Ideology

Down with the Nihilists!

mtj828 Ideology , , ,

Cairo

Multiple Choice Question: Who brought victory to the Sino-Japanese War 70 years ago? A. Kuomintang, B. The Chinese Communists, C. The United States, D. The Soviet Union.

If your answer does not in some way include B, then BAM! You are a historical nihilist, even though you might not have read a single word by Nietzsche, the German philosopher who elaborated on this important concept in the 19th century. He declared nihilism as a characteristic of the modern age and “a moment of the deepest self-reflection for humanity”. The “death of God” and the dissolution of Christianity as a singular source of truth deprive the world of meaning, intrinsic value and destiny.

But what has nihilism to do with the Kuomintang? This obviously perplexed a few serious philosophy scholars and historians who took pains to organize a seminar at Tongji University in Shanghai earlier this month. The seminar was titled “Nihilism and the End of History: a Dialogue between Philosophy and History”. A consensus coming of it was that “recent criticism on ‘historical nihilism’ has nothing to do with the academic sense of the word.”

The academicians were responding to a tide of attacks on “historical nihilism” largely waged by party publications and leftist opinion leaders. Their targets are very simple: anything that challenges the historical orthodox that depicts the Party as the decisive force in the Chinese people’s struggle for independence and liberation from suppression. It is basically a move against what they consider to be revisionist views of contemporary Chinese history, but for some curious reasons they adopt “nihilism” as the label for their target, probably just for the forcefulness of the word in Chinese (“xuwu“). In the past year, a few controversies surrounding the veracity of communist war-time heroism hammered the term into modern Chinese vocabulary. For instance, in April this year, a beverage company got harangued by conservative commentators for associating itself publicly with a Weibo personality who once compared a Korean War hero to “barbecue” (as party propaganda maintained that he endured being burned alive by an incendiary bomb in complete silence in order not to expose his comrades). The Communist Youth League’s official mouthpiece triumphantly declared at the time that “the consistent condemnation (of the company) from the netizens shows that the public is no longer swayed by the historical nihilism that uses the excuse of ‘freedom of speech’ to smear heroes.” But reality was far from “consistent condemnation.” Actually, the questioning of the “physiological feasibility” of that heroic act was so strong that official media even had to use the example of the 1963 self-immolation of the Vietnamese monk to establish its validity.

The crusade against “historical nihilism” met with a major setback this month when the cause suffered from unexpected friendly fire. A film commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II that sets its scene at the Cairo Conference of 1943 induced widespread astonishment by highlighting Chairman Mao in its publicity campaign. To be clear, the film itself does not put Mao in Cairo, as that would have been outright fabrication (It was Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek who represented China at the conference). But in its posters, the film’s PR team gave Mao an equal treatment as Roosevelt and Churchill, overshadowing Chiang. Criticism immediately ensued, some even from across the Taiwan Strait. Put on defense, the filmmaker responded by saying that the Cairo Conference was the result of the sacrifice of the entire Chinese population, and the Chinese Communists were surely an important part of it. Spurred by the unapologetic tone in the response, netizens made fun of it by photoshopping unrelated public figures onto the poster, claiming that they could all have legitimately been at the conference, the climax being the Kim Jong-un version of the poster.

Some left-leaning online commentators took a confrontational stance. One of them even declared that Mao’s blown-up role in the posters was a place he “deserved”. And if anyone had a problem with it, he should “win a war to make his point”. The winner-writes-history cynicism was blaring in this instance. Compared with their online comrades, commentators at the Global Times were much more worried that the backlash might give opponents of the anti-nihilism campaign excuse to discredit it entirely. They regarded the posters “inappropriate” and argued that it was unnecessary to arbitrarily link the Party with every episode of that war, even if its role in it should not be denied. They even suggested last minute modifications to the film if it contained undue elevation of Mao.

The campaign against historical nihilism and the anxiety about its undone both betray a sense of insecurity. The Party is deeply disturbed by the risk of losing its righteous place in history. It might have a point though, as its war-time record, like its currency now, is being depreciated not only by domestic liberals but also international observers. The Economist, in a recent editorial, just gave the credit of resisting the Japanese invasion completely to the Kuomintang.

