Chinese Nationalism in the Global Era

Christopher R. Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780415182652
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134672806
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Presenting an analysis of the tension between nationalism and globalization in China since the beginning of the 'reform and opening' period in the late 1970s to the present day, this book makes a unique contribution to the on-going debate on the nature of Chinese nationalism. It shows how nationalism is used to link together key areas of policy-making, including economic policy, national unification and foreign policy.

Hughes provides historical context to the debate by examining how nationalism became incorporated into the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1980s and the ways in which this strengthened and combined with globalization discourse through the domestic crisis of the Tiananmen Massacre and the external shock of the Cold War's conclusion. The different perspectives towards this resulting orthodoxy are discussed, including those of the state and dissent in mainland China and the alternative views from Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Based on Chinese sources throughout, this book offers a systematic treatment of Chinese nationalism, providing conceptual insights that allow the reader to grasp the complex weave of Chinese nationalist sentiment today and its implications for the future.

1
The globalisation of nationalism under ‘reform and opening’

By the time Mao Zedong died on 9 September 1976, China’s population had suffered the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Sixty per cent of the people had to survive on less than the internationally accepted poverty line of one US dollar per day. Productivity in agriculture and industry was either standing still or in decline. There were serious economic imbalances across the country, with underdevelopment of the western regions creating a huge drain on the eastern economy. The non-Han populations who populated the border regions suffered deeper feelings of alienation than most after being subjected to nation-building through ‘class struggle’. In foreign affairs, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) not only had tense relations with both superpowers, it had even alienated the non-aligned states, thanks largely to attempts to export Maoism. Meanwhile, the military was more of a bloated and inefficient welfare system engaged in maintaining domestic political stability than a professional fighting force.

Before these deep-seated problems could be addressed, the CCP had to resolve the issue of the leadership succession. After the fall of the ‘Gang of Four’, this was the subject of intense factional conflict between acting chairman Hua Guofeng and the supporters of Deng Xiaoping. Deng’s supporters could portray Hua Guofeng as a dogmatist slavishly bound to Mao’s policies and ideology. This strategy was complicated, however, by the fact that Hua was also a moderniser, insofar as he had previously worked with Deng and Zhou Enlai on formulating the ‘Four Modernisations’ of agriculture, industry, defence, and science and technology. Under Hua’s leadership, this had been announced as the new policy orientation when the first Session of the Fifth National People’s Congress convened in February and March 1978. Moreover, as Acting Chairman, Hua actively promoted foreign investment and the expansion of links with the non-socialist states, trying to achieve industrial modernisation through the wholescale importation of foreign plant and capital in a way that allowed his critics to christen his policies the ‘Foreign Leap Forward’ (yang maojin).

In this situation, the ‘thought emancipation’ campaign launched by Deng Xiaoping’s supporters to discredit acting chairman Hua Guofeng’s reliance on Mao’s authority could never be a mere call for ‘pragmatism’. The claim that ‘practice is the sole criterion for testing truth’ was, Deng asserted, ‘a debate about ideological line, about politics, about the future and the destiny of our party and nation’ (1984b: 154). Deng placed ‘thought emancipation’ in the CCP’s narrative of national salvation when he pointed out that the slogan ‘seek truth from facts’ had been presented to the Central Party School in Yan’an during the war against Japan (1984c:58). Deng’s political programme, moreover, could be presented as the restoration of continuity with the ‘period before and after Liberation’, when the collectivisation of agriculture and the nationalisation of industry had brought to a peak the Party’s triumphs in the civil war and the conflict with Japan. The struggle against the bourgeois class had been rendered obsolete. As Deng told a national conference on education in April 1978, that had been a time when the young ‘were filled with love for their motherland, for the people and for labour, science and public property, and they struggled heroically and resourcefully against bad elements and enemies, setting the tone for the new era’ (1984d:121).

Calling for selfless devotion to the nation was a way to justify key elements of Deng’s reform programme, such as the introduction of greater agricultural incentives, dismantling the commune system, introducing ‘responsibility systems’ and developing an elitist education system. As well as deploying an atavistic patriotism, though, Deng also had to articulate an ideological dispensation for the future that could win the loyalty of those sections of the population upon whose expertise modernisation would depend. He thus reassured the education conference that schools would no longer be the field of class struggle, but were to be used to build an army of working-class intellectuals combining the virtues of being both ‘red and expert’, capable of mastering and advancing modern science, culture and the new technologies in order to ‘transform China into a modern and powerful socialist country and ultimately defeat bourgeois influences in the superstructure’ (1984d:120). When he spoke at a national science conference in December that year, he insisted that ‘experts’ would no longer be contrasted negatively with those who had bona fide ‘red’ political credentials, because ‘If a person loves our socialist motherland and is serving socialism and the workers, peasants and soldiers of his own free will and accord, then it should be said that he has begun to acquire a proletarian world outlook’ (1984e:107–8).

