China: Humiliation & the Olympics (Extract)

It's an extract from an article published in the New York Review of Books last week. (See http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21715 )It's a good article for those who lacks of sense of modern Chinese histroy to understand China. You could refer it to my previous blog articles to see my familiar viewshttp://hk.myblog.yahoo.com/our_wch/article?mid=3439&prev=3468&next=3448)

下面紐約書評刊登了一篇"百年國耻"的文章，對不了解近當代中國史的朋友會很有幫助。原文很長，下面是我的摘錄。有興趣的朋友可瀏覽全文：http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21715，各位亦可參考我先前的相似評論：http://hk.myblog.yahoo.com/our_wch/article?mid=3439&prev=3468&next=3448。

......But as the director, China-born Chen Shi-Zheng, explained to me recently, he does see the film's protagonist as expressing, in extreme form, "the complexity of the modern-day relationship of Chinese to the outside world." Liu Xing

is a paradox. He feels superior, because of the length and depth of the Chinese civilization from which he comes. However, at the same time, despite all of its extraordinary development and change, because China still lags behind America, he personalizes this reality and feels insecure.

......

The question the filmmakers seek to explore in Dark Matter is not simply the personal one but the larger question of China's sensitivity to foreign dominance and criticism. Here the film is masterful in illuminating how any suggestion of foreign superiority, or even condescension, toward Chinese may intersect with their own sense of historical victimization and insecurity to create a volatile chemistry.

"We Chinese carry the burden of our history with us and the question of Western humiliation is always unconsciously inside us," Chen told me.

Thus, we feel sensitive to any kind of slight and often have a very sharp reaction to perceived unfair treatment or injustices. On an emotional level we cannot help but associate treatment in the present with past injuries, defeats, invasions, and occupations by foreigners. There is something almost in our DNA that triggers autonomic, and sometimes extreme, responses to foreign criticism or put-downs.

"Throughout the ages Chinese have had only one way of looking at foreigners," lamented China's most famous essayist and social critic, Lu Xun, almost seventy-five years ago. "We either look up to them as gods or down on them as wild animals." By acting it out in an interpersonal setting, as it is in Dark Matter, Chen seems to hope that viewers will be able to see more clearly that this complicated dynamic is also subtly at work in the larger "relationship."

As Peter Hays Gries has written in his thoughtful book China's New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy, like it or not, "The West is central to the construction of China's identity today; it has become China's alter ego."

......

As a result of the insulting terms of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, by which the West cravenly gave Germany's concessions in China to Japan, an expression, wuwang guochi, "Never forget our national humiliation," became a common slogan in China. Indeed, to ignore China's national failure came to be seen as unpatriotic. Since then, Chinese historians and ideological overseers have never ceased to mine China's putative past sufferings "to serve the political, ideological, rhetorical, and/or emotional needs of the present," as the historian Paul Cohen has put it.

Sun Yat-sen, for example, described China in 1924 as being "a heap of loose sand" that had "experienced several decades of economic oppression by the foreign powers" and "as a consequence is being transformed everywhere into a colony...." In his 1947 book, China's Destiny, Chiang Kai-shek wrote:

During the past hundred 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 the state be made strong.

And when the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, Mao Zedong famously declared, "Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We...have stood up."

In 1997, when Hong Kong reverted from British colonial status to Chinese sovereignty, the Communist Party returned to the theme of China as victim to help encourage greater nationalism. General Secretary Jiang Zemin pointedly reminded the world that "the occupation of Hong Kong was the epitome of the humiliation that China suffered in modern history." Since then, much of the talk about victimization has concentrated on Japan, China's brutal and still incompletely repentant World War II occupier.

---

China's restless search for a more self-confident, less-aggrieved persona has paradoxically been made more complicated by other wounds not directly related to foreign attacks: for much of the past hundred years Chinese themselves have also been engaged in a series of assaults on their own culture and history. These frequently uncompromising self-critiques first started in the early part of the twentieth century when Chinese reformers began denouncing traditional Confucian culture, above all because it seemed to have left them so weak before the technological superiority of the West.

...

As the scholar William A. Callahan has recently noted, despite fifty years of Maoist revolution—when "anti-Communism" was often perceived as being "anti-Chinese"—and then as even China began to surprise the world with its recent economic success,

the national-humiliation narrative is [still] painstakingly reproduced in textbooks, museums, popular history books, virtual exhibits, feature films, dictionaries, journals, atlases, pictorials and commemorative stamps.

.....

What was surprising was that many of the most indignant counterdemonstrators were young Chinese, born during the post-Mao era. Better educated and more worldly than older Chinese, one might have expected them to have been exempt from the China-as-victim syndrome. But, perhaps because they, too, were products of the Party's propaganda, many of them have turned out every bit as nationalistic, perhaps even more so, than their elders.^[*] But what made these demonstrations against the torch such an affront to so many Chinese was the way in which they intruded just when they had allowed themselves to imagine that their national identity might actually metamorphose from victim to victor, thanks to the alchemy of the Olympic Games.

...

After a century and a half of famine, war, weakness, foreign occupation, and revolutionary extremism, a growing number of Chinese—overseas as well as inside China—had come to look to the Olympic Games as the long-heralded symbolic moment when their country might at last escape old stereotypes of being the hapless "poor man of Asia"; a preyed-upon "defenseless giant"; victim of a misguided Cultural Revolution; the benighted land where in 1989 the People's Liberation Army fired on "the people." In one grand, symbolic stroke, the Olympic aura promised to help cleanse China's messy historical slate, overthrow its legacy of victimization and humiliation, and allow the country to spring forth on the world stage reborn —"rebranded" in contemporary parlance—as the great nation it once had been, and has yearned for so long to once more become.

....

When I asked Chen Shi-Zheng if in making his film he intended to draw any parallels to the present and the Games, he replied:

I'm not involved with the Olympics, but I have, of course, thought a lot about them. After years of a modern history that because of colonization and Western domination have caused a certain sense of shame, the games presented themselves as an opportunity for China to show the world its strengths and greatness.

The protagonist in my movie is the embodiment of certain Chinese characteristics, a person who is ambitious and up-and-coming, but filled with self-doubt. When he does not pass his Ph.D. orals, it creates an unbearable pain.

.....

It was into this atmosphere of hopeful expectation that the Tibetan protests intruded. "Chinese felt: This is our time!" Chen Shi-Zheng told me.

And then, along come the Tibetan demonstrations, which made them feel as if they were again being thwarted, as if what they finally rightfully deserved was going to be denied.

......

What may be confusing to outsiders trying to make sense of all this is that despite China's stunning accomplishments, few Chinese of my acquaintance, at least, have yet allowed themselves to be psychologically convinced by China's success, to embrace a new national belief in China's establishment as a leading nation. To do this, I suppose, they would have to fully believe 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.

As Xu Guoqi suggests in Olympic Dreams, Olympic medals may not be the answer to what ails. "China," he writes,

has been obsessed with winning gold metals in major international competitions to demonstrate China's new status as an economic and political powerhouse....

Although China's pursuit of Olympic gold medals clearly coincides with the nation's journey toward internationalization and achieving new status in the world, the state-driven championship mentality still reflects a combination of Chinese can-do confidence and the country's lingering inferiority complex. A nation that obsesses over gold medals is not a self-assured nation.

Xu goes on to caution that

Beijing has used its so-called gold medal strategy to demonstrate China's rise in power and wealth, but the political system that the Communist Party has tried to legitimize through sports and other means cannot produce a healthy and strong nation when its citizens have been forced to give up their independence and even personal dignity.

....

Extract from: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21715