Mao's dictum, “Make the past serve the present, and make foreign things serve China,” aptly describes how modern history is an important security issue in the People's Republic of China (PRC). This chapter and Chapter 3 examine how history is used to answer the question “Who is China?” In other words, we need to see how both official propaganda and popular culture answer the admittedly awkward question “When is China?” In this chapter, we consider how the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses the grand narrative of the Century of National Humiliation to socialize Chinese people into patriots who must continuously struggle against hostile foreign forces. Chapter 3 discusses how Chinese nationalism is produced and consumed through patriotic activities on a special day: National Humiliation Day. Together these Centuries and Days of National Humiliation will show how historical narratives are employed to unite moral, patriotic, and civilized Chinese against corrupt, hostile, and barbaric foreigners. Chapters 2 and 3 thus examine how history comes alive as a political activity in China, on both a very grand and a very local scale, through a combination of party‐state policy and movements in popular culture.

Seeing how particular historical narratives answer the question “When is China?” is important because China's pessoptimist historiography of national pride and national humiliation does more than guide how people understand the past. Long after the Century of National Humiliation ended in 1949, the pessoptimist historical narrative still provides the template that encourages militant Chinese reactions to conflicts in the present and the future. This is especially true for China's controversial relationships with (p. 32 ) the United States, Japan, and Taiwan. The bombing of China's Belgrade embassy (1999) and the EP‐3 reconnaissance plane incident (2001) were explained in China as “new national humiliations”; the unclear status of Taiwan and international criticism of China's Tibet policy are seen as historical legacies of the Century of National Humiliation. In other words, China's campaign to be recognized as a great power has a reverse image: it wants to make sure that it is not humiliated (again) on the world stage.

This chapter thus elaborates on themes raised in Chapter 1 to show how China's pessoptimist structure of feeling frames historical memory, and primes China's angry youth to explode into popular protests when they feel that China is being bullied or humiliated.

Patriotic Education Policy Since 1989

While many saw the 1989 mass movement in Tiananmen Square as a possible solution to the problem of the brutality of the Chinese state, Deng Xiaoping felt that this “counter‐revolutionary rebellion” was best explained as a catastrophic failure of the CCP propaganda system. In a speech to top generals on June 9, 1989, Deng concluded that “during the last ten years our biggest mistake was made in the field of education, primarily in ideological and political education – not just of students but of the people in general.”¹ In September 1989, he elaborated: “Our gravest failure has been in education. We did not provide enough education to young people, including students. For many who participated in the demonstrations and hunger strikes it will take years, not just a couple of months, of education to change their thinking.”² Deng realized that loyalty to the party‐state was not natural; China's youth needed to be taught how to be patriotic. His dictum “Seize with both hands, with both hands holding tight” thus describes how China needs to develop both the material civilization of economic prosperity and the spiritual civilization of political loyalty.

Although it has faced challenges from a commercialization of the media, the impact of new information and communication technologies (including the Internet), and a globalization of ideas, China still has a formidable propaganda system. To regulate what people can and cannot know, and thus who they can and cannot be, the party‐state has been adept at utilizing the market and new technologies to “enhance and strengthen the propaganda apparatus.”³ Rather than being degraded by Deng's economic reforms, which have opened up Chinese society, “the Central Propaganda Department and the system it oversees has expanded and modernized to (p. 33 ) keep up with these changes.”⁴ While many hoped that Hu Jintao would bring political reform to China, his regime actually has tightened control over the discussion of key political topics through both negative censorship of dissenting views and a positive socialization of the Chinese public through education and propaganda.

As the CCP's propaganda system has exploited new technologies, the content of its messages still maintains the same fundamental goal: to present a singular correct view of “the real China” to both foreigners and Chinese citizens. While the country we now call “China” has a contingent history that includes different peoples and different territories at different times, the party‐state works hard to assert an essentialized primordial view of Chinese civilization, identity, and territory. In this way Beijing's “One China Policy” seems to apply beyond Cross‐Straits Relations; unification with Taiwan is part of the propaganda system's very careful promotion of a unified view of China and the world: One China, One Truth, One World, One Dream.

To accomplish this singular correct view of “the real China,” Jiang Zemin instructed propaganda workers to regulate the production and the distribution of information about the PRC by promoting “correct theories and unified thinking.”⁵ To guide political understanding and action, the propaganda system employs a set of official phrases [tifa] – such as “Never Forget National Humiliation, Rejuvenate China.” As Michael Schoenhals explains, “By proscribing some formulations and prescribing others, they set out to regulate what is being said and what is being written – and by extension what is being done.”⁶ While this language politics is common in China's domestic sphere, recently Beijing has been deploying it in a more sophisticated way for foreign audiences.⁷ “Peaceful rising‐heping jueqi” is another good example of a tifa “official phrase” that shapes Chinese understandings of domestic and foreign politics. It appeared in 2003, and has been popular in China's explanations of its global role since early 2004.⁸ The import of “peaceful rising” comes less from its deep meaning, than from the role it plays in official language games, which is reinforced through persistent and continuous repetition in the mass media. Indeed, Chinese texts do not argue that “peaceful rising” is more persuasive than “China threat” for understanding the rise of China; rather, peaceful rising is presented as an “indisputable fact,” while China threat is dismissed as a “malicious fallacy.”⁹

Any arguments that offer a more complex view of Chinese history, identity, and by extension China's current foreign policy are dismissed as “unobjective” examples of “Western bias.” As the deputy director of the 2 (p. 34 ) 008 Olympics’ opening ceremony informed us, critical understanding that deviates from the party‐state's view of “the real China” is unthinkable because “to know China” is “to love China, to desire China.”¹⁰ This unified understanding of China leads to a proliferation of pronouncements in the official media about what “the Chinese people think,” and what “the Chinese people feel.”

