Jottings from the Granite Studio

In the recent issue of Forbes Magazine, Lee Kuan-yew writes about the continuing perception gap between East and West, citing the recent protests surrounding the torch relay and the angry response by ethnic Chinese both inside and outside the PRC. Lee argues that this is part of the developmental process and that as China becomes stronger and the Chinese middle class becomes larger, richer, and better educated (especially educated abroad) this sense of victimization at the hands of the West will diminish.

Last week, Chinese blogger Xueyong wrote a response to Mr. Lee’s piece. Xueyong asserts that the recent wave of patriotic fervor runs deeper than Lee Kuan-yew suggests, and that the sense of resentment over ‘Western bullying’ and the resulting feelings of victimization also have their roots in the PRC information and educational environment. (h/t Global Voices Online)

I took the liberty of translating Xueyong’s piece in full. I’m not the best translator, so I welcome any suggestions for fixes or more felicitous renderings of the original.

Singaporean Minister Mentor Lee Kuan-yew in the most recent issue of Forbes Magazine, discusses the chasm of understanding between East and West. He criticizes both sides. At the the end Lee gently chides:

The Chinese must prove to themselves that they are capable of building a modern nation. For this, China needs a large, well-educated middle class; if and when it gets it, many of them will have been educated in the West and will be familiar with the U.S. and Europe. Then, like the educated of Japan, Korea, and Singapore, they will cease to view themselves as victims of Western imperialism.” (Ed note. — In the original Forbes piece, Lee Kuan-yew mentions Taiwan and Hong Kong along with Japan, Singapore, and Korea.)

Li Kuan-yew pointed out that the misunderstanding which caused the wave of patriotic fervor over the last two months was this feeling or sense of being insulted by western countries. He feels sending foreign students abroad can change this perception. But it also leads to a perplexing situation: Those students studying abroad right now are even more patriotic than Chinese back home. These students wave the red flag on Capitol Hill, singing the refrain “As the Chinese nation faces its greatest peril” from our national anthem with gusto.

In reality, few people can say what the crises of the Chinese nation are or how the West in the past 30 or 50 years has bullied China. Japan and the West have provided China with a great deal of assistance over the past 30 years of development. Those people of Chinese ethnicity living abroad have benefited from this development. In addition, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong have little feeling of being bullied by the West. The West has little reason to oppress China. It is only a dark contest of ideologies. Western criticism of Chinese ideology or China’s human rights record is exists only to give westerners a pretext for gossiping. In any case, it’s not bullying China.

This sense of being bullied by the West is not from a lack of contact or communication with Western countries, so from whence does this feeling arise? Lee Kuan-yew is a politician and he has not considered carefully the past fifty years of ideological controls in China. If he thought about it, he found it inconvenient to mention it. As a matter of fact, this sense of being bullied from the west is rooted in the control of public opinion in China, the obstruction of the free flow of ideas, and students who from a young age are instilled with the notion of “Westerners bullying Chinese people.” Some Chinese students have had this feeling of oppression and bullying instilled in their blood, going to the west does not change this feeling. In the middle of Lee Kuan-yew’s article, he refers to a Chinese student who asks his professor a question that reflects this situation: “What do you want from us? When we were labeled the ’sick man of Asia,’ we were called a peril. When we are billed to be the next superpower, we’re called the threat.” (Ed note–this is taken from a poem which circulated on the internet this past spring.)

In fact, few westerners are familiar with this term “The Sick Man of Asia.” That was 100 years ago. As for “The China Threat” theory, that’s merely the view of a few extreme right-wing Westerners. Where did the student get his question? It came from propaganda, it came from indoctrination, it came from the emotional content of CCTV programs.

Chinese propaganda is characterized by harangues over the shortcomings of the West and the “carrying forward” of Chinese patriotism and heroism. During the tense period following the Sichuan earthquake, China’s propaganda department organized a national speech tour on the subject of “The Heroic Relief Effort.”

Truly it is: “A relative and those who remain grieve, others are singing, what they died for, is to inspire as heroes and models for the whole country.”

The Chinese are justifiably angry at the destruction wrought by aggressive foreign powers during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Who wouldn’t be? There’s also a theory of historical development, immensely popular inside the PRC but not without its adherents abroad as well, which argues that China’s recent ‘backwardness’ began when imperialism derailed the natural process of modernization and development which some scholars claim dates as far back as the 9th century.

I tend to take a middle path, in part because of my distaste for monocausal explanations of historical phenomena. Certainly imperialism crippled the economy of the Qing Empire and the system of unequal treaties were enormous infringements on Qing imperial sovereignty. The tariff restrictions and commerce clauses of the treaties hampered efforts to build and protect domestic industry and the need to enforce the treaties in the face of overwhelming popular resentment weakened the political legitimacy for all levels of the Qing government, from the Manchu court down to the local officials. That’s not even mentioning the human toll of warfare, economic dislocations, and the insidious spread of opium addiction. That said, by the early 19th century, the Qing Empire was a mess, the center was weak, the bureaucracy riven with corruption, and the pressure of an expanding population on limited resources threatened the social and economic order. Furthermore, why should we assume that, if left alone, China would have developed and modernized on its own? Is there a single path of development that assumes the end goal of all human progress to be an industrial revolution and modernization as occurred in Western Europe and then spread to its satellite polities in North America?

We should never forget about the problems of imperialism on China, but at the same time we should remain aware that this narrative of Western victimization and Communist liberation is a key part of the legitimizing ideology of Party and state. History is taught in the schools and presented in the mass media not as a process of questioning, critical analysis, and objective inquiry leading to renewed understanding of the past, but rather as a reinforcement of ideology and a petrification of old tropes and myths.

Oscar Wilde once said, “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.” I couldn’t agree more. Increasing understanding, building bridges between cultures, and making friends of old enemies cannot simply be stages on some macroeconomic timeline, they must be a part of a process by which the past, both the good and bad, the laudable and the regrettable, are reexamined, discussed, and remembered, because a past viewed through ideological blinkers and partisan agendas is a shaky foundation for building a future. I’m just saying…