Final essay

Gao Yong felt his excitement mount as he climbed the stairs out of Beijing’s Liangmaqiao subway station. He joined the river of people flowing toward the exit, gathering in pace and resolve as they got closer to the roaring crescendo of angry chants pulsating down the boulevard. He was heading to join the largest protests to take place in China since 1989. A similar roar was echoing across more than a hundred Chinese cities. The marchers—mostly young people— were not, however, calling their own government to account; rather, they were rallying in support of its foreign policy.

This self-righteous anger is part of Tiananmen’s legacy, for it was born of the Communist Party’s use of nationalism to shore up its shaky mandate after 1989. Since then, the biggest street protests permitted by the authorities, including the 1999 demonstrations against the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and the virulent anti-Japanese demonstrations in 2005, have been nationalistic.

By the time Gao Yong emerged from the subway, he had become part of a group united by a common purpose:  to protest against Japan. The immediate cause for this outpouring of anger was the Japanese government’s purchase in September 2012 of disputed islands in the East China Sea from their private owners. The rocky outcrop—known as the Senkaku islands in Japan and the Diaoyu islands in China—is controlled by Japan, but simultaneously

Patriot6 ::

134 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

claimed by Japan, China, and Taiwan. The march was particularly charged because it took place on the Day of National Humiliation, which is the anniversary of the Japanese invasion of Northeast China on September 18, 1931. Every year, in Gao’s hometown of Huludao, in Northeast China, at exactly 9:18 in the morning on that day, the wails of air-raid sirens pierce the air.

Gao Yong had been in Beijing buying used cars, which he in- tended to sell back home, when he heard about the anti-Japanese protests. He knew immediately he had to take part; he saw it as his duty as a Chinese citizen to stand up to Japan. As he put it, “Back when China was weak, it would say, ‘If you want it, then take it.’ But now China has become a great power. You can’t just give in to others.” We were talking over lunch in an upscale Chinese restau- rant in a shopping mall. Smartly dressed in a Western suit, Gao Yong had the self-assurance of an older man, so I  was surprised to find out that he was just 32  years old. Judging from the demo- graphics at the marches, displays of nationalism are a young man’s game. “Young people have more of a sense that they need to protect national sovereignty,” he explained earnestly.

This anti-Japanese protest was Gao Yong’s first demonstration, and he had tried to take in all the details: the volunteers handing out Chinese flags and bottles of mineral water to the demonstrators; the throngs crowding the boulevard bringing to his mind the Chinese idiom “people-mountain people-sea”; and the efficiency with which the marchers were organized. At first, he was corralled into a make- shift holding area where he was told to wait 20 minutes. An officious man was waving off clumps of protesters with the solemn authority of an Olympic starter. Finally, it was Gao’s group’s turn to march up one side of the main road, pausing briefly to shout abuse at the Japanese embassy, and then circle back down the other side of the street in a small, highly controlled loop of fury.

Gao Yong had enjoyed marching and screaming slogans like “End Japanese Imperialism” and “Declare War!” He had also sung the Chinese national anthem vigorously and shouted “Go China!” as he punched his clenched fist skyward. It was empowering to be part of an enormous and seething crowd of young people. Although he was only marching around and around the same short circuit, he

P a t r i o t 135

felt invigorated. Before he knew it, three hours had passed, and he suddenly realized how tired his feet were.

This was actually the fourth day of these rallies in Beijing. I had been tracking their progress. The word on the street was that the first protesters were anti-riot cops who had melted away as civil- ians joined in. That was never proven. But the government had cer- tainly facilitated and encouraged the protests by allowing a major thoroughfare to be closed for the better part of a week, gridlocking traffic throughout the capital, so that the demonstrators’ voices— which echoed the government’s position—could be heard. As the days passed, the marchers’ organizational machine became more sophisticated; by the time Gao Yong joined in, the demonstrations had all the spontaneity of a North Korean military parade.

Not only were flags being distributed, so were posters of Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman, which protesters waved aloft. Mainly in their 20s and 30s, the marchers included groups of tracksuit-clad students posing for photos while pairing telegenic smiles with ubiquitous V-for-victory fingers. I came across a group of construction workers who were delighted to have been bussed in from their building site to spend the day demonstrating instead of working. As I  watched the spectacle, a middle-aged onlooker stopped alongside me. “I haven’t been organized to demonstrate,” he told me wistfully, eyes fixed on the bellowing crowds. “The gov- ernment controls and organizes the demonstrations. You can’t just go if you like. At the very least, there’s organization among the uni- versities. There are at least half a million college students in Beijing. If they all came at once, it’d be unimaginable.”

Some marchers, like Gao Yong, had clearly arrived spontane- ously. But my suspicions of official incitement were stoked when I interviewed a middle-aged man with a neat buzz-cut and a Chinese flag draped over his shoulders.

“Why are you here?” I asked him. “I feel extremely proud to be able to play a tiny role in defending

my motherland’s sovereignty,” he answered glibly. As we chatted, I commented on the big police presence on the streets.

He looked straight at me. “How do you know I’m not a policeman?”

136 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

“I don’t,” I replied, suddenly noting that he had the haircut, the bearing, and the slightly bossy air of a cop. “Are you a policeman?”

“Don’t ask me that,” he said, stiffening visibly, and looking around for an escape route. Suddenly, I  noticed that we were sur- rounded by male protesters with identical short haircuts and trim physiques. The Internet was abuzz with such rumors; in one city, a man who had led protesters to overturn three cars was even outed as a policeman, though this news was quickly expunged from social media.

