Impact of culture & history on China's foreign policy - Part 5 Test of legitimacy

China's recent rise has made many uncomfortable with its direction as a world power.  The experience called China and its thinking are so very different to that in the West that misunderstanding is so easy, leading to unnecessary fear and unwarranted optimism.  If Russia is a riddle in an enigma, China is even more mysterious, with little contact with Western history until lately, different religion & philosophy and even different basis for its language.

While I am not a scholar or an expert in the field, I find most analysis of China's foreign policy ignores the history and culture of this great nation and so I will attempt to explain how China's foreign policy is rooted in its history and its culture.  The timeline of the Chinese dynasties here may help put things into historical perspective.  Also, by culture, I do not mean the arts, although that is an element, but I mean the way people think and behave in the social sphere.

The article got much longer than I expected and is now part of a five part series.  In the process I all realised that what I really want to do is to share insights into Chinese culture, philosophy and practices, which shaped and are shaped by its history.  Many non-Chinese observers view China as a mirror of their own experience but while there is much that the Chinese culture shares with the rest of the world, being part of the human world after all, there is also much that can be very alien to it.  And of course, a great deal lies in the middle - same drives expressed in different conditions.  So, I hope I can help the Western mind understand China using an examination of its foreign policy as a convenient vehicle.  You will need to keep this intention in mind as this series is not intended to be a complete thesis of all the topics it touches on. 

The first article in the series is here and the previous article is here.

Breakdown of government legitimacy

Every government coming into power anywhere in the world can only rule with legitimacy, with the consent of the ruled if you must.  And that legitimacy is governed within the context of a permanent social contract that governs the relationship between any transient ruler and the ruled.  Sometimes, consent are obtained under duress by the barrel of the gun, as military dictators are wont to do, but it is still a form of legitimacy nevertheless.  In China where the entrenched one-party rule made the ruler is no longer transient, legitimacy and social contract are one and the same thing: shifting between restoration of national pride and personal economic advancement depending on the political expediency of the day.

Legitimacy and geopolitics

While the early post-revolution wars were fought for ideological leadership for the mindshare of communists worldwide, today there is also an economic aspect to China's conflicts.  The government has identified key resources worldwide it need to own or control so as to continue the economic growth that underpins its legitimacy: from Australian minerals and rare earths elsewhere to undersea maritime resources.  In particular, the South China Sea which tianxia-cultured Chinese still see as its very own Southern seas, much like India seeks to ensure Indian Ocean is Indian.  The South China Sea disputes also potentially bring much oil and gas resources into play for the Chinese economy, resources China is desperately short.

Indians never hesitate to point out that China has ongoing border disputes with most of its neighbours - clockwise from north: the old Soviet Union, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bhutan, India and Tajikistan - that is 12 out of 22 land and maritime neighbours, ignoring less active ones that Indians like to list.  Oh, and communist China has also fought hot wars with four of its neighbours and two internally plus the on-and-off war to reclaim Taiwan - all in seven decades of its short communist history.  With the exception of the ongoing war with Xinjiang Islamists, China fought each of these wars by choice though of course provocation and justifications were claimed.  Each war was carefully calculated to an end in mind and accordingly propagandised to its populace.  War has always been a cornerstone of communist legitimacy.

The invasion of Vietnam in 1979 was a classic example of a tianxia war.  While geopolitical concerns over encirclement by Soviet client states probably was a some small consideration, the war's stated aims were to 'teach Vietnam a lesson' for occupying the Cambodia of the ardent Maoist Khmer Rouge.  The war only served to expose the woeful inadequacies of the PLA, with stories of human wave attacks against battle-hardened Vietnamese fighting on home territory.  But still, it was portrayed as a glorious triumph: a Chinese national I worked with expressed surprise when I told him that Vietnam won the war because he was taught about Chinese victory in school - but his response did betray some scepticism of the government line.  Today, China plays down the Sino-Vietnam war, so as not to invite examination of its military underperformance, its failure to achieve war aims (the Vietnamese stayed a decade in Cambodia until they left in a UN-brokered deal) and most importantly, its display of unjustified aggression against a neighbour, from an International law point of view.

The Sino-Indian War of 1962 had even less of a geopolitical aim other than ostensibly to build a road link between Xinjiang and Tibet in Aksai Chin, a region in the west end of the Himalaya mountain range which the Indian prime minister described before the war as a place where 'nothing grows there', indicating an absence of economic utility.  The Sino-Indian border at the eastern end of the Himalayas had not only little economic value but also no geo-political value: the dispute was over where in icy glaciers was the peak of the Himalaya range, which from ancient times was understood to be that arcane line separating China from India.  The trouble was that the border in both places, the Johnson Line and the Macmahon Line respectively, were drawn by British officers.  To make matters worse, the Macmahon Line in the east was really the result of consultations that officers of the British Raj in India had with the government of Tibet, at that time de facto independent but nominally under Chinese sovereignty - Beijing control was only militarily asserted by China in 1959.  Thus, the Sino-Indian conflicts were really initiated as a defiance against borders imposed on a weakened China as one of the unequal treaties, one imposed by that paragon of evil opium dealers, the Englishmen.

Foreign policy and legitimacy

The Chinese regime does not do anything on the basis of principles, at least not anymore since the pragmatic Deng took over.  While Western foreign policy is often ostensibly conducted on principles of democracy and human rights - ostensible being in bold because the underlying agenda could of course be decidedly different - Chinese foreign policy is transactional and principles-free.  The principle of non-intervention much touted by Chinese diplomats is really for the preservation of its ruling regime.  Which is why non-democratic leaders welcome Chinese scruples-free aid even if they burden their future generations with debts.  There really isn't much window dressing in China's foreign policy and is rather nakedly about self-interest: in that sense I find it refreshingly honest.  The different ways of conducting foreign policy is really due to fundamentally different world views and values systems created by culture: tianxia and Chinese pragmatism vs Westphalia system of nominally equal nation-states.  This is not to say that what drives the Chinese regime is reflective of attitudes of the Chinese population.  Especially that growing segment of better read youths grown up in the luxury of middle-class affluence, who often push the envelope of the social contract by raising values-based issues of concern even against interests within the Communist Party.

So, Chinese foreign policy is driven really by an amalgam of economic self-interest, restoration of past grandeur and revenge on foreigners who have wronged them.  The pragmatic nature of Chinese action, untempered by softer values, can be particularly brutal for the subjugated: over a million out of 13 million Uighurs are said to be in concentration camps.  Under tianxia, local interests even of recipients of economic or other aid, are always subordinate to those of China as there is no higher principles to appeal to.  While probably not an intention of the Belt and Road Initiative, China ended up owning a port in Sri Lanka, putting many other nations in wariness of China's motivations and methods.

