The Contest of the Century

by Geoff A. Dyer

  ——

  Though it is always tempting to think that everything in China is mapped out by an all-powerful Communist Party, the reality is that modern nationalism is very much a two-way process. The Communist Party has been happy to fan the sense of victimhood to buttress its own legitimacy. Yet the foundational myths that are at the heart of today’s nationalism have their origin well before the Communists took power, and will not disappear if they should ever fall. At the same time that the party has been pushing its own “patriotic education,” the themes of victimhood and resentment at the U.S. have flourished in their own right among young educated Chinese. The publishing industry has had a series of huge successes with potboiler polemics, in the Ann Coulter style, raging against the West. They started with the 1996 hit China Can Say No, written by a group of young intellectuals, which warned that China risked being “culturally strangled” and turned into a “slave” if it did not resist its infatuation with America. Two of the authors had taken part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, but in the book they turned their ire on activists such as Fang Lizhi, the astrophysicist who inspired some of the 1989 protesters and ended up an exile in the U.S. after spending a year in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

  Chinese intellectual life in the 1980s had been dominated by a fascination with the West and a thirst for political experimentation, but in the years after Tiananmen there has also been a strong counter-reaction, a popular clarion call that China needs to stand up for itself and to find its own path, resisting the temptations of the West. A string of popular anti-American titles have been released in recent years, with titles like The Plot to Demonize China. In 2009, the authors of China Can Say No published a follow-up, this time called Unhappy China, which was just as big a hit. Detailing a long list of tales about continued Western condescension toward the Chinese, the book urges China’s leaders to turn the nation into a hegemon, or be cast aside. The writers and audience for these books, mostly young, are not party apparatchiks. They see themselves as loyal to a China that is a great and respected nation, not to the Communist Party.

  The most famous megaphone of modern Chinese nationalism is the Global Times, the third-most-popular newspaper in the country. With a mix of conspiracy and indignation that has echoes of Fox News, Global Times has built a huge successful franchise by fanning the flames of any perceived slight to China and by criticizing the weaknesses of the U.S. and Japan. It has come to dominate the market for full-throated populism. Hu Xijin, the paper’s dynamic editor, once described Chinese liberals as “the cancer cells that will lead to the demise of China” and “a key tool in the hands of the Americans who want to topple China.” However, it can also be quite critical of the government, especially concerning Beijing’s dogged support of North Korea. In a way, Global Times is the perfect example of the two-way nature of Chinese nationalism. It is published by the same group that produces the People’s Daily, the party’s mouthpiece and distiller of official truths, which gives it an official stamp of approval. But it is also far more interesting and controversial than the dreary People’s Daily, projecting its own abrasive worldview and building its own constituency among the public. Global Times does not provide the official China line, but it is the Communist Party’s nationalist alter ego. That alone makes it essential reading.

  MEMORIES OF A HOLOCAUST

  When we moved to Shanghai in early 2005, my wife and I rented a flat on Huai Hai Road, one of the main streets running through what in colonial days was known as the French Concession. In a city that has become overrun by skyscrapers, the area is a museum of prewar Western architecture. One block away from our flat was the Normandie Apartments, a wedge-shaped building reminiscent of the Flatiron Building in New York; three blocks in the other direction was a Russian basilica. Its avenues lined with plane trees planted by the French, the area has an unhurried feel that is a welcome break from Shanghai’s frenetic pace. It has become a popular neighborhood for foreigners, including the tens of thousands of Japanese who now call Shanghai home. Many of the shops along Huai Hai Road had Japanese writing in the windows to attract customers, including the tailor on our block and the tobacco store run by a couple from Anhui Province.

  At about the same time that we arrived in Shanghai, a group of right-wing historians in Japan published a new textbook which downplayed important aspects of the war crimes committed by Japanese soldiers in China. One of the books described the evidence behind the massacre in Nanjing in 1937 as “inconclusive.” It was not the first revisionist textbook in Japan to minimize war crimes, and it was only taken up by a small number of schools. But it caused a furor in China. Meetings with Japanese politicians were canceled, official protests lodged. After a few weeks, messages started to circulate on the Internet about a demonstration in Shanghai on the following Saturday. “A lot of people are talking,” one of our new Chinese acquaintances told us a couple of days before the demonstration.

  At around 10 a.m. that Saturday, we headed out to try and find the protest, only to discover that our section of Huai Hai Road had already been totally closed off to traffic. After walking up the street, we could eventually see the beachhead of a demonstration that looked to be much bigger than the modest protest we had been expecting. The group had started near the Bund and had already halted the traffic in some of the city’s busiest shopping and business areas. The demonstrators were all young, mostly university or high-school students. Older residents watched from the sidewalk, a little bemused, not quite knowing what to think. The protest gathered numbers along the way until it had at least ten thousand people by some counts—making it one of the biggest public demonstrations since the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square. The students carried banners and shouted slogans such as “Down with Little Japan,” “Japan Out of Asia,” and “We Love Our China, We Hate Your Japan.” By the time they reached our stretch of town, they had developed a distinct sense of impunity. When they passed a little sushi restaurant a block away from our flat, they threw eggs and plastic bottles at the windows, as well as red paint. At the cigarette shop with the Japanese script, they smashed the window. There were plenty of police keeping an eye on the protest, and occasionally they would move people along. But mostly they stood back and laughed.

