The vengeful nationalism that pervades China under Communist Party rule is explored in Peter Gries’s study, China’s New Nationalism. The discourse of this nationalism identifies the forces threatening China’s return to glory and describes what must be done to defeat that threat and restore the nation’s dignity.

Having learned back in the Mao era that a century of humiliations by imperialists lost China its central place in Asia and the world, Chinese are now learning to demand that their government act to reclaim its rightful place—against Japan, which, above all, is considered an unrepentant militaristic nation. Chinese “know” that ever since an incursion into Taiwan in the 1870s, a cruel Japan has been trying to rise in Asia at the expense of China. In 1894–1895, China lost a war to this murderous Japan. In 1919, at the Versailles Peace Conference, Japan obtained German holdings in China, sparking a nationwide, patriotic May 4 anti-imperialist movement that gave birth to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the start of the 1930s, this expansionist Japan savagely bombed Shanghai. Patriotic Chinese responded by boycotting Japanese goods.

A long history reveals the immoral, anti-China actions of an inhuman Japanese nation. How, given this hateful adversary, dare one call for moderation in stopping it? In 2004, the CCP silenced Chinese who sought reconciliation with Japan.

Actually, there is no truth in the anti-Japan narrative just sketched. None. Nationalism is a very late development. China, in the nineteenth century, was ruled by the Manchus, who did not put much value on a distant Taiwan full of cannibals, whose troublesome Austronesian first settlers autonomously ruled much of the rugged island. The 1894–1895 war was not seen by Sun Yat-sen, leader of the major Han Chinese movement to overthrow the Manchu empire, as a struggle between us (China) and them (Japan). Instead, it was a fight between a progressive Meiji empire in Japan and a reactionary Manchu empire that had conquered Ming dynasty China in the seventeenth century, massacring Sinicized resisters. Identifying with the defeated Ming, Sun supported the dynamic Meiji and celebrated the defeat of the decadent Manchus, imagined as slaughterers of the Han.

Sun, of course, was anti-imperialist. But the major power threatening Chinese territory was Britain, not Japan. Sun saw Japan as a Pan-Asian ally of yellow races ridding Asia of invading whites. That is also how Japan’s defeat of Russia was celebrated in 1905, all the way to Muslim West Asia. The first nationwide anti-imperialist movement was not the May 4 movement of 1919. It was the May 30 movement of 1925, which targeted Britain. The political party leading the struggle against Britain was the KMT (Nationalists), headed by Sun and Chiang Kai-shek, with whom the CCP temporarily allied itself.

Anti-Japan nationalism was still so weak in the early 1930s that it was not easy to organize a boycott after Hirohito’s Showa-era imperial military wantonly bombed civilian Shanghai. This lack of popular support for anti-Japan politics was captured in Lao She’s great short story “The Lin Family Shop,” which shows the superior power of parochial interests over nationalism. Many progressive Chinese preferred the Japanese government to China’s corrupt, police-state/warlord coalition led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, perpetrator of an infamous anticommunist White Terror. Had Lu Xun, China’s great writer who resided in Shanghai and counted Japanese among his closest friends, lived but a few years longer, he could not have been honored posthumously by Mao. Lu Xun would have had to be labeled a “traitor to the Han” to accord with the policy that made traitors of all Chinese who did not accept the CCP line on Japan.

Even when Imperial Japan launched its all-out offensive in 1937, many patriotic Chinese who comprehended the evil that was Stalinism-Leninism did not see Mao’s CCP as a superior alternative. Pro-Japanese Chinese forces were led by a left-wing colleague of Sun. Imagining his collaboration as in line with Sun’s pro-Japanese Pan-Asianism, Wang Jing-wei helped Japan rule much of China. At the same time, millions of impoverished farmers fled for succor to the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo to escape the chaos, exploitation, and misery of Chinese-ruled China. Given the unpalatable alternatives, many Chinese rejected a call for “fighting the Japanese.” Embracing a popular Chinese mythos, some hoped that, as it had with previous Mongol and Manchu invaders, a superior Chinese culture would eventually Sinicize and civilize the Japanese barbarians.

Knowing nothing of the history sketched above, Chinese under CCP control learn to see Japan as a unique source of evil, making “Japan bashing . . . ascendant and unquestioned.”* Gries’s understanding of the policy implications of nationalist ideology foreshadows the outbreak of racist Japan-bashing a year after his book was published. There is realpolitik calculation here: with Japan understood as China’s main competitor in Asia, the goal is that “The 21st century will be China’s.”

