Bloggers and Patriotism

Us versus Them? Culture and nationality are not meaningless, but they are overemphasised.

Good or bad, my Blog

China is America´s mortal enemy, says Nanheyangrouchuan (apparently a Westerner with a Chinese alias; linktext at the right column).
America is a country with a cognitive elite against the ignorant and uneducated, says Bianxiangbianqiao, and "the poor [Americans] just want a church state"
Welcome to the Blogosphere. You know, that universe parallel to ours, where, as they say, the world comes together. Take a look at Nanheyangrouchuan´s "Bad Bad China". And if you are Chinese or fed up with Nanheyangrouchuan for other reasons, take a look at Bianxiangbianqiao´s.

These two blogs are two extremes, in that Nanheyangrouchuan sees more danger coming from China than other non-Chinese bloggers do, and in that Bianxiangbianqiao is, as he says himself, an exception among Chinese, in tackling foreign jerks more aggressively than other Chinese bloggers would.

What motivates them personally isn´t my concern. What interests me is what some Eastern and Western blogs are really quarrelling about.
And as the multi-national bitching seems to have something to do with our respective senses of national belonging, let´s dive deep into:

Two patriotic bloggers

There is a cold hard fact about states. In Max Weber's influential definition, it is that organization that has a "monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." And there is a warmer one, too. It is about togetherness. One convincing point is a common language, which is likely to be there in a nation state, and with some probability in a national state, too.

But to me, the striking thing about national states is that they seem to work pretty much like soccer fan clubs. Both nations and fan clubs make their members pay. Taxes, or membership fees. Both nations and soccer fan clubs make their members feel superior or give them a sense of humiliation. Both of them offer flags, shawls, buttons, and other fan merchandise for purchase (the soccer club stuff is usually more expensive though). Another common feature is that both nationalists and soccer fans may call supporters of competing clubs or nations names, or mock them.

So there must be something that makes the individual´s relationship with his or her national state more serious than soccer. A relationship with the state is both more sober, and more binding. While you´ll hardly volunteer more taxes than the state orders you to pay, you may volunteer to die for your country. (That said, they´ll draft you anyway, if they think they need you.) A contemporary German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk , points to something about national states that has a lot to do with feel-good factors, but also goes beyond that. The feel-good stuff is about togetherness and belonging. You can have that both in a fan club, and nationally. But nationally, you subscribe to duties and rights that apparently no soccer fan club can ask for, or offer.

When Napoleon Bonaparte ended "the novel of revolution" in 1779, he didn´t only replace it by realpolitik. He also made a defining statement: "We are 30 Million people, united by enlightenment, property, and commerce."
Obviously, this was not exactly a description of France´s reality. It was more of a promise, without using the appropriate tense: the will-future, rather than the indicative mode. Had he used the former, it would have been apparent that the revolution was still unfinished business. Even today, not everyone in France feels united with everyone else by enlightenment, property, and commerce.

Apart from this promise, which is indeed a permanent underlying topic in America, China, France and Germany alike, there is also some sort of collective appointments calendar. In soccer, it would be about whom your club will play next, and if it is going to be a Home or Away match. Nations have agendas of their own. Here are some random examples:
– Hilary Clinton, in her New Hampshire primary acceptance speech, promises to take care of the "invisible Americans" who had been sidelined during the George W. Bush presidency.
– China studies the options for rural healthcare.
– Sarkozy promises disenfranchised youngsters jobs or education opportunities (and sanctions, if they don´t seize them).
–Germans discuss equal access to education for children, no matter the class background of the parents.

Sloterdijk refers to this (I suppose that is what he means) as hypnotising people into togetherness. A nation, he says, has to be kind of auto-suggestive. A nation needs, actually or seemingly, common topics and issues to keep the hypnotic sense of togetherness going. There were plenty of them in French and German history alike, and one of these was that they could see each other as enemies. A common enemy can convince you of your own sense of belonging.
"My grandfather fought in. . ." Whatever war and place.
"The French occupied Saarland, even though they weren´t victorious in 1945."
"Had not the Americans interfered, the war would have been a different story!"

The Chinese have the Unequal Treaties to remember. Or the Japanese War. Or Taiwan, those poor people who can´t wait to be reunited with their mainland brothers and sisters, but who are still denied that right by the Western imperialists.

Today, more than ever, it is the media who fulfil the task of keeping us busy with national togetherness.

But it has worked long before. Shortly after Bonaparte had "united" the French, Fichte undertook the same task with my German great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfathers. To be specific, when looking at my class background, my forefathers weren´t among his audience. But Fichte´s audience came back from university, and my ancestors were their subjects, or employees. So they became part of the same kind of national togetherness.

Who was Fichte? He was a philosopher, too. But contrary to our contemporary philosophers, he was idealistic. You get something, if you really want it. As Sloterdijk puts it, Fichte "talked the German nation into being".

