “normal” country now, and amending their pacifist postwar constitution to be allowed a functioning military that can play a more active role in international peacekeeping missions. Their main motivation is long-term concern about China’s rise. China, for its part, insists its rise will be peaceful, but it is equally concerned about a return to militarism in the Land of the Rising Sun.
“Some people in Asia, and in the West, are afraid that China could become like Japan in the 1930s,” I say to Wu. “You know, after industrializing, with all this growing nationalism, and needing oil and other resources, that China could invade its neighbors just like Japan did.”
“Bu keneng,” says Wu softly, echoing the words of every Chinese person I’ve ever talked to on this issue. “That is not possible. Chinese people could never do this. The Chinese character is completely different from the Japanese character. They are warriors, samurai. We love ren. We love compassion. We love peace. And besides, we know what it is like to be occupied and killed.”
I thank Wu for chatting with me and move slowly toward the exit, stopping to look at more of the photos on the way. It is all too horrific for words, but as well as saying a lot about Japan, it also says something about China, especially in the tone that comes through in the museum. It’s a tone you hear a lot in China, when history or the country’s role in the world is discussed, and it’s the tone of the victim.
China was the victim, there is no doubt, and has been for too long. The Western powers and Japan are guilty as charged of terrible military aggression. But now China is becoming a Great Power. Economically, diplomatically, internationally, it is on the verge of greatness. And yet it still tends to think and speak like a victim.
I don’t know what will change that. What does it take to change your psychological identity as a nation, when for so long you have been a loser and then suddenly you become a winner? It’s like being a Boston Red Sox fan when the Red Sox finally win the World Series.
I return to my hotel, pull on my shorts and running shoes, and head up the hill toward the tomb of Sun Yat-sen. It’s a steep hill, and a real test of my new fitness regime. I stagger all the way up without stopping, coming to a halt outside the entrance to the tomb. A group of Chinese tourists, who have clearly never seen a foreigner expire in real time, gather to stare at me, doubled over with my hands on my knees.
In my sweaty state, I decide not to go in and look around, saving that for the following day. You can visit Sun’s tomb at the top of a magnificent flight of shining white stone steps, surrounded by some rather beautiful gardens. There are exhibits and historical displays discussing the 1912 Revolution and its ideals, but there is little about its failures, which seems a rather serious oversight.
Nearly a hundred years later, no one seems to have learned the lessons of the 1912 Revolution (or, for that matter, the two thousand years before it or the tragedies of the twentieth century that followed it): that a corrupt one-party state can’t go on forever, and that if you don’t want a revolution and subsequent collapse, you had better start planning some proper political transition. Modern-day China has disturbing echoes of the situation in China a hundred years ago.
I turn and head back to the hotel, letting my legs freewheel downhill in the heat, returning the waves of the giggling gaggles of Chinese tourists struggling up the hill. I run past the tomb of the first emperor of the Ming dynasty (a man who certainly never tried to establish a republic), then past the entrance to the Nanjing Botanical Gardens. It’s late afternoon, and as
I’m looping back toward the hotel, I see a small iron gate almost in the shadow of the old city wall, and a large sign beside it. I almost don’t stop, but something about it seems unusual. From the gate a path winds around the edge of a garden, with a handrail running beside it. All types of trees and shrubs and flowers have been planted beside the path, so that a blind person can walk, holding the rail, and feel the leaves and branches and buds of each one. The sign says BLIND PEOPLE’S ARBORETUM.
I stand, still out of breath, dripping sweat and marveling at such a beautiful concept—in China, of all places, where disabled people are still often considered flawed and superfluous. I have never seen anything like this, even in the United States or Europe, and yet here, hidden away on the edge of a noisy, bustling, modernizing Chinese city, someone has taken the effort and expense to plant this beautiful, tree-hugging garden—an island of stop-and-rest in a sea of smash-and-grab.