Should there be any doubt about who was in ultimate control, the entire ecosystem of the state security apparatus had been mobi- lized. Helicopters whirred overhead, swooping low over an avenue better known for its high-end shopping opportunities. Tiers of elite, helmeted riot police protected the Japanese embassy, glaring warily through a wall of plexiglass shields, while navy blue-clad paramilitary police bookended each cluster of marchers. Every 15 feet policemen in pale-blue summer uniforms were stationed, while sinister-looking black-clad youths milled around the entrance to the enclosure penning in the marchers. Even those on lowest rungs of the security apparatus were out in force: hundreds of neighbor- hood volunteers, many of them elderly matrons, lined the streets. They were wearing red armbands and perched every few feet on folding stools, their tea jars tidily stowed by their feet, as they took the chance to get in a good stretch of uninterrupted knitting. The authorities may have felt such disproportionate manpower was nec- essary. Though the marches were contrived, the rage expressed by the marchers was very real.

This I discovered with a shock when I marched alongside a young college student named Zhu Zeyao. He blushed when I spoke to him and disclosed, haltingly, that he was studying auto engineering at university. I asked what he was hoping to do with his degree. “I want to learn to make tanks, in order to exterminate the Japanese,” he answered, his nostrils flaring with anger.

Next to him was a strapping young man by the name of Mu Peidong, who described his job as involving Internet marketing strategy. Toting a homemade banner reading “Even if we have to kill every single Japanese person, we must recover the Diaoyu Islands,”

P a t r i o t 137

he led the marchers in their chants, alternately bellowing, “Declare War!” and “Never Forget National Humiliation!”

•  •  •  •

That four-word phrase—“Never Forget National Humiliation”  — lies at the center of the party’s post-Tiananmen strategy of regime legitimization. By unleashing the PLA against its own people in 1989, the Communist leadership had accelerated an ideological cri- sis that had been brewing for years. “Socialism and Communism were no longer an ideology for the Chinese people,” said Zheng Wang of the Wilson Center and the author of Never Forget National Humiliation:  Historic Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations. “There was a sort of spiritual vacuum. Nationalism was the easiest tool to use.”

In the immediate aftermath of June 4th, Deng Xiaoping himself concluded that the party’s biggest failure had been a lack of ideo- logical education. In his address to the martial law troops five days after the suppression, he said, “I have told foreign guests that during the last ten years our biggest mistake was made in the field of ed- ucation, primarily in ideological and political education—not just of the students, but of the people in general. We didn’t tell them enough about the need for hard struggle, about what China was like in the old days and what kind of country it was to become. That was a serious error on our part.” These words kicked off one of the most wide-scale attempts at ideological reeducation in modern history.

In the wake of Deng’s words, textbooks were rewritten to change the prism through which the past—and present—were viewed. Class struggle was out; national humiliation was in. China as victor was out; instead, China was cast as the victim of a century of foreign bullying and semi-colonization, from which only the Communist Party offered deliverance. The Century of National Humiliation had begun with the treaty that Britain imposed on the Qing Dynasty to end the First Opium War in 1842, and continued with China being carved up into different spheres of influence by foreign powers, peaking with the brutal Japanese occupation that began in 1931. It only ended with the Communist Party’s “liberation” of China from

138 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

this state of “semi-feudalism and semi-colonialism” in 1949. Thus the interests of the nation and the party formed one seamless mass; loving the nation became synonymous with loving the party, and criticism of the party came to be seen as treachery.

This focus served to outflank the students’ claims that they had been driven by patriotism, as well as dovetailing with the party’s interpretation of the 1989 protests as whipped up by hostile for- eign forces intent on overthrowing the Communist Party and the Socialist system.

The “instigators of the riots” were accused of receiving financial help from these overseas hostile forces, which were also active in “spreading rumors, stirring up trouble and adding fuel to the tur- moil” through the foreign press such as the Voice of America. In this context, Western economic sanctions after June 4th were seen as yet one more humiliation, which, in the eyes of Deng Xiaoping, was comparable in scope to the invasion of China by the eight-nation alliance of Western nations in response to the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. The subsequent collapse of the Soviet bloc provided further jus- tification to China’s Communist leaders for the necessity of sup- pressing the pro-democracy movement. In 2001, Li Peng, who had been premier in 1989, reportedly said that “the tide of liberaliza- tion” had reached dangerous levels. “If this trend had continued for three more years, something similar to the fall of the Berlin Wall would have happened to China and the Communist Party would have crumbled.”

By 1994, the new patriotic education campaign had been rolled out nationwide and was greeted with enthusiasm by teachers and students alike. The old textbooks, emphasizing class struggle and the impending demise of parasitic capitalism, had been hard to teach, since students only had to look out the window to see cap- italism blossoming unimpeded, contradicting everything they were learning at school. The new focus on national humiliation was easier to accept, as well as being relatively fresh; one American political scientist, William Callahan, checking the records at the National Library of China, could not find a single new book on national humiliation published domestically between 1947 and 1990.

P a t r i o t 139

The post-Tiananmen revision of the textbooks was so compre- hensive that certain historical figures were transmogrified from vil- lains into heroes. One example was a Qing Dynasty general named Zuo Zongtang—incidentally the inspiration for the “General Tso’s Chicken” dish—who was formerly judged a class traitor for sup- pressing peasant rebellions in the 1860s. However, his success in defeating the Russian invasion of Xinjiang and defending China’s territorial integrity now allowed him to be reclassified as a hero.