  The demonstration carried on three miles farther, through another of the city’s busiest areas, before it reached the Japanese consulate in Hongqiao, in a modern office building. By then a couple of Japanese cars had been overturned, and there was a report that a few demonstrators attacked a police car which they believed was protecting a Japanese citizen. Some local shop owners had put up Chinese flags, not as a patriotic act but to try and convince the protesters that their businesses had no Japanese connection. At the consulate, a large contingent of police was waiting, including some from an anti-riot squad in special protective equipment. But although they made sure no one entered the consulate, they, too, stood aside as the demonstrators threw rocks and bottles at the premises.

  For a while, I walked alongside a young woman called Wang Hongli, who said she was sixteen and in high school. Her dark hair was cut in a bob, she was carrying a knapsack on her shoulders that was covered in “Hello Kitty” stickers, and she wore round John Lennon–style glasses. “You must think this is all very strange,” she said at one stage. She told me how word of the protest had spread rapidly by text message over the previous two days. At first she had not thought about attending, but she kept getting more and more messages. A friend of a friend, who was a student at Fudan University, had said he was going. Eventually, she and a couple of schoolmates had decided to come along, although the friends had given up after a while. When I asked her why she was so keen to stay with the march, her mood darkened and she fixed me with a severe look. “We hate the Japanese, just hate them,” she said. Most of the students thought the whole thing was quite fun, and there was a day-out-of-school feel about the event. This was probably the first chance they had ever had in their lives to walk through the streets chanting politic
al slogans, and many reveled in the experience. The good humor could not disguise, however, that this was an exercise in political mob violence.

  ——

  One of the more peculiar aspects of the “national humiliation” mindset is that it allows Chinese officials to decide when the country has been offended. Officials at the Foreign Ministry will announce with a straight face that a particular government has “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” The phrase often prompts a bemused sneer from foreigners, but makes some sort of sense within the emotional framework of victim nationalism. In 2008, Danwei, a Beijing-based Web site, reported on a fascinating piece of research conducted by a Chinese blogger. He had gone through the archives of the People’s Daily since 1946 and collected all the instances in which the Chinese government had accused someone else of “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.” In total, nineteen countries and organizations had committed the sin—representing around two-fifths of the world’s population. The United States had done so twenty-three times, with another ten from NATO (mostly to do with the 1999 Belgrade bombing), which were really the U.S. as well. Only one country had managed to offend China more—in fact, on a total of forty-seven occasions. That nation was Japan.

  Japan is the epicenter of China’s victim complex. It is Japan that is most likely to turn young, cosmopolitan, Internet-savvy Chinese into fire-breathing protesters, Japan that is most likely to elicit reactions that mix inferiority and superiority. Japan is also the area of foreign policy where nationalism has its greatest potential impact, a populist anger that is at times encouraged by the government but which is also increasingly tying its hands. Nationalism is becoming a major force in the relationship between the two richest countries in Asia. After the 2005 protests and another round of demonstrations in 2010, the protests reached a new intensity in late 2012, as the dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands flared up again. In one incident, a Chinese man was paralyzed after a mob of anti-Japanese protesters in the city of Xian attacked his car. His crime was to drive a Japanese vehicle.

  The immediate source of such anger is the catalogue of grotesque war crimes committed by Japanese soldiers during the occupations and wars of the 1930s and 1940s in China. Japan operated labor camps and conducted medical experiments on Chinese prisoners. At one stage, Japanese planes dropped fleas infected with the plague onto a Chinese city. In Nanjing in 1937, the invading Japanese army slaughtered a significant part of the local population. The estimates of casualties range from fifty thousand to three hundred thousand, the latter figure being widely accepted in China. In an era of jaw-dropping, shocking crimes, Nanjing was one of the great crimes. When the Japanese were finally defeated, however, hostility toward Japan remained surprisingly restrained. Mao’s China was the victor, not a victim that wanted to linger on war crimes. When Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei visited in 1972 to reopen relations with China following the Nixon trip, Mao is reported to have observed that, without the war with Japan, his Communist revolution would not have succeeded. In keeping with that mood, the massacre at Nanjing was deliberately downplayed. In some ways, it is a natural human reaction to avoid thinking about such events when they are still raw. Sometimes, survivors of an atrocity just want to carry on with their own lives: it is often the next generation who feels the urge to guard memories. But by the 1980s, the official tide had started to shift. With economic reformers under pressure by leftists for their diversion from Marxist truths, a spot of Japan-bashing nationalism was a useful crutch. After the 1989 massacre, official attention to Japanese war crimes snowballed as the National Humiliation History canon was launched.