Of late, a newly confident crop of diplomatic officials have taken the cue from Xi to conduct a highly aggressive form of diplomacy known as "Wolf warriors", the name taken from a Chinese series of movies of a Chinese Rambo-copy special forces team defeating American ex-SEAL mercenaries in the like-manner.  The highly successful movie franchise appeals to Chinese aspirations to beat Americans at their own game, extracting vengeance along the way for denying China's heaven-mandated place at the apex of the family of nations.  In that sense, aggressiveness of wolf warrior diplomacy is consistent with the growing segment of Chinese consciousness impatient with the dream of a return to world pre-eminence, now tantalisingly within reach due to its recent economic clout.

You can well imagine that wolf warrior diplomacy is not very well received by much of the rest of world, particularly its neighbours, and Xi has been forced to rein it back in.  American diplomacy is very much backed by its soft power projections, its overseas bases to project military power, and more importantly a world-wide network of military, economic and diplomatic alliances founded on a common worldview and values like democracy and human rights - both as sources of their own legitimacy and as demanded by their own constituents.  Despite its newly found confidence, China does not have the soft power projections Americans have or even the potential to challenge that soft power in the near future.

Soft power and legitimacy

Even countries within China's traditional cultural orbits are now wary adversaries with vastly different aspirations and values systems that do not hold to Chinese pre-eminence that they once did a long time ago.  Japan, Korea and even Singapore have more soft power than China's.  And the transactional nature of China's foreign policy does not make for the building of long-lasting alliances, the way that a common worldview and values system would do.

Discerning the trajectory of China's foreign policy in the short term is not too difficult.  The border disputes with its many neighbours are red lines which China has made clear with military moves: there is no room for negotiations.  Wolf warriors red lines, however, do not go down well in a diplomatic world used to negotiating pragmatically in civil conversations.  So far, Chinese economic ties and its more recent vaccine diplomacy has also drawn guarded acceptance from nations wary of the naked power projection agenda involved, except maybe by potentates eager for assistance without the scrutiny that comes with aid from Western institutions.  The lack of transparency over the origins of the Covid-19 virus, results of its vaccine tests and its initial slow reaction raised much suspicions and conspiracy theories over perceived Chinese motives, whatever the truth of the virus origins were.  This is not to say Chinese diplomats will not learn from these mistakes to do better in future but the glimpse into Chinese mindset and intentions afforded by the recent clumsy stumbles will likely keep potential partners chary well into the foreseeable future.

Though the Belt and Road Initiative is doubtlessly a tool of diplomacy, there is likely an economic rationale for its genesis: to export its overcapacity and provide employment for an overly weighted public investment sector.   Even if not born out of a clearly articulated policy, the ruling elites quickly surmised its potential and packaged it as Chinese largesse to recipients - much of which are loans not grants.  Photo ops of crates with Chinese characters outside the ship or plane at the port or airport with the Chinese national anthem played by the local band is certainly one that Chinese, ruling and ruled, relish.  So, while I may not subscribe to the theory that debt-trap diplomacy was the core reason for the Belt and Road Initiative, debt is certainly an intended by-product.  Debt and other controversies very much dented its efficacy in China's soft power projections.

Aside from the lure of economic partnerships, I would think Chinese soft power could be in the area of technology, which has garnered much respect for its quiet and rapid advancements in industrial, space and weaponry fields as well as the apps developed for its alternative internet.  At the present moment, much of this is retracing the same steps of successful Western efforts, picking off easy wins that do not depend on risky innovations: like adding more CPUs to make a more powerful supercomputer.   The Chinese space program look suspiciously similar to early Soviet and American space programs, scoring some firsts that both programs neglected like landing a probe on the far side of the moon.  Still, it remains to be seen how the Chinese system will work when it has to lead from the front and create its own roadmap instead of improving on success of others.  Tik Tok is very much the first significant Chinese social media app that has appealed in a novel way to non-Chinese consumers in a very crowded market, unlike Chinese copies of Amazon (Ali Baba), WhatsApp (WeChat), Facebook (Renren), Twitter (Weibo), Google (Baidu), etc that work well in a walled Chinese ecosystem - interesting that even the ecosystem itself is a Western copy.  It comes hot on the heels of Tencent quietly cornering parts of the gaming market in the Asian region through their business model of aggressive investments into teams, titles and local partners.

There is a constant leakage of Chinese soft power when success of Chinese stars take them out of China to escape state control.  Li Na, the first Chinese to win a tennis grand slam made no secret of the fact that she won in spite of the Chinese sports system and not because, earning her much opprobrium in the Chinese social media for any misstep she made.  Tik Tok was quick to consider cutting links with China when under pressure from the Trump administration.  Tencent's partnerships and investments into local players and teams in the region was very much due to its need to divest to outside of China to escape state control of the gaming ecosystem in China.  It is difficult to escape the feeling that the rhetoric will quieten pragmatically once you put a green card in the hands of a voluble proponent of Chinese supremacy.

Legitimacy and the regime

Changing the Chinese narrative for it to adopt the Westphalia model of equal nation-state requires a fundamental rethink in its social contract based on tianxia.  That means breaking the link between nationalism and legitimacy, between a future and a past which nationalism reimagines, between a national self-esteem and a hierarchical pre-eminence that tianxia is based on.  Such a fundamental shift would be difficult as it is a deep reach into the psyche of the nation and culture and likely, also a change in the current polity of the Communist Party, for which nationalism and the Century of Humiliation is embedded in its origin story.

Just as Zhou Enlai's reply of "It's too early to tell" to a question about the impact of the French Revolution (no, it was not Deng and it was likely a misunderstood question), it is still uncertain to me whether the People's Republic of China is the latest of China's long-lasting dynasties or just another long interregnum.  After all, in China's history, seven decades is a short while: they say only China and the Vatican think in centuries.  And they do - that is why diplomatic negotiations between these two parties take so long: it is in neither culture to feel hurried in these sort of things.  Anyway, in Chinese history, being an interregnum is not necessarily negative: although most interregnum is inherent unstable by Chinese standards, which may be considered very stable in Europe, an interregnum could still be a period when arts flourished and sinicisation progressed, as happened during the three-centuries long Six Dynasties period.

Unlike imperial governments of the past, technological and sociological advancements have enabled a tighter grip on restive provinces, even if it is still not enough to handle the task.  Modern techniques built on China's ability to marshal all human and material resources at its disposal, facilitated ambitions to build economic, technological, and tianxia-based political power to challenge America's global manifest destiny in that ultimate clash of exceptionalism.  Its control over the messaging and narrative means that it still has that iron grip on power via its social contract.  All government propaganda needs to do is to proclaim clearly its intentions and priorities on the many channels of its all-pervasive media & walled internet and the Chinese sense of pragmatism does the rest.

