China watcher Orville Schell shows us the danger of China watching in his July 26 Newsweek essay, “China’s Agony of Defeat.”
After describing China’s “100 years of national humiliation”—the Chinese feel shamed by foreign invasions at the end of the Qing dynasty—as well as other tragic events in the country’s recent history, Schell gives us general advice on how to deal with today’s angry populace and their touchy rulers. “While honest criticisms should not be muted just because Chinese leaders find them grating, we foreigners should be mindful of this complex psychological landscape,” he writes, channeling Kissinger. “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.”
So is China’s angry outlook really our fault? Almost all Chinese, whether living inside the People’s Republic or not, carry with them some sense of historical grievance. For instance, after listening most of my life to stories told by my father, relatives, and friends about the wartime Japanese, I do.
Yet the Chinese government, especially after Mao’s death, has taught the nation’s young a history of half-truths, distortions, and outright lies. And that is why anti-foreigner sentiment is far stronger among China’s Chinese than among Chinese growing up elsewhere—and why it is stronger among China’s youth than its older generations, who have greater justification for nursing grievance.
The solution, therefore, is not for foreigners to cower in the presence of angry Chinese. On the contrary, we should tell them to get over it. There is no point to legitimizing Beijing’s largely fabricated version of historical events. And we only deceive ourselves when we believe that the Chinese will develop a more “self-assured sense of nationhood” while their government continues to lie about their past.
