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Subject: H-ASIA: REVIEW Fredman on Wang, _Never Forget National Humiliation:
Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations_
> H-ASIA
> December 3, 2012
>
> Book Review (orig. pub. H-Diplo) by Zachary Fredman on Zheng Wang. _Never
> Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and
> Foreign Relations_
>
> (x-post H-Review)
> ***********************************************************************
> From: H-Net Staff <
revhelp@mail.h-net.msu.edu>
>
> Zheng Wang. Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in
> Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations. New York Columbia
> University Press, 2012. xiii + 293 pp. $32.50 (cloth), ISBN
> 978-0-231-14890-0.
>
> Reviewed by Zachary Fredman (Boston University)
> Published on H-Diplo (December, 2012)
> Commissioned by Seth Offenbach
>
> Chinese Exceptionalism
>
> As the title for his new book on historical memory and Chinese
> nationalism, Zheng Wang has chosen a phrase that first became
> popularized in China around 1915: "never forget national humiliation"
> (_Wuwang guochi_). This phrase aptly captures Wang's thesis: the
> Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has bolstered its legitimacy in the
> post-Tiananmen era by using historical memory to cultivate a
> nationalistic and anti-Western victim mentality that provides young
> Chinese with an understanding of who they are and how to comprehend
> the rest of the world. Historical memory, Wang argues "is the prime
> raw material for constructing China's national identity" and it
> constitutes a powerful force in the way the Chinese understand and
> carry out foreign relations (p. 223).
>
> Wang brings impressive credentials and an insider's perspective in
> his attempt to understand how historical memory informs Chinese
> foreign policy and why Chinese youth are so patriotic and
> nationalistic. A native of Kunming, capital of China's southwestern
> Yunnan province, he holds a Ph in conflict analysis and resolution
> from George Mason University and now teaches at Seton Hall's
> Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations. Before
> taking up his professorship, he spent nearly a decade as a researcher
> at the Chinese People's Association for Peace and Disarmament in
> Beijing.
>
> A timely and well-researched book, _Never Forget National
> Humiliation_ qualifies as a landmark in the study of Chinese
> nationalism. Despite the minor reservations detailed below, it offers
> a comprehensive exploration of Chinese identity and the politics of
> history education in the People's Republic of China. Anyone
> interested in modern China or U.S.-China relations should read this
> book.
>
> "To understand a country," Wang writes, "one should visit the
> country's primary and high schools and read their history textbooks"
> (p. 7). Through his study of Chinese textbooks and education policy,
> Wang reveals how the CCP has used history education to glorify the
> party, consolidate national identity, and justify one-party rule in
> the post-Tiananmen era. After the 1989 Tiananmen protests and the
> Soviet bloc collapse, China's leaders concluded that the CCP's
> greatest failure in the 1980s was not focusing enough attention on
> ideological education. Shortly afterward, the party launched its
> patriotic education campaign. By selecting which parts of Chinese
> history to remember and which parts to forget, the CCP has used
> historical memory to cultivate a national consciousness and what Wang
> calls a "Chosenness-Myth-Trauma (CMT) complex." Wang argues that this
> CMT complex and historical consciousness "are the dominant ideas in
> China's public rhetoric and bureaucratic procedures" (p. 240).
>
> Inspired by a letter CCP leader Jiang Zemin wrote to the Education
> Ministry, the party officially launched the patriotic education
> campaign in August 1991 with two documents: "Notice about Conducting
> Education of Patriotism and Revolutionary Tradition by Exploiting
> Extensively Cultural Relics," and "General Outline on Strengthening
> Education on Chinese Modern and Contemporary History and National
> Conditions." The patriotic education campaign jettisoned the Mao-era
> class struggle narrative in favor of a framework for teaching history
> that focused on China's struggle with outside forces. A 1994 CCP
> directive stated that the party initiated the campaign in order to
> "boost the nation's spirit, enhance cohesion, foster national
> self-esteem and pride, consolidate and develop a patriotic united
> front to the broadest extent possible, and direct and rally the
> masses' patriotic passions to the great cause of building socialism
> with Chinese characteristics" (p. 99). The patriotic education
> campaign--the driving force behind contemporary Chinese
> nationalism--is thus "an elite-led, top-down political movement" (p.
> 140).
