The Contest of the Century

by Geoff A. Dyer

  China’s rulers tried to restore many of the buildings that had been destroyed, even if a shortage of funds meant they had not quite completed the job by the time the Boxer Rebellion broke out in 1898. Called I Ho Ch’uan in Chinese or Righteous Harmonious Fists, the Boxers—as they were known in English—were a secret society that called for the expulsion of “foreign devils.” The initial target was Chinese Christians, but some British missionaries were also killed. By 1900, the violence against foreigners was so intense that hundreds took refuge in the Legation Quarter in Beijing, where foreign diplomats resided. To relieve the siege, a twenty-thousand-strong army from eight countries made its way to Beijing—six European countries, Japan, and this time the U.S., which had troops in the region following the conquest of the Philippines. After they relieved the Legation Quarter, the foreign armies embarked on what one American marine called an “orgy” of looting, so extensive that the troops later held open-air markets to trade the gold, silver, and silks they had stolen. (Again, the actions of the foreign armies were denounced in their home countries, this time with Mark Twain to the fore.) Before they left Beijing, the armies decided they needed to perform one last act to rub in their victory. They looted, ransacked, and burned down the Summer Palace again.

  In some ways, it is surprising that the Summer Palace has been turned into a symbol of the wonders of Han Chinese civilization. The Qing rulers were Manchus, who were considered by many of their Chinese subjects to be foreign barbarians, and the ravishing complex they built was full of overseas influences. A series of marble pavilions in the northeast of the complex, including one known as View of Distant Seas, were actually designed by Jesuit missionaries. The destruction continued for many decades after the foreign armies had left, this time at the hands of ordinary Chinese people, who quietly took away many of the remaining treasures. During the Cultural Revolution, the Summer Palace continued to be thoroughly ransacked. The Zhengjue Temple, one of the few buildings that remained intact, became a boiler factory. But in the late 1970s, as China started to breathe again after the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution, historical interest in the Yuanming Yuan site picked up.

  A petition was circulated in 1980 to get funds for its protection—120 years after the duke of Elgin’s fateful order. The Chinese historian Wu Hung described the pavilions of the View of Distant Seas, by then crumbling and smashed columns, as China’s “national ruin.” A picture of the destroyed pavilions became a regular fixture in popular culture, reproduced on playing cards and cake tins. As interest in the stories of Elgin and the anti-Boxer armies spiked, the Summer Palace site gradually evolved into an emotional symbol of both cultural unity and patriotic outrage. So it was not a complete surprise that, when the G-7 imposed sanctions on China after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, Deng Xiaoping reached into this collective memory of anti-imperial anger to frame his response. “I am familiar with the history of foreign aggression against China. When I heard the seven Western countries had at their summit decided to impose sanctions on China, my immediate association was to 1900, when the allied forces of the eight powers invaded China,” he said.

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  The stories that a country tells about itself say a lot about how it views the rest of the world. Tiananmen was a fundamental break in the way Communist China has decided to describe its own history. During the Mao years, China was the proud winner in a revolutionary struggle against imperialism and its internal class enemies. The Chinese people had stood up, as Mao declared in 1949. There was plenty of anti-foreigner sentiment—during the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards burned down the British embassy—but China presented itself as victor, not one of history’s injured parties. After Tiananmen, however, Chinese history-writing started to reflect a very different self-image, a form of anti-Western nationalism that adopted the tone of an aggrieved victim. Jiang Zemin, who took over from the ousted Zhao Ziyang as party secretary-general after the massacre, announced that the education system “must prevent the rise of the worship of the West.” In a speech entitled “Patriotism and the Mission of the Chinese Intellectual,” he thundered that the U.S. and its allies were “trying to turn China into a vassal state dependent on the Western superpowers.” Deng, who continued to pull the strings behind the scenes, gave a speech to the PLA in which he blamed the protests on the way history had been taught to young people. “During the last ten years, our biggest mistake was made in the field of education, primarily ideological and political education,” he said. The students had occupied Tiananmen Square and had called into question the very legitimacy of the Communist Party for one simple reason: they had not been taught how to be sufficiently patriotic.