How did the new nationalism arise? The CCP’s rewriting of history to legitimate itself as the savior of a continually threatened Chinese people intensified “after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre” of supporters of democratization. The CCP interpreted the implosion and democratization of Leninist states from 1989 to 1991 as an American plot to remove the CCP from power, leaving China prey to Japan as in 1937. Therefore, the CCP stepped up efforts to marshal the past, hoping that nationalist mobilization would trump democratic legitimacy. The nationalist narrative recited above was also intended to trace anti-Chinese policies back to Japan’s 1870s incursion into Taiwan, legitimating China’s annexation of that small democratic country as another step in the CCP’s anti-imperialist struggle, thereby ending an age of humiliation.

The CCP has greatly magnified Japanese inhumanity (which is not to deny its reality). Whereas the accepted figure for Chinese killed by Hirohito’s military, as calculated at the end of the Second World War, was around ten million, the CCP, after the traumatic events of 1989 to 1991, raised “the number of war casualties . . . to 35 million,” perhaps seeking a number larger than the tally of innocent Chinese who died because of the policies of Mao. The number of Chinese dead from Japan’s 1937–1938 massacre in Nanjing was also raised. It was reported as “more than the death toll at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.” China is a great power today, but its people are being taught that they are a victim nation that must stand up, strike back, and end its victimization.

The CCP shows consistent disdain for the historical record, inventing a past in which Japan is a uniquely evil force. This “history” also obscures the role of the American-led coalition in defeating Hirohito’s Japan. How, in this narrative that celebrates Confucian authoritarianism and treats democracy as an alien threat, could a democratic America be virtuous? “China’s role in defeating Japan was, in fact, greater than America’s.” “The Chinese people were the key determining influence in defeating Japanese imperialism.”

With Japanese portrayed as “beasts” and Americans as “devils,” a benign CCP is leading the Chinese race, descendants of the Yellow Emperor, to resume its rightful place in the world order. “China will soon replace America as the world’s number one superpower.” The CCP vision of the future is “a Sinocentric order . . . in which barbarians [non-Sinicized peoples] humbly pay tribute to a superior Chinese civilization.” The new nationalism legitimates authoritarian CCP rule inside of China, Chinese predominance in Asia, and China’s global challenge to America. “[O]riental culture is superior to Western culture and bound to dominate the world.”

But what is most worrisome to Gries is that the “CCP is losing its control over nationalist discourse.” It has created purists who believe that their rulers are compromising with evil—for China’s rulers actually want the economic benefits of normal relations with America, Japan, and Taiwan. But, as with the Saudi promotion of Wahhabism, which was intended to legitimate the regime at home and was certainly not meant to spread terror abroad or create a force seeking to topple the Saudi rulers, the socialization of the Chinese people to imagine Americans and Japanese as subhumans, “oppressing us, invading our motherland, and even killing our countrymen” has real and dangerous consequences. More and more Chinese ask, shouldn’t their rulers be doing far more to defeat the Japanese beasts, Taiwanese troublemakers, and American devils? If not, how can this CCP claim to be a legitimate ruler of the virtuous yet victimized Chinese people?

Responding to a nationalist rage it has itself spawned, the CCP is trying to control and co-opt the new nationalism. Many observers think, as I do, that the party has the power to do that. Repression is intensifying. In contrast to 2004, leaders of the 2005 Japan-bashing movement were arrested.

As with Islamic countries, many analysts worry that, given the hatred that official propaganda has created, a transition to democracy would unleash a war-prone nationalist force. Therefore these analysts support the repressors as the lesser evil. I believe, on the contrary, that a democratic China would have to give priority to the painful problems created by the CCP regime—a rich-poor gap worse than Russia’s or India’s, pervasive and cruel corruption, the absence of social safety nets, murderous environmental degradation, and so on.

The new popular nationalist discourse challenges both the state’s own nationalism and the state’s “softness” on Japan, America, and Taiwan. Nationalism from below, purist, racial populism, first generated by the CCP, now is used to discredit the CCP as a selfish and greedy ally of the barbarous enemies of the Chinese people. Although any Chinese government, authoritarian or democratic, can probably contain this infection, politics is a contingent arena. The future is not guaranteed. Meanwhile, a deadly poison spreads inside the Chinese body politic. Gries’s rich and reliable study provides the sad details.

Edward Friedman is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Three books by him on China were published in 2005: Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (Yale), China’s Rise, Taiwan’s Dilemmas, and International Peace (Routledge), and Asia’s Giants: Comparing China and India (Palgrave).

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