In China, the rewriting of history books goes back to the very first emperor, Qin Shihuang, who unified the country in 221 B.C. To consolidate control over political thought, he decreed the burning of all scholarly books, sparing only the chronicles penned by his own historians. Such a pattern whereby each dynasty rewrites his- tory to its own ends persists to this day. Though the Communist Party remained in control after 1989, its complete rewriting of his- tory shows how shaken it had been by the events that began in the square.

•  •  •  •

Gao Yong’s hometown of Huludao was occupied by the Japanese in 1932, one of more than 900 cities in China to suffer that fate. Today, it is a scrubby beach resort up the coast from its more up- scale cousin Beidaihe, where the party leadership gathers for its an- nual summer enclave. The main beach in Huludao, named after an army hospital, is populated by swarms of Chinese holidaymakers, standing knee-deep in the soupy brown sea, holding umbrellas over their heads, and wearing rubber tubes around their midriffs. It is a holiday destination on the make; along the seafront, the bare bones of a half-dozen skyscrapers under construction emerge through the murky haze as sunbathers jostle for space along the small, grainy strip of sand littered with potato chip bags and candy wrappers.

Beyond the city limits is a promontory overlooking a container terminal and a large plot of reclaimed land. Like so much else in Huludao, it is under construction. It is a bleak site, not improved by a desolate concrete pavilion and a granite monument resembling a ship whose sculptor gave up on it midway in despair. According

14 0 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

to the monument’s inscription, 1,051,047 Japanese prisoners of war were repatriated from this very spot after the end of World War II. An inscription engraved on the back of the monument reads “We will absolutely not allow this historical tragedy to play out again, and we sincerely look forward to Sino-Japanese friendship being passed from one generation to the next.” In today’s China, such a sentiment now appears quaint.

During the Japanese occupation of the northeast, Gao’s paternal grandfather was taken prisoner by the Japanese. According to fam- ily folklore, he was saved by his wife, an underground Communist Party worker with bound feet so insignificant that she was never even given a proper name. It became the stuff of local legend, though nobody ever told Gao the details and, as a child, he never thought to ask. By the time he was 11, both grandparents had died, and the opportunity to hear the story firsthand was gone forever. As Gao talked to me about his family history, it became clear that any animus against Japan was not stoked by the half-forgotten past, but rather by more contemporary forces.

Gao Yong’s view of the past is conflicted, reflecting the par- ty’s own efforts to highlight certain episodes and forget others. Regarding the suppression of the pro-democracy movement in 1989, he was quick to point out that he had been only seven years old at the time. “I have no thoughts about it,” he told me firmly. “Even now, I  don’t have any impression of it. I  just want to live a good life and earn some money. If you’re always looking back, what’s the point of that? There are so many problems, you can’t solve them all.”

Yet, for the party’s patriotic education strategy to work, looking back is necessary, as long as the retrospection happens under strictly controlled circumstances. Certain periods of history should be for- gotten—notably those when the wounds were self-inflicted through misguided internal policies, such as the Cultural Revolution and June 4th. But the memory of other episodes—when the pain was inflicted by external sources—should be kept alive to ensure that China’s citizens remain grateful to their Communist leaders for delivering them from the depredations of the past.

P a t r i o t 141

With this, Gao Yong had unconsciously fallen into step. On his car-buying trips to Beijing, he liked to visit Yuan Ming Yuan, the old Summer Palace, a rococo pleasure park designed for China’s Qing emperors replete with classical palaces sprouting ornate columns and Botticelli-like curlicued shells. It was razed to the ground by the British and French armies during the 1860 Second Opium War, after their envoys were killed by the Qing. The destruction has been left for posterity; to this day, the park is dotted with broken marble chunks and signs emphasizing the great crimes of the British and French. The sacking of the Old Summer Palace was, as Gao Yong himself put it, a “flesh wound” for China. Such humiliation, how- ever, paved the way for the road to revival.

“The Road to Revival” is in fact the title of a massive permanent exhibition at the National Museum of China, which also functions as a shrine to the party’s historical orthodoxy. Among the 980 pho- tos on display is one of Deng Xiaoping congratulating the martial law troops post-Tiananmen—the single, elliptical reference to June 4th—but the exhibition’s ambitions are far greater. It outlines its mission as charting “the rejuvenation of the country under the lead- ership of the Communist Party of China,” beginning at the dawn of modern Chinese history as defined by the Communist Party:  the First Opium War. The most valuable object on display is a remnant of the original flag hoisted on the first National Day, October 1st, 1949. Due to fabric shortages, it was made from strips of fabric sewn together by a tailor.

The first outing by China’s new leadership committee after Xi Jinping’s ascension to the top post in 2012 was a symbolic pil- grimage to the “Road to Revival.” The seven men posed soberly for pictures, all head to toe in black as if at an undertakers’ conven- tion, while Xi unveiled the centerpiece of his ideology, announc- ing, “In my view, to realize the great renewal of the Chinese nation is the greatest Chinese Dream for the Chinese nation in modern history.” Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” marks a tipping point:  The Communist Party’s focus on political or social issues has given way to nationalism. The vagueness of the China dream makes it all-encompassing—covering improvements in the standard of

142 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

living, building military strength and general national rejuvena- tion—but its beating heart is nationalistic.

