patriotic education

how far does it go?

Most of the peoples of the world are proud of the countries where they live. It’s a pretty basic statement, I realize, but nationalism—devotion to one’s country as Dictionary.com defines it—is pretty ubiquitous because people around the world love the place from which they spring. In this country, for instance, we view our commitment to our country as pretty wholesome expression of goodness. Of course there are exceptions but I am pretty confident in this assessment.

An observation some have made is that we substitute patriotism for nationalism in our speech about what we are supporting. We see ourselves as patriotic rather than nationalist. We tend to prefer that term rather than nationalism which Americans find uncomfortable, indicative of something unseemly or over the top dangerous. After all, hasn’t nationalism been the cause of multiple wars throughout history?

Patriotism is our pride in our flag, our people, and our dedication to ideals we hold so dear. For generations we saw patriotism as linked to our commitment to defend the Constitution, for example. We view ourselves as uniquely determined to pursue good and the ideals of altruism. Americans respond to others in need: remember how many flew Ukrainian flags in February 2022 or how many still put an Israeli flag around their avatars on Facebook? We fly our flags, adorn our lapels with flag pins, and proudly focus on what we can do when we put our minds to it. This has been our heritage and will remain our future in our national psyche.

Patriotism is also a term China uses. We are currently seeing, however, is that patriotism can have some dangerous aspects. Just yesterday, The Wall Street Journal published several disturbing recent incidents in the Middle Kingdom bound to lead to the question of whether this patriotic education is creating a dangerous trend, if not international incidents.

Patriotic thought is always an instrument of the CCP (celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary in power on Tuesday), a reminder of what the foreigners did to the country beginning in the early 1800s. At that time, the story goes, foreigners, under the guise of the First Opium War, humiliated China on the Pearl River, then forced the Qing Dynasty to sign an agreement to open several China’s ports to foreigners. In defeating the Qing, the British, followed by Europeans and Japanese, perpetrated incalculable injustice against the Chinese people by thwarting the Qing dynasty’s ability to govern effectively. China’s cosmology always put the Middle Kingdom, qingguo, in the central player between the Heavens (not in a religious sense but as the great unknown above man) and the mere mortals on earth (us outside of China). China held a special, unique role in the world that foreigners sought to destroy to advance their civilizations against the Sinic one so dominant and successful for five thousand years.

With the Qing’s fall in October 1911, successor leaders were similarly unable to protect the Chinese people from outside fates or to return the appropriate respect to qingguo until the CCP won the civil war against western-supported Guomindang with the establishment of the PRC on 1 October 1949. The Party acknowledges advances of the five generations of CCP General Secretaries—Mao Zedong (1949-1976), Deng Xiaoping (1978-1992), Jiang Zemin (1992-2002) Hu Jintao (2002-2012) and the current master, Xi Jinping starting in November 2012. Without those individuals and their heavily lauded brilliance in charting a course for the nation under the unswerving eye of the Party, China would be the same economically and technologically retarded place the Communists found when they defeated the weak Guomindang at the end of the Civil War. Mao proclaimed in front of the gate into the Forbidden City in 1949 that “China has stood up”, with the Communist Party of China being the reason.

This narrative, whether official history or communal lore, requires a heavy dose of vehemently anti-foreign reminders. The Century of Humiliation is a retelling of western powers using the Treaty Ports (Shanghai, Amoy [today’s Xiamen], Canton [Guangzhou], Fuzhou, and Ningbo) to facilitate their citizens having entré to corrupt China by selling opium, taking advantage of trade, and establishing extraterritoriality where China’s laws did not apply to outsiders. Countless western powers perpetrated this on the unsuspecting, innocent Chinese: Britain, Germany, Italy, France, Russia, and others.