>
> Central to the patriotic education campaign are the CCP's chosen
> glories and traumas--Wang's CMT complex. Wang shows that when looking
> to the glories of China's past, party-approved textbooks engage in
> selective remembering and forgetting. For example, China's standard
> history textbooks praise Ming Dynasty admiral Zheng He's naval
> expeditions as "voyages of peace and friendship," yet recent
> scholarship has shown that Zheng's voyages were often accompanied by
> violence against local populations (p. 46). These textbooks emphasize
> that China has always been a "peace-loving country" while overlooking
> military campaigns various dynasties have undertaken against China's
> neighbors. History education in China also glorifies the CCP's
> achievements while downplaying or ignoring the suffering that many
> ordinary Chinese have experienced at the party's hands. In China's
> textbooks, most suffering comes at the hands of foreigners and brings
> national humiliation.
>
> Under Mao, history education emphasized national glory. The
> government suppressed writing about the Nanjing Massacre and used
> class struggle theory to explain the Chinese Revolution and foreign
> imperialism. Above all, history education during the Mao years
> emphasized that the CCP and Mao's brilliant leadership deserved all
> credit for victory over the Japanese and the Guomindang (GMD). Under
> Mao the party had redeemed the country after a century of national
> humiliation stretching from the First Opium War to the Communists'
> victory in the Chinese Civil War.
>
> China's patriotic education campaign revised these Mao-era
> narratives. The new narrative blamed the West rather than class
> enemies for China's suffering. In teaching students about the War of
> Resistance against Japan, for example, the revised curriculum focused
> on ethnic conflict between Japan and China rather than class conflict
> between the CCP and the GMD. More than anything else it emphasized
> the foreign powers' brutality against the Chinese, forcing the
> younger generation to confront the atrocities of the century of
> humiliation. According to Wang, "this transition from China as victor
> to China as victim reveals a great deal about changes to Chinese
> national identity" (p. 103).
>
> In order to cultivate the new China-as-victim identity, the patriotic
> education campaign reached beyond the classroom. Wang finds no
> parallel anywhere in the world for "the special effort made by the
> Chinese government since 1991 to construct memory sites and use them
> for ideological reeducation" (p. 104). In 1995 the party selected one
> hundred national-level demonstration sites for patriotic education.
> Nearly two-thirds were devoted to past wars and conflicts. The
> remainder featured ancient Chinese civilization and national heroes
> like Mao and Zhou Enlai. Taking their cues from the center,
> provincial and county authorities created patriotic education bases
> of their own. Wang counts more than 2,300 provincial- and
> county-level sites in Beijing, Hebei, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, and Anhui
> alone (p. 109). Visiting these sites, he notes, has become a regular
> part of the school curriculum.
>
> Entertainment, too, has become a patriotic education tool. To
> encourage visits to patriotic education bases, the CCP launched a
> "Red Tourism" program in the early 2000s. Red tourism skillfully
> exploits China's domestic tourism boom by replacing the term
> "education" with "tourism." The results, as Wang shows, have been
> impressive: between 2004 and 2007 more than 400 million Chinese
> traveled to red tourism sites (p. 109). While at home, Chinese can
> watch movies and TV series about the War of Resistance and
> humiliation at the hands of foreigners. Nothing, of course,
> illustrated Chinese national greatness and rejuvenation like the
> opening ceremony at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
>
> Wang's excellent chapter on the Beijing Olympics reveals that the
> anxieties underpinning China's patriotic education campaign also
> inform its attitudes toward international athletic competition. In
> preparation for the games, the CCP's General Sports Administration
> drew up a strategy called "The General Outline for Winning Honor at
> the Olympics, 2001-2010." The document urged government ministries
> and provinces to win honor at the 2004 and 2008 Olympic Games by
> winning as many gold medals as possible--silver and bronze would not
> suffice. They targeted medal-rich disciplines that rely on athletes'
> long-term training and individual skillfulness--diving,
> weightlifting, shooting--rather than more popular sports emphasizing
> teamwork and contact, such as soccer or basketball. The strategy paid
> off handsomely in 2008 when Chinese athletes took home fifty-one gold
> medals.
>
> But Wang argues that China's emphasis on gold medals "masks a
> lingering inferiority complex" (p. 153). In 2004 Chinese hurdler Liu
> Xiang won China's first track and field gold and became the country's
> most popular athlete. By winning gold in a sport traditionally
> dominated by Westerners, Liu, according to Wang, "became an instant
> symbol for China's ability to conquer the world in any new field that
> China wants to take on" (p. 153). Because of the lingering memory of
> national humiliation, the Chinese government can legitimize its rule
> through sports. To win more gold medals than the United States
> symbolized China's passage into the top tier of world powers. Yet
> Wang remains wary about such logic and urges Chinese elites to heed
> the words of historian Xu Guoqi: "A nation that obsesses over gold
> medals to bolster nationalist sentiment and its domestic legitimacy
> is not a confident government" (p. 162).