•  •  •  •

The China Dream first percolated into the Chinese consciousness in 2011 as the title of a bestselling book written by a senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, Liu Mingfu, who also teaches at the National Defense University. Senior Colonel Liu is tall and hand- some with a military man’s ramrod posture and a bureaucrat’s ten- dency to talk in lists, punctuated by finger-jabbing gestures. When The China Dream first came out, Senior Colonel Liu managed to get my assistant and me into his military compound in Beijing for an interview. Foreigners were not normally permitted into this army zone, so he asked us to slouch down low in the back of a black mil- itary sedan as it sped through the gate and into an enormous resi- dential complex of basketball courts, squat brick blocks, and small shady parks, all entirely hidden from the main road.

When we got to his apartment, however, the senior colonel sat down behind a gigantic desk and, smiling stiffly, declared that as a serving army officer, he could not talk on the record to the for- eign media. We entered into lengthy negotiations that threatened to break down several times until at last we hammered out a con- voluted compromise that involved two Chinese journalists from a specialist defense publication sitting meekly across the table. The senior colonel announced that they would record his words with their own equipment, and then post the audio on their website. One of them leapt into action, switching on an ancient recording device, and then promptly fell asleep, his head lolling uncomfortably on his chest until the end of the interview. It didn’t matter that the results made Colonel Liu sound as if he had been interviewed at the bottom of the sea by phonograph. He was satisfied with this arrangement. Technically, by giving an interview to Chinese journalists, he could be absolved of the sin of talking to the foreign media.

When we met two years later, again in his apartment, Senior Colonel Liu’s mood was far more expansive. He had retired from active service, so there was no need for complicated compromises.

P a t r i o t 143

Better still, his book had garnered a mention in Henry Kissinger’s On China. He rushed off to fetch both the English and Chinese ver- sions of Kissinger’s tome, so we could admire his fame in full bilin- gual glory. Kissinger cited the book as premised on the assumption that the West was much weaker than previously thought, while at the same time emphasizing that China should build up its mili- tary as a deterrent, thus rejecting the concept of a “peaceful rise.” That an unabashed nationalist like Senior Colonel Liu would attach such value to American recognition is not surprising in a society in which even President Xi Jinping’s own daughter chose to attend Harvard over China’s elite universities.

Senior Colonel Liu’s views can be summed up succinctly: China should become the world’s leading military power. He is confident that President Xi shares his dream. “My China dream and President Xi’s China dream are in essence the same—to realize the great re- juvenation of the Chinese people,” he told me, “but the language is different. I was a scholar from the National Defense University, and when I talked about China wanting to be the world’s number one, the Americans got upset. If President Xi talked about becoming the world’s number one, Americans would be unable to bear it.”

This dream of China comes at a moment when Beijing’s approach toward regional affairs has become increasingly assertive. China is embroiled in territorial disputes with neighbors, including Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, and Taiwan. Indeed, China now claims almost 90 percent of the South China Sea, using as its basis a U-shaped “nine-dash line” that first appeared on a map published by China’s Nationalist government in 1947. The govern- ment is pressing forward with its territorial claims, sending ships to conduct drills as far as a thousand miles from the Chinese main- land, including one drill just 50 miles from Malaysia. In recent years, Beijing has also made greater use of an array of nonmilitary agen- cies—such as the China Marine Surveillance, the Maritime Safety Administration, the Fisheries Law Enforcement Command, and the State Oceanic Administration—to pursue its maritime claims.

Few corners of the world now seem beyond the reach of the Chinese. Beijing has sent its Jiaolong submarines to plumb the ocean depths, and a steady stream of Chinese space travelers orbits

14 4 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

the earth. A  permanent space station is planned by 2020, after which, according to current plans, a manned moon landing will follow. China’s increasing presence in space just as the United States ends its own shuttle program delivers a powerful message. In 2008, after astronaut Zhai Zhigang completed China’s first-ever space- walk while wearing a four million U.S.  dollar Chinese-designed spacesuit, he told President Hu Jintao, “In the vastness of space, I felt proud of our motherland.”

•  •  •  •

In China, the passage of political seasons can be measured by the rise and fall of slogans. The roster of numerical mottoes includes the “Two Whatevers,” the “Three Represents,” the “Four Modernizations,” and the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.” These slogans tend to flit in and out of the public consciousness without leaving much of a trace. So it was with a jolt that I suddenly remembered that just five years before the China Dream, a slogan trumpeting a far more ambitious dream had been everywhere, and then was almost immediately and completely forgotten. This slogan picked from 210,000 possible entries for the 2008 Beijing Olympic motto was: “One World, One Dream.”

But the vaunted universality of the dream was exposed as a mi- rage when human rights activists and Tibet supporters protested against the Olympic torch on its 85,000-mile, round-the-world “journey of harmony.” The extent of the dream’s bifurcation be- came clear when young Chinese living overseas—distraught at the tarnishing of the motherland’s moment of glory—began to stage counter-demonstrations facing off against the protesters along the torch route. The crisis came to a head in Paris, where a Chinese Paralympian in a wheelchair was forced to use her upper body to shield the Olympic flame from screaming protesters trying to wrest it from her. These scenes of utter chaos were far from the dignified spectacle envisaged by the Beijing Olympic Committee. In response, Chinese nationalists turned their wrath onto the French super- market chain Carrefour, staging protests outside the China-based branches and trying to launch a boycott of the stores.

P a t r i o t 145

For foreign journalists, 2008 was an unsettling period. The touchpaper of nationalistic fury could be ignited by a single word, an incorrect caption, or even simply by the implication of words left unsaid. At least 10 foreign reporters received death threats. Some had been on a government trip to Tibet and, after returning to Beijing, began receiving as many as 30 harassing phone calls an hour, even though their contact information was not in the public domain.