  The new patriotic education had a name: National Humiliation History. Wuwang guochi—or “Never forget our national humiliation”—had been a popular phrase in the 1920s, after Germany’s colonial possessions in China had been handed to Japan at the 1919 Versailles Conference. With their backs to the wall after 1989, the Communist authorities started to lean on the same emotional memory of national humiliation. The school curriculum began to emphasize the “Century of National Humiliation,” which started in 1840 with the First Opium War and ended with the Communist takeover in 1949. This time frame knits together the different invasions, unfair treaties, economic exploitation, and other indignities that a weakened China suffered at the hands of the Western powers. The destruction of the Summer Palace, first by Elgin, then by the anti-Boxer armies, became a central episode in the narrative.

  The bullying, war crimes, and injustice were real, of course, the genuine story of a proud civilization humbled by foreigners who had become more powerful without anyone in China realizing it. Yet it is also a version of history that leaves out as much as it includes. Qing China (1644–1912) ruled a country twice the size of the one controlled by the Ming dynasty that preceded it (1368–1644). Long before British warships ever sailed up the Yangtze, China’s frontiers had been a constantly shifting map that contained their own stories of expansion and aggression. One of the foundational myths of modern Chinese identity is the benevolence of imperial rule, the belief that China expanded as a result of the superiority of its culture rather than the strength of its armed forces. Today’s official histories also have little to say about the Taiping Rebellion, a civil war in the 1850s which Elgin stumbled into, and which took as many as twenty million Chinese lives, making it one of the most brutal episodes in China’s or any country’s history. In the “national humiliation” canon, Qing China was neither an expansionary empire nor a dynasty whose writ was crumbling, but a victim of history—a defenseless and naïve innocent plundered by a warmongering West.

  To mark the 150th anniversary of the First Opium War, a book entitled The Indignation of National Humiliation was published in 1990, the first in a series of new textbooks that aimed to provide the patriotic lessons Deng thought China’s youth needed. The 1998 text Never Forget National Humiliation set as its goal the rejuvenation of a Chinese nation that would “rise again to be an awesome and gracious great power like in the past that will stand lofty and firm in the Eastern part of the World.” Another school textbook implored its student readers: “In modern Chinese history since the Opium War, foreign powers have launched invasion after invasion, act after bloody act of coercive pillage, occupying Chinese sovereign territory, slaughtering the Chinese masses, looting China’s wealth, and stealing China’s cultural artefacts. All this stained China with blood and tears.” Jiang Zemin ordered that the curriculum start in kindergarten.

  The new emphasis on National Humiliation History proved hugely popular; its themes were used to frame major political events. During the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from British rule, Jiang Zemin described the occupation of Hong Kong as “the epitome of the humiliation that China suffered.” Speaking to a huge crowd in Beijing two days after the handover, he announced: “The return of Hong Kong marks an end to the 100-year national humiliation.” When a NATO bomb hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, a People’
s Daily article thundered: “It is 1999, not 1899.… This is not the age when Western powers plundered the imperial palace at will.… The Chinese people are not to be bullied.… In the veins of the Chinese people circulate the blood of the anti-imperialist patriots over a period of 150-plus years.” The slogan “Never Forget National Humiliation, Rejuvenate China” started to appear on signs in parks. An aerial photo shows a group of Chinese police forming the phrase with their bodies as part of a parade-ground drill. In the aftermath of a 2001 diplomatic standoff between China and the U.S. after China shot down a U.S. spy plane, the government declared a National Humiliation Day in mid-September. Thousands of students turned out to celebrate the occasion at the Summer Palace. “This is the national phrase of China,” says the historian Zheng Wang. “It is the key to [the] cultural and historic formation of Chinese nationalism.”

