Never Forget National Humiliation

Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations

Zheng Wang

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231520164
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Relazioni internazionali

How could the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) not only survive but even thrive, regaining the support of many Chinese citizens after the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989? Why has popular sentiment turned toward anti-Western nationalism despite the anti-dictatorship democratic movements of the 1980s? And why has China been more assertive toward the United States and Japan in foreign policy but relatively conciliatory toward smaller countries in conflict?

Offering an explanation for these unexpected trends, Zheng Wang follows the Communist government's ideological reeducation of the public, which relentlessly portrays China as the victim of foreign imperialist bullying during "one hundred years of humiliation." By concentrating on the telling and teaching of history in today's China, Wang illuminates the thinking of the young patriots who will lead this rising power in the twenty-first century.

Wang visits China's primary schools and memory sites and reads its history textbooks, arguing that China's rise should not be viewed through a single lens, such as economics or military growth, but from a more comprehensive perspective that takes national identity and domestic discourse into account. Since it is the prime raw material for constructing China's national identity, historical memory is the key to unlocking the inner mystery of the Chinese. From this vantage point, Wang tracks the CCP's use of history education to glorify the party, reestablish its legitimacy, consolidate national identity, and justify one-party rule in the post-Tiananmen and post–Cold War era. The institutionalization of this manipulated historical consciousness now directs political discourse and foreign policy, and Wang demonstrates its important role in China's rise.

1

HISTORICAL MEMORY, IDENTITY, AND POLITICS

IN THE workings of social life, the past does not always exist as a hard, objective, or factual reality—something “out there” to be grasped and appropriated.¹ The past is not solid, immutable, or even measureable; rather, it is a fluid set of ideas, able to be shaped by time, emotion, and the politically savvy. Furthermore, we seldom step back from our own cultures to assess their components—the stories that shape our thinking. We therefore often overlook the role that history and memory play in the present. However, in many societies, including China’s, collective memory and the political use of history serve very important functions both inside the social group and in the group’s interactions with other groups.

While exploring the sources, dynamics, and structures of contemporary conflict, some scholars have paid special attention to the power of historical memory over human thoughts, feelings, and actions. This is especially apparent in studies relating to the remarkable proliferation of deadly conflicts between ethnic groups after the end of the Cold War. For example, Irish historian Ian McBride writes that “in Ireland, the interpretation of the past has always been at the heart of national conflict.”² Victor Roudometof of the University of Cyprus believes that “the conflicting ethnocentric national narratives of the different sides have generated the Greek-Bulgarian-Macedonian dispute of 1990s.”³ According to Gerrit W. Gong, remembering and forgetting issues have come to shape international relations in East Asia.⁴ For Polish historian Jerzy Jedlicki, “The twentieth-century history of Eastern Europe is a perfect laboratory to observe how the genuine or apparent remembrances of the past may aggravate current conflicts and how they themselves are modified in the process.”⁵ From Eastern Europe to the Middle East and East Asia, these case studies illustrate that many intractable conflicts are deeply rooted in the history and memory of the involved parties. Without paying close attention to history and memory, any conflict resolution process is bound to fail.

Although many world conflicts have their genesis in the history and memory of various factions, the role this concept plays in national politics and international relations remains a decidedly understudied field. The insights into the theories of historical memory are scattered among diverse bodies of literature on history, politics, culture, philosophy, and communication. The reasons for this relative lack of attention to historical memory vary widely across different disciplines. In history, Roudometof argues that the long-standing tradition of seeking “scientific objectivity” has not allowed the examination of historical writing in relation to the articulation of collective memory until recently.⁶ In sociology and anthropology, the legacy of pioneers such as Emile Durkheim and Maurice Halbwachs “was eclipsed in mid-twentieth century by the more empirically oriented and positivist tradition of U.S. mainstream sociology.”⁷

Ideas (including historical memory and other ideational factors) have been underestimated—if not entirely ignored—in the field of international relations. This is because the most current and widely accepted systemic approaches to the study of international relations are realism and liberal institutionalism. Both of these approaches take rationalist models as their starting points and focus on how structures affect the instrumental rationality of actors. In such models, the preferences and causal beliefs of actors are a given. Most analysts who rely on such approaches have relegated ideas to only a minor role.⁸

In fact, how ideational factors affect international relations has been one of the most bewildering puzzles for scholars. Progress in incorporating cognitive variables into empirical research on decision making has been relatively slow and uneven.⁹ Scholars who have struggled with this question list three factors that may pose difficulties to research that uses identity as a variable. First, the existence of identity as a universal but largely implicit concept makes it difficult to isolate and understand.¹⁰ This is because identities and perceptions may influence decision-making behavior but do not unilaterally determine such behavior. They are only one variable cluster within a rich and complex causal framework for explaining decision making.¹¹ Second, it is extremely difficult to find a one-to-one correlation between perceptions and behavior.¹² And third, when identities are measured, the techniques used (large-N surveys, interviews with policy makers, ethnographic fieldwork) are typically not available to social scientists who study elites in closed or semiclosed states.

In this chapter, I will review the major studies that make up the theoretical framework for understanding the politics of historical memory and will present an assessment of the current state of the field. I focus here on understanding the function of historical memory in group identity formation and how historical memory influences people’s perceptions, interpretations, and decision-making processes, especially in a conflict or crisis situation. The literature and theories presented will help relate the Chinese cases to global contexts and will also introduce general theoretical frameworks for the analysis of empirical data.

