Which spirit of nation will prevail in rise to greatness?

MARCUS GEE

Globe and Mail

July 26, 2008: When the Olympic flame flares to life on Aug. 8, Chinese hearts all around the world will glow with pride.

If the Communist Revolution of 1949 showed that “the Chinese people have stood up,” then the Beijing Games will show that China is stepping out – an economic superpower, a player on the world stage, a force to be reckoned with.

But the proud, confident, forward-looking country that is supposed to have its formal debut in Beijing is only one side of modern China. Its twin is insecure, angry and resentful, often frightening its neighbours and worrying the wider world.

China has shown both sides in the months leading up to the Olympics. First came an ugly explosion of anger over the West's sympathy for the uprising in Tibet, then a surge of civic spirit after the devastating Sichuan earthquake.

Which will prevail? “Good” China, self-assured, helpful, dynamic; or “bad” China, peevish, obstructive, threatening? The answer hangs on the powerful, complex force that is modern Chinese nationalism.

The Chinese are a proud people – proud of their 5,000 years of continuous civilization, their language, cuisine, arts and sciences, and, most recently, their breathtaking ascent from pauper state to economic dynamo.

They are especially proud of their recent advance because it is a comeback story. The century or so leading up to China's rise featured one disaster after another: first the crumbling of the imperial dynasty and the descent into warlordism; then years of struggle between nationalists and communists, with invasion by Japan throw in; then the isolation, poverty and extremism of the Mao Zedong years that crested with the tumult of the Cultural Revolution.

As long ago as the late 19th century, Chinese nationalist reformers dreamed of a China “rich and strong.” Now it is on its way to being both, with the Olympics symbolizing nothing less than the realization of the century-old dream of national revival.

A poll this week found a staggering level of optimism for the Olympics, with more than nine out of 10 Chinese believing the Games will be a success and boost the country's image in the world. More than 80 per cent of those polled for the Pew Research Center were happy with China's direction and economy – a snapshot of the country's rising confidence.

But with countries as with people, boastfulness often masks insecurity. As the new kid on the block, China doubts whether the rest of the world – and especially the West – will accept it as an equal. In fact, many Chinese are certain that Westerners are determined to deny China its place in the sun.

That makes the country and its leaders acutely sensitive to criticism – of its human-rights record, support for foreign dictators or dubious product-safety standards. “Their feeling is: ‘Yes, we know we have problems, but look how far we've come and look what we've achieved. Why are you constantly pounding on us?'” says veteran China scholar Bernard Frolic, who is writing a book on Canada-China relations.

That feeling has deep roots. The Western world got a first taste of Chinese fury when the Society of Right and Harmonious Fists, otherwise known as the Boxers, massacred more than 200 foreigners in Beijing in 1900 in a paroxysm of rage over foreign domination of their homeland. Six decades later, the wild-eyed xenophobia of Mao's Red Guards showed the extremes nationalism could reach under the sway of radical ideology.

As the country emerged from isolation, joined the world economy, effectively abandoned Marxism and began the climb to prosperity, it seemed reasonable to expect those passions would fade. The Olympics, many hoped, would showcase a new, more open and cosmopolitan China.

But something unexpected happened on the way to Beijing. On March 10, the most serious anti-government protests in 20 years broke out in Tibet, reminding the outside world of the burning resentment many Tibetans feel over China's often imperious rule.

Even more surprising was the reaction of ordinary Chinese. They responded with bitter anger directed not only at the Tibetans involved in the violent disturbances, but at the West for (as they saw it) painting the Tibetans as the innocent victims and the Chinese as the brutal oppressors. Foreign news agencies were bombarded with hate mail. Foreign reporters got ugly threats.

The anger only grew when pro-Tibet protesters tried to disrupt the procession of the Olympic flame through several Western cities. Chinese websites lit up with angry denunciations of the West. Chinese in some cities staged fierce counterdemonstrations against pro-Tibetan protesters. Was this the mature, outward-looking new China that was to be the world's host at Beijing?

Worse could come at the Games themselves.

“The combination of demonstrators desperate for the world's attention and the heightened nationalism of Chinese citizens makes for an extremely combustible situation,” write China watchers Elizabeth Economy and Adam Segal in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. “A poor outcome for the Games could engender another round of nationalist outbursts and Chinese citizens decrying what they see as racism, anti-Chinese bias, and a misguided sense of Western superiority. This inflamed form of Chinese nationalism could be the most enduring and dangerous outcome of the protests surrounding the Olympics.”