After Deng had consolidated his leadership position in December 1978, he had to develop his appeal to patriotism in a way that could manage the growing dissatisfaction spreading among broader sections of the urban population. He began to do this in March 1979, when he marked the suppression of the Beijing Spring Democracy Wall movement by delivering a speech on the ‘Four Cardinal Principles’ within which political discussion would be permitted (1984f). These principles of ‘keep to the socialist road’, ‘uphold Party leadership’, ‘uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat’, and ‘uphold Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought’, were drawn from the Communist lexicon. Yet they make only a passing commitment to socialism, compared to the emphasis that is placed on patriotism. The commitment to public ownership expressed in the explanation of ‘keeping to the socialist road’ pales beside his portrayal of socialism as being important in the first place because, ‘socialism and socialism alone can save China—this is the unshakeable historical conclusion that the Chinese people have drawn from their own experience in the 60 years since the May Fourth Movement’ (1984f:174–5), referring to the 1919 student demonstrations in Peking against the transfer of German concessions in China to Japan at Versailles.

Furthermore, ‘Party leadership’ and the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ are not explained in terms of a struggle between clearly defined social classes, but against an enemy conceived as a ragbag collection of ‘counter-revolutionaries, enemy agents, criminals and other bad elements of all kinds who undermine socialist public order, as well as new exploiters who engage in corruption, embezzlement, speculation and profiteering’. Advocates of human rights are discredited as the stooges of foreign powers, contemptible for their supposed links with pernicious outside influences and inviting intervention in China’s internal affairs. To make China turn towards capitalism, he warned, such people will seek political asylum overseas and make contact with KMT agents sent from Taiwan and abroad to plot sabotage (1984f:181). Faced by such enemies, who are supposed to have developed inseparable links with the international forces of imperialism and hegemonism, it is inconceivable that the army, public security organs, courts and prisons can be allowed to ‘wither away’ (1984f:176–7).

As for upholding ‘Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought’, this does not refer to the ideas of the man who had engineered the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and internationalism. It meant remembering the leader who had allowed the Chinese people to ‘stand up’ in 1949, the statesman who had formulated the strategy of differentiating the ‘three worlds’ and personally ushered in a new stage in Sino-American and Sino-Japanese relations. These elements of Mao’s heritage were further elaborated when the orthodox version of the past appeared in the form of the Resolution on CCP History (1949–81), two years later. In this document, the essence of Mao Zedong thought was presented as the principles ‘to seek truth from facts’, the ‘mass line’, and ‘independence’. The first of these had already become a safer formula than ‘thought emancipation’, because it could be presented to mean that the answers to China’s problems have to be found in Chinese experience and not in foreign teaching. The ‘mass line’, which had traditionally meant that the Party should canvass the opinions of the general population when developing its policies, was now presented as proof that the Party ‘exists and fights for the interests of the people’. ‘Independence’ was taken to represent Mao’s belief that China must find its own path to modernity, rejecting any kind of interference in national sovereignty.

Patriotism and policy-making

Deng set out the ‘three major tasks’ for the future in his speech to the Central Committee in January 1980 on ‘The Present Situation and the Tasks Before Us’. These were: ‘oppose hegemonism and strive to preserve world peace’, strive for ‘the return of Taiwan to the motherland for China’s unification’, and ‘step up economic construction’ (1984g: 224–5). It is possible to interpret this formula as establishing the priority of economic development over politics, because it presents the argument that unification depends on whether China can catch up economically with the developed countries (Zheng 1999:17). Deng certainly puts economic development first, when he states:

…in the final analysis, the two tasks of opposing hegemonism and reunifying the country by achieving the return of Taiwan to the motherland both require that we do well in our economic development. Of course, we have to handle our other affairs well too, but economic development is primary.

(1984g:225)

Yet there is another way in which Deng’s presentation of ‘economic construction’ as the condition for achieving unification and opposing international hegemony creates a link between patriotism and policy-making that has far-reaching implications for the ideology of ‘reform and opening’. This is the implication that economic development is merely the condition for achieving the higher goals of foreign and unification policy. National unification and opposing international hegemony thus become criteria for measuring the success of the reforms. Questioning economic policy becomes forbidden not due to any departure from socialist principles, but because it will weaken China internationally and prevent unification. This makes it unpatriotic to question the movement towards a market-based economy.

The nationalist force of this speech is further illustrated by the way in which Deng goes to some lengths in deploying themes drawn from the Party’s narrative of the nation’s salvation, locating himself in the tradition of national fathers that runs through Mao to the ‘National Father’ Sun Yatsen. He does this by reminding his audience how China used to be described as a ‘heap of loose sand’ until ‘the CCP came to power and rallied the whole country around it, bringing to an end the disunity resulting from the partitioning of the country by various forces’ (1984g:252), a metaphor that had been used by both Sun Yatsen and Mao Zedong. Looking to the future, he continues to emphasise patriotism, when he insistes that the ‘Four Modernisations’ of agriculture, industry, defence, and science and technology cannot be achieved unless a political line is maintained according to the principle: ‘Unite the people of all our nationalities and bring all positive forces into play so that we can work with one heart and one mind, go all out, aim high and achieve greater, faster, better and more economical results in building a modern, powerful socialist country.’