At that time, I was sharing an office in Shanghai with the BBC correspondent Quentin Sommerville. During a press conference televised live, he asked what measures the authorities would take to protect the Olympic flame on its journey through Tibet. For that, he received death threats from angry nationalists, who saw the question as a veiled insult. At first, we monitored the online ful- minations that Quentin should “drown on his own saliva” without taking them seriously. Yet within hours, our office address had been posted on the Internet. Our Chinese coworkers were being vilified as traitors. The threats were no longer a laughing matter. We all worked from home for a few days; our Chinese colleagues’ nerves persisted for far longer.

This was my introduction to the bully pulpit of nationalism and its power. The party’s education program has succeeded in raising a nation of patriots, but one whose love of country is tipping over into state-backed nationalism. The twin poles of China’s century of victimization and the Communist Party’s act of deliverance have created public sentiment that veers schizophrenically between self-hatred and self-aggrandizement.

The Beijing Olympics opening ceremony proved to be a water- shed. As the first fireworks raced their way round the rim of the Bird’s Nest stadium and flashes of light illuminated 2,008 drum- mers pounding away in surreal synchronicity, the roar of the crowd was that of a nation finally finding its voice. Choreographed by film director Zhang Yimou, who spent 13 months training the per- formers, the spectacular opening ceremony reinforced patriotic sentiment as it charted China’s four historic inventions—paper, gunpowder, printing, and the compass—and its reemergence as a world power. Of the nearly 14,000 performers, almost

146 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

two-thirds were members of either the People’s Liberation Army or the paramilitary forces, confirming Orwell’s dictum that serious sport is “war without shooting.”

As the Chinese gold medals began to roll in, the popular mood swung from righteous indignation to triumphalism. Cushioned by a post-Olympic glow, this sentiment continued to build as the unfold- ing global financial crisis reshuffled the world order to leave Beijing surpassing Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy and the largest foreign creditor of the United States. Politically and economically, China is no longer the “sick man of Asia.” And its youth is determined their country should be treated with the re- spect they believe it deserves.

•  •  •  •

The lessons of patriotic education have inexorably seeped into every aspect of Chinese life. Walk down any street and you are likely to pass a street committee blackboard bearing uplifting patriotic sen- timents. Flick through any school textbook, even a grammar book, and you will find expressions of national pride. Turn on the tele- vision, and Japanese soldiers are incessantly being routed in battle by brave Chinese warriors. Given strict governmental controls over content—ghost stories, time travel, adultery, and even shows featur- ing spy sagas have been variously banned by censors—anti-Japanese shows have filled the void, to the point where the regulator reined in chop-socky anti-Japanese action sequences for being “overly dramatic.”

In 2004, 15 television shows approved by the regulator fea- tured battles with the Japanese. By 2011 and 2012, that figure had increased to 177. The appetite for anti-Japanese entertainment has become so overwhelming that one-third of the productions filmed in China’s biggest movie studio, Hengdian, involve battles against the Japanese. Some have even dubbed the film studio a “huge anti-Japanese revolutionary base.”

Indeed, so mainstream has anti-Japanese sentiment become that one local newspaper devoted an article to outlining the tricks of the trade for extras playing Japanese soldiers, whom it called “devils.”

P a t r i o t 147

The article drew on advice from Shi Zhongpeng, a Chinese extra who has become famous for his skill at portraying Japanese sol- diers. It wrote, “As an experienced ‘devil,’ Shi summarizes what he’s learned in one sentence: ‘The more horrible you look, the better.’ The casting teams specifically select people who are less attractive and somewhat vicious-looking to play ‘devils.’ During interviews, Shi hunches his back, squints his eyes and presents a fierce, wretched look to boost his chances of being chosen for the part.” On his most productive day, Shi was slaughtered 31 times. Showing his grasp of political correctness, his stated dream is to play a Red Army soldier.

As part of its patriotic education effort, the Communist Party has rolled out star power in its attempts to mythologize its own creation myth. In the lead-up to its 60th anniversary in 2009, it produced two blockbuster movies, using hundreds of the country’s most bankable stars, who donated cameo performances to this propaganda epic for a new age. It was no surprise when The Founding of a Republic smashed box office records, bringing in more than $65  million, helped along by audiences of students and government workers who were strong-armed into attendance by their institutions.

In line with current political dictates, class struggle is barely mentioned in the film. Instead, Chairman Mao is seen bemoaning his inability to buy a cigarette, which he attributes to a lamentable lack of capitalists. “If there aren’t any businessmen, I can’t even buy cigarettes,” he says, “let  alone talk about market prosperity. We have to invite them back.” Of course, he never uttered those words. This film and its 2011 sequel The Beginning of the Great Revival are filled with scenes that never happened, including one moment when in 1919, the young Chairman Mao appears on the docks with his suitcases, about to board a boat for France with 16-year-old Deng Xiaoping, when he suddenly changes his mind. Such attempts to spin the country’s history were much mocked online. Yet the con- stant rewriting of history has made untangling truth from fiction ever harder.

The patriotic education campaign has not only transformed history books and popular entertainment, it has also reshaped do- mestic tourism. In 1994, a Red Tourism policy began to subsidize “patriotic education bases.” Two decades later, there are 10,000

14 8 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

Red Tourism destinations in China, Communist Disneylands that memorialize a manipulated version of the country’s past. Their suc- cess can be measured in numbers. In 2011, more than a half billion visitors went to Red Tourist sites, accounting for one-fifth of all do- mestic tourism.