In his "Addresses to the German Nation", a series of university lectures in Berlin in Winter 1807/1808, Fichte tells his audience that he has "taken them hostage". They can still go home, he says, and act like if they hadn´t heard his message about what it means to be German. But they should not try to find excuses, like "we didn´t hear the message". With one idealistic act of volitation, Germans can come together as one nation, says Fichte. He even evokes his listeners´ and his own ancestors - the dead. A new age of togetherness has started. It is the power of Fichte´s language that makes the audience resonate with it, says Sloterdijk. It is excitement, if not hysteria.
That said, Germans who listen to Fichte at the beginning of the 19th century can look at a case study which seems to work. The case is France. It is already a nation. And Bonaparte´s France has occupied all these small, picturesque German mini-states, plus not-so-picturesque Prussia. Another good reason to stand together as one. When it is about coming together as a nation, nothing works better than a common enemy.

If you have ever seen a mass evangelisation, be it on TV or in real life, you probably have a good picture of what happened in Fichte´s lectures.


» Fichte: the BIG picture

But then, evangelisations are about promises. Eternal life, for example. What was the promise of the German national state?

There was a desire that the elites and the "common people" had in common: to get rid of Bonaparte´s frogs.
Our history books of today tell us that another promise was democracy. OK, we know that democracy can mean a lot of different things. They tell us that Greece was a democracy, too - one man, one vote (except women, foreigners, slaves...).
But history books in schools, umm... Ask a historian, not me.

Anyway, the elites weren´t so fond of democracy. After the French were back home, and Bonaparte had died on the island of Saint Helena, Austria´s chancellor Metternich told the German patriots to forget about national togetherness.
To the luck of the patriots however, Prussia found togetherness quite useful, and some other mini-state elites agreed that some togetherness could be good for business. It started with a tariff union.
German integration was achieved after they had finished France. To intensify their feeling of togetherness, they proclaimed the German emperor in Versailles, right at the heart of their defeated enemy, in January 1871.

Economic utility was one promise. It didn´t work all the time, but it worked for most of the time before World War 1. Germany industrialised rapidly, and Bismarck gave the working class social insurance.
The "common people", besides that insurance, got something else, too. No matter how poor they were, they belonged to the world´s "number one" nation. They were very special people. They were Germans. They had taught the French a lesson. No one should mess with them.

Colonialism

To be a good national state, you needed colonies. Germany got some in Africa. And in the Pacific. And in China.
Bismarck had brought Germany unity and social insurance, and the first German emperor, Wilhelm I, appreciated Bismarck´s role as a chancellor.
Wilhelm II didn´t. He was much more into war than into diplomacy, and China was a nice first testing ground. No one should mess with Germany, but before messing with established powers yourself, you better mess with China, side by side with the established powers.

To be fair, there were some reasons to join the Eight-Nation Alliance against the Boxer uprising, in 1900. A German diplomat, Klemens Freiherr von Ketteler, was murdered on June 20 by a Manchu banner man, and the Dowager Empress declared war against all Western powers. Previous foreign attacks and territory seizures had probably started the Boxer rebellion, but killing a diplomat wasn´t in accordance with international law, either.
Still, the "expedition" that followed the Chinese declaration of war brought out the worst of German jingoism – and racism.

The "Real China" – the Peasants

If there is an economic miracle in some places in China, it is there thanks to the peasants. Qiucheng Tan, in a paper of April 2002 at the University of Liverpool, describes how even in the 1950s, under CCP rule, "China had no choice except to siphon capital from agriculture". "In order to extract resources for industrial development from agriculture, the government first closed the markets for main agricultural products, trying to use the traditional method whereby agricultural products were forced into unequal low-price exchanges for industrial products." As Tan notes, the peasants were not allowed to sell at market prices, but at much lower ones, to only one customer – the state. That was a way "of accumulating capital for industrialisation", and at the costs of the peasants. Interestingly, at that time, the peasants still owned land. But not for long – collectivisation started in 1952.

This has been a rule through all of China´s history. Agriculture was there to help the pet projects of China´s elite, through the centuries and millenia. Around 500 B.C., the peasants owned their land, according to K. A. Dietsch. But that wasn´t to last. The burden of taxes and tributes was too high for sustainable farming, forcing the peasants to sell their properties to the gentry, and to continue their work as tenants. During the second and first century B.C., the land owners were the real rulers of China, because of their immeasurable wealth, and the central government was practically insignificant. Making sure that the peasants owned their land and paid taxes was in the interest of the central bureaucracy. To gather the land from the peasants and have them as rent-paying tenants was in the interest of the local elites.

