at the foundation

Interesting constitutional scholarship. A Chinese group in Canada is calling on Chinese-Canadians to renounce their citizenship on the grounds that it puts them under Queen Elizabeth as head of the commonwealth which in turn means that they retrospectively endorse the Opium Wars. It’s a Chi-com-will-you-condemn-athon!

While we’re dealing with Chinese nationalism nouveau, as we seem to be doing interminably round here, let’s go back to a couple of foundational incidents.

Danwei carries an interview with Song Qiang, editor of China Can Say No, an anthology of nationalist essays published in 1996. No professional patriot ever failed to make a profit, and the book is basically knockoff of the Ishihara Japan That Can Say No franchise. He did spot a gap in the market:

Wang Xiaodong and Fang Ning did a survey in 1995 in which a large proportion of young people said that the country they hated most was America. This was one year before China Can Say No. The US authorities were a bit taken aback by this information. The appearance of a youth voice in China that hated the US, and the subsequent appearance of a voice saying "China can say no"—they said, hey, that can't be right. They imagined that more than 90% of Chinese youth could make up their own minds, and that there was no doubt they'd love America.

The ideological line at that time effectively demanded that China imitate the US economically while preventing “peaceful evolution” towards western politics and culture. As such, Americanisation was experienced by many in China as a process of erasure, the elimination of native culture and its replacement by a sterile, ultra capitalist modernity – there was no sense of connection to a world of ideas to go with the world of capital flows and business school techniques. From that point it’s not a big jump towards the idea that the West was trying to wipe out what was Chinese about China – which, to be fair, was precisely the assumption many Westerners had about where the country’s economic reforms would lead. The river elegy generation actually embraced that idea. Not so their post-Tiananmen successors.

China Can Say No was a runaway success. Three years later its authors ideas were confirmed for many by the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo conflict, an incident which was brushed off in the West but was a major turning point in the development of Chinese public opinion. China Hand has the story:

The embassy bombing was quite traumatic to China.

However, when the attack occured, triggering official and popular anger within China, the West was disbelieving, dismissive—and defensive.

It was considered rather churlish of the Chinese to intrude their crude and manufactured nationalistic outrage into our “good war” narrative of the Kosovo conflict by trying to make political capital out of our honest mistake.

And he quotes a Chinese source as follows:

I believe that the U.S. attack on our embassy came from the fact that China's accurate reporting of the Yugoslavia war provoked America to anger and retribution. At the very least we can say that China’s strength really was incapable of hindering America's risky move. Now we know, and it causes us to appreciate even more profoundly that a nation, when it is poor and weak, is without recourse and pitiful (How helpless and evoking bitterness in people's hearts were the tears of Premier Zhu Rongji as he wept at the airfield when the remains of the martyrs were transported back to China).

Next to no-one in China accepts that the bombing was accidental. It was generally assumed afterwards in the West that the demonstrations at the US embassy in Beijing were a put up job by the Chinese government. Something much more significant was happening. Before the Belgrade attack – and despite China can say No – the default sense amongst the population was that the world was basically helpful and people looked for information that would confirm this notion. Following it, millions began to assume that the world was basically hostile and began to look at events in order to confirm their suspicions. This may be the most profound long term effect of the Kosovo war.

Comments

[godoggo]

Hey, you mentioned "peaceful evolution" again! Now, I'm really, really trying to restrain my obsessive-compulsive commenting tendencies here, but I'm gonna use that as a cue to tell what else I found out about the term on the Internets.
a) The term seems to have originated as a doctrine pursued in China and other countries by the U.S. National Security Council.
b) Mao voiced concern about it in the late 50s, then cranked it up just before the Cultural Revolution commenced.
c) The term "anti-peaceful evolution (movement)" seems to be the standard English term for the policy that began after Tiananmen ("anti" and "oppose" translations of the same word).
d)I did a quick google of Taiwanese sites, and found a post at http://blog.president.gov.tw (no longer updated, and not actually written by the prez, unfortunately, though that's his site) with a title that can be translated, "As Long as There Is 'Economic Independence,' Taiwan Will 'Peaceful Liberation' China (yeah, I could make that grammatical, but it loses its flavor that way, I think).

That's it, no more.

[godoggo]

Damn! I swear I previewed that and everything. "Liberation" should be "Evolution."

[godoggo]

Sorry, sorry, sorry - that Taiwan thing is newish, but not a real blog post, rather part of some sort of wiki-like forum (seems you can edit the post, if you like), that's still extant. I won't keep doing this, promise.

[Demon]

Queen Elizabeth II still controls the international drug trade: allegedly claimed by Lyndon LaRouche - an extended interview with whom appeared in the People's Daily back in 2005. Perhaps his views have become popular in China?