  The war crimes from the 1930s would be reason enough for modern China’s antagonism toward Japan, but the roots are much deeper, stretching back into the emotionally strained history of the nineteenth century. The Opium Wars with Britain may have been a huge jolt to Chinese self-esteem, but in a sense they were a warm-up act for the real psychic shock that imperial China suffered: the rise of Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century. China had always looked upon Japan as a “little brother” nation, one of the countries which had been brought under the civilizing realm of Confucian culture and Chinese script. Chinese emperors thought of themselves as the center of a world where nations like Japan offered them deferential respect. Defeat in the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War was a double blow: not only did China lose to one of these junior nations, but Japan had fortified itself precisely by choosing Western over Chinese culture. (It was after this war that Japan took control of the Senkaku Islands.) The Meiji Restoration in Japan, from the 1860s, was a modernization project that deliberately turned its back on Asia and sought to learn from the West, importing everything from military organization and engineering colleges to fashions. The protests after the Versailles Treaty in 1919 were not just about continued imperial interference in China: they were in a pique of rage that Japan was now a member of the club of imperial bullies. Sun Yatsen and several other senior figures from the early years of the Chinese republic actually spent time in exile in Japan and were inspired by its zeal for modernization, but they also felt the loss of the Sino-Japanese War deeply. One of them, Kang Youwei, described it as “the greatest humiliation in two hundred years.” Modern Chinese nationalism began with defeat by Japan in 1895.

  China’s anti-Japanese tilt has not taken place in a vacuum, of course, but has had its own mirror in Japanese society. For the last couple of decades, Chinese nationalists and right-wing Japanese revisionists have fed off one another. In the decades immediately after the Second World War, Japanese textbooks included an open discussion of events such as the Nanjing Massacre, as Japanese society and its American occupiers sought to erase the vestiges of imperialism. But from the 1970s, with the Cold War in full flight, revisionist versions of Japan’s role in the war started to gain some ground both in the academy and in popular culture, including manga comics. Japanese efforts to fudge history produced a resentment in China that reached a peak during the prime ministership of Junichiro Koizumi—the idiosyncratic Elvis Presley fan—who led Japan from 2001 to 2006. Unlike his predecessors, Koizumi made a habit of visiting Yasukuni, a Shinto shrine not far from the presidential palace in Tokyo, which honors the war dead. Koizumi described his visits as “a matter of the heart,” but the Yasukuni Shrine also honors many of the military leaders from the Second World War who were later branded as “war criminals.” Among the portraits of kamikaze pilots at the shrine’s war museum there is also a portrait of General Tojo Hideki, head of the Imperial Japanese Army. In late 2012, Japan returned to power Shinzo Abe, another leader with strongly nationalist tendencies, whose grandfather was arrested as a war criminal after the Second World War but never charged. Members of his cabinet have resumed visits to Yasukuni.

  China saw these visits as a crude insult, and it was not alone in thinking this way. Distaste for revisionism in Japan has also been strong in South Korea, which has its own painful memories of Japanese occupation, and which threatened at one stage to break off diplomatic relations with Tokyo because of what it saw as Koizumi’s provocations. The deep sense of hurt in South Korea about continued Japanese efforts to massage its wartime past show that these emotions are not merely the product of China’s propaganda authorities. Japan’s attitude to the war remains a deep sore across Northeast Asia.

  China’s response has been to gradually turn up the emotional temperature. It was Iris Chang’s 1997 book, The Rape of Nanking, that first really brought the events of 1937 to the attention of many Americans. As well as documenting the atrocities, the book made a central intellectual claim that was clear from its subtitle: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Over the last couple of decades, China has gradually begun to use the idea of a holocaust to frame the memory of the Japanese invasion and the retelling of the Nanjing Massacre. In 1985, the local authorities in Nanjing built a museum to commemorate the massacre, which includes a large display of bones from bodies found at a nearby location which was dubbed “
the pit of ten thousand corpses.” In the mid-1990s, the museum was expanded, and it now includes a series of powerful sculptures. Qi Kang, who helped design parts of the reformed memorial, says that he was influenced by the Holocaust museums that started to appear in the U.S. in the 1990s, and the Nanjing memorial has a similar bleak and desolate aesthetic. Near the entrance, the figure three hundred thousand—the official estimate of the number of deaths—is carved into a wall. Ian Buruma, who has written extensively on both Japan and the Holocaust, argues that the only real parallel with the way the Chinese Communist Party has started to use this history is in Israel’s Likud Party. “The humiliations of the past must act as a spur to national strength and unity,” he wrote. “The more people are told about the terrible things inflicted on their people by foreign enemies, the more they will follow their ‘patriotic’ leaders.” There is no higher form of victimhood than a holocaust.

  The emotionally charged atmosphere of the Nanjing memorial is even more intense at the September 18 History Museum in Shenyang, established to celebrate the 1931 Mukden incident that was used as a pretext for Japan’s invasion of northeastern China. The museum’s catalogue calls on visitors “not to forget national humiliation and to invigorate China.” The main gate is a huge stone carved with the date September 18 and riddled with bullet holes. There is a picture of a blood-red teardrop, and beside it an inscription which blames the “criminal Japanese militarists” who invaded “Great China with its five thousand years of history.” At the end of the museum, the text reads: “As we are about to leave the exhibition room, everyone’s heart is dripping blood, and every drop of blood seems to congeal into a question mark: How could Japanese imperialism dare to lift a butcher’s knife against our great and vast China?”