In an effort to meet the challenge of conducting systematic research on historical memory, I have created two frameworks for research, based on the existing literature on historical memory and theories of identity and beliefs. The first is a method of measuring historical memory as a collective identity. A set of research questions is presented to measure whether and how the content of historical memory serves as four types of identity content:

1. Constitutive norms (norms or rules that define group membership)

2. Relational content (references and comparisons to other identities or groups)

3. Cognitive models (content that affects the way group members interpret and understand the world)

4. Social purpose (content that provides the group socially appropriate roles to perform)

Each of these four types of identity content implies an alternate causal pathway between this collective identity and policy behaviors or practices.

The second framework is a set of questions examining the function of historical memory in people’s perceptions, interpretations, and decision-making processes. According to this framework, there are three causal pathways in which the beliefs or ideas of historical memory can serve to influence political actions:

1. As road maps that increase actors’ clarity about goals or ends-means relationships

2. As focal points, by facilitating the cohesion of particular groups or by causing conflict and constituting difficulties to the settlement of the conflict

3. As institutionalized ideas and beliefs that constrain policy when embedded in political institutions and in patterns of political discourse

With these two frameworks for research, I hope to provide a model by which researchers can conduct a more rigorous study of historical memory. These frameworks can help categorize and subsequently demonstrate the effects of historical memory. They have been used throughout this book as a way to prove that historical memory is not just a post hoc rationalization of behavior motivated by national interests but rather a direct source of policy behavior motivation. It is my hope that these frameworks will be useful not only for those interested in historical memory but also for those interested in China’s foreign relations specifically.

HISTORICAL MEMORY AND IDENTITY FORMATION

With the rise of sociological constructivism in the 1990s, historical memory and identity have received more attention because national identity is seen as determining national interests, which in turn determines policy and state action.¹³ A significant amount of literature on the politics of memory is centered on the role of historical memory in the formation of group membership and identity. Collective memory binds a group of people together, and the prime raw material for constructing ethnicity is history.¹⁴ According to Anthony D. Smith, ethnic, national, and religious identities are built on historical myths that define who a group member is, what it means to be a group member, and typically who the group’s enemies are.¹⁵ These myths are usually based on truth, but are selective or exaggerated in their presentation of history.

Group identity is also shaped in large part by certain struggles that a group has endured. These struggles can be classified as “chosen traumas” and “chosen glories.”¹⁶ According to Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung, key historical events are critical in defining a group’s identity and determining how that group behaves in conflict situations. Galtung identifies the categories of “chosenness” (the idea of being a people chosen by transcendental forces), trauma, and myths, which together form a syndrome: the Chosenness-Myths-Trauma (CMT) complex or, to use a more evocative term, the collective megalo-paranoia syndrome.¹⁷ Similarly, Vamik Volkan, a psychoanalyst at the University of Virginia, examines how individual identity is inextricably intertwined with one’s large-group (i.e., ethnic) identity and how mental representations of historical events shape this identity. Volkan identifies chosen traumas (the horrors of the past that cast shadows onto the future) and chosen glories (myths about a glorious future, often seen as a reenactment of a glorious past) as elements in the development of group identity.¹⁸

Chosen traumas and glories are passed on to succeeding generations by parents and teachers and through participation in ritualistic ceremonies recalling past successful or traumatic events.¹⁹ A group incorporates the memory of traumatic events into its identity, which leads one generation to pass enmity to the next. In other words, later generations share the suffering of past generations even though they did not take part in the actual traumatic events themselves.²⁰ Like chosen traumas, chosen glories become heavily mythologized over time.²¹ This is because they have the effect of forming bonds and connecting group members with their larger group, which increases members’ self-esteem by being associated with such glories.²²

There are three main approaches to looking at historical memory in identity formation: primordialist, constructivist, and instrumentalist. Following the first approach, some scholars assert that collective memory and identity are formed on the basis of the primordial ties of blood, kinship, language, and common history. These are objective cultural criteria that distinguish one group from another.²³ As Gong writes, “Transferring from generation to generation, history and memory issues tell grandparents and grandchildren who they are, give countries national identity, and channel the values and purposes that chart the future in the name of the past.”²⁴ Through the lens of primordialism, people often suggest that ethnic conflicts from many years ago and the “centuries of accumulated hatreds” are behind much present-day violence, such as the case of the China-Japan relationship.

Constructivists, on the other hand, view identity as manufactured rather than given and emphasize that ethnicity and identity are socially constructed. People choose a history and common ancestry and create, just as much as discover, differences from others. In The Past Is a Foreign Country, David Lowenthal argues that it is we, the contemporaries, who construct our past selectively and for a variety of reasons. According to Halbwachs, who conducted pathbreaking work on the subject, collective memory reconstructs its various recollections to align itself with contemporary ideas and preoccupations; in other words, the past is reconstructed with regard to the concerns and needs of the present.²⁵ Benedict Anderson argues that print languages laid the foundation for national consciousness by creating unified fields of exchange and communication.²⁶ According to him, print capitalism (the book market, mass media, etc.) linked people in disparate regions to a larger, imagined national community. People learn their group’s history not only from their parents or grandparents but from history books, mass media, and formal schooling as well.

In the third approach, history and memory can also be used instrumentally to promote the individual or collective interests of leaders. In their struggle for power, competing elites often use history as a tool to mobilize popular support. Ethnic categories can also be manipulated to maintain the power of a dominant group and justify discrimination against other groups. The manipulation of the past provides the opportunity to mold the present and the future. The instrumentalist approach treats ethnicity primarily as an ad hoc element of a political strategy, used as a resource by interest groups for achieving such goals as an increase in ...