Dethroning Chinese imperial dynasties has never been easy and this current one has proven just as immovable.  The communist agenda has permeated through all parts of the Chinese society until it can be considered totalitarian without being arbitrarily mandatory.  The scrupulous observance of the social contract has kept the populace on its side in concert towards its ostensibly common aspiration.  The careful and proactive use of laws to rule has minimised naked and arbitrary use of power - the barrel of the communist gun is rarely visible in society but very clearly in the minds of people.

The process of dismantling communist power will likely be so tumultuous a revolution that the Chinese people with a Confucianist idea of social harmony may find it a cost too high to pay.  The omnipresent communist power means that merely taking over of levers of government, as was done in Russia, will not be enough.  Unlike the Communist Party of the Soviet Union where control and funding is clearly separate if symbiotic, most of the funding for the Chinese Communist Party comes directly from state activities and it is hard to identify which activity is party and which is state.  Most alarmingly, the entire military apparatus of the People's Liberation Army belongs to the party and civilian control is exerted by the Central Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party, not by a government minister.  The Defence Ministry does not exercise any control over the military but acts only as liaison with defence establishments in other countries.  This beats the Nazi system of parallel military formations or the Soviet system of embedded parallel chain of command via political commissars - the party does more than mirror the army or guide the military: it actually owns it.

Very critically, the party has over the decades positioned itself at the heart of Chinese life.  While membership is counted in the millions, it is still a relatively small proportion of the population - just under 10% of adults.  It used to be a requirement to have party membership to get ahead in your career in China but of late, the focus has been to get the best and the brightest of society to be part of the ruling elite, very much the model in Singapore.  The objective is a body of ultra-capable, ultra-motivated, ultra-loyal who is always strategically placed at all key decision-making points in the machinery of government and the economy.  to be mobilised at command.  It is not as insidious as being mobilised as shock troopers like the SS - after, they already own the army - but to engage the public and influence public opinion.  This makes disentangling the tentacles of the communist party from China all the more difficult.

Not that I am advocating armed rebellion: Chinese emperors have never hesitated to deploy all forces to ensure its continuity in power, with many layers in between insulating them from the consequences of their decrees - Beihaihe is big enough and secluded enough to mute any gunfire in Tiananmen Square.  I am just illustrating that the regime is entrenched by culture, by mechanism and so far, by consent of the ruled.  The party has successfully built its multi-layered defence for its continuing stay in power in a way no other government has.

The fear is that as the economy slows down and the Chinese Communist Party can no longer rely on personal economic advancement for its legitimacy, it may then have to turn to its other alternative legitimacy: restoration of national pride.  That inflection point may be near.  The first public event attended by all seven Standing Committee members of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee after Xi Jinping's accession to power in 2012 was a visit to the "Road to Revival" exhibition at the National Museum, no less a potent indication of his agenda in power.  At that visit, he was very explicit in his speech, later known as the "China Dream", contrasting the current capitalist development of China with its former backwardness and “humiliation” by foreign powers.  Under Xi, redressing past humiliation is very much a part of policy.

Centralising powers into a single person's cult of personality as Xi has done is very much a slippery slope.  Often, the autocrat eventually gets corrupted by power even after initial successes (think Mugabe, et al) or the machinery of absolute power is handed over to a successor less equipped to deal with the nuances and patronage demands to stay in power (think Maduro, Nicholas II, et al).  We all still hope for a new China to emerge peacefully, democratic in nature and reconciled with its past to give up its dreams of restoration of their imagined past.  But until, then the stability of the region will still depend on an oligarchy in Beidaihe imprisoned by China's long history and culture.

In conclusion, I hope I have illustrated how much Chinese foreign policy is entrenched in its history and culture, conducted by a regime with deep-roots into the mechanism of power and legitimacy.  Until something changes and the Chinese people find themselves at the raw end of a social contract deal, I cannot see mindset changed, and thus the foreign policy moderated.  China's neighbours and the wider world will need to work out a way to either live the lives of tributary states again or to more adequately defend their Westphalia-style independence from servitude to a power with a sense of self-predestined glory.

I also hope that this series has helped to illuminate the fascinating story of and fascinating stories from Chinese culture and history.  While it is not my intention to provide a complete account of the events mentioned in this series, I hope there is enough links for the reader to start their own journey of understanding and further delve into this very absorbing subject.  Many of the topics touched on is worthy of an article on itself and I apologise for my lack of competency to explore them further or my inability to otherwise maintain the flow of this engaging story.  I will be happy for anyone to contact me either on this site or directly to discuss, debate, dispute, disagree, correct or improve this topics talked about here

This is the last article of the series.

Impact of culture & history on China's foreign policy - Part 4 Challenges

China's recent rise has made many uncomfortable with its direction as a world power.  The experience called China and its thinking are so very different to that in the West that misunderstanding is so easy, leading to unnecessary fear and unwarranted optimism.  If Russia is a riddle in an enigma, China is even more mysterious, with little contact with Western history until lately, different religion & philosophy and even different basis for its language.

While I am not a scholar or an expert in the field, I find most analysis of China's foreign policy ignores the history and culture of this great nation and so I will attempt to explain how China's foreign policy is rooted in its history and its culture.  The timeline of the Chinese dynasties here may help put things into historical perspective.  Also, by culture, I do not mean the arts, although that is an element, but I mean the way people think and behave in the social sphere.

The article got much longer than I expected and is now part of a five part series.  In the process I all realised that what I really want to do is to share insights into Chinese culture, philosophy and practices, which shaped and are shaped by its history.  Many non-Chinese observers view China as a mirror of their own experience but while there is much that the Chinese culture shares with the rest of the world, being part of the human world after all, there is also much that can be very alien to it.  And of course, a great deal lies in the middle - same drives expressed in different conditions.  So, I hope I can help the Western mind understand China using an examination of its foreign policy as a convenient vehicle.  You will need to keep this intention in mind as this series is not intended to be a complete thesis of all the topics it touches on. 

The first article in the series is here and the previous article is here.

Challenges for China

It is hard for me to see China's rise to be anything but transient, despite the current media fascination with its inexorable rise.  How difficult would it be for China to overcome the baggage of its history and culture remains to be seen, considering the very fundamental challenges to its continuing ascent to the global apex.  There is probably a small window for China to realise any global ambitions before these challenges drags its trajectory back to earth.