Ever since the 1950s, land ownership in China has been "collective". When the National Peoples´ Congress passed a new law on property in 2007, it did not touch the issue of land ownership. This however does not mean that the central bureaucracy is in control of land ownership now. Local cadres are, and they transfer the land to industrial or estate developers at will, and at prices that they and the buyers agree to. The farmers have no say in such negotiations. Again, the peasants pay for the pet projects of the local elites.
The struggle for land is at the heart of the power struggle between Peking and local cadres, all within the Communist Party. The story about land ownership may have its variations through history, but the main difference from the old days is that the struggles now wear a "communist" hat.

The Failure of China´s Feudal Elite

It is a popular Chinese narrative that it was only the foreign powers that had thrown China into trouble. But the Opium Wars and other Western invasions weren´t the only challenges the Qing Empire was facing during the 19th century. Even before 1834, population growth had outpaced agricultural productivity. What Bonaparte needed to achieve in 1799 was a satisfied majority. The Qing Dynasty faced a challenge on a much more basic level: to make sure that the majority would not starve. Apparently, the time had come to realign relations between the elite and the people. It was to become a long, dramatic and often miserable journey.

"When China awakes, the world will tremble." When Bonaparte spoke these words (if he really did), he probably thought in national terms. No-one can escape his or her own categories of thought altogether. But did China have the makings of a national state?

Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙, 中山) chose that concept anyway, be it because he found that it was working in Europe and America, or be it that it was rather an emulation (something pretty usual, and even more so in China). And as it befits a good national state, he formulated promises. The San Min Zhu Yi, the Three Principles of the People were about Nation (a combination of people and race), the Rights and Powers of the People, and Life for the people (means of living).

There are probably many ways to transate 民族主義, 民權主義, and 民生主義. Wikipedia, as of Febr 13, 2008, points out that with San Min Zhu Yi, "Sun meant freedom from imperialist domination. To achieve this he believed that China must develop a "civic-nationalism", Zhonghua Minzu, as opposed to an "ethnic-nationalism", so as to unite all of the different ethnicities of China, mainly composed by the five major groups of Han, Mongols, Tibetans, Manchus, and the Muslims, which together are symbolized by the Five Color Flag of the First Republic (1911-1928). This sense of nationalism is different from the idea of "ethnocentrism," which equates to the same meaning of nationalism in Chinese language.

One can certainly say that Sun was aware of China´s multi- ethnicity. Would it be fair to say that Sun´s concept was put to a genuine test, from 1911 to 1949? Probably not. Life took care of the concept and modified it beyond recognition. Sun himself died in March, 1925, aged only 58, and it would be bold to say that he had really been in control. Central bureaucracies were traditionally remote ones from the perspective of local or provincial governors, and again from their subordinates´ perspective. Although arguably with some exceptions, there have traditionally been "internal affairs" within China itself. According to Li Hanlin there was a high degree of autonomy, even within families, in China´s history: a father could beat a disobedient child to death, without being held accountable for that.

What used to be the boss of a huge clan network, may today count as the director of a big state-owned enterprise (who makes decisions on wages, flat distribution, promotion, and even educational opportunities), or a local cadre whose jurisdiction goes even further. Hence, the tradition of petitions to the central bureaucracy once all local and provincial tries to achieve "harmonious" consent on the ground have failed.

In mainland China, by 1949, the Republic of China had failed. The leaders had not fulfilled the three promises or principles that had defined their mission - no civic nationalism, no rights and powers of the people, no life for the people. Power was for the warlords, and China looked as feudal as ever - only without an emperor now. It was time for another new approach.

Maoism: Class Relations before Nationality?

Maoism took over. For some decades, the concept of a national state seemed to fade while "class struggle" came to the fore. Land reform, then forced collectivisation of the land, precipitous industrialisation, and more "class struggles" in- and outside of the Communist Party.
That said, Mao biographers like Stuart Schram have pointed out that many cultural patterns continued to exist. "Schram argues that the Chinese Communist Party early on assumed the role once held by the imperial bureaucracy, both in the sense of providing the necessary means to exercise state power, but also to legitimate that power." And Schram explains the irrationality of the Cultural Revolution in traditional terms, too:
"Schram presents a convincing argument to the effect that the two sources of state legitimation in imperial China, the magical/religious role of the emperor and the rationalized bureaucracy, always in a state of tension, had split apart, with the former coming to dominate the latter completely. With the technology of totalitarianism, and without the curbs of custom, rites and religious duties that had circumscribed the institutionalized role of the emperor, Mao was able to assume the role of totalitarian dictator. He began his reign praising the communist democracy of the Paris Commune, and finished it glorifying the bloody autocrat Qin Shihuang."
Communist or feudal – the heydays of Maoism weren´t great times for the national state, its promises of participation, sustainable lives or national greatness.

