America Through
Chinese Eyes:
The Role of Nationalism
Peter Gries
THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA
EAI / NCTA
The Old and New China Merge
Tulsa, OK
15 November 2014
Victimization and Mourning
Heroism and Resistance
• FDNY
• UA 93 passengers
who fought the
terrorists
China’s Trauma:
The “Century of Humiliation”
Narratives of past exploitation and
anti-imperialist nationalism today
The Maoist “Victor” Narrative
• Heroism
– Lin Zexu 林则徐
• Resistance
– “War of Resistance
Against Japan”
抗日战争
– “War to Resist
America and Aid
Korea” 抗美援朝
The victor narrative today
The post-Mao “Victim” Narrative
• Death
• Dismemberment
1997: A Year of Some Significance?
• Victor narrative hegemonic under Mao
– Narrative of anti-imperialist resistance and
triumph needed for PRC nation-building.
• 1997: victim narrative becomes hegemonic?
– Summer 1996-Winter 1997: “China Can Say
“No’!” sensation.
– Spring, Summer 1997: “Hong Kong’s Return.”
– Fall, Winter 1997: 60th Anniversary of the Nanjing
Massacre.
Eichmann’s trial,
1961 Israel
The “Victim” Narrative in China:
The Trope of Rape
• Iris Chang’s 1997
The Rape of
Nanking
Narrative
• (Re)definitions of national identity are both
constrained and enabled by the narratives or
stories we tell about our national pasts.
• “Pastism”
– E.g. W.J.F. Jenner’s Tyranny of History (1992): “6/4”
and the weight of the past.
• “Presentism”
– E.g. Paul Cohen (1997): Chinese historians “draw on
[the past] to serve the political, ideological, rhetorical,
and/or emotional needs of the present.”
Backwards / Beaten
落后挨打
• The backwards will be beaten.
–落后就要挨打
• Backwards because beaten.
–落后因为挨打
The 1999 Belgrade Embassy Bombing and
the 2001 “Spy Plane” Collision:
Why were so many Chinese so angry?
Seen as insults
羞辱: “Fellow Chinese, this is actually
Americans humiliating us! The American
desire to humiliate us is no mere recent event.
Blocking our hosting of the Olympics was a
humiliation. Boarding the Milky Way by force
to search its cargo was a humiliation. Recent
allegations that we stole their [nuclear]
secrets are a humiliation. The motive for the
bombing of our embassy was also to
humiliate China.” - 欧阳桦 to GMD in 1999.
May 1999 People’s Daily editorial
“This is not 1899 China”
“This is 1999, not 1899. This is not… the age when people
can barge about in the world just by sending a few
gunboats… It is not the age when the Western powers
plundered the Imperial Palace at will, destroyed the Old
Summer Palace, and seized Hong Kong and Macao… China
is a China that has stood up; it is a China that defeated the
Japanese fascists; it is a China that had a trial of strength and
won victory over the United States on the Korean
battleground. The Chinese people are not to be bullied, and
China’s sovereignty and dignity are not to be violated. The hot
blood of people of ideas and integrity who opposed
imperialism for over 150 years flows in the veins of the
Chinese people. U.S.-led NATO had better remember this.”
Obama in China, 2014