The Central Propaganda Department promotes this singular view of the real China through its control over the production and distribution of all types of media and information;¹¹ while it cannot effectively control the content of the massive amount of information and culture now available in China, it is able to effectively control specific areas of political interest. One of the Central Propaganda Department's key areas of interest is education, where it maintains joint responsibility with the Ministry of Education for curricula and textbooks at all levels of the system.¹²

“History” is a particularly important security issue in China: the legitimacy of the CCP regime grows out of the history of its revolution against foreign imperialism and domestic corruption, rather than from democratic elections, effectiveness, or public opinion. But history can be subversive as well; it records the memories not just of regimes, but of the revolutionary history of mass movements as well. Much of the power of China's mass demonstrations in 1989 came from the fact that they presented an alternative to the official commemoration of a key revolutionary holiday – the seventieth anniversary of the May 4th movement of 1919.

Because of these legitimacy issues, the CCP is very attentive to history education.¹³ In the wake of the 1989 mass movement that had shocked the party‐state, President Jiang Zemin refocused political education to stress the importance of modern and contemporary Chinese history, which the Central Propaganda Department then targeted as a “meaningful security issue.”¹⁴ Hence, rather than China's new nationalism being an expression of popular feeling, we need to understand this nationalism in the context of the state's patriotic education policy that emerged in the 1990s, and which continues to guide education and propaganda today. This is not a new policy: patriotism and national humiliation also were closely linked in newspaper commentaries and history textbooks in the early twentieth century: History of National Humiliation is the title of numerous state‐approved textbooks from the 1920s and 1930s.¹⁵ Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that when the idea of “modern history” took shape in China in the 1920s, it was guided by the history of national humiliation. Top historian Lü Simian, for example, published a popular history of modern China at the same time that he published a history of China's (p. 35 ) national humiliation.¹⁶ President Chiang Kai‐shek himself appealed to the history of national humiliation as part of the construction of citizenship and national identity in the Republic of China.¹⁷

With the communist victory in 1949, official history curriculum and patriotic education policy shifted to focus on the more positive Marxist themes of class struggle and revolutionary victory.¹⁸ According to the records of the National Library of China in Beijing, no national humiliation history textbooks were published between 1937 and 1990. Yet, national humiliation history education was suddenly revived in the late twentieth century as a response to the Tiananmen movement in 1989.

To the outside world, the Tiananmen Square movement was seen as a pro‐democracy movement, where for the first time in generations popular protest was not directed against foreign imperialism. Indeed, the focus of students’ ire was internal: official corruption and the lack of domestic political reform. Hence this presented a security crisis to the Chinese leadership; but not a crisis of traditional national security, so much as nontraditional security of the party‐state: the ideological security, regime security, and cultural security of the CCP.

The solution to this problem, China's leaders decided, was to shift the focus of youthful energies away from domestic issues to foreign problems. The CCP thus formulated a patriotic education policy, not so much to reeducate the youth (as in the past), as to redirect protest toward the foreigner as the primary enemy. The Central Propaganda Department's “Outline for Implementing Patriotic Education” (1994) states that the policy's objective is to boost the nation's spirit, enhance national cohesion, foster national pride, consolidate and develop a patriotic united front, and rally the masses’ patriotic passions to “build socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Not surprisingly, the study of history is an important part of this patriotic education policy, especially the study of China's modern history of being invaded by imperialists, and the study of China's national characteristics, especially as they are incompatible with democratic values that are defined as “Western” – and thus foreign.¹⁹ The Central Propaganda Department's “Outline” proposed a multimedia campaign of patriotic education activities that would take place not just in schools but in museums, film, television, popular magazines, newspapers, and on official holidays.

Patriotic education history textbooks thus go beyond the positive narrative of China's ancient civilization and modern revolutionary victories. Although it is not usually recognized outside China, national humiliation education has become an important part of the patriotic education curriculum: the encyclopedic Practical Dictionary of Patriotic Education includes a 3 (p. 36 ) 55‐page section recording China's national humiliations in detail.²⁰ As the patriotic education policy was taking shape in the early 1990s, the national humiliation theme dramatically reappeared in China, perhaps as the result of a caustic remark from Deng Xiaoping. Responding to the Group of Seven's sanctions imposed on China after the June 4th massacre, Deng revived national humiliation themes when he quipped that the Group of Seven was basically the same bunch of imperialists that had invaded China in 1900 to put down the Boxer Uprising and divide up the country:

I am a Chinese, and I am familiar with the history of foreign aggression against China. When I heard that the seven Western countries, at their summit meeting, had decided to impose sanctions on China, my immediate association was to 1900, when the allied forces of the eight powers invaded China.

Deng thus concluded that in order to properly understand the world “Our people should study Chinese history; it will inspire us to develop the country.”²¹

Following Deng's lead, the first National Humiliation history textbook since 1937 was published in 1990 as part of a “history, patriotism, and socialism” book series. The aim was to promote the singular correct history that would persuade China's youth that the CCP's rule was legitimate. By recounting China's humiliating diplomatic and military defeats at the hands of European, Japanese, and American forces, The Indignation of National Humiliation follows many of the same themes and rhetorical style as textbooks from the early twentieth century. The author confirms that the timing of the book was very political: it was published in April 1990 on the eve of the 150th anniversary of The Opium War.²² Patriotic education thus served to redirect students’ emotions and energies away from commemorating the first anniversary of the Tiananmen movement, which started in April 1989.