One town entirely transformed by Red Tourism is the moun- tain base of Yan’an, where the Communist Party ended the Long March in 1935. It was in the hillside caves of this dusty little place that Chairman Mao and his fellow revolutionaries cloistered them- selves for the next dozen years, hammering out the party’s ideology. When I first visited Yan’an as a student in 1991, it was a down-at-heel town whose main attraction was a few dank caves scooped out of the hillside. There were so few shopping opportunities that in one deeply embarrassing misunderstanding, we ended up being shooed out of a funeral shop after attempting to try on burial clothes meant for corpses.

Two decades later, the town has been rebranded the “Holy Land of China’s Communist Revolution,” somewhat of an oxymoron in a state that remains officially atheist. A  cavernous Revolutionary Memorial Hall was built in 2009 at a cost of $80 million in which such relics as a lilac-colored metal soapdish once used by the Great Helmsman are lovingly displayed. A  gigantic statue of Chairman Mao, arms akimbo, dominates a huge, empty square that has been leveled in front of the hall. On a recent visit, the Memorial Hall’s lobby was filled with people dressed up as Red Army soldiers in brand-new pale-blue cotton jackets and pedal-pushers. I  had assumed they were government officials or perhaps staffers from a state-owned enterprise on a state-sponsored freebie. In fact, they turned out to be China’s top Amway salespeople, who had earned themselves a Red Tourism holiday for their prowess in selling skin- care products and protein powders. Lining up for the obligatory group photo, they enthusiastically shouted chants that I  couldn’t quite decipher. I assumed it was a Communist slogan until I was in- formed that this new Red Army was shouting out the name of that year’s bestselling Amway product.

Tour buses clog every road as they shuttle some of the 20 million annual visitors from one revolutionary site to the next. Many of the

P a t r i o t 149

tourists are government officials or party members on organized tours to better understand their patrimony. At night, they crowd into a state-of-the-art theater to enjoy some ideologically correct Broadway-style glitz in the form of a lavish—$5.5 million—produc- tion called Nursery School of the Red Capital about orphans whose parents had died fighting the Japanese. As for shopping opportuni- ties, Mao-themed souvenirs, from Mao Zedong cigarettes to shiny golden busts of the Great Helmsman, are available on every street corner.

In the hills outside Yan’an, a battle against the Nationalists is recreated every single day for the tourists. For an extra couple of dollars, visitors can even don a costume and help defeat the Nationalists. It is a highly choreographed spectacle that includes lots of whizz-bang shooting, an antique tank, and, for the finale, a rusty aircraft zooming down a zipwire. The day I went, the wooden benches were packed with tourists who spontaneously erupted into loud applause when a Chairman Mao look-alike appeared on the scene to deliver one of his speeches. After the battle, I  met Yang Xiaowu, a jovial distributor of grain alcohol, who had made the 150-mile trip from his home to visit Yan’an more than 10 times. This time, he had brought along his sales staff for a group bonding exer- cise. It was the right place to come, he told me, because Mao’s classic essay “On Protracted War” was his business bible. He used it to help his team map out their strategy for marketing booze.

The transformation of Mao’s stronghold symbolizes the ideo- logical contortions that China’s Communist party has twisted it- self into over the past 65 years. In one meeting hall, a 1940 banner, unnoticed by the crowds, forlornly calls for the early adoption of democracy. Mao himself advocated multiparty democracy, though he abandoned this position after gaining power. Nowadays, Yan’an has become a giant theme park designed to milk nostalgia for an imagined past in order to instruct—and make money from—those too young to have suffered through it. Communism is being put into the service of consumerism.

By emphasizing the hardships that revolutionaries suffered to build today’s China, Red Tourism is designed to foster grati- tude toward the Communist Party. Although most of the visitors

15 0 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

I  met seemed to be enjoying themselves—especially if they were on government-subsidized holidays from their jobs—there was discontent too, even at the heart of the Revolutionary Holy Land. At one of Chairman Mao’s caves, an elderly man who was visiting with his village party committee was so enraged by government corruption that he couldn’t contain himself, even in this shrine to Communism. “Now there are 80 million Communist Party mem- bers,” he said. “I think half of them should be killed. If every official serving at county level or above was shot by a firing squad, I don’t think any innocent blood would be shed.”

Even at the National Museum’s “Road to Revival” exhibition, open dissent to the party’s view of history was scrawled throughout the guestbook. The museum’s relentlessly positive representation of history devotes just one photograph and three lines of text to the decade-long Cultural Revolution, with similarly cryptic treatment of June 4th. For those who have lived through the party’s mass cam- paigns, the lacunae are glaring. One outraged visitor had written, “The historical perspective of the Road to the Great Revival has problems!” Another commented, “At the exhibition, there is little about the darkness of the blood-and-tears history of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. After constructing our Road to Revival, the country needs to look squarely at its own history to avoid going down the same route.”

•  •  •  •

Such an assessment echoes one of the great fears of Cong Riyun, a scholar who teaches at the Chinese University of Politics and Law. We met in a small town about an hour and a half from Beijing at an anonymous coffee shop divided by booths. With his doughy face, neat comb-over, and black briefcase, Cong Riyun is the very picture of a mid-level Chinese bureaucrat, yet he is a respected academic who dares to differ from the official party line. The course he teaches has the un- threatening title “Western Civilization and History,” yet its content is far edgier: It examines Chinese misunderstandings of Western history.