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  At first sight, it seems an odd sort of political project, to encourage national regeneration by constantly harping on past suffering. Not only is history written by the victors, but it usually dwells on the victories. Instead, China has developed a form of hair-shirt nationalism, the manipulation of the authority that comes from past suffering to forge a permanent sense of victimhood. The Communist Party has faced a slow-burning threat to its legitimacy ever since it dumped Marx for the market and dropped the Mao cult of personality, a threat that was only exacerbated after it turned the army on its own people in Tiananmen. Chinese sometimes talk about their xinyang weiji, a crisis of faith which has eaten away at society as the old Confucian or socialist sense of order has eroded. The emphasis on humiliation has helped the Communist Party create a sense of unity that had been fracturing, and to define a Chinese identity fundamentally at odds with American modernity. This strand of nationalism has become an important part of its claim to maintaining a monopoly of political power, a deliberate project to mold the historical instincts of young Chinese.

  The crude version of history that is portrayed in Chinese textbooks is scorned in private by Chinese academics, but it is a dangerous orthodoxy to oppose. One of the most dramatic acts of censorship in recent times involved the writing of history—and not just any history, but the story behind the burning of the Summer Palace. In 2006, the authorities closed a magazine called Freezing Point after it published an article by Zhongshan University historian Yuan Weishi which took issue with what he saw as the blind nationalism and anti-foreigner sentiment of school textbooks. The official Chinese histories, he said, completely glossed over the mistakes made in the later years of the Qing dynasty. Professor Yuan did not doubt the official version of how the palaces and gardens at the Summer Palace had been destroyed. But he suggested that China broke its word by arresting the diplomats and killing the soldiers. The Qing rulers, he said, had been asking for trouble. He also objected to the way the Boxer Rebellion was constantly praised as “a magnificent feat of patriotism,” while the violence against foreigners was ignored. “Our youth are still drinking wolf’s milk,” Yuan wrote, a reference to the excuse people gave during the Cultural Revolution for violent excesses. The new generation of textbooks “suggest that the current Chinese culture is superior and unmatched and that outside culture is evil and corrodes the purity of existing culture.… To use this kind of logic to quietly exert a subtle influence on our children is an unforgivable harm.”

  For daring to criticize the official verdict, Yuan Weishi was vilified. He had “attempted to vindicate the criminal acts of the invading powers,” as the propaganda authorities put it. Li Datong, managing editor of the magazine, was fired. Freezing Point was later re-opened under new editors, but only on condition that its first issue carry an article entitled “The Main Theme of Modern Chinese History Is Anti-Imperialism and Anti-Feudalism.” Sipping Coca-Cola in a café next to his apartment a couple of years later, Li Datong described to me how control of history had been so central to the party’s hold on power and its legitimacy. He went through a long list of historical subjects, from the decline of science in the Qing and Ming dynasties to the Korean War, about which it was impossible to have an honest debate. “The legacy of a ruling party is the right to define history—they use history to brainwash people,” he said. “The textbooks say that history proved that such-and-such happened, that history chose the CCP to be the ruling party. They think this can convince people how great the CCP is.”

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  Totalitarian regimes are able to completely invent their own histories. North Korea can get away with claiming that Kim Jong-il wrote fifteen hundred books and composed six operas because no one can say otherwise. But China is no longer that sort of regime. Though dictatorships censor their histories, they cannot create them in a vacuum. The CCP may have manipulated the idea of “national humiliation” after Tiananmen for its own ends, but it did not make it up. To understand the force of modern Chinese nationalism, it is important to recognize that the CCP has helped revive an older intellectual tradition that had its roots in the early years of the Chinese republic and the attempt to forge a modern nation-state after the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912. The patriotic-education campaign has been so influential in part because it taps into a long-standing emotional reflex about what it means to be Chinese. As the historian William Callahan puts it: “It would not be an exaggeration to say that when the idea of ‘modern history’ took shape in China in the 1920s, it was guided by the history of national humiliation.”