Other national humiliation textbooks were more direct in linking national humiliation and the Tiananmen movement. In June 1990, for the first anniversary of the crackdown an education journal article, “How Can We Conduct National Humiliation Education?,” attacked the question head on:

How can we make national humiliation education the guiding line of patriotic education, in order to make students understand the crimes of the imperialist invasion of China, the suffering of the Chinese nation, and thus grasp class exploitation and oppression in today's world? How can we use the perspective of class struggle to clearly understand the general international political climate and the specific domestic political climate so as to build an ideological Great Wall to oppose the “peaceful evolution” policy of the reactionary international powers?²³

(p. 37 ) The article answers this set of questions with a set of suggestions on how to integrate national humiliation education into Chinese, English, and French language instruction; chemistry, biology, and geography curricula; thematic extracurricular activities including political study groups, movie dates, poetry readings, and even public‐speaking contests. The aim was to instruct teachers about how to answer questions raised by students in the Tiananmen movement – specifically about the reasons for China's backwardness and political corruption – in the correct way. The answers, according to this article, are simple: China is backward because the West has obstructed its rise, and corruption in China comes from foreign capitalist ideology. Chinese critics are seen as counterrevolutionary liberal elites who wanted “total Westernization,” while foreign critics – especially from the United States – are simply the latest generation of reactionary hostile foreign imperialist invaders.

The preface by China's vice‐minister of education to a history textbook edited by the National Education Committee thus explains how patriotic education can protect the Chinese nation from threats, both foreign and domestic: “Today we are confronted with foreign and domestic enemies who are plotting to force ‘peaceful evolution’ on our country. We need to make the youth understand [the history of national humiliation].…I hope that patriotic education will end the turmoil and counter‐revolutionary tendencies among primary and secondary school students.”²⁴

While this anxiety about the patriotism of China's youth initially was a knee‐jerk reaction to challenges faced by the party‐state after 1989 (which included the fall of fraternal communist parties in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe), this short‐term propaganda tactic eventually became Beijing's long‐term propaganda strategy. Throughout the 1990s, patriotic education policy continued to develop and become more institutionalized. While the PRC was embracing the world in the twenty‐first century through its foreign policy narratives of “peaceful rising” and “harmonious world,” the number of articles in education journals about the importance of national humiliation education was actually increasing. After scores of textbooks and hundreds of academic articles were published, in 2004 the PRC's main newsweekly Outlook [Liaowang] concluded that national humiliation was an under‐researched and under‐taught topic. China's “history of suffering” is an “invaluable heritage” because of the “tragedy” of “the lack of understanding among China's youth about national humiliation and national crises.” The author thus concluded that national humiliation education is still necessary so that “the youth would feel how their happiness today is the outcome of a time of difficulty. Only then would they work hard in trying to repay the motherland.”²⁵

(p. 38 ) This view of China's modern history guides textbooks, university entrance exams, and core university courses.²⁶ Patriotic education and national humiliation education thus have become an institutionalized part of China's propaganda system because, as Deng Xiaoping reasoned in 1989, the CCP couldn't take loyalty for granted. The Central Propaganda Department had to socialize China's youth and the general public into a particular form of identity that tells people what to remember – and what to forget.

National Humiliation History Textbooks

The Political Economy of National Humiliation

Since the textbooks highlight how Western countries – especially the United States – used an “Open Door” policy at the turn of the twentieth century to invade China not only politically, but economically, it would be easy to conclude that patriotic education is against China's current economic reform policy that has opened up China to the international market. But the long‐term aim of the national humiliation narrative is both political and economic, aiming to resolve both foreign challenges and domestic problems. To “cleanse national humiliation,” the Chinese government first needs to overcome imperialism by uniting the country and asserting national sovereignty under Beijing's leadership – as it did in 1949. Now the CCP needs to prove that it can develop China's social and economic system better than previous “stupidly corrupt” regimes that were “backward.”⁵⁰

Some of the textbooks argue that backwardness of the Qing dynasty and Republican China was not simply the fault of a few “race traitors”; China was weak because of systemic problems. In other words, the struggle was not just between countries like China and Britain, but between political and economic systems: capitalist imperialism attacked the feudal system of the Qing dynasty. Here the textbooks employ Mao Zedong's version of Marxism⁵¹ to explain how imperialist expansion transformed China domestically:

The feudal economy was seriously challenged, transforming China day‐by‐day into a commercial market and source of raw materials for world capitalism, thus changing China step‐by‐step into a semi‐feudal and semi‐colonial society. After the Opium War, China's independence was completely destroyed…with the expansion of foreign control over its politics, economics and culture.⁵²

China thus became a target of imperialist aggression because its “closed‐door” foreign policy made it weak and backward militarily, politically, economically, and culturally. In the early 1800s, we are told, Britain first conquered India before it targeted China as the most “politically corrupt and scientifically backward country in Asia.”⁵³ The national humiliation textbooks thus repeat, again and again, that the lesson that the Chinese people must take to heart is that “a weak country will be bullied and humiliated, and the backward will be beaten.”⁵⁴ As another national (p. 45 ) humiliation textbook concludes: “History indisputably tells us: the backward must be beaten. But history at the same time clearly tells us: if we yield to a stronger enemy's despotic power and don't dare to resist, then we will certainly be beaten.”⁵⁵

Here China's narrative of national humiliation, which is highly critical of foreigners and traitors, becomes self‐critical. As Never Forget National Humiliation (1992) succinctly puts it: “When facing the challenge of the modern world in the nineteenth century, China fell behind.”⁵⁶ As Modern Chinese History (2005) explains, “In the past century the basic question facing us is ‘Can the Chinese people modernize?’…If we can, our nation's future will be bright. If we can't, our nation will have no future.”⁵⁷