Without going over the same grounds that many more qualified commentators have analysed in depth in specific topics like China's debt bomb, I would like to outline the more cultural aspects of China's challenges.  I will focus only on three of the many challenges China faces, and I have selected them really as vehicles to discuss insights into the Chinese culture that I often feel has been left out in analysis of the future of China.

Economy and demographics

Much has been made of the economic rise of China and working out when it will overtake the American economy.  I find that irksome because of the intellectual laziness of merely projecting past growth into an indefinite future to plot when two lines will cross, satisfying the lure of sensational headlines in the process.  Some years ago, much ink was split over reports that the Chinese economy has overtaken the American economy if calculated by PPP, which is an economically nonsensical comparison, and thankfully is hardly heard now.

The past: are the numbers accurate?

The discussion of future Chinese growth rarely considers several points.  First, there is the issue of the past: how much of this economic growth numbers is accurate?  Indeed, even the Prime Minister himself was said to have questioned the reliability of the numbers and said he relied on proxy numbers to gauge economic growth: freight transportation and electricity consumption are among the proxies most economic analysts use, which have developed to become sophisticated indices.  Studies seem to indicate growth numbers using these proxies/indices are consistently lower than the official numbers reported.  Wouldn't you be suspicious if annual economic growth has been reported came in at almost exactly the projections issued by the government, every single year for decades?  This questionability of Chinese numbers extend to other areas, not just purely economic: for instance, in 2014 the US SEC imposed a six months ban on the Big 4 accounting firms' reliance on audit work of their affiliates in China.  I do think most China observers & reporters can and do understand the reality but why put facts in the way of a good story, right?

In a culture where a centralised autocracy struggle to maintain control over practically autonomous provinces that nominally report to them, it is common for provincial officials to report what the emperor far away wants to hear but find difficult to verify.  This arose from a combination of a lack of transparency, reliance on a centralised bureaucracy for promotion, 
complexity of the country and a culture saving face.  The central government is aware of this and does moderate the numbers to compensate: the sum of provincial GDP numbers are some 5-10% higher than the consolidated national GDP issued by the National Bureau of Statistics.  This misreporting had disastrous consequence in the past: the central government response to the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan in 2019, though highly effective, was delayed by the hesitation of local party officers to report it upwards.  The reluctance to challenge industrial policies of an idealistic Mao in the 1950s led to the charade of Potemkin villages and agricultural misreporting at each level of government.  The reported but non-existent surpluses ended up being exported by Mao to bolster communist allies in the midst of the worst famine in history.  The photo shows grain harvests so dense that a child could sit on it, intended like many other reports to impress central government but led to other farms densely growing grains until they failed.

The future: will demographics catch up with economics

Second, there is the issue of the future: demographics will be even more difficult to defeat.  One has to remember that the generation who first had children under the one child policy in the 80s are now retiring: two pensioners supported by the economic efforts of one worker, eventually four grandparents by that one sole grandchild.  By the end of the century, China's population will halve while America's increases, to half that of China's from under a quarter now.  The Chinese labour force has already started to shrink, and is now running on increased efficiency to generate growth.  The government responded by raising the limit per family to three, but is unlikely to reverse the decline for long (still having a limit could be aimed at restive minorities like Uighurs and Tibetans rather than Han Chinese).  The xenophobic nature of the culture preclude imported labour, unlike the American demographics built on immigration.  If not reversed, we could expect the economic growth to falter as efficiency growth runs out.  Japan could be a model for its recent opening up to foreign labour, but then again Japan never had resentment of exploitative foreign devils but always held a fascination with the foreign gaijin.  The adage of China will be the first country to get old before getting rich is gaining currency for some time now.

The current: can it still remain centrally controlled

Third, there is the issue of the current: the structure of China's growth, which is largely based on centrally-directed public investments, as opposed to more sustainable private consumption common in Western economies.  This created a massive overcapacity in the economy with entire ghost cities lying empty waiting for inhabitants.  Yes, these cities will eventually be filled like Pudong, initially a ghost city now a part of Shanghai, eventually did.  In a way, overcapacity would be expected in a centrally planned economy like China's as economic needs usually change faster than economic policy can adjust.  While one can say China's centrally planned economy is a result of the communist system, I find it unlikely considering that communism really only inhabit the small visible spectrum of China's public life, especially in today capitalism-fuelled growth.  Governance ambitions of emperors of the past often outstrips their ability to reach into Chinese lives, public and private.  The communist emperor is no different and with the focus on economic management because its legitimacy depends on it, one would understand its aspirations to control the economy to the nth degree.  Who knows, they may succeed, with China's much vaunted mobilisation abilities at its disposal - but history is stacked against centrally-planned economic management.

In a way, the Belt and Road Initiative is very much an attempt to export this overcapacity to be paid by hire purchase by buying countries, winning diplomatic points as a by-product.  Chinese foreign policy is as transactional as Chinese culture: Belt and Road is not the Marshall 

Plan where the United States gave away some 5% of its GDP in form of grants and more importantly, opened its economy to rebuild nations devastated by the war.  Sure, American generosity was not driven entirely by altruism but also by geopolitical and commercial considerations but Belt and Road lack the subtlety of the Marshall Plan to competently consider the broader factors beyond self-interest - maybe it is just a Chinese learning curve and they will acquire this perspective eventually.   I have tracked Chinese investments in Africa since the 80s and noted how they brought in Chinese workers to build railroads with the accompanying infrastructure of living quarters and cooks instead of using local labour which would have stimulated the local economy.  I wondered whether they will bring in their own cooks to support their labour force building their investments in Malaysia, where there are plenty of local ethnic Chinese cooks.  No, they brought in Chinese cooks too: that was confirmation to me that Chinese investments were not intended to help the local economy but theirs.

Another concern arose from the recent reduction of democracy within the Chinese Communist Party with the rise of Xi's cult of personality and the removal of term limits to allow him to be leader pretty much for life.  The accumulation and centralisation of power in the person of Xi has the inevitable result of surrounding him with sycophants who will not be able to provide the diversity required in decision-making.  Should this state of affairs persist and spread to the rest of society, the worry within the Communist Party is that it diminishes creativity with self-censorship of thoughts and solutions inconsistent with the promoted narrative.  And creativity is really what China needs now if it is to challenge for the global economic leadership with no one to copy, unlike the command and logistical skills that facilitated its rise along paths trodden by previous global economic powers.

Culture and its role in the world

Of late, China's relationship with Western culture shifted in the 80s with Deng's opening up.  With the trauma of the Cultural Revolution still fresh in memory, the realisation was that the Cultural Revolution happened because of inherent vulnerabilities of the Chinese culture.  Reconciling it with the nascent rediscovery of the Chinese culture laid waste by Mao's turmoil, China's public debate slowly seek to consider Western openness that has engendered its vibrant progress while anchoring in the rehabilitated Chinese Confucianism to ameliorate the worst of Western world's tendency for traumatic change.  Ironically, the model suggested was that of its own cultural colony, Japan.