>
> Wang's next chapter shows how this "culture of insecurity" influenced
> China's response to three crises in U.S.-China relations. The
> majority of China's top leaders interpreted the 1999 NATO bombing of
> the Chinese embassy in Belgrade as an open provocation and insult to
> the Chinese people. The government organized anti-American
> demonstrations outside U.S. diplomatic missions and demanded an
> official apology. Beijing had also demanded an apology after the 1996
> Taiwan Strait Crisis. In 2001, Beijing blamed the United States for
> the collision between a Chinese F-8 fighter jet and a U.S. EP-3 spy
> plane and expected Washington to apologize and take full
> responsibility. According to Wang, each incident touched on the
> feelings of national humiliation cultivated by the patriotic
> education program. As a result, the Chinese government escalated each
> crisis through military maneuvers, rejecting American apologies, or
> sending students to pelt U.S. diplomatic facilities with rocks and
> debris. Because the CCP has built its legitimacy on righting the
> humiliations of the past, it cannot allow the country to be
> humiliated again. Each crisis thus becomes a test of the CCP's
> political credibility, and presses the government toward a more
> uncompromising stance.
>
> Wang concludes that Beijing must move beyond its victim mentality and
> allow discussion of the failures and catastrophes caused by the
> party. He sees the 2005 publication of the first joint history
> textbook in East Asia--written by Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean
> scholars--as a step in the right direction. But he also concedes that
> China has a long way to go: in 2006 the CCP shut down _Bingdian_
> (Freezing point), the weekly supplement to the national _China Youth
> Daily_ newspaper, after _Bingdian_ published an article criticizing a
> Chinese history textbook for fostering blind nationalism and
> providing one-sided historical accounts. Party officials also sacked
> the _China Youth Daily's_ editors and barred all Chinese media from
> reporting on the suspension. Though China today is far more open than
> it was during the Mao years, the party retains its monopoly on
> interpreting controversial history.
>
> Wang wrote _Never Forget National Humiliation_ because he wanted to
> help Westerners better understand the Chinese people, their
> motivations, and their intentions. Here he succeeds admirably, and
> his task is no doubt an important one. Failing to understand Chinese
> nationalism in the past has caused and exacerbated problems in
> U.S-.China relations. Taiwanese scholar Ch'i Hsi-sheng, for example,
> shows that during World War II General Joseph Stilwell, commander of
> U.S. forces in China, needlessly angered the Chinese by treating them
> with disrespect and contempt. Stilwell assumed this was the best way
> to accomplish his goals, but Chinese president Chiang Kai-shek
> interpreted Stilwell's manner as evidence of the general's ignorance
> and racism. Ch'i concludes that Stilwell treated Chiang harshly and
> demanded control over Chinese military forces because he failed to
> understand the depth of Chinese nationalism.[1] Books like _Never
> Forget National Humiliation_ go a long way toward giving non-Chinese
> a clearer understanding of how many Chinese see the world.
>
> Although a first-rate study, _Never Forget National Humiliation_ is
> not without its flaws. Wang's first chapter contains a literature
> review and theoretical framework that may put some readers off. That
> would be a mistake--the book is well worth reading. And though Wang
> argues that China's CMT complex and historical memory are the
> dominant ideas in the PRC's bureaucratic procedures, he proves his
> case only when discussing the Belgrade embassy bombing and EP-3 spy
> plane incident. But these minor shortcomings do not detract from this
> masterful book. One hopes it not only leaves non-Chinese with a
> clearer understanding of the PRC and its people but also encourages
> the Chinese to look more honestly at their country's recent past and
> see China as it truly is.
>
> Note
>
> [1]. Ch'i Hsi-sheng, _Jianbanuzhang de mengyou: Taiping yang
> zhanzheng qijian de ZhongMei junshi hezuo guanxi, 1941-1945_ [Allies
> at daggers drawn: China-U.S. military affairs cooperation during the
> Pacific War, 1941-1945] (Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiu yuan lianjing
> chuban gongsi, 2011), esp. 503-555, 634-643.
>
> Citation: Zachary Fredman. Review of Wang, Zheng, _Never Forget
> National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and
> Foreign Relations_. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. December, 2012.
> URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=36967
>
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
> Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
> License.
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