IR theorist Qin Yaqing likewise highlights the link between development and identity:

In the last century China began to experience anxiety regarding its identity with respect to the international system, and China fell into the dilemma of its place in the process of achieving modernity. Chinese people were forced to consider the question ‘Who are we?’ In the past, China regarded those who had not been civilized by Chinese culture as barbarians; but now, it seems that Chinese themselves become barbarians.⁵⁸

The backward/modern distinction, which works parallel to the civilization/barbarian distinction, thus continues to frame key issues for the Chinese leadership in the twenty‐first century.⁵⁹

Patriotic education textbooks therefore stress that Chinese people need to recognize not only the fact that the CCP saved China in 1949, but also that “only reform and opening would allow China to develop” in the twenty‐first century.⁶⁰ Although China has prospered with the economic reforms, Never Forget the Century of National Humiliation underlines how China's level of “development in economy, science and the people's livelihood is still far behind that of economically advanced countries.” It argues that this is not just an economic problem, but a problem of national security because China still faces threats like those in the Century of National Humiliation: “we may still face a grave situation where we could be beaten up because we are backward.”⁶¹ Chinese people thus need to beware of the ever‐present danger of hostile foreign powers.

Hence, while the dominant theme of the narrative of national humiliation that pits Chinese civilization against foreign barbarism can be xenophobic, this modernization sub‐theme seeks to engage with the world economy. Its goal is in line with China's stated policy: use the negative lessons of the corrupt and isolationist Qing dynasty to promote the PRC's (p. 46 ) economic reform project, and use the international system to develop China. Economic reform opens China up to the world; but the party‐state still is wary of political reform, foreign influence, and the risk of being “beaten up” in the future. The Chinese thus are instructed to guard the PRC's political, economic, and cultural sovereignty through the curious combination of national defense discourse and economic reform discourse presented in the national humiliation history textbooks. The textbooks reflect this somewhat contradictory policy by employing Marxist vocabulary in a new way. The goal of the propaganda system in the reform era is no longer a “world socialist revolution” that unites the workers of the world, but is safeguarding (and promoting) the Chinese nation: recall the popular slogan “Never Forget National Humiliation, Rejuvenate China.” Nationalism in China is not merely antiforeign; it also promotes modernization, just as the modernization of China helps to confirm the patriotic nationalist credentials of the party‐state. Deng's dictum to “seize with both hands” thus joins together China's open‐door development policy with its xenophobic propaganda policy in order to create a strong and wealthy nation. This politics/economics nexus promotes national strength and party legitimacy in particular ways to stress the politics of the party‐state, by the party‐state, and for the party‐state.

The Popularization of Patriotic Education

Many serious scholars in China and abroad dismiss these mass market textbooks as clumsy propaganda artifacts that have little influence on how people think and act. But the textbooks’ importance is confirmed by their celebrity endorsements: the first few pages of many of these books include laudatory inscriptions by top political and military leaders. Moreover, while some analysts dismiss these textbooks as shoddy history written by party hacks, key national humiliation history books have been endorsed by China's top historians and historical research institutes. Dai Yi, a prominent historian of modern China, wrote the preface for the first national humiliation history book, The Indignation of National Humiliation (1990), as well as for the Dictionary of National Humiliation: 1840–1949 (1992).⁶² The president of China's World War II History Association, who is a history professor at China's National Defense University, wrote the preface for Never Forget National Humiliation: Use History to Teach the People (2003).⁶³ The director of the elite Modern History Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) co‐authored 100 Events of National Humiliation (p. 47 ) (2001).⁶⁴ The Modern History Institute edited the Simple Dictionary of National Humiliation (1993), and CASS has published other national humiliation books as well.⁶⁵

While political and academic endorsements are important, in the late 1990s and 2000s national humiliation publications have increasingly aimed for a wider non‐academic audience. Like with the commercialization of the mass media, there has been an expansion beyond the standard textbook format to a more “fresh and lively” style that engages a broader readership for patriotic education beyond the classroom.⁶⁶ Perhaps the best example of this populist mode of national humiliation education is an exhibit called “Never Forget National Humiliation” that was independently organized and funded by an “ordinary peasant.”⁶⁷ This exhibit of photographs, maps, and artifacts from Japan's World War II invasion of China started as the pet project of Ren Diaoyue, a peasant from a small town in central China. Ren's private collection travelled the country for eight years, gradually building up influence until it was invited to exhibit in major cities

(p. 48 ) like Beijing and Shanghai. The travelling museum, and the strange story of the success of the “ordinary peasant” in an arena dominated by intellectuals and party officials, ended up generating publicity at the highest levels of Chinese media. National newspapers published articles about the exhibit, while Ren became a popular guest on China's talk‐show circuit (see Figure 2.1).

As we saw with the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Olympics, film directors can effectively guide China's structure of feeling. Hence to see how China's national aesthetic shapes patriotic education at the turn of the twenty‐first century, we need to go to the movies. The Opium War opened in cinemas all over China in June 1997.⁶⁸ This epic is usually described in terms of superlatives. It was China's most expensive film. It literally employed a cast of thousands, including 3,000 foreign extras and dozens of professional foreign actors. It was financed by numerous semiofficial and semiprivate sources, and was publicly endorsed by President Jiang Zemin and other political leaders. Its premier was marked by both a Hollywood‐style event at Beijing's Great Hall of the People, and by a somber academic conference. The result was a film that was successful among both the intellectual elite and the masses, wowing the critics and conquering the market: in its first few months The Opium War accounted for 37 percent of mainland China's total box office receipts, making it the highest‐grossing Chinese film.⁶⁹

Its director, Xie Jin, was already well known for his “revolutionary films” that were part of the CCP's propaganda arsenal during the Maoist era. However, The Opium War was different. It had private funding, and was much more sophisticated, both technically and aesthetically. Compared with an earlier cinematic treatment of the same historical events, Lin Zexu (1959), The Opium War was seen by many as much more “balanced.” It was the first Chinese film to use foreign actors, and it presented them as more well‐rounded characters.⁷⁰ Yet, the opposite interpretation can also be true: Xie's technical and aesthetic sophistication actually enables the film to much more persuasively convey the same messages as the patriotic education campaign: the Chinese people need a strong and modern party‐state to avoid national humiliation in the twenty‐first century.