Again, little is said about the meaning of socialism in this formula, other than that it will express its superiority first and foremost though the rate of economic growth and the high degree of efficiency it delivers through development of the productive forces (1984g:233–5). This theme was to be developed over the following years as patriotism was adapted to globalisation discourse. Welfarism is rejected in favour of public recognition and material rewards for those individuals and organisations that make outstanding contributions according to the principle of ‘to each according to his work’, with some parts of the population and certain localities becoming well-off before others. For Deng, socialist ideology has come to mean not much more than immunising an increasingly professionalised elite against the infiltration of bourgeois ideology as relations are developed with the capitalist world. In the process, the dissidents of Democracy Wall can be discredited by comparing their activities with the fanatics of the Cultural Revolution. Such behaviour is condemned when what is needed is ‘stability and unity’ and the spirit to ‘work hard with a pioneering spirit’.

Patriotism between foreign policy and unification

In January 1980 there were good reasons for Deng to establish this linkage between patriotism, reform and policy-making. Above all, Deng had gained a good deal of personal kudos from the normalisation of relations with Washington on 1 January 1979, having steered negotiations on the issue since the deterioration of Zhou Enlai’s health in the early 1970s. His visit to Washington to mark the event had been used as a publicity coup, with images of Deng receiving the nine-gun salute on the White House lawn broadcast to the PRC by satellite (Hsu 1983:72). Conceptually, moreover, Deng could identify with Mao’s vision of international politics as power-balancing between the ‘three worlds’ of the superpowers, the developing countries of the Third World and an intermediate zone of developed countries (Mao 1998:454). Deng had presented this theory to the United Nations General Assembly in 1974, and restated it in December 1977 when he argued that China could contribute to the struggle against international hegemonism because the United States was pre-occupied with Soviet expansionism and on the defensive after its defeat in Southeast Asia (1984i:92–3). In his speech on upholding the Four Cardinal Principles, Deng had used the theory of the three worlds to justify the ‘defensive counter-attack’ against Vietnam, reminding his audience that Mao had called for China ‘to side with the third world countries and strengthen its unity with them, try to win over the second-world countries for a concerted effort against hegemonism, and establish normal diplomatic relations with the United States and Japan’ (1984f:168).

Given that the theory of the three worlds is a product of the elements of statecraft in Mao Zedong’s diplomacy, it was also useful for establishing a positive appraisal of Mao’s foreign policy, even during the Cultural Revolution. It was made public that Deng himself had insisted that the definitive judgement of the past that was to appear in the form of the 1981 Resolution on Party History, should stress that these years had seen the improvement in China’s status as a great nation, the visits of Henry Kissinger, the signing of the Shanghai Communiqué with the United States, return to the United Nations, restoration of diplomatic relations with Japan, and the warm reception that Deng had received when he addressed the UN General Assembly in 1974 (1984h:291). The drafters of the Resolution duly complied with Deng’s wishes, stating that Mao’s last years were a period ‘when our country remained unified and exerted a significant influence on international affairs’ and when Mao Zedong’s ‘correct foreign policy’ correctly stood up to the ‘pressure of the social-imperialists’ and ‘firmly supported the just struggles of all peoples, outlined the correct strategy of the three worlds and advanced the important principle that China would never seek hegemony’ (41–2).

The state-centric nature of the fluid international situation described by the ‘three worlds’ was developed further by the revival of the formula of the ‘Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence’, namely: respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty; mutual non-aggression; mutual non-interference in internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful coexistence. This has a certain resonance in domestic politics because the Five Priniciples formula is attributed to Zhou Enlai, reinforcing continuity with the popular face of the CCP’s past and making a ready counterpart to Zhou’s Four Modernisations. When Deng revived the slogan of ‘seeking truth from facts’ during the leadership struggle in September 1978 (1984j:141–4), he presented Mao’s theory of the three worlds as useful in domestic politics for distinguishing the correct attitude of maintaining the international conditions that enable the importation of foreign capital, technology and know-how, as opposed to the incorrect branding of economic relations with other countries as a kind of ‘national betrayal’ (1984j: 142). Over the years that followed, references to both proletarian internationalism and the three worlds were to be eclipsed by the Five Principles, which came to encapsulate the sovereignty-centred nature of PRC foreign policy.

The strong attachment to the principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention also meant that the Five Principles could be tied in with the ...

Table of contents

• Politics in Asia series
• Contents
• Note on romanisation
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The globalisation of nationalism under ‘reform and opening’
• 2 After 1989
• 3 Globalisation and its discontents
• 4 What kind of a status quo power?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index