Cong’s epiphany came in 2005, when he spent the year at Yale as a Fulbright scholar. There he witnessed the unintended

P a t r i o t 151

consequences of China’s patriotic education campaign playing out. He noticed that the discovery of other perspectives on their own history was not a mind-opening experience for newly arrived Chinese students; it had the opposite effect, simply reinforcing their own beliefs. The students tended to conclude that American pro- fessors had simply failed to understand Chinese history or, worse still, that the U.S.  education system was peddling misinformation as part of a Western-led conspiracy to stop China’s rise. So steeped are many of these students—China’s elite—in patriotic education that they simply cannot accept any other version of their country’s history. Often, they ended up arguing with their professors, causing class discussions to degenerate into bitter squabbling.

As increasing numbers of young Chinese venture overseas for an education, such experiences are becoming more common. In 2012, nearly 200,000 Chinese students studied at tertiary institutions in the United States, accounting for almost a quarter of all foreign students in the United States. In 2006, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology became embroiled in controversy when two profes- sors received hate mail and death threats after angering Chinese students. Their offense was using a century-old Japanese woodblock print, depicting a scene from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, in their multimedia course on “Visualizing Cultures.” The print showed a Japanese soldier poised to behead a kneeling Chinese prisoner of war, his sword ready to swoop down in a deadly parabola. Rows of Chinese captives sit in the background, awaiting their own deaths; in the foreground, the pigtailed heads of other Chinese prisoners roll in pools of blood. The mere use of this picture was enough for the Chinese students to accuse the two professors, John Dower and Shigeru Miyagawa, of endorsing Japanese militarism and racism. In a statement, the Chinese Student and Scholar Association con- demned “the emotional damage the inappropriate presentation had caused to thousands of Chinese people worldwide,” and demanded that more context be given to the picture.

In fact, Dower’s essay for the online course described how such woodblock prints were used to pump up Japan’s newly emerging sense of nationalism, militarism, and imperialism. He called the print an “unusually frightful scene” that was “disdainful of Chinese,”

152 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

and he criticized its implicit racism. Yet the Chinese students had been so quick to anger that some had not bothered to read the essay, but simply posted the print online stripped of all explanation, thus committing the very offense about which they had complained. During a town hall meeting, the Chinese students called for an of- ficial apology, the permanent shutdown of the site, and the cancel- lation of related academic workshops. For some of the faculty, this episode threatened the core values of MIT’s mission. Peter Perdue, who has taught Chinese history for a quarter-century first at MIT and then at Yale, was the most direct, telling the Chinese students in an open letter “that they had violated fundamental academic norms of civil discourse and respect. As future leaders of China, they had a responsibility to open their minds, in order to make China strong, and not to indulge in destructive narrow-minded self-righteous in- dignation.” In the end, the website was taken down so more con- text could be added, and then re-launched. But such episodes offer a sobering glimpse of how a generation of new nationalists is assert- ing itself.

So what is at the root of such acts of blind nationalism? Professor Cong blames China’s examination system, which requires con- formity of education and thought. Each high school student’s fu- ture is determined by the gaokao exam, which dictates whether the student can attend university and which one, putting teachers under pressure to stick to the curriculum to maximize their stu- dents’ chance of exam success. In this way, the exam system ensures teachers’ ideological purity and political correctness, as well as those of their students, who must stick to the acceptable answers to guarantee their own futures.

At university level, lecturers can take a more independent line, but doing so carries its own risks. Professor Cong learned this first- hand during the anti-Japanese protests of September 2012. Seeing the marchers carrying Chairman Mao’s portrait, Cong thought it would be a good opportunity to discuss the Great Helmsman’s ac- tual record when it came to territorial disputes. Far from taking a tough line—as the young demonstrators believed—Mao actually ceded disputed Chinese territory to neighbors, including North Korea, Russia, Mongolia, and Vietnam. Cong paid the price for

P a t r i o t 153

puncturing his students’ illusions. During class, he had mentioned that in 1953 when Chairman Mao was in control, even the People’s Daily had carried an article stating that the disputed islands in the East China Sea were part of the Ryukyu Island chain, thus implic- itly acknowledging that they were Japanese territory. For this, the students informed on him to the university authorities. He was summoned for an explanation of his behavior. “They accused me of telling them that the Diaoyu Islands belong to Japan,” Cong said, smiling ruefully.

Cong also worried about the psychological cost of constructing a national identity through the inculcation of hatred. “Before it was class hatred against landlords, capitalists and the Nationalist party,” he told me. “Now we talk about Western imperialists, and how they invaded us, how bad they were, how savage and unreasonable.” Cong feared such underlying messages were fostering an instinctive mistrust of the West at street level, which would ultimately add to the pressures on decision-makers.

His biggest fear is that patriotic education has created “a new generation of Red Guards and Boxers.” This is a reference to the vi- olent Cultural Revolution-era rebels—and before that, the Boxers, who at the turn of the 20th century were anti-foreign nationalists who murdered missionaries and their Chinese converts. Today’s young, Cong believes, slip into a wired iteration of such youthful anger. “Firstly, they’re ignorant, their brains are full of prejudice. Secondly, they’re made violent by this education of hatred. Thirdly, they’re xenophobic, not just toward foreigners but also they show their hatred towards domestic traitors.”

•  •  •  •

Back at the protests, as Gao Yong was swept along in the sea of peo- ple, he found himself yelling “Declare War!” and “Boycott Japanese goods!” at the top of his lungs. Neither were sentiments he actu- ally supported, as he admitted to me over lunch, but he had become carried away by the novelty of protesting and the adrenaline of the crowd. In actual fact, he was firmly opposed to war with Japan, which he believed would be disastrous. As for a boycott of Japanese

15 4 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

products, he believed that to be unnecessary, since market forces were making Chinese products increasingly attractive to domestic consumers.