Why do the Chinese nurse such a powerful sense of grievance? No one is scheming to keep China down. It sits on the United Nations Security Council as a veto-bearing permanent member. Western countries welcomed its emergence from isolation, applaud its progress and absorb the flood of Chinese imports that have made the Chinese boom possible. Far from shunning the country, Western leaders from mayors to presidents beat a path to Beijing to marvel at the Chinese miracle and beg for a share of its trade.

Western complaints about Chinese human-rights abuses, polluting industries or sometimes thuggish behaviour in Tibet are mere pinpricks to the world's most populous country, far outweighed by the almost slavish desire of Western countries to profit from the China boom.

But to a thin skin, even a pinprick can feel like a sword thrust. The Chinese have been told for years – in the schools, in the official press, in museums and at historical ceremonies – that China suffered a “century of shame and humiliation” at the hands of Western imperialists.

Despite its recent accomplishments, the Chinese have never really shaken off that sense of shame, or the suspicion that Westerners are out to thwart their recovery from it. In moments of anger, that feeling often curdles into a conspiracy theory, as when U.S. warplanes bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the 1999 Kosovo War. It was an awful mistake for which Washington apologized, but which prompted Chinese to take to the streets to rant about a dastardly U.S. plot against the Chinese nation.

Suffering from a sense of national humiliation, China sees slights to its honour around every corner.

“It's been very hard for the Chinese to be proud for the past 150 years, and I think that explains some of the anger when Tibetans threatened to rain on the Chinese parade,” says Richard Baum, a China scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. “When the Tibetan protesters tried to disrupt the torch, I think that was experienced widely as an attempt to denigrate this accomplishment and source of pride.”

Successive Chinese governments have stoked this sense of victimhood to maintain a grip on power. Mao whipped the masses into a frenzy against imperialist enemies and their Chinese “running dogs.” In a much milder way, China's current leaders do the same thing.

Having lost their raison d'être as leaders of the continuing Communist Revolution, and lacking any democratic mandate, they have latched onto their role as guardians of the country: its unity, it security, its very Chineseness in a globalized world.

But patriot games can be dangerous. Again and again over the past couple of decades, Beijing has been forced to throttle back on nationalist upheavals that threatened to run out of control.

Susan Shirk, the U.S. author of a recent book on China's rise, Fragile Superpower, says Beijing is beginning to realize how destructive explosions of xenophobic nationalism can be. “Attacking the Western media and CNN a few months before the Olympics – does that seem a good way to enhance China's reputation and it relations with the journalists who are coming over to cover the whole thing? It's pretty self-defeating,” she says.

Dr. Shirk says recent moves to improve relations with Taiwan and Japan – both important to China's economic well-being – could founder on patriotic opposition in China.

The world saw another side of Chinese patriotism after the Sichuan earthquake in May, as thousands of volunteers rushed to help and millions donated to the relief cause, a sign of growing civic-spirit engagement. Here was the positive face of Chinese nationalism, a unifying force that galvanizes people and motivates them to work for the common good.

Vancouver China scholar Jan Walls says the flip side of angry Chinese nationalism is “a real strain of compassion” that springs partly from the country's Buddhist heritage. That strain is embodied in the concept of bo'ai, universal love, or love without boundaries.

Chinese patriotic feeling, he says, is not principally an ethnic form of nationalism, though the majority of Chinese are Han people. Rather, “it embraces a culture and a world view and a sense of history and the idea of the ultimate triumph of virtue over vice.”

Wenran Jiang, a China scholar at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, says the past few months may even represent a sort of road map for the way Chinese nationalism could evolve. In the Tibet crisis, we saw old-style, angry nationalism; after the earthquake, a constructive patriotism; and in the mixing of countries at the Olympics, if all goes well, we will see the blossoming of Chinese internationalism, the first hint of awareness that relations between countries don't have to be marked by survival-of-the-fittest rivalry or breast-beating assertions of national greatness.

China watchers point to other signs of positive nationalism: a growing concern about the despoiled environment, an openness to engagement with the world, a new willingness to assert civic rights like access to information and the right to a fair trial.

These may be the beginnings of something new. After a century of weakness and turmoil followed by decades of communist isolation, China is only now exploring what it means to be a modern country.

How do you embrace a Western model of modernity and still remain uniquely Chinese? How do you compete with other countries without fighting them? How do you deal with minorities? How do you have freedom without disorder?

When he was U.S. president, Bill Clinton said the future of the world depended in part on how China decided to define its own greatness.

A self-assured China that wins the respect and acceptance of the outside world could graduate to great-power status without threatening international security, a process Beijing likes to call “peaceful rise.” An aggrieved China that feels excluded and persecuted would be another matter entirely.