In particular, the Party today stresses two nations’ behaviors as emblematic of the painful and disrespectful actions by foreigners—Japan and the United States (currently allies, of course). Sino-Japanese hatred is hard to overstate; the cruel actions by Japanese soldiers on the Chinese mainland from 1931 to 1945 is noteworthy. No one in Asia is entirely comfortable with Japan eighty years later as the memories of atrocities run deep and wide but the bad feelings in the Middle Kingdom and Korea (where Japan colonized in 1910) have been the worst.

Additionally, Japan and China long struggled over dominance in northeast Asia, exacerbated when Japan took Taiwan as part of the settlement in 1895 under the Treaty of Simonseki after the Imperial Fleet defeated the Chinese; the humiliation is a long, bitter memory for China and the animosity is old. China detests Japan; Japanese nationalists more often than not respond in kind. Just this week, incoming Prime Minister Ishiba’s mention of an Asian NATO won’t help in the least as Beijing will know it’s aimed at China.

The U.S. relationship is more complicted. While China recognizes that billions of dollars of American assistance FDR sent to the Guomindang under Chiang Kai Shek to defeat the Imperial War machine, the Americans had their own role in the Century of Humiliation.

We also sold opium, just not on Sundays, in China. Thousands of U.S. missionaries went to “save Chinese souls” as if we were asked to do so. One of ours is supposed to have been the source of the Bible that led a misguided Hakka convert to believe himself the younger son of Jesus, thus launching a civil war that killed 20-30 million in the middle 1800s. Our traders lived in the International Settlement of Shanghai, subject not to Chinese law but under the extraterritoriality that ignored acts of violence against the local citizens by drunken Americans. To the Chinese, our actions looked little different from those of any other neo-colonializing power humiliating the people. Following the Boxer Rebellion attempt to reassert sovereignty in 1900, we sent Army personnel to China to defend U.S. citizens and sailed U.S. Navy vessels on the Yangzi River, again acts of a bigger power embarrassing a far weaker one.

The United States did engage in several uniquely beneficial actions in China, such as plowing the reparations from the Boxer period back into educational opportunities for local students, but these actions were fewer than the steps patriots there saw as humiliation.

The current attacks on foreigners are the culmination of several waves of “patriotism” and leadership-driven narratives which turned to anti-foreign violence. The erroneous 1999 attack on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade incited mob violence against the U.S. compound in the diplomatic quarter of Beijing, memorialized by a sad photograph of Ambassador James Sasser standing among broken windows looking out on the streets. A friend with decades’ experience had the chutzpah to be a foreigner amid the frenzy; he said no one took note of his blue Irish eyes as they were too busy being riled up. The government bussed people in for the event, then broke up the gathering when enough glass broke to make the point to the round eyes, a common phrase Chinese use for Americans.

While the Beijing scene led to broken glass, the same incident incited a crowd to burn down our Consulate in Chengdu, a definite escalation which may or may not have exceeded government expectations.

In 2005, vast protests broke out against Japanese-owned stores across the big cities. I was in Beijing at the tail end of the tension as miles of concertina wire across the Diplomatic Quarter reminded everyone that the need to dial things back was real. CCP officials found deescalation mechanisms but never curtailed perfidious words their own rhetoric about Tokyo’s actions across the centuries.

My husband witnessed a fascinating display of “patriotic education” in Chonqing years ago. He saw, at a museum on the Three Gorges Dam, a field trip of elementary school children sitting through a diorama simulating an attack on the audience, as if they were living in Chonqing in 1943. He noted the growing anxiety and accompanying screams as the simulated attack proceeded, leaving an indelible mark on those in attendance. The Nanjing Holocaust Museum has a similar effect when one walks across an entry way constructed of solid glass revealing skulls below, an enduring reminder of the 1937 Rape of Nanjing.

Beginning in about 2010, as the Obama administration talked about rebalancing to the Pacific, a decided cooling towards Americans on the part of average citizens became clear in the cities of China. Finding a cab driver willing to take an American fare (westerners all look alike, after all) after an evening out became almost impossible. Beijing has a superb metro system so taxi transportation was not absolutely essential but a message of growing unhappiness with Americans was clear, much as the local guards subtly increased their harassment of anyone approaching the new Embassy at the same time. Americans were not welcome as they had been years before.

