It is a widely acknowledged fact that Chinese society and its prevailing culture are closely linked to its unique conception of terms such as ‘nation’ and ‘patriotism’. Contributing to this uniqueness is the fact that Imperial China of the last five centuries had evaded attempts by European Imperial powers to fully colonize it. Barring the trade arrangements with leading superpowers of the imperial age and special cases such as Hong Kong, China had charted an independent course for itself, and to this extent its understanding of nationalism and patriotism are quite unique. The Japanese invasion and occupation of large tracts of North Eastern China during the Second World War had threatened this independence and compelled Chinese intellectuals to construct a new image and identity for the country and its people. It then becomes interesting to see what ideas and which intellectuals influenced the development of the brand of patriotism that is now recognized with the Chinese. The rest of this essay is an endeavor towards this end.
Renowned sociologist and philosopher Jurgen Habermas’ coining of the term ‘constitutional patriotism’ (xianzheng aiguozhuyi) in reference to China, has had a big influence on Chinese intellectuals in the last few years. Under constitutional patriotism, “a kind of ethical bond would enable the citizens of complex societies to recognize themselves as members of their polity, a post-traditional community bound and motivated by the pursuit of equal justice under the law rather than by ethnic and cultural association” (Habermas, as quoted in Davies, 2007). While many Chinese intellectuals appreciated Habermas’ analysis and explanation of this brand of patriotism, he was not without his detractors. Among those who were critical of Habermas’ views were Xu Youyu, who reckoned that “this implicit nationalism is a flawed account of cultural pluralism: one that runs the risk of affirming all forms of difference-including fascist culture and ideas of slavery-at the expense of a properly universal conception of human rights” (Davies, 2007). Cao Weidong, on the other hand was more sympathetic toward Habermas’ conception. Hence opinion is divided among the Chinese intelligentsia on the validity and importance of Habermas’ analyses.
A distinction has to be made between the two terms ‘patriotism’ and ‘nationalism’, as they are closely allied. The former is used more loosely in public discourse and it encapsulates feeling of solidarity and the emotion of belonging to a community at the individual level. In this way, patriotism is more of a personal expression of allegiance to a country and its people. Nationalism, on the other hand is a more arcane concept, which finds application in scholarly policy analysis. Here, the word is used to refer to the collective aspirations of members of an ethnic group (or its representatives) to achieve/maintain a status of legitimacy for their nation. But in the case of People’s Republic of China an overwhelming majority of the population belongs to the Han ethnic group and its leadership derives almost exclusively from this group (Fairbrother, 2003). In this context, patriotism and nationalism in China become interchangeable and come to represent the same set of aspirations and feelings. In the West, there are often misconceptions about what Chinese nationalism actually entails. But under the leadership of Hu Jintao and the neo-liberal economic policies he oversaw, a clearer picture of Chinese nationalism had emerged:
“Watching from their offices in Beijing, the officials of Hu’s government exemplified the tradition of state nationalism, which has roots deep in the imperial past but today closely identifies the Chinese nation with the Communist state. The Chinese government officially expresses nationalist sentiment as aigu, which in Chinese means “loving the state,” or aiguozhuyi, which means “love and support for China,” a China that is always indistinguishable from the Communist state. State nationalism demands that citizens subordinate their individual interests to those of the state. And in its relations with foreign powers, China’s current rulers believe that the state must prudently balance nationalist imperatives against other objectives, particularly the overriding goal of economic modernization”. (Terrill, et. Al, 2005)
With this brand of ‘state nationalism’ being the accepted norm, Chinese intellectuals of recent times have fostered the formation of national identity. And the idea of ‘national humiliation’ is an integral part of this process. In other words, influential Chinese thinkers “have delimited national culture, redefined group membership, recreated social hierarchy and rewritten history” (Gries, 2004). In this interpretive framework, the history of China is seen as a series of humiliating events that should be compensated for in the present. As early as 1840, Chinese scholar Fend Guifen referred to the intrusion of European powers in the affairs of the nation: “We are shamefully humiliated by the four [Western] nations, not because our climate, soil, or products are inferior, but actually because our people are inferior … Our inferiority is not due to nature, it is inferiority due to ourselves. If it were inborn, it would be a shame, but a shame we could not do anything about. Since the inferiority is due to ourselves, it is still a greater shame, but a shame we can do something about.” (Gries, 2004)
Although Guifen’s assessment might come across as being self-deprecating, it is not unusual for the time. Another important official of Imperial China, Kang Youwei, poignantly noted in his June 1898 memorandum to the throne that the subordinate role of women in Chinese society is a constant source of humiliation for him. Liang Qichao, a progressive scholar of the same era had written in his Travel Notes on the New Continent, that he “could only sigh and weep when I compare our nation with theirs [America]” (Terrill, et. al, 2005). Some intellectuals even lamented that their people’s fate is worser than that of blacks in America, who were liberated at the end of the Civil War. Hence,
“The theme of humiliation, still pervasive in China today, emerged as a consciously constructed emotion during the second half of the nineteenth century, and was given an emotional content through a long and complex process of internalization and habituation. Humiliation implied a sense of collective responsibility. The causes of failure could be attributed to the nation’s lack of effort or ability, not to external factors independent of human will. It promoted voluntarist strategies of national revenge. Self-accusation completed the idea of causal attribution. The nation-race exacerbated the feeling of humiliation by accusing itself of failure” (Brook & Frolic, 1997)
At times though, the basis for fostering the feeling of humiliation is rather far-fetched. Renowned social thinker and translator of Western philosophical works Yan Fu has a rather paranoid vision of insecurity for the Chinese people. During the late nineteenth century when he lived, he was alerting his readership to the possibility of the Chinese race being destroyed by black, brown and white races. Following Yan Fu’s assessment of threat to the race, subsequent generations of Chinese intellectuals have played upon it and magnified it so that nationalist and patriotic feelings are consolidated in the collective Chinese psyche and totalitarian excesses are tolerated for this cause. For example, a contemporary legal scholar Yuan Hongbing from Beijing University had recently called for “a new heroism in order to save the fate of the race and for a totalitarian regime which would fuse the weak, ignorant and selfish individuals of the race into a powerful whole…only purification through blood and fire would provide a solution to China’s problems” (Yang, 2007).
In conclusion, based on the views of former and current Chinese intellectuals, it is fair to say that the Chinese take their national identity quite seriously and patriotism is a deeply held feeling for most of its citizens. The worrying factor though, is that these discourses on patriotism and national identity generally portray the ‘West’ as the enemy and it remains to be seen how this sort of geo-political and cultural polarization affects the economic and diplomatic future of China.
References
Davies, G. (2007). Habermas in China: Theory as Catalyst. The China Journal, (57), 61+.
Fairbrother, G. P. (2003). Toward Critical Patriotism: Student Resistance to Political Education in Hong Kong and China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Gries, P. H. (2004). China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Guo, Y. (2003). Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China. New York: Routledge Curzon.
Terrill, R., Hua, S., Thurston, A. F., & Zhao, S. (2005, Autumn). Inside the Chinese Mind. The Wilson Quarterly, 29, 49+.
Yang, J. (2007). Of Interest and Distrust: Understanding China’s Policy towards Japan. China: An International Journal, 5(2), 250+.
Zhidong Hao (2003), Intellectuals at a Crossroads: The Changing Politics of China’s
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