Xie very quickly locates The Opium War in the now familiar pessoptimist structure of feeling. The film shows how China's struggle with Britain over opium relies on cultural distinctions to separate Chinese from foreigners, and sort out enemies from friends. It employs the same binary distinctions as the textbooks we analyzed earlier – foreign/domestic, civilized/barbaric, and hero/traitor – to make a patriotic sense of a war fought nearly two centuries ago. While textbooks simply use words and phrases to define a (p. 49 ) person as civilized or barbaric, The Opium War does it through images, dialogue, musical background, as well as running textual commentaries. For example, the film's protagonist, Lin Zexu, is introduced to the audience as a civilized scholar‐official who writes poetry for his teacher. The key antagonist, Denton the British opium smuggler, is introduced shooting a seagull for fun. When his daughter Mary protests, he assures her that “it's only a game” to underline how foreigners take pleasure in being cruel and wasteful. Throughout the film, foreigners are presented as barbaric against Chinese civilization: when reading a letter from the British, Lin complains that their calligraphy is ugly and that they misspell his name.⁷¹ Thus, when the hostilities begin the Chinese emperor can declare, “These foreigners are barbaric and ignorant. I tried peaceful means before resorting to force.”

The clearest example of the film's organizing principle of civilization/barbarian is conveyed in the scene where the Chinese envoy Qi Shan goes to the British camp to negotiate a truce over dinner. Viewing his rare steak with distaste, Qi Shan opines that “You are born bellicose because you like to eat bleeding food.” The British envoy responds: “I understand that the Chinese cuisine is unrivaled anywhere in the world. I can't say as much about your cannons. If you had applied just a little of your expertise in cooking to the manufacturing of cannon it would be we who today were begging for a truce.” Thus, the superior spiritual power of Chinese civilization is vanquished by the superior military power of Western capitalist imperialism; it is important to note that Xie still has foreigners recognizing the wealth of Chinese civilization.

The patriotic meaning of The Opium War is likewise built around the hero/traitor distinction. Lin is not just a civilized person, but a national hero. Through various scenes we are shown that Lin is a good, honest, and upright official who respects his elders, and is a filial son. But this upright official is not passive: to save China he actively fights against Chinese merchants who smuggle opium in cahoots with corrupt government officials. These two groups of Chinese people are not simply criminals; the film shows time and again that they are traitors who sell out the Chinese nation for their own personal profit.

Curiously, Lin Zexu is not the only hero in The Opium War. A sing‐song girl, Rong'er, also fights for China against both foreign barbarians and traitors to the Chinese race. Early in the film she is forced to prostitute herself to support a drug habit that was encouraged by a greedy merchant. But when she finds out that her john is Denton, Rong'er recoils in horror: “No, no. I don't sleep with foreigners.” She is only saved from this indignity when Lin Zexu's officials raid her club. Later in the film, Rong'er suffers the (p. 50 ) same fate again: after Qi Shan has sealed the deal with the British, he offers them Chinese food and Chinese women since “now you are our guests.” The film presents British soldiers as drunken lechers with insatiable appetites, who paw at defenseless Chinese women. Rong'er, however, is willing to sacrifice herself for the good of the Chinese nation by agreeing to have sex with the British envoy. But once in bed, she fights back, trying to stab him with secreted scissors. In this way, Rong'er is like “China” itself. Both greedy merchants and corrupt officials are willing to sacrifice her body to foreigners – but like the Chinese people in the patriotic education narrative, Rong'er fights back. As the Qing dynasty bows before British gunboat diplomacy, she successfully resists foreign men – only to be martyred by corrupt Chinese officials.

Through its epic story, The Opium War clearly distinguishes between a civilized and heroic inside and a corrupt and barbaric outside. It is true that the film is progressive when compared with Lin Zexu (1959), because outsiders are not presented as completely evil. But the sympathetic foreigners are typically daughters and priests, not “real men” with political and economic power; and these and other sympathetic foreigners are required to praise Chinese culture to reinforce the civilization/barbarism distinction. Hence, foreigners and foreign ideas are still presented in The Opium War as a key moral, economic, military, and political problem.

Like with national humiliation textbooks, the film reminds us that China's fall from grace is not wholly the result of foreign invasion – it also stems from the structural and ideological “backwardness” of the Qing state. While Lin Zexu focuses more on the Chinese people and their resistance to imperialism and feudalism, The Opium War tells us that the problem in 1839 is as much the weak Qing dynasty as it is the aggressive British Empire. Long scenes emotionally document bloody battles where the heroic Chinese army is brutally destroyed. Another extended scene solemnly records how the British ceremoniously took control of Hong Kong in 1840, complete with British troops singing their national anthem and raising the British flag over China's sovereign territory.

