The Mind of Empire: China's History and Modern Foreign Relations

14. China and the Foreign Other

14 China and the Foreign Other It has correctly been observed that antiforeign sentiment was an important tool in the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to reunite and develop China,1 but it is important to stress that antiforeignism was not simply instrumental; it was an important constituent part of the CCP’s political personality and one with roots stretching back beyond the Party’s own establishment in 1921. As Edward Friedman has noted, the CCP came to power seeing itself as “the embodiment of heroic antiimperialist nationalism” in a “nationalist tale of modern Chinese resistance to foreign marauders . . . imagined as one with the struggle of China ’s people throughout history to defend their land from foreign invaders. It links time, place, and people in a unifying grand narrative that begins with the building of a Great Wall of stone in ancient times.”2 In Ann Anagnost’s phrasing, the “national narrative” of China in the modern era is “constituted always in relation to an ‘outside.’”3 Similarly, according to Chi-yu Shih, “Constantly searching for an ‘Other’ to prove, through contradiction , what one was or was not, composed a typical modern Chinese political drama. This Other could be either internal, such as feudalist, counterrevolutionary, compradors, or defectors, or external, such as anti-Chinese, imperialist, or Japanese militarist.”4 With regard to engagement with non-Chinese peoples in the international arena into which the appearance of European power began to force China in the mid-nineteenth century, this tendency toward self-definition by way of an opponent /antagonist flowered in specifically antiforeign forms. And the CCP was clearly no exception, with the hyperbolically xenophobic popular expressions of the Cultural Revolution period5 representing merely an extreme manifestation of this dynamic—perhaps a hybridization of Maoist revolutionary messianism with some of the populist antiforeign bru- 218 THE MIND OF EMPIRE tality of the Boxer Rebellion, now applied against fellow Chinese said to be imperialist collaborators or spies. Of Blame and Benevolence Suspicion of the foreign Other might differ somewhat in its modern manifestations from its ancient antecedents because—except for periodic frontier incursions and the highly singular cases of the Mongol and Manchu conquests—the old empire generally had little occasion to ponder non-Chinese challenges to its own centrality and superiority. Nevertheless , antiforeign themes during the Communist era seem to have clear connections to long-standing assumptions about moral and civilizational gradients and the general depravity of barbarian societies remote from the Sinic cultural core. If anything, the very precariousness of China’s military and economic situation vis-à-vis the intruding West made it necessary to accentuate perceptions of the wickedness of the new barbarian marauders in order to sustain the Middle Kingdom’s self-image of virtuous primacy. (Such a proud and worthy civilization could have been humbled, the reasoning might run, only by an extraordinarily crafty and malevolent coalition of outside oppressors and their domestic collaborators.)6 Chi-yu Shih has remarked that the image of China as a “backward state” constrained the way Chinese leaders perceived the world, in part because the notion of backwardness would seem to require that Chinese leaders and intellectuals “[jettison] the image of being culturally superior.”7 Backwardness may have been reconcilable with assumptions of virtuous primacy, however, to the extent that weakness and dysfunction could be blamed on evil and unfair outside interference. At this door can probably be laid much of the purple prose of Chinese propaganda for the first decades of Communist rule, first against the imperialist West,8 and then against Soviet revisionists . As China’s power and stature have grown, the insecurity suggested by such hyperbole seems to have lessened. At the same time, it has also been essential to insist on the disinterested benevolence of China’s own motivations in its foreign relations. In a conceptual framework powerfully influenced both by the Confucian tradition of rectification of names and by notions of Sinic cultural superiority , cognitive consonance and the legitimacy of CCP rule required simultaneously that China display exemplary virtue in all circumstances China and the Foreign Other 219 and that others be guilty of some kind of moral turpitude to the degree that they opposed or frustrated China’s righteous trajectory toward a restored global centrality. (We shall discuss this further in the following chapter.) Additionally, it was important that China’s successes be its own and not attributable to others. It...