The concept of a national state had a comeback. It has been back since the beginning of the reform and opening (改革开放) policies from the second half of the 1970s. No one should believe that the reforms came because the CCP loved that concept. The leaders hardly had a choice, as they had failed the country several times already. Interaction with the rest of the world has saved their rule over China, and the idea of a national state seemed practical. After all, the countries they are doing business with are national states, too, and before doing business with foreign people (especially if you distrust them), you need to know who you are.

The Old Promise of the National State

An individual share in a nation´s greatness for everyone. A share in its material progress. A share in educational progress. These are old promises, and hardly fulfilled promises. And even more than in cases like America, France or Germany, there is reason to doubt that China really is a national state. Kang Xiaoguang, a Chinese academic, rather sees it as an "empire system" for its multi-ethnicity together with countries like Russia or former Yugoslavia. Multi-ethnicity is one feature that makes the concept of a national state complicated. Another is the role of the CCP itself. The Chinese army owes loyalty to the Party in the first place and to the country only in the second place. According to the German Zeitpunkte magazine No. 3, 1997, Admiral Liu Huaqing, General Zhang Zhen and other leading PLA officers swore allegiance to the Central Committee of the CCP on February 19 of that year, only hours after Deng Xiaoping had passed away. And a few weeks later, the National People´s Congress passed a law that expressly put the army under the command of the Party – not the state.

Nevertheless, the post-Mao leadership acts as if it was the leadership of a national state. The leadership and its media condition the Chinese public accordingly. The state sports the same features as national states do: patriotism, flag-raising ceremonies, topics that are meant to concern everyone (and that are, as such, presented in the Chinese media), and grandeur. When looking at the third picture of » this web page, you will see how the state choreographers evoke the dead just as Fichte did: the man on the poster on the 人民英雄纪念碑 is Sun Yatsen, the "Father of the Republic of China" (establishing a link with Taiwan just as with China´s own history).

But what is the promise of the national state? Many foreign bloggers never seem to get tired of reminding both foreign and Chinese bloggers or readers of this question (possibly because they are spotting one of Rising China´s weaknesses here). There are several ways of pointing that out: by referring to the PRC constitution itself (which actually features a surprising number of human rights similar to ours), or at the way Taiwan has achieved this level of human rights protection, or by simply bringing out the universality of human rights.

The Chinese position often looks like a reaction to foreign challenges rather than an initiative of their own. There are historical reasons for it, but it is probably also Chinese conditioning. A response to foreign human rights criticism that I´m familiar with is that Chinese unity is more important than individual freedom.
"Otherwise, you will do to us again, what you have done to us in the past."
So abuse is alright, when done to you by fellow Chinese people, and wrong, when done to you by foreigners?
"Nothing is as bad as what you have done to us. We are still struggling to overcome the aftermath of it."

You can see the power of a well-established national narrative here.

But I´m doubtful of many Western criticisms, too. If Chinese business gets too easy terms of trade from the West, it should be an issue between us and our elites to correct that. If democracy really works and enables us to do that, there is no need to paint Chinese entrepreneurs, officials, or spies as monsters, only because they take what they can get. And if we can´t hold our elites accountable, that is our own problem in the first place. The question is how efficient our national states and societies are, and if they can work to the benefit of their people.

Before we go to war again...

Sino-Western debates could be more rewarding if we didn´t reduce them to fan culture rituals. Debate could also make us ask ourselves what has happened to the promises of our respective national states. The business practice Nanheyangrouchuan complains about – throwing Western technology after Chinese "partners" – is not a matter of nationality, but of classes. The upper class profits from "common people´s" ingenuity that stems from study and training, often paid for by the tax payers. The technology may then be transferred to a Chinese upper class that only serves itself, not the Chinese "common people". Decades of double-digit growth in China have done little to overcome the material and income gaps between the Chinese classes, and as long as most individuals have no voice, this isn´t going to change. The economic miracle´s real effect so far has been that those classes that were meant to come first when the PRC was established in 1949, are now coming last.
So much for China´s national unity or solidarity. This unity is nothing for China-sceptics or China-haters to fear, because this unity doesn´t exist, when it comes to individual incomes and access to development opportunities.

For these reasons I believe that Nanheyangrouchuan should either relax, or curse his employer, if he thinks he has to curse someone, for throwing good Western tech "at China". And Bianxiangbianqiao is not only Chinese, but also a member of the global upper class. That defines him much more than his nationality. His comment about the American working class on the a Daily Telegraph Blog speaks volumes in this respect. (And what he does not say about the Chinese working class speaks volumes, too.)

To finish my humble rant I would like to quote Brian Finney reviewing an (apparent) detective story by Kazuo Ishiguro:
What we are left with is an old fashioned detective thrust into a modern world where evil can no longer be confined to a lone murderer uncovered by a Poirot or a Holmes.

Bookmark?

In the blogosphere, we are left with many such detectives.

2008-03-01