National Insecurities: Humiliation, Salvation, and Chinese Nationalism

Abstract

The line separating good from evil passes not through states, nor between political parties--but right through every human heart. --Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Use past to serve present. --Mao Zedong While I was researching South China Sea disputes between China, Vietnam, and Philippines, I came upon an unlikely reference. In an otherwise hard-nosed analysis of issue, a noted Chinese expert cited a book called Atlas of Shame. This odd juxtaposition of security studies, territoriality, and emotion piqued my interest, and I asked a friend in Beijing to track down this curious book. Once I got a copy of Atlas of Century of National Humiliation in Modern China, correct title, I was fascinated by what seemed to be a unique feature of Communist Chinese historiography and identity: very deliberate celebration of a national insecurity. But more I looked for national humiliation discourse, more I found. Though they do not receive much attention in Western analysis, it turns out that there are textbooks, novels, museums, songs, and parks devoted to commemorating national humiliation in China. I continued looking for examples of such national insecurity in other countries. I found that such activities are not limited to some exotic political culture of the East. Humiliation is a common and recurring theme in domestic and international politics, being invoked far and wide in a diverse set of circumstances. Humiliation has thus joined guilt, victimhood, and apology as a topic of analytical interest in international studies. (1) With spread of popular media and growth of public opinion, such individual feelings have been nationalized: Guilt of Nations. (2) But this popular politics has not necessarily led to greater democracy or freedom. Rather, it has added another dimension to broad forms of governance that rely on culture and history for political and economic projects. Indeed, this nationalization of has accompanied a denationalization of industry and a liberalization of markets around globe. This article examines how humiliation has been an integral part of construction of Chinese nationalism. Public culture is analyzed to show how national humiliation is not deployed just in a predictably xenophobic way but also in a self-critical examination of Chineseness. By contrast, in her article following this one. Marie Thorsten (3) criticizes standard U.S. understanding of Japanese economic success as a parody. (4) Though Japanese state does periodically issue national images, they are not part of a narrative about postwar vengeance, about humiliation of vanquished or an economic Pearl Harbor. We find quite opposite: Japan's postwar consumer identity has not been directed from top down, through a rational state bureaucracy in a way imagined by others, particularly in United States, as warlike nationalism. On face of it, Thorsten and I disagree about political import of and humiliation. On one hand, Thorsten uses topic of shame to understand something else: how United States mis / understands Japanese economic success. On other hand, I use Chinese nationalism to argue that logic of humiliation itself needs to be probed. While Thorsten analyzes an international discourse of intercultural understanding and norms, I focus on a group of nationalist texts that is largely unknown outside China. Both of us examine how humiliation is used by political leaders and public culture to mobilize populations, but these populations are on opposite sides of dispute: I consider nativistic understandings of Chinese self, while Thorsten examines a U.S. othering of Japan. While I argue that humiliation can be generalized to explain a modular form of nationalism, Thorsten examines Japanese case as a peculiarity of U.S. identity politics. Indeed, while global media use to motivate United States to intervene in places like Bosnia, in China it is just such intervention--that is, foreign invasion--that is commemorated as national humiliation. …