While The Opium War was still dominating Chinese cinemas, the official handover ceremony, where Jiang Zemin declared that “the occupation of Hong Kong was the epitome of the humiliation China suffered in modern history,”⁷² took place on July 1, 1997. The cinematic spectacle of British forces raising their flag over Hong Kong in 1840 thus formed a counterpart to the real time spectacle of the handover ceremony that focused on the lowering of the British flag and the raising of the Chinese flag. In case the film audience had forgotten, the film ends with white text on a black (p. 51 ) background: “July 1st, 1997 the Chinese government takes back sovereignty of Hong Kong, 157 years after the Opium War.” The lesson is clear: only a strong state can safeguard China's political, economic, and cultural sovereignty. Actually, the state itself was a major segment of the audience behind the blockbuster success of The Opium War – most of the tickets were sold as “group purchases” to organs of the party‐state.

The Opium War, therefore, is successful because it appeals to the structure of feeling of China's national aesthetic. It is full of facts, many of which are presented in running textual commentaries that explain the war's historical background with important dates and the official titles of Chinese and foreign historical figures. Although this documentary style delivers much important information to the audience, the film actually targets the frustration and indignation of the Chinese people who still suffer the legacies of the Century of National Humiliation. Indeed, the film shows how Lin Zexu doesn't just rationally plan his strategy for curing China's opium habit. Numerous scenes also show him yelling in anger at evil foreigners and corrupt Chinese merchants and officials. This would seem to go against Lin's role as an “upright official,” where he is kind and gentle to “victims” who deserve his care. But it graphically shows Lin as a tough guy who uses his righteous rage to stand up for the Chinese people, even though he knows that he is fighting a losing battle against political–economic forces that are beyond his control. Viewers also feel the geopolitical pain of Rong'er, who has to prostitute herself to evil foreigners because she cannot afford to marry her childhood sweetheart. The film ends with long shots of the Chinese emperor weeping in the face of the judgment of history: the camera then pans across official portraits of his more successful predecessors. The ultimate issue here is whether the emperor, and the state he embodies, is strong enough to defend itself – because, as the slogan tells us, the backward will be beaten. The camera finally settles on the stone lions that guard the imperial palace in Beijing: the red glow of the lion's eye shines through the rainy gloom, promising revenge against China's foreign and domestic enemies.

Films like The Opium War are successful because they show how modernization in China is both material and spiritual in ways made familiar in national humiliation history textbooks. Patriotic education promotes the material goals of China's economic development project; it also works to achieve spiritual and emotional goals by both guiding and responding to how the Chinese people feel. Patriotic education policy documents quote how Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin both stress the importance of “national self‐respect, national self‐esteem, and national pride.”⁷³ Many (p. 52 ) patriotic education textbooks dutifully state that students should “Read these books and then be able to feel the proper sense of pride for the Chinese people. Read them and then be able to feel the mission and duty of the Chinese people.”⁷⁴ But this pride is always intimately linked to humiliation: the writers of Never Forget National Humiliation (2002) feel that their “work as writers will be done” when readers “feel the unforgettable national humiliation and mass hatred, which makes the Chinese nation self‐sufficient and self‐reliant”⁷⁵ in its quest for wealth and power.

Resisting National Humiliation Education

By many measures the patriotic education campaign has been fantastically successful. Yet, some in China are worried that it is shaping their country's “national character” in violent and xenophobic ways, which ultimately work against the rise of China as a responsible member of international society. Historian Yuan Weishi's article, “Modernization and History Textbooks,” is the most famous recent critique of patriotic education policy. It was published in China Youth Daily's weekly supplement “Freezing Point” in January 2006.⁷⁶ Yuan wrote this article because he “was stunned to find that our youth are continuing to drink the wolf's milk” of harsh history textbooks, which he felt had inspired the violent chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Rather than building patriotism on a distinction between Chinese and foreign, Yuan argues that China would be strengthened if its history education developed “the national character of the Chinese people” in ways that stressed “rationality and tolerance.” Yuan's reasonable conclusion actually is in line with the party‐state's economic reform policy.

However, the Central Propaganda Department of the China Youth League, which owns the China Youth Daily, criticized Yuan and his article. It banned “Modernization and History Textbooks” because the article “seriously contradicted news propaganda discipline,” and thus “hurt the feelings of the Chinese nation.” The committee felt that this lack of propaganda discipline was endemic in “Freezing Point,” so it shut down the magazine and fired its editor. This blatant censorship of academic analysis became a cause célèbre in Greater China and the international community. Yet, if we read the Central Propaganda Committee's judgment closely, we can see that they were enraged not just by what Yuan wrote, but with how he wrote it. It declared that Yuan himself was “seriously distorting historical facts” in ways that “attempted to vindicate the criminal acts of the imperial powers’ invasion of China.” Indeed, in “Modernization and (p. 53 ) History Textbooks” Yuan plays with the rhetoric of national humiliation, often taking the pessoptimist distinctions examined earlier – inside/outside, civilized/barbaric, hero/traitor, modern/backward, and domestic/foreign – and reversing their logic. This probably is what most incensed the censors – and it also can show us how patriotic education works to promote a singular correct view of “the real China.”

While textbooks see China as civilized and foreigners as barbaric, Yuan points to the Boxer Uprising (1900) to argue the opposite: here these Chinese are barbaric, anti‐civilization, anti‐humanity, xenophobic, ignorant, and backward. Using the same phrase that is commonly employed to describe the barbarity of foreigners, Yuan writes that “The Boxers burned, killed, looted and deliberately destroyed modern civilization.” Likewise, Yuan uses the example of the Second Opium War (1858–60) that saw the burning of the Garden of Perfect Brilliance imperial palace to reverse the valence on patriotic hero/evil traitor. He points out that because they violated military discipline, the “irregular” Chinese forces that attacked European troops in 1858 cannot be called patriotic or heroic. Moreover, while diplomats like Li Hongzhang are prominent on lists of Chinese traitors, Yuan lists Li as an “astute official” who was patriotic and heroic.