Rather sheepishly, he admitted that in fact his own camera was Japanese, because Chinese cameras weren’t quite as good yet. As for Japanese cars, he was happy to continue selling them, even though he personally judged German and American cars to be of better quality. His mood seemed to reflect wider sentiment; right after the demonstrations, Japanese car exports to China plummeted by 80 percent. But after a few months, as the furor died down, Japanese car exports began to pick up, since Chinese consumers—like Gao— are too pragmatic to allow politics to get in the way of business for long.

In general, Gao Yong was grateful for what he had. Though he had never gone to college, his China was a land of opportunity, a place where hard work was enough to realize his dream of be- coming wealthy. Since leaving school, he had variously run a bath- house, driven a taxi, and started a small barbeque restaurant before embarking on his used-car business. His parents’ lives had been far more circumscribed, working until retirement in a semiconductor factory and a quartz glass factory respectively. Unlike them, he was in charge of his own life and felt no constraints, political or other- wise. Far from wanting more freedom, he actually felt that life in the United States might be too free, believing that there should be more gun control to curb mass shootings.

“Right now I’m content with my lot,” he told me, as we used our iPhones to snap pictures of our artfully presented dishes of mush- rooms and bean curd garnished with flowers. “I’m very appreciative of this society. I’m not an angry youth. I love my country.”

Gao Yong had been taken aback by the raw anger at the marches. Outside the Liangmaqiao subway station, the demonstrators had scooped up eggs, donated by a patriotic pancake stall-owner, that they gleefully smashed onto Japanese flags on the ground. Gao had been shocked to see the crowds pelting the Japanese embassy with eggs, tomatoes, and bottles of water, while Chinese riot police stood by and watched. Some of the police were even injured by these makeshift missiles falling short of the embassy gates.

P a t r i o t 155

Outside Beijing, some of the protests had degenerated into mob violence that even targeted Chinese perceived as traitors. In the cen- tral city of Xi’an, a Chinese driver was dragged from his car and beaten over the head with a heavy metal bicycle lock, even as he shouted, “I’m also a Diaoyu supporter. I’m also anti-Japanese.” His offense was driving a Japanese car, a Toyota Corolla. His head in- jury was so serious that even weeks later, he had still not regained the ability to speak properly. In Qingdao, a Toyota plant and a Panasonic factory were set on fire, while elsewhere, goods were looted from Japanese department stores and Japanese restaurants were attacked.

The Chinese state-run media criticized the violence but made a point of supporting the demonstrations, as well as lashing out at the Western demonization of patriotic education in China as brain- washing by drawing parallels with the United States. In an edito- rial, the China Daily stated, “Many Chinese have demonstrated their patriotism by responding appropriately to Japanese right-wing activists’ provocations over the Diaoyu Islands dispute. . . . Patriotic education is at the core of a country’s strategy to realize its goals.”

One day after Gao Yong protested, however, the rallies were ab- ruptly shut down. Within a few days, the whole spectacle seemed to have been some kind of collective hallucination. Had thousands really marched down these traffic-clogged streets while helicopters hovered overhead? The yellow smears marking the Japanese embas- sy’s gateway were the only sign that something unusual had hap- pened. Though the spasm of anti-Japanese anger had convulsed the big cities leaving almost no trace, long afterward the reverberations were still rippling outward to smaller places. About six months after the protests, when we visited my husband’s hometown in Yunnan, near the Vietnamese border, everyone was talking about war with Japan as if it were imminent. Graffiti featuring Chinese soldiers bayoneting Japanese were scrawled on dusty cars. My favorite snack stall was displaying a huge red banner reminding its customers to “Never Forget National Humiliation” as they crouched on plastic children’s stools to eat spicy ducks’ tongues and eel-and-mint noo- dles. A clothing store had even pasted a large Japanese flag on the ground with instructions for prospective shoppers to “Stamp the

156 T h e P e o p l e ’ s R e p u b l i c o f A m n e s i a

little Japanese to death!” as they stopped by to pick up a new shirt. The raw anger may have faded away in the major cities, but in the outlying areas, the anti-Japanese message was a unifying one.

“The Chinese memory of national humiliation is really the key to understanding China’s foreign policy,” says scholar Zheng Wang, who believes that the strident voice of the young national- ists, magnified by the Internet, has become a factor in foreign policy decisions. “This government is finding itself the victim of its own patriotic education campaign. It has very limited choices. Backing down becomes weakness or even a new humiliation. The govern- ment is the guardian of China’s national face, so being tough and strong is the only choice.”

After 1989, the Communist Party gambled on nationalism as a way to extend its mandate and offer distractions from demands for political reform. As the beneficiaries of that gamble come of age, they just might end up undermining the Communist Party’s mandate.

Over lunch, Gao Yong struggled as he tried to put into words the mix of duty, love, and gratitude he feels toward China. “Patriotism is a feeling that is always in our hearts,” he told me, though he ac- knowledged that the anti-Japanese protests had also provided a much-needed release. That was explicit in the police handling of the protests, allowing marchers to yell anti-Japanese slogans—no matter how incendiary—but forbidding them from shouting slo- gans against corruption. “This was a channel for people to vent,” Gao Yong said. “These sentiments had built up among the ordinary people. If you don’t allow them to express their sentiments, then the people could turn around and say the government is completely useless.”