  The seminal event in the early years of the republic was the May Fourth Movement, a youthful protest which encapsulated the new country’s search for a place in the modern world. The ideas behind May Fourth came to be characterized by the slogan “Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy,” but it was also steeped in the nationalism of bruised pride. At the end of the 1919 Versailles Conference, which awarded Germany’s possessions in China to Japan, Chinese students who were living in Paris surrounded the hotel of the Chinese delegation to prevent them from leaving to sign such a humiliating treaty. On hearing the news from France, a group of around three thousand students in Beijing met at Tiananmen Gate on May 4 and decided to march on the house of Communications Minister Cao Rulin. According to one of the demonstrators, a student named Luo Jialun, the crowd started cursing Cao as a “traitor to the country” when they arrived at his door. They then proceeded to storm into his house. Cao changed into a policeman’s outfit and escaped over the back wall, injuring his leg along the way. Zhang Zongxiang, a former minister to Japan who had been visiting that day, was not so lucky: he was beaten with iron rods torn from an old bed and left nearly dead. Cao’s house was then burned to the ground. The historian Rana Mitter summed up the launch of the May Fourth Movement this way: “The combination of these factors—youth, internationalism, and violence—would shape not just the day of the demonstrations, but much of the path taken by twentieth-century China.”

  As republican China struggled to find its way in the 1920s and 1930s, the feeling of injured national honor was a powerful political reflex among the new urban middle classes being established in cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Political leaders used this aggrieved nationalism as a way to appeal to the new constituencies and social organizations that were developing. When Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists asserted control over the country in 1927, they decreed a National Humiliation Commemoration Day. It is worth noting that the controversial “nine-dash line” map of the South China Sea was drawn up during this period, one example of the way China’s current territorial claims are wrapped up in this mentality of restoring injured pride.

  Chiang Kai-shek kept a daily diary for two decades, and at the top right corner of each page he wrote the same words—xue chi, “wipe out humiliation.” The weaker he got politically, the harder he pushed the humiliation narrative. Shortly before he lost the Civil War to the Communists, he published a book called China’s Destiny, which blamed much of the country’s ills on foreigners. The text was scorned even by the Chinese intellectuals who still supported his regime, but it was p
riced cheaply and proved a huge hit. “During the past hundred years, the citizens of the entire country, suffering under the yoke of the unequal treaties which gave foreigners special ‘concessions’ and extra-territorial status in China, were unanimous in their demand that the national humiliation be avenged, and the state be made strong,” he wrote. When this nationalist potboiler was released, his wife, Meiling, happened to be in the U.S., trying to raise money for the anti-Communist cause, and Chiang himself was about to be awarded the Legion of Merit. An English-language version of the book was first shelved and then heavily edited to take out the fire-breathing passages. Lest Chiang’s views about the West gain too wide a circulation, the State Department classified its copy of the Chinese original as “top secret.”

  The emphasis on humiliation and suffering in these histories actually has even deeper roots. China celebrates many of the usual sorts of historical heroes—brave generals and great thinkers. But it also reserves a special place for Goujian, the king of the state of Yue in the Warring States period (around the fifth century B.C.), whose story strikes a very different emotional chord. Having been captured by the rival king of Wu, Goujian set about trying to be as submissive as it was possible to be. He slept amid the horse manure of the rival king and even tasted the king’s excrement. When he was eventually freed and allowed to return home, he spent the next two decades submitting himself to one humiliation after another in order to keep his desire for revenge intense. The Chinese phrase woxin changdan (“sleeping on brushwood and tasting gall”) stems from Goujian’s nightly exercise in self-flagellation, when he would sleep on a bed of brushwood and lick a gallbladder full of bile. It was this regimen of suffering and self-victimization that gave him the strength finally to defeat the king of Wu. The story of Goujian is “as familiar to Chinese schoolchildren as the biblical stories of Adam and Eve or David and Goliath are to American youngsters,” wrote Paul Cohen, the American historian who has brought the mythical story to the attention of a wider Western audience. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Goujian story was particularly popular in the 1920s and 1930s, when National Humiliation History began to take off. It also gained another lease on life in the 1990s and 2000s.