The Journal article this week reminds everyone that “patriotic education” is a staple in China today, a probable cause for three stabbings in recent months. The September murder of a ten year old Japanese (and half Chinese) boy may be a harbinger of further deaths. The attack took place in Shenzhen, the vast industrial city created on the Pearl River, where many foreigners lived in the glory years of large-scale manufacturing for export. The attack occurred on the heels of CCP criticism of Japan’s decision to release water from its crippled Fukishima nuclear power, comments covered widely on state-run media.

The article notes that anti-Japan sentiment is common in Chinese schools, particularly over the past half decade as Xi Jinping repeated argued that foreigners present dangers by permeating the educational system with bad ideas to undermine China. The state-monitored internet similarly post lewd stories about actions foreigners pursue to hurt the PRC. Attempts to address the murder of the ten-year old or show sympathy for his family, much less ask for a reconsideration of “patriotic education”, became targets themselves of hatred by netizens who monitor the world through the lens of the Chinese internet. Overall, the reaction has been that the Japanese, perpetrators of horrible acts against the Chinese nation over the past hundred years, deserved these actions as if this youngster the instigator rather than collateral damage. The ends justify the means, in other words.

Similarly, other attacks earlier in the summer highlighted the danger of Americans and Japanese operating in the Middle Kingdom. A man on the street attacked four American academics in Jilin in June, although without fatalities. Another Japanese citizen living in Suzhou, a city where many Japanese actually live, also suffered a knife attack in June but received little popular support from neighbors as anti-Japanese tropes spread on the web as if the knifing were normal intercourse in twenty-first century world.

Putting the word out to blame the foreigners is not uniquely Chinese nor is patriotic nationalism, although China currently excels at unleashing anger at outsiders. The Party carefully calibrates what it tolerates but always worries that mass gatherings, particularly involving violence, could redirect against unpopular CCP governance. Sadly, the danger of some elements within any society turning their nationalist anger to violence is an enduring threat around the world. The CCP is willing to stoke the anger with relative confidence it can shut off protests when it deems the power of threatening social stability. Nothing guarantees they will judge that moment correctly or that significant force would not be required to prevent the creation of international incidents.

The tolerance for social protests are unique to each society. Similarly, a risk exists that peaceful actions breed such intense violence as to unleash violence against any foreigners. How much of this violence results from rhetoric the Party condones, if not propagates but how much is sui generis from a society undergoing much stress, discontent, and hopelessness? How much of it results from the competition with a United States determined not to cede Asia to China while the Chinese want a far lower U.S. decision-making role? Is the anti-U.S. sentiment linked to our growing shadow-boxing around the world?

At the same time, following the COVID pandemic, reports of anti-Asian attacks rose across the United States. Anti-Semitistic attacks have been on the rise for years as well. While our government does not incite such actions as the CCP does through its preferred narrative and its actions in schools, the increased propensity for public figures, sometimes including individuals in public office, to use anti-foreigner rhetoric is similarly worrying. The result of violence can be precisely the same once unleashed. It will similarly be hard to control if it becomes accepted behavior.

I am not equating us with China but I am worried about how pervasive our discussions of violent retribution are of late.

Actions can create horrifying consequences. Words matter whether they are in schools, in churches/synagogues/mosques/temples or anywhere publics gather, on the floor of Congress, or in relationships. China is clearly not controlling theirs but how are we doing?

I welcome your thoughts on this or any other column. Please feel free to circulate this column if you find it of value. Thank you for your time. Thanks also to the subscribers.

Be well, get outside for the weekend, and be safe. FIN

Wenxin Fan, “China’s patriotic rhetoric takes a violent turn”, WallStreetJournal.com, 3 October 2024, retrieved at https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-patriotic-rhetoric-takes-a-violent-turn-6266ca09?mod=china_news_article_pos3