Re-examining the social contract

Unfortunately, the debate got increasingly politicised in the aftermath of the Tiananmen incident when many conservative communists identified too much exposure to Western ideals as the root cause to the communist grip on power.  Refocussing the social contract onto the 'we let you get rich' part became the paramount effort to ensure 'you let us stay in power' part.  The communist leadership correctly identified the emerging internet as the gateway to Western thinking & culture that needed controlling and the result was the Great Firewall of China, behind which a controlled narrative was exclusively fed to an entire population.

If anything, the Chinese culture is a very practical culture.  Chinese religion, for instance, has little need for sophisticated concepts of divinity, unlike Western and Indian religions.  Chinese philosophy is largely aimed at ensuring the smooth running of society as Confucianism does.  I can't think of any internal or external war the Chinese fought over principles.  (OK, the Taiping Rebellion was ostensibly led by the 'younger brother of Jesus Christ' but that really took place against a backdrop of economic and food deprivation).  That is another reason why Chinese foreign policy is so transactional.

The social contract also became very transactional, especially the 'we let you get rich' part.  Many young people today have sources of information outside of the official narrative, particularly those who had the opportunity to study or work overseas.  While there are some who take the government narrative as the unvarnished truth, I believe most understand the government narrative for what it is - government narrative.  They are happy to behave in China in the manner endearing them to the communist government to ensure their personal advancement and security of their families but I often wonder how they will act if you put a retribution-free green card in their hands.

Will the social contract change with the ever growing awareness of Chinese youths, with their loosening need for economic security?  The bellwethers are the experience of the successes in the Chinese diaspora: Hong Kong and Singapore.  The social contract in Hong Kong has broken down after a century of apolitical pursuit of economic advancement: Hong Kong youths are now keen to seek non-material goals of democracy and self-choice.  At the same time though, Singaporeans are willing to support the government at the ballot box to continue the deal of peace and prosperity in exchange for giving up their political voice.  It will be interesting to examine these two societies for indications which way China will go.

Mass cultural products

Historically, mass cultural products in China do not involve satisfying the cravings of the populace by commercial interests as in the West but rather to exploit popular trends for political purposes, which could be as benign as maintaining a peaceful society or as insidious as keeping the emperor in power.  Often both are basically the same thing.  The communist party is merely following an ancient tradition when they tapped into latent anger at the Century of Humiliation whenever their grip on power is questioned.  They could just as easily have swung to the other end of the spectrum to court Western culture, technology and economies as they did in the 70s when Mao sought American support to buttress Soviet power, or in the 80s when Deng sought Western affirmation and assistance for his market reforms.  Popular culture in China is at the service of government policy.

The cultural vandalism of the Mao years was the not uncommon in China: Shi Huangdi was infamous for his book burning and burying Confucianist scholars alive but his trauma was short-lived and was followed by the flowering of Chinese culture under the Hans after a short interregnum.  Would the Mao interregnum lead to a similar renaissance in Chinese culture but in a way that is no longer exclusively Chinese?  Western competitiveness married to Eastern corporatism in an environment of Chinese pride at its pre-eminence in the world?  

And what of the place of the centralised autocracy in such a culture: would it still be able to hold the narrative to drive the diplomacy and soft power projections or would the Western features of a hybrid culture means Chinese power is more driven more by the aspirations of the Chinese people as a whole than the Beidahe elite?  And how much retributions for the Century of Humiliations would it seek?

How will such a syncretised Chinese culture strengthen its challenge to Western culture to export itself beyond its traditional cultural orbit? Unlike Japan and Korea, Chinese soft power has not been taken up in the rest of the world outside of culinary (where it is arguably more overshadowed by Hong Kong cuisine) and maybe kungfu (which has not achieved Olympic status like Japanese and Korean martial arts have, and first popularised in the 1970s by Bruce Lee, an American).  Will the transactional nature of the Chinese culture be a hinderance to its ability to project soft power projections?  As the Soft Power Report 2019 concluded

Until global audiences see China as an unequivocal force for good in the world, China will struggle to generate the soft power one might expect of such an important and great nation.

Governance and language

The Chinese language has long been a source of befuddlement to those not born with the language.  Its highly tonal nature has been exasperating for those never exposed from young to basic Chinese and are used to non-tonal languages prevalent in almost all over the world.  Also, the ideogramic nature of written Chinese, probably the most practical way to effectively represent a tonal language, makes it difficult for foreigners to memorise the 3000 characters or so needed to read a newspaper.  Memorise, because there is really no other way to learn to read the language.  And learning to write is even more difficult with the teacher's emphasis on stroke order.  This emphasis on memorisation is likely to be the origins of the rote learning prevalent in Chinese education, with its consequence on the Chinese conformal work ethic.

Not only that, southern China is a patchwork of local dialects, overlaid with Mandarin as the Beijing dialect imposed as the national common language.  Interestingly, all dialects including Mandarin share a common script.  The dialects are incomprehensible to non-speakers and are separate verbal languages but much like Japanese and Chinese, the dialecticists (is that a word: what do you call someone who speaks a dialect?) can intercommunicate via writing.  Basically, you speak Mandarin or Cantonese and not Chinese but you write Chinese and not Mandarin or Cantonese.

OK, I am not getting into a debate here over the definitions of language and dialects.  Just to state that in Chinese thinking, Cantonese occupies a lower status as a mere dialect, even if it has some 80 million native speakers, if you use the widest definition of Cantonese.  The ruling elite considers Mandarin as putonghua, the common tongue which has a higher status as a language, when linguistically it is just the Beijing dialect of the Mandarin branch of the Chinese language.  One can see some cultural imperialism here in the denial of Cantonese the dignity of a language, something Cantonese resents, particularly those in Hong Kong.

Potential consequences of language reforms

Chinese authorities do realise the difficulties of the language, particularly its writing system and have simplified most of the common characters.  Successive Chinese governments have also tried to romanise the Chinese written language but none has gained traction until smartphones arrived.  (Interesting note: At one point during the Sino-Soviet rapprochement in the 1950s, Mao flirted with the idea of cyrillisation of written Chinese, with books and propaganda posters printed in Cyrillic Chinese.)  The explosion of technology use and the tiny size of the keyboard made it impractical to form characters using strokes.  Romanised pinyin make it easier to select the correct character from the pinyin keyed in, especially with the advent of predictive text.  Thus, the skill moved from formation of characters (which you have to follow strict rules on stroke sequence) to merely recognising them.  Many recent surveys revealed the inability, not just lack of fluency, of Chinese youths to write basic characters on paper from scratch.  In effect, Chinese children learn to write Chinese characters to know how difficult it is and learn the alphabets so that they can forget how to write characters.  Is my childhood exasperation showing?

