China’s Agony of Defeat

Equally surprising was the fact that many of the most indignant counterdemonstrators—those flooding the BBC and CNN with angry Internet threats, or shouting down protesters along the torch route—were young Chinese, born during the booming post-Mao era. Because they are better educated and more worldly than their elders, one might have expected them to have been exempt from the China-as-victim syndrome. But, perhaps because they, too, have been subject to the party's propaganda, many have turned out every bit as nationalistic as older Chinese.

What made the Tibet protests such an affront to so many Chinese was the timing: China had finally allowed itself to imagine that its national identity might metamorphose from victim to victor, thanks to the alchemy of the Olympic Games. In one grand, symbolic stroke, a successful Games was meant to cleanse China's messy historical slate, overthrow its legacy of victimization and allow the country to spring forth on the world stage reborn. The Chinese, though, may again be looking for self-confidence in the wrong places. As Xu Guoqi suggests in his new book, "Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895–2008," Beijing is fixated on winning gold medals as a means of proving its status as an economic and political powerhouse. "A nation that obsesses over gold medals," Xu notes archly, "is not a self-assured nation."

Ironically, on the surface China has never seemed more "equal" to the West. Anyone arriving in Beijing is bound to be impressed by the magnificent new Norman Foster–designed Capital airport. The Beijing Olympic Park, with its Herzog & de Meuron–designed "bird's nest" stadium and its bubble-skinned, transparent National Swimming Center, is stunning. The dingy Soviet-style apartment blocks, disheveled courtyard houses and defoliated streets that I first came to know in the 1970s during the Cultural Revolution have all but vanished. Now one is everywhere overwhelmed by new "development," or fazhan, a word that has attained almost sacerdotal overtones in China.

Yet few Chinese of my acquaintance have allowed themselves to be psychologically convinced by China's success, to believe truly in China's establishment as a leading nation. To do this, I suppose, they would have to be convinced that they already are, in fact, successful and powerful; that the world has already begun to look on their country with a growing sense of wonder, even envy, and that the past is, in fact, the past.

While honest criticisms should not be muted just because Chinese leaders find them grating, we foreigners should be mindful of this complex psychological landscape. In reacting to contemporary events, we tend to forget just how deeply implicated we are in how China came to experience and view the modern world. This long relationship has created a still rather unyielding tension as each country interacts with the other. Despite the fact that China has gotten closer than ever to escaping from this past, it's important to understand that its leaders and people are still susceptible to older ways of responding to the world around them. Now is not the time to provoke them further and impede their progress toward a new, more equal and self-assured sense of nationhood.

Adapted from “China: Humiliation and the Olympics” by Orville Schell, published in the current New York Review of Books.

© 2008