China's "culture of humiliation'

China's 'humiliation,' and the rest of us

DAN ROTTENBERG

The opening of the Beijing Olympics has focused the world’s attention on the Chinese government’s oppression of Tibet, its cover-up of its recent earthquake, the intolerable levels of air pollution in Beijing itself, and of course the government’s hypersensitivity to any discussion of these and other problems within Chinese society. All of which raises a larger philosophical question: Why were China’s leaders so eager to host the Olympics in the first place? And why are they so threatened by things that few other governments find threatening?

I’ve long presumed that the answer to both questions lies in the hunger for legitimacy suffered by a government that wasn’t freely elected by its subjects. To govern the People’s Republic of China is to be perpetually threatened; it seems to come with the job description. China’s leaders are threatened not only by protest demonstrations but also by the Internet and cell phones. They’re threatened by public opinion polls. They’re threatened by citizens who seek justice in the courts and film earthquake damage with video cameras. They’re threatened when President Sarkozy of France meets with the Dalai Lama. They’re threatened by the Falun Gong.

When the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 1995 for plotting to overthrow China’s government, an official government statement described Wei’s specific crimes:

“The court’s investigation showed that Wei, in attempting to overthrow the Government, developed a plan of action which included an organization to raise funds to support democratic movement activities, purchasing newspapers, setting up a company in charge of organizing cultural activities, and organizing nongovernmental painting exhibitions, performances and publications with the aim of setting up a propaganda base, attempting to raise a storm powerful enough to shake up the present government.”

A common thread from Chiang to Mao

Can such a mighty government truly be threatened by cultural activities and nongovernmental painting exhibitions? In the past I have said yes: China’s leaders truly are threatened by words, pictures, free assembly, free communications— any of the First Amendment rights that genuine democracies take for granted. But in the current New York Review of Books, Orville Schell argues that the key to China’s modern identity lies not in its dictatorial form of government but in “the legacy of the country's ‘humiliation’ at the hands of foreigners, beginning with China's defeat in the Opium Wars in the mid-19th Century and the shameful treatment of Chinese in America.” (See “China: Humiliation and the Olympics,” Aug. 14, 2008.) Not only Communists like Mao but democrats like Sun Yat-Sen and nationalists like Chiang Kai-shek, Schell points out, have embraced the same slogan: “Never forget our national humiliation.”

It’s a valid point. But in my mind Schell’s thesis raises another question: Why are some cultures— Arabs and/or Muslims immediately come to mind— so much more obsessed with their humiliation than other cultures who’ve suffered just as grievously?

Black slavery, Jewish persecution

African-Americans, for example, quite properly recall their mistreatment during 244 years of slavery plus another century of racial segregation. Yet black rhetoric has focused almost entirely on freedom, justice, equal opportunity and compensation for past abuse; “humiliation” almost never enters into the discussion. (Jesse Jackson’s mantra: “I may be black, I may be poor, I may uneducated, but I am somebody.”)

Ditto for the Jews, perhaps history’s greatest victims. The Egyptian Pharaoh tried to demoralize the Hebrews by giving men women’s work and vice versa; the Nazis clipped their beards in public and made them mop sidewalks on their hands and knees. Yet of all the persecutions recounted at Passover, Yom Kippur and Holocaust observations, “humiliation” is (to my knowledge) a word that’s never mentioned. Similarly, India was occupied and exploited by the British for 200 years, yet as Gandhi reminded his countrymen, “They cannot take away our dignity unless we give it to them.”

The British, for that matter, could have felt humiliation at the loss of their American colonies in the 18th and 19th centuries and the loss of their global empire in the 20th. What has emerged instead from the British is a sense of relief that they’re no longer saddled with the task of bossing disparate peoples around against their will.

The French and the Germans

France’s national disgrace— its failure to stand up to Hitler’s invasion in 1940, and its abject surrender after just six weeks of fighting— might seem humiliating. Yet the French, who remain preoccupied with that defeat even to this day, seem angered not so much at Germany as at their own inability to resist tyranny. Even in postwar Germany, national humiliation has never been much of an issue for politicians to exploit.

All peoples, I would argue, suffer reverses periodically. Some react to adversity through self-examination; others blame external forces for their humiliation and so seek revenge. China’s grievances about its past mistreatment by Britain, America and Japan may be legitimate. But if China’s leaders choose to dwell on their humiliations at the hands of others, I would argue, that’s a reflection on them. To paraphrase Gandhi, you cannot be humiliated without your consent.



To read a response, click here.
For another perspective on China by Reed Stevens, click here.