China’s Agony of Defeat

Sun Yat-sen, for instance, described China in 1924 as being "a heap of loose sand" that had "experienced several decades of economic oppression by the foreign powers." In his 1947 book, "China's Destiny," Chiang Kai-shek wrote: "During the past 100 years, the citizens of the entire country, suffering under the yoke of the unequal treaties which gave foreigners special 'concessions' and extra-territorial status in China, were unanimous in their demand that the national humiliation be avenged." And when the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, Mao Zedong declared, "Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation."

Highlighting their victimhood has led Chinese leaders to rely on what historian Peter Hays Gries calls "the moral authority of their past suffering." This was especially true during the 1960s, when non-Western countries vied with one another to appear the most "oppressed" by imperialism, and thus the most authentically revolutionary. But it has continued to the present day. In 2001, the National People's Congress passed a law proclaiming an official "National Humiliation Day." (Of course, so many historical dates were proposed that delegates couldn't agree on any particular one.)

This history pretty much guarantees that certain traits will express themselves again and again whenever China responds under stress to the outside world. "The question of Western humiliation is always unconsciously inside us," filmmaker Chen Shi-Zheng—whose recent film, "Dark Matter," explores this theme—told me. "There is something almost in our DNA that triggers autonomic, and sometimes extreme, responses to foreign criticism or put-downs." Or as Lu Xun, China's most famous essayist and social critic, lamented almost 75 years ago, "Throughout the ages Chinese have had only one way of looking at foreigners. We either look up to them as gods or down on them as wild animals."

The Chinese themselves have made the search for a more self-confident, less-aggrieved persona harder. For much of the past 100 years China has been engaged in a series of assaults on its culture and history. These frequently uncompromising self-critiques started in the early 20th century when Chinese reformers began denouncing traditional Confucian culture, above all because it seemed to have left them so weak before the technological might of the West.

By the 1930s and 1940s, these attacks began to turn against Chinese nationalists. Having begun to fashion a new identity that combined elements of both East and West, Chiang Kai-shek and his Wellesley-educated Christian wife were criticized for, among other things, being too Westernized. Then, after Mao's communists had spent three decades trying to fashion a new revolutionary identity for China, Deng Xiaoping came along and performed yet another act of demolition, this time on the revolution itself.

The failures of these successive efforts at self-reinvention have cast the Chinese adrift, with an uncertain sense of cultural and political direction. We tend to forget this when focusing on how efficient the regime in Beijing is at building infrastructure, or managing the economy. Take the reaction to the anti-Beijing protests this spring in Tibet, and later around the world as the Olympic torch made its way to China. Old-fashioned police controls were tightened and rhetoric that harked back to Mao made China look retrograde, just when it most wanted to look modern. One official raged that the gentle Dalai Lama was "a monster with a human face, but the heart of a beast."