Made in China: Rally Round the Flag

AN STYLE="font-size: 75%; color:#990000; font-weight:bold">Wednesday, Apr. 18, 2001 Throughout the course of the spy plane affair, China-watchers have sought to explain Beijing's rigidity in terms of the leadership's domestic considerations. The strident tone of Beijing's reaction is intended mainly for a home audience -- for a military with which President Jiang Zemin has to establish credibility, and for the 1.3 billion Chinese, among whom nationalism runs deep.

The tough talk goes over well with the unwashed masses, one might assume, but not with the educated Chinese elite, with their exposure to Western ideas and generally liberal leanings. Right? Wrong!

Two years ago, when American laser-guided bombs destroyed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, many Western observers were caught quite off guard by the generally indignant reaction of Chinese intellectuals. Many expatriate acquaintances in China told me that even among their Westernized or Western-educated Chinese friends ordinarily critical of their government, sympathies were overwhelmingly with Beijing. In this latest crisis, popular Chinese reaction has been notably muted, but again, among intellectuals there are few who take exception with Beijing's interpretation of events.

In the West, liberalism and nationalism are competing ideological strains, rarely found together in conspicuous measure in any one person. Western liberals tend to be cosmopolitans who turn up their noses at the flag-wavers. But in China the liberal tradition developed in lockstep with national consciousness, and nationalism remains at the very heart of the liberal Chinese worldview.

From the moment of its emergence on the modern Chinese political stage -- protests among Imperial exam candidates against the treaty that settled the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 -- the liberal intelligentsia has devoted itself to saving China, whether from foreign powers, or from itself. The May Fourth Movement, centering on student-led demonstrations in 1919, was the watershed event in the liberal intelligentsia's political coming of age; it was chiefly a protest against the impotence of the Beijing warlord regime in the face of Japan and Western powers at the Versailles Conference.

During World War II and in its aftermath, the intelligentsia abandoned the Kuomintang in favor of Mao's Communist Party largely because of popular perception that the latter was more serious about saving the nation. And when the students and intellectuals took to the streets in the spring of 1989, at Tiananmen, they insisted on the patriotic nature of their demonstrations, and couched their protest in terms of national salvation.

In dealing with popular nationalism, the Chinese leadership has had to strike a delicate balance: it stakes its very claim to political legitimacy on its nationalist record. But the Party has had to squelch spontaneous expressions of nationalism when they do not serve state interests. This has been especially apparent in Sino-Japanese relations, when popular protests commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre and against Japanese occupation of the Diaoyu Islands were banned. Unruly crowds, like those that stoned the American embassy in Beijing and burned the consulate in Chengdu, can easily turn against a regime that appears too weak and fails to slake the mob's thirst for justice.

Beijing has learned lessons from the Belgrade embassy bombing of 1999 – there's no mob to answer to this time, and therefore greater flexibility in negotiations -- but considerations of national dignity are still foremost. As U.S. officials meet with their Chinese counterparts this week in Beijing to try to resolve outstanding issues from the plane collision incident, they would do well to keep this in mind.