Each dialect is spoken differently with different pronunciation and/or tone even when reading the same script.  Thus, there are separate pinyin for Mandarin and each dialect.  To be able to write each other's pinyin require ability to speak each other's dialect, which would otherwise be unnecessary.  Communication can still take place via the common script but each person has to input separately, much like using translators when travelling.

At the present trend with the increasing reliance on pinyin, the unity of the Chinese language could come into question.   An extreme development would be that a future Chinese education system skips the characters themselves and teach only pinyin.  This would be the ultimate fragmentation of the Chinese language like how Vietnamese and Korean broke away.  But is that an extreme unlikely scenario: would the Chinese turn its back on over two millennia of continuous Chinese writing?  There is pride in an untrained Chinese ability to read inscriptions on a two-millennia-old tomb, something I don't think any other living language can claim.

Options

A more likely scenario would be a parallel writing system as in Japan or Korea, where Chinese characters act as a supplement to an alphabetic-based system: Koreans refer back to classical Chinese characters if there is any ambiguity in the Korean script.  Having said that, Koreans schools no longer teach Chinese characters, though available as an elective.  One hears stories of Chinese couples finding out that they have the same surname only on sending out wedding invitations with their names in Chinese characters, a taboo in traditional Chinese societies.  Non-Chinese government officers often unknowingly transliterate the same Chinese name using different spelling, eg., Chen & Tan could be the same Chinese character.   Even a parallel writing system could lead to fragmentation.

The current accommodation seems to be a lite version of the Japanese model and Chinese newspapers already use it: Chinese characters forming the bulk of writing but foreign names and new loan words are spelt out in fully romanised alphabets instead of previously transliterating them with the nearest sounding Chinese words, sometimes with hilarious meanings.  Japanese and more structured and transliterate imported words using their own syllabic katakana script to supplement Chinese-based kanji characters.  While this will likely preserve the unity of the language, the overt differentiation in pinyin systems could give rise to reassertion of regional identities, undermining the historical centralising tendencies of Chinese emperors.  At the very least, it could spin off Chinese sub-cultures within mainland China as is happening in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore.

If this happens, how will it affect overall Chinese culture & the remaining sub-cultures and consequently Chinese domestic power?  Will it still be able to propagate its soft power in the future when its own culture is fragmenting rather than consolidating?  Wasn't this what happened to previously ascendant powers that proved too unwieldy to stay together: Roman, Islamic, British?  More pertinently, what will be the impact on national politics if reassertion of regional identities leads to cycles of cultural repression, accelerating fragmentation through resentment, especially in the more independent-minded South?

The next article in this series is here. 

Impact of culture & history on China's foreign policy - Part 3 Weight of history

China's recent rise has made many uncomfortable with its direction as a world power.  The experience called China and its thinking are so very different to that in the West that misunderstanding is so easy, leading to unnecessary fear and unwarranted optimism.  If Russia is a riddle in an enigma, China is even more mysterious, with little contact with Western history until lately, different religion & philosophy and even different basis for its language.

While I am not a scholar or an expert in the field, I find most analysis of China's foreign policy ignores the history and culture of this great nation and so I will attempt to explain how China's foreign policy is rooted in its history and its culture.  The timeline of the Chinese dynasties here may help put things into historical perspective.  Also, by culture, I do not mean the arts, although that is an element, but I mean the way people think and behave in the social sphere.

The article got much longer than I expected and is now part of a five-part series.  In the process I all realised that what I really want to do is to share insights into Chinese culture, philosophy and practices, which shaped and are shaped by its history.  Many non-Chinese observers view China as a mirror of their own experience but while there is much that the Chinese culture shares with the rest of the world, being part of the human world after all, there is also much that can be very alien to it.  And of course, a great deal lies in the middle - same drives expressed in different conditions.  So, I hope I can help the Western mind understand China using an examination of its foreign policy as a convenient vehicle.  You will need to keep this intention in mind as this series is not intended to be a complete thesis of all the topics it touches on. 

The first article in the series is here and the previous article is here.

Is China a threat

I think we may need to explain what the debate is and who is China deemed a threat to.  China's rise is often interpreted as a challenge to American sole superpower status.  Although it is clear that no empire will last forever and the American empire is no different (at best, it can probably hope for is to be subsumed into a successor global identity based on America's professed values), the debate is whether the United States will be superseded by China.  There is also the concurrent question of whether China's Sinitic culture is a threat to the broader Western culture, ala Huntingdon.

Causes of Century of humiliation

I will not add to the extensive bibliography on the Century of humiliation and the use of opium to exploit the Chinese, both subjects written by more competent writers than me but let me just sketch a few highlights to place things within context.  The period started with the First Opium War in 1839, and ended with the Communist take-over in 1949.  The main stories of national humiliation included the burning of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing during the second Opium War in 1860, entry of foreign armies into Beijing ending the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and the Rape of Nanking during the Second World War.  My focus here is to examine the internal causes of the decline that led to humiliation and the impact of the humiliation that last to today.  I will only refer to salient points in history to illustrate my points, and should not be considered as complete descriptions of historical events.

While much has been made of Qing decline having started with the Opium Wars, the seeds of the decline were probably economic and sown much earlier.  The Qing dynasty reached its zenith in the 18th century with restoration of economic stability.  At that point, it still controlled some 20% of the global economy and was strong enough to rebuff British and Dutch entreaties for free trade.  This economy stability led a vibrant expansion of domestic trade.  

Difficulties in fuelling this economic expansion using imported silver was one of the factors behind the innovations behind the Qing banking system.  Qing promissory notes, bankers' drafts and more matured forms of credit oiled more sophisticated transfers of funds demanded by the ever increasingly complex distribution networks.  Paper money invented in the Song Dynasty was greatly expanded by Qing merchants rather than the government which continued to rely on metal coinage.  That, however, proved insufficient for the growing economy to the point that by late 18th century Spanish silver dollars were circulating in the south as a parallel currency.  I would hesitate to draw similarities, though, with say the use of US dollars in failed economies like Venezuela today because, inter alia, physical and economic borders in those days were rather more porous and Spanish dollars were the common currency throughout most of South East Asia as well.

Chinese governmental economic policy until then was rather limited to ensuring food security and running state monopolies in some essential commodities.  The Qing government did intervene more in the economy while simultaneously liberalising other sectors to make the overall economy more efficient.  Still, it would be considered very light touch regulations today and we all know from the 2008 financial crisis that light touch is not a good approach to regulations particularly with banking innovations that governments did not lead or understand.