While the history textbooks generate patriotism by “inflaming nationalistic passions” against foreigners, Yuan criticizes this strategy, saying that “Our thinking is still poisoned by…traditional Chinese culture's deeply ingrained idea that ‘Chinese and foreigners are different.’” He warns that we “should not underestimate the consequences of this mis‐education,” and draws a close parallel between the logic of the Boxers’ attack on Beijing's diplomatic quarter in 1900 and the Red Guards’ torching a British consulate during the Cultural Revolution. Hence, while patriotic education textbooks list the national humiliations of foreigners’ barbaric invasion of China, Yuan thinks that Chinese textbooks themselves are a “national humiliation.” Speaking of the barbarities of the Boxers, he concludes that “these are all facts that everybody knows, and it is a national humiliation that the Chinese people cannot forget. Yet our children's compulsory textbooks will not speak about it.”

Yuan is not the only critic of Beijing's ideological campaigns. In another newspaper article, “China Must Adopt a Great‐power Mentality, and Make Psychological Change Part of its Modernization,” CASS scholar Jin Xide also argues against patriotic education and national humiliation discourse.⁷⁷ While Yuan is mainly concerned with how national humiliation education fans extremism in China's domestic politics, Jin is interested in patriotic education's impact on international relations. While historians (p. 54 ) like Yuan are interested in how the events of 1840–1949 are presented to Chinese students, Jin is interested in how the dynamic of “glory and humiliation” has shaped the PRC's relation to the world in the past half century. Rather than seeing glory and humiliation as opposites, Jin tells us that these positive and negative “extremes” are “interwoven, separated only by a fine line and can easily trade places.” This pessoptimist mentality has led Chinese to “conduct ourselves in the world either arrogantly or with an inferiority complex.”

China's unstable foreign policy over the past five decades, Jin tells us, has been fostered by a crisis mentality in education and the media, which exaggerates China's various problems into existential threats to the nation. Yet, Jin feels that in the twenty‐first century China is hardly in a crisis – it is stronger and more successful than at any time over the past few centuries. There are still problems with China's international environment, including many hostile “anti‐China” critics abroad. But Jin argues that the main challenge is less a “foreign threat” than the domestic identity politics of “how should we look upon ourselves? How should we approach the international community?” Being a great power is not merely an achievement of material success, for Jin tells us that it involves “a need for us to do some soul‐searching on the national psychology, national mentality, and strategic thinking in the context of our response to the outside world.” Modernization thus needs to target not just the national economy, but China's “national ideology.” The real question for Jin is “are we prepared psychologically” to be a great power?

Jin's solution to the problem of China's pessoptimism is to use the media to shift “public opinion and the national psychology” away from “parochial and xenophobic nationalism.” He argues that there should be more “good news” about international events: “Those who study and report international affairs must interpret a matter correctly and explain it fully without, however, steering public opinion in the direction of pessimism and xenophobia.” Still, Jin is not naïve; he doesn't expect the outside world – especially Europe, Japan, and the United States – to be fair to China. But a strong national consciousness will enable China to resist any “psychological offensive that the world may launch against us.” Jin thus concludes that “We should adopt a neither‐obsequious‐nor‐supercilious attitude toward international affairs. We should handle things calmly and keep our cool.”

These and other examples of resistance to patriotic education show how there is some space in China to critically comment on orthodox versions of Chinese identity. This broader view of politics that avoids categorizing things as either totally right or wholly wrong, is leading to what Richard (p. 55 ) Curt Kraus feels is an “increased toleration for rival points of view” in China's civil society.⁷⁸ In this way, commentators can go beyond the Central Propaganda Department's structure of feeling, which sorts statements as either pro‐ or anti‐Chinese, to encourage people to think about different ways of being Chinese.

But new forms of patriotic education and critique also show how the party‐state's propaganda apparatus is adapting to the multimedia environment of the twenty‐first century. Commercialization of the media has not lead to a meaningful liberalization of discourse because the Central Propaganda Department still maintains ultimate control over mass communications and education. Indeed, even critics like Yuan and Jin follow the party‐state's ideology by arguing, on the one hand, that their views are the “correct” way to understand “the real China.” On the other, they both feel that propaganda is still important: it just needs to be redirected to promote more positive themes. Hence, we need to both recognize the limits of the Chinese party‐state, while not exaggerating the impact of criticisms of China's political system; against the overwhelming din of patriotic education, critics of national humiliation discourse are merely a whisper of dissent.

Conclusion

China's leaders and scholars often tell foreigners that the world should not be worried about the spread of xenophobic nationalism in the PRC. They state that the party‐state is actually against any divisive, narrow‐minded, or parochial nationalism, and that it works hard to promote a “rational nationalism” that is pragmatic. In Autumn 2006, for example, secondary schools in Shanghai started using new textbooks that downplayed ideology and national humiliation discourse, and had only one brief reference to Mao Zedong.⁷⁹

This chapter has shown that while China's education and propaganda systems certainly do promote a positive image of China and the world that the Chinese people can be proud of, at the same time they also present a very negative view of China's relation with the world based on the history of national humiliation. The Central Propaganda Department has very deliberately developed the pedagogy of national humiliation as an important part of its patriotic education policy. This elaborate policy graphically shows how historical memory is a social phenomenon; as Deng Xiaoping concluded in 1989, China's youth need to be taught how to be patriots: (p. 56 ) they need to be taught to remember to “Never Forget National Humiliation.”

