Nationalism in China

Introduction
With China hosting its first-ever Olympics, the country has seen a surge in national pride. But Chinese are angry at what they see as the West trying to spoil their party. In March, anti-government protests in Tibet followed by human rights' demonstrations during the international leg of the Olympic torch relay sparked a sharp response from Chinese both at home and abroad. Their anger has taken the form of public demonstrations, newspaper editorials, online petitions, and other Internet activism. Olympic protests in Paris during the torch relay have drawn particular ire in China and have led to calls for a boycott of French goods. Flaring nationalism is not new. It has been set off in instances such as the accidental bombing of a Chinese embassy in 1999 during the Kosovo War and a 2001 incident in which a U.S. surveillance aircraft collided with a Chinese fighter jet off China's coast. But experts say this time the public outrage appears to be more genuine, instigated by perceived unfair treatment by the West rather than stoked by the Communist Party. This change could pose challenges not only for the West coming to terms with a rising China, but also for China's government trying to maintain peace and stability within its borders.

A Pillar of Legitimacy
China's nationalism today is shaped by its pride in its history as well as its century of humiliation at the hands of the West and Japan. China expert Peter Hays Gries writes: "Chinese nationalists today find pride in stories about the superiority of China's '5000 years' of 'glorious civilization.'" This yearning for lost glory is accompanied by the story of victimization in the past, a narrative central to what being Chinese today means, says Gries. China perceives itself as a victim of Western imperialism that began with the First Opium War and the British acquisition of Hong Kong in 1842 and lasted until the end of World War II in 1945, during which it suffered humiliating losses of sovereignty.

"Chinese nationalism was actually partly a creation of Western imperialism," says Minxin Pei, a senior associate in the China program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Pei says the first surge of Chinese nationalism was seen in 1919 in what's now widely referred to as the May 4th Movement when thousands of students demonstrated against the Treaty of Versailles' transfer of Chinese territory to Japan. Some of these student leaders went on to form the Chinese Communist Party two years later in 1921. "The current Chinese communist government is more a product of nationalism than a product of ideology like Marxism and Communism," says Liu Kang, a professor of Chinese cultural studies at Duke University. Kang says today nationalism has probably "become the most powerful legitimating ideology."

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opening up of the Chinese economy by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, and the pro-democracy protests of 1989, nationalism was once again revived by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), say experts. Gries writes: "Lacking the procedural legitimacy accorded to democratically elected governments and facing the collapse of communist ideology, the CCP is increasingly dependent upon its nationalist credentials to rule." As the International Herald Tribune noted in an April 2008 editorial, stripped of Maoism as its guiding light, the CCP frequently has fallen back on nationalism as societal glue.

Beyond the party's control, the emergence of the Internet in the last two decades has given nationalists more power to vent their anger after particular incidents. It has also brought the huge Chinese diaspora in places like Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Europe, and North America, into closer contact with those residing within China's borders, facilitating an easy flow of information. "It makes it much easier for the nationalistic rhetoric," says Pei. He says the young, urban, and educated Chinese are more nationalistic and they are the ones using the Internet. "Compared to before, the Internet has democratized opinion but this democratization of opinion is not evenly distributed and the fringe elements tend to exploit this new opportunity far more actively than the mainstream," Pei says. 

Anti-West Sentiment
On May 8, 1999, a U.S. plane accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade mistaking it for a Serbian arms depot, killing three Chinese and injuring several others. Protests erupted around China. The Chinese government called it a "gross encroachment upon China 's sovereignty," demanded an apology from the U.S. government, and asserted: "The great People's Republic of China was not to be bullied." Chinese nationalism was also active on the Internet at the time. In his book China's New Nationalism, Gries writes: "deluged by e-mail from China, the White House Web site in Washington, D.C. was temporarily shut down" and "cyber-nationalists also hacked into the U.S. embassy's website in Beijing, inserting 'Down with the Barbarians!' on the homepage."