As merchants got rich, it drew in more talents from a social system which until then looked down on the merchant class as non-producer of economic goods.  In particular, it drew in candidates for the civil service entrance examination - both candidates who failed, and those who would otherwise have unhesitatingly entered the public exams system (yes, kids, we can blame the Chinese for yet another of their many inventions: public exams).  This and the tilt in the financial, social and political power balance towards the merchant class left subsequent generations of Chinese civil service less capable of meeting challenges in governing an ever more complex China.

One consequence of the sea bans and the focus of land-based threats was that China gave up control of the seas to European traders explicitly backed by their ever more self-confident governments back home.  Up until then, Chinese foreign trade took place far from their home waters and was more easily controlled by the central government, who at times was even able to aspire to hold a monopoly in international trade during the sea bans.  But aggressive European trading expansion brought foreigners onto the shores of China, disorientating the civil service unused to dealing with equality on two fronts: foreigners who considered themselves equal or superior to Chinese in all fields, and local merchants who considered themselves equal to envoys of the emperor.

Oh, and the peace the Qings eventually brought in the late 17th century also proved to be its undoing as the army atrophied.  Its role shifted from protection from rebels and invaders to impressing the populace with displays of soldiery and weaponry - Instagrammable rather than effective.  Officer commissions became hereditary rather meritocratic to preserve the upper echelons of the officer class for the ruling Manchus.  Peace and the banning of guns outside of the military deprived the military of the need to innovate and Qing military technology declined.  (Interesting note: Qing artillery development was in part facilitated by the Jesuits)  And, in common with the complacent civil service, corruption took over much of the incentive for military service entrance.

So essentially, the China at the start of the Opium Wars was ruled by a slowly weakening civil service, slowly losing control over an economy they did not understand in an increasingly hostile environment their strict Confucianist world view was unable to imagine.  In short, Chinese decline was very much in Chinese hands and the Europeans arrived just at the right time to exploit it.

The Chinese response to European encroachment consolidated by the unequal treaties were based on tried and tested ancient ways of tying barbarians down in agreements to buy time to ply them with the luxuries of civilisation until they were sufficiently weakened for the Chinese civilisation to strike back.  This unfortunately failed as the pace of European technological advancement far outran the pace of Chinese reforms; the distance to European power centres insulated them from Chinese attempts to weaken them and the failure of modernisation in China held back by the reactionary regime living in splendid isolation of the Forbidden City, meant that the old methods did not work.

None of this imply that opium did not play a role.  The first imperial ban against opium trading was promulgated more than a century before the First Opium War and that was really before the British, or more accurately the British East India Company, got into the act.  The Portuguese were the ones who expanded the sale of opium to China, having previously been imported for medicinal purposes in pre-European days.  While the British initially ignore the imperial ban, the real explosion of opium trade took place after the 1833 Charter Act passed by the British Parliament to eliminate all of the British East India Company's monopoly of trade to China, opening the way for anyone to sell opium to China.

Thus, by the start of the First Opium War, some one fifth of the silver available in China was used to pay for opium.  Opium addiction as a social problem in China was only eradicated under the Communists but the remnant of the opium trade then focused on South East Asia via the Chinese diaspora, and was soon serving American GIs in Vietnam, from where narcotic use spread to the United States.  So, if Americans wish to blame someone for their drug culture, they could do well to start with an obscure pre-Victorian British trade law.

The place of the Chinese revolution

The military losses during Century of Humiliation were particularly jarring for a people schooled in the concept of tianxia, especially when the losses were to a cultural colony like Japan in 1895.  The Chinese court did what people with big egos do when taken down - deny.  The denial did delay the military, economic, social and political modernisation China desperately needed, particularly under the Empress Dowager Cixi, who held sway at the imperial court until the waning years of the dynasty.  The nightmare of enduring one humiliation after another ended only with the promulgation of the People's Republic in 1949.

Sun Yat Sen's revolution of 1911 which ended the last dynasty could not have lasted as Chinese history has never been democratic in the Western sense of the world and did not have any democratic institution to sustain it, beyond the education of a small circle of youths and elites.  Within a year, the capital came under the rule of that staple of Chinese interregna: the warlord.  Yuan Shi Kai declared himself emperor and just as swiftly was deposed, leaving China to descend into a patchwork of warlord domains culminating in the civil war between the communists of Mao Zedong and the nationalists of Chiang Kai Shek, successor to Sun.  (note: All Chinese names in this series follow the Eastern name order and I will preserve respect for Chinese names by putting the surname first followed by unhyphenated given names.  Spellings of names follow the convention of the country they are from: pinyin spelling for mainland China and traditional spelling elsewhere.  Oh, and by the way, the names of emperors mentioned here are not their personal names but the names of their reign) 

Both the Kuomintang and its successor Communist Party grew out of resentment of the humiliation suffered by China, with Kuomintang's genesis as the Revive China Society founded in the 1890s while the 1919 protests at the Treaty of Versailles awarding the formerly German-controlled Shandong province to Japan was the intellectual origin of the Communist Party.  With such origin stories, it is no surprise that restorationism is very much in the DNA in China's political elites.  Kuomintang in Taiwan have subsequently ditched this but it still took decades of being out of power on the mainland before it reformed itself, seeing itself as Taiwanese rather than Chinese.

Interesting fact for those who argued that the Chinese civil war was a conflict between two competing ideologies: the Chinese Nationalists who fought the Communists were initially sponsored by the Soviets on the grounds that the industrially-based Nationalist movement was the more ideologically-logical next step towards a socialist paradise than the agriculturally-based Communist.  The Nationalist Kuomintang party was organised with a Politburo at its apex and appoints political commissars to assert its control over the armed forces, much like in Soviet-style communist parties.   Both these features were only done away with this century.  It was also decidedly anti-merchant even during the civil war period and its success in Taiwan was very much ironically built on early agricultural reforms in the communist mould.  So, the Kuomintang were not ideological opposites of the Communists - indeed, they were ideological kin.

Mao's revolution follows the traditional Chinese polity of distributed centralised autocracy.  By distributed centralisation, I mean that like with any other autocrats, the instinct of China's rulers has always been to centralised but because China is so large, there are practical limits to a ruler's ability to assert control all the way down to local government level.  Hence the Chinese adage the mountains are high and the emperor is far away.  The Xia dynasty did not employ a tributary system out of respect for local autonomy or a belief in the principle of subsidiarity but because of the lack of an effective communication system common in the classical world.  Even today, the government in Beijing have problems enforcing its directives onto practically autonomous southern provinces with independent sources of finances from the special economic zones, and therefore patronage.  In politics as in life, it is ultimately all about who has money.