This chapter has examined Chinese‐language sources from official and popular culture – including textbooks, pop histories, exhibitions, and films – to show how patriotic education promotes a particular structure of feeling that draws thick moral distinctions between patriotic Chinese on the one hand, and evil foreigners and their Chinese race-traitors on the other. This harsh division of a civilized domestic sphere from a barbaric outside world helped the party‐state survive the regime security challenges it faced after 1989. While the patriotic education policy was initially formulated in the wake of the June 4th massacre, this mass campaign is continually adapting to China's new circumstances in a way that is both flexible (to promote new slogans like Hu Jintao's “harmonious society”), and institutionalized (to not only maintain the power of the Central Propaganda Department, but to spread it beyond traditional education to entertainment and new media products).

The CCP's Central Propaganda Department thus uses a multidisciplinary and multimedia campaign to tie patriotism to the party‐state, while critics want to use history education to produce rational citizens rather than rabid wolves. Crucially, all sides talk about China's national character, national psychology, and national mentality – they just have different answers to the question “Who is China?” On the other hand, the propaganda system's sharp distinction between patriotic Chinese and hostile foreigners can help explain how and why the country's indignant youth are so quickly and easily aroused to defend China against enemies both foreign and domestic.

While international security experts like Bates Gill confidently state that China has “abandon[ed its] long‐held and reactive ‘victimhood’ complex, and put the country's ‘century of shame’ to one side,”⁸⁰ the reaction of vocal segments of the Chinese public in spring 2008 to international criticism of Beijing's crackdown in Tibet is instructive. The party‐state's official spokespeople and publications quickly labored to turn a domestic issue of interracial relations into an international issue of “the West” attacking China: Lies and Truth, the title of a book that was quickly published during the uprising, underlines the pessoptimism of such propaganda campaigns.⁸¹

Yet, Chinese reaction went far beyond official propaganda products produced and distributed by the party state. China's official anger was accompanied by a firestorm of anti‐Western feeling on the Internet, which repeated the themes and vocabulary of national humiliation education. YouTube videos, special Web sites, and e‐mailed essays all employed official (p. 57 ) historiography to defiantly proclaim “Tibet is ours!” The common theme was not simply political, but epistemological in the sense of promoting a single correct view of “the real China”: many of these texts instruct foreigners not only in how to correctly understand China, but also in the proper way to criticize China. If you transgress the bounds of respectful commentary, then watch out: “Hopefully the good intention can bring positive result when it's combined with insight. As to those who have other purposes, China has a unique program for them as well, but that's a different thing.”⁸² A popular YouTube video “Tibet WAS, IS, and ALWAYS WILL BE a part of China” was even more blunt in its harsh division between patriotic Chinese and hostile foreigners: “to all you bandwagon jumpers who know nothing about chinese [sic] history, and to all you bashers, let me give you some solid FACTS why Tibet was, is and always will be, a part of China, so you can f*** right off trying to separate our country.”⁸³ Many of these postings and videos were gathered together on a Web site that highlights the negatively productive nature of the attacks: Anti‐CNN.com.

Spring 2008's popular reaction by Chinese netizens, which was both earnest and harsh, to what they saw as foreign provocation is far from unique. It followed the familiar institutional and rhetorical patterns that produced and guided popular Chinese opinion in earlier crises.⁸⁴ But there have been new developments in recent years. While the NATO bombing of China's Belgrade embassy (1999) and the EP‐3 reconnaissance plane collision (2001) were clearly international issues, national humiliation discourse is increasingly deployed to deal with China's domestic problems. Like with the Tibet controversy in 2008, the party‐state and the indignant youth both employed national humiliation discourse to frame the controversy over the health and safety of Chinese exports that arose in summer 2007. In the face of this singular view of China's history, identity, and security that unites Chinese people against a hostile foreign enemy, it is not surprising that Shanghai authorities withdrew their new history textbooks in 2007.

The PRC's patriotic education policy is certainly not unique. It has parallels in many countries in Europe, Asia, and North America.⁸⁵ Japan and Russia, for example, have been beefing up their curricula to instill a proper state‐centric pride in the youth over the past few years.⁸⁶ In Europe many identities, both national and regional, are predicated on being “not American.” Debate over China's patriotic education also resonates with struggles in the United States. Understanding the Sino‐British conflict in the nineteenth century as the Opium War is very similar to the “war on drugs” that the United States has pursued over the past few decades.⁸⁷ Indeed, the (p. 58 )

(p. 59 ) overseas Chinese community put up a statue of Lin Zexu in New York's Chinatown; it faces One Police Plaza and its inscription praises Lin as the first soldier in the “war on drugs” (see Figure 2.2). More importantly, the debate in China about the utility of patriotic education is quite similar to the debate about the “war on terror” in the United States. Yuan and Jin's questioning of how China should understand its modern history is similar to debates over how to understand the September 11 attacks: are they an emotional issue in “the war on terror,” or a rational–legal issue where “terrorists are criminals.”

The difference between China and the United States here is that while the September 11 attacks are still a recent phenomenon in living memory, China's Century of National Humiliation ended in 1949 and now is largely known through official propaganda. China certainly suffered at the hands of European, American, and Japanese imperialism, but enough time has gone by to allow us to go beyond “the facts” to see how history and memory are being produced and consumed in the PRC. Crucially, both propagandists and their critics trust that education and propaganda can effectively socialize the Chinese public. Indeed, all follow Mao's double injunction to “Make the past serve the present, and foreign things serve China” in order to make the PRC a great power.

Chapter 3 answers the questions “Who is China?” and “When is China?” in a different way. While this chapter has looked at how the party‐state's propaganda policies have socialized the Chinese public, Chapter 3 examines how Chinese people produce and consume their national identity through popular practices like National Humiliation Day. Together these two chapters show the interplay of state policy and popular practices in China's identity and security politics. (p. 60 )