Mao's revolution was essentially a nationalistic one with communism as a convenient tool to legitimise its ascension and provide a complete cultural environment to break past loyalties with competing cultural legacies that threatened their legitimacy.  It was not ideological beyond the surface, which is why it was easy for the more lasting Deng revolution to don the trappings of capitalism while cherry picking features of the communist system that kept themselves in power.  The lip-service nature to ideology enabled Mao to break with the Soviet Union, its ideological partner and hitherto sponsor in 1960 when it became expedient to do so.  There was also no position for a chief ideologue like the one Suslov unofficially filled in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as ideological purity in the Chinese Communist Party was a rather much fluid concept, depending on the exigency of the moment and the leadership style of the leader.

Reclaiming its history and historical role

Surprising to many, the autocratic regime in Beijing always ensured it is legitimate in the eyes of the populace.  The barrel of the gun does contribute but only in a small way and as a last resort was employed only once in a significant manner during the Tiananmen incident of 1989.  Though one could argue that more died by the bullet during the Cultural Revolution, but that was a revolution in itself, not an attempt to quell one.  But in many ways, violence at Tiananmen was only the quick fix.  The Chinese Communist Party held in-depth studies to conclude that high inflation, corruption and wealth & opportunity inequalities were what emboldened its enemies leading to the protests, not just democracy per se and instituted reforms to redress the grievances, which accelerated economic growth even more.   Oh, and of course, the studies found exposure to Western values were also to be blamed, leading to the Great Firewall of China.  In many ways, the requirement to rule with the consent of the ruled also apply to Communist China.

As a nationalistic revolution, its legitimacy under Mao was reliant on the restoration of national pride not ideological purity.  That essentially was the original communist social contract: We give you peace and pride in being Chinese and you let us stay in exclusive power.  Mao's revolution succeeded by giving the people a rapid transition out of the interregnum that often accompanied Chinese change of dynasties, though one could argue that the Cultural Revolution was the last throes of that same traumatic interregnum which only ended with the death of Mao in 1976.

Mao did restore Chinese pride by ending foreign intervention in its affairs.  Not just politically but also culturally.  Much of arts and culture that largely appealed to the landowning class, of which Mao was a proud nemesis, were dismantled.  Any remaining talents were redeployed to support the new regime, particularly Mao's cult of personality.  Particular venom was reserved for objects of foreign culture, like Western clothing, dance halls, music and all foreign symbols were purged from Chinese daily lives save for icons of Marx, Lenin and Stalin.

On taking over, foreign commercial assets were of course nationalised and foreigners were gradually ejected.  Even religions were nationalised, following the practice of the emperors who held tight control over religions.  Local religions without international links like Buddhist and Taoist temples were easily brought under state control.  By 1954, Protestant churches were merged into a state-controlled church while the Patriotic Catholic Church was set up in 1957 to be independent of any links to the Vatican, with any dissenting clergy expelled.

Keeping the memories alive

Victimisation has always been used by the Chinese Communist Party as the basis of its legitimacy whenever its legitimacy was threatened.  During the Cultural Revolution it was the victimisation by the bourgeoise still fresh in memory, over which the communist had triumphed.  This victor narrative was brought to an end with the crisis of belief in the Communist Party after the Tiananmen incident.  In those more economically liberating times, the Communists fell back on the Century of Humiliation victimisation, with the promise of 'national rejuvenation' and all its associated implications of the restoration of past imperial grandeur and regional domination.  

The two victimisations are related in that the one led to the other, two faces of the same coin; just a difference in emphasis.  During the Mao era, the ruling elite of land-owners & civil servants under the aegis of the emperor oppressed the peasants, while in the post-Tiananmen era, it was foreigners exploiting Chinese.  In the process of the shift, the imperial period, especially the Han, Tang and Ming dynasties, was rehabilitated for the grandeur they brought China to which the current regime aspires while the Japanese lost their role in facilitating the communist takeover.  Apparently, it is in the records of the Chinese Communist Party that when the Japanese prime minister tried to apologise for invading China in the 30s during talks to normalise diplomatic relations in 1972, Mao was said to have thanked the Japanese instead as the invasion gave pause to the civil war and strengthened the communists while weakening the Kuomintang. 

This collective memory was kept alive by indirect references in the official media, much of it in conjunction with implicit contrasts between the morally indefensible practices of the West and the civility of Chinese customs.  One example would be the regular citation of European colonialism, in particular the British, whenever China's domestic policy is criticised (on Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong), with the implied narrative that 'at least China never set up colonies to exploit others'.  Recent recognition of Kuomintang efforts in the war with Japan was aimed rapprochement towards Taiwanese reunification with the motherland but also had the objective to retaining the narrative of Japanese aggression against a defenceless China in the public consciousness.  China is also attempting to claim the role of torchbearer of poor countries trying to develop itself while righting past wrongs of Western 'ecological imperialism'.

There are plenty of opportunities for the populace to be reminded of the humiliations by foreigners, and most of these are state led.  Museums and exhibitions are common places to keep the communist narrative alive with institutions such as the Opium War Museum, Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall and the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, The last, not to be confused with the newly reconstructed Summer Palace in Beijing and elsewhere, was preserved in ruins from its burning by British troops in 1860 to provide the suitable backdrop for guided tours that 'discuss' the pain inflicted by barbarous foreigners on a vulnerable China: it is easy to see how the ruins of the Old Summer Palace has become a pilgrimage of sorts for a small but growing band of China restorationists.

The Road to Rejuvenation permanent display in the China National Museum was started in 2011 as the Road to Revival and the introduction in its website will leave you in no doubt of the mindset-forming propaganda of the state-run exhibition:

"The Road of Rejuvenation is a permanent exhibition showcasing the explorations made by Chinese people from all walks of life who, after being reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society since the Opium War of 1840, rose up to overcome their humiliation and misery, and tried in every way possible to rejuvenate the nation."

None of this is to say that the wrongs done to China in the past is justifiable in any way but efforts at restorationism of past glories only served to delay the just peace all of us are entitled to.  Victims elsewhere have brought together victor & vanquished, victim & tormentor for annual commemorations of victory & victimhood to emphasise the dangers of seeking glory on the battlefield but not assigning blame to current successors of wrong-doers of the past: think the joint minutes of silence in Normandy and the quiet bells of Hiroshima.  China, on the other hand, continue to remember the past losses suffered by a hitherto dominant power as an unblamed victim by uncivilised outsiders, all at the service of legitimising the continuing grip on exclusive power by the ruling elite - this can only store conflicts for the future.

The next article in this series is here.