The Chinese theater of World War II was messy and intricate. At any given point, the Kuomintang, the Communists, the Kuomintang traitors and the Japanese were all fighting each other. The Soviet Union was involved from the very early stage, supporting the Kuomintang government (not the Communists) for a substantial period of the eight-year war. When the Pacific War broke out, the United States upped its ante in China by subjecting its China-Burma-India theater commander, General Stilwell, under Chiang Kai-shek as his chief of staff. In this intertwined situation, any attempt to claim full credit for the victory against Japan would be challenging if not outright impossible. The Kuomintang enjoys an advantage in this race as it was the “legitimate” government at the time of the war. That’s why it was Chiang Kai-shek who appeared in Cairo, and the reason why most of the international aid of that time (including that from the Soviet Union) went to Kuomintang during the war. And truth be told that as the government, Kuomintang organized the country’s major defense against the Japanese, and its soldiers suffered epic sacrifices.

But nominal legitimacy can only get you so far. As a corrupt, crude and incompetent dictatorship, the Kuomintang regime was not without its fierce criticizers for its humiliating military defeats, its startling mismanagement of the economy, and the brutal ways it treated its own people. The horrifying conscription programs that brought as much death and fear as the war itself was widely noted even by biographers sympathetic of Chiang. The tragic famine of 1942, in Henan province, became a whole chapter in Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby’s influential book about that war (both were Time magazine’s China correspondents at that time), which showed to the American public the cold-blooded indifference  of the Kuomintang government to the unbelievable suffering of the Chinese peasants. The book was written in 1946, when there was already widespread disillusion and discontent with the Kuomintang regime among US elites. But White and Jacoby’s account of the famine, which was based on first-hand personal experience, should still be read as an overall reflection of Kuomintang’s stage of decay at that time.

Within this context, where the Kuomintang’s real legitimacy was being contested, the Chinese Communists advanced their argument that they played a pivotal role in the fight against Japan. For one thing, their status as a partner against the Japanese invader was formally recognized by their 1937 “United Front” agreement with the Kuomintang, whereby they agreed to subject the Red Army under governmental line of command. That “partnership” proved to be fragile and unstable. Skirmishes (some of them quite bloody) between Kuomintang and Communist forces abounded in the years between 1937 and 1940, after which a new agreement had to be drawn which demarcated where both parties should operate (but mainly for the Communists). After that the Communists, and the millions of Chinese people living in the areas north of the Yellow River, were basically left on their own to bear the weight of Japanese savagery in that part of China. And in those years the Communists were the only protection that the people of North China could have. White and Jacoby estimated that at the peak of Japanese activity, forty percent of the Japanese military force in China was battling Communists. The estimation could have been influenced by both Communist and Kuomintang propaganda, but it is probably fair to say that Communist resistance to the Japanese invasion was not as trivial as some would perceive.

It is clear that the “nihilist” challenge that the Party faces today is partly fueled by dissatisfaction of its current rule. It is both a backfire of its own propaganda overkill (things such as the Cairo Declaration blunder) and an over-correction by romanticizing the China under Kuomintang’s reign. Lately, the “ROC Fever” (“ROC” stands for the Republic of China as opposed to the People’s Republic), which refers to a general nostalgia of the pre-communist China in some circles of the Chinese society, has become a cultural phenomenon. Part of it can also be attributed to the complete re-invention of the Kuomintang in Taiwan after the 1980s. Today’s Kuomintang is no longer the collection of reactionary warlords and capitalists that Chiang Kai-shek presided over 70 years ago. It has turned into a modern political party firmly committed to basic democratic values. One author even went so far as suggesting that the Kuomintang’s record in Taiwan proved Chiang to be the ultimate winner over Mao for his more superior political philosophy of Confucianism (“Mao won the battle, Chiang won the war.”) A relatively more positive light over today’s Kuomintang reinforces the feeling that the Communists “stole” the fruit of the WWII. In such an environment, the Party finds itself mired in an endless battle to defend once well-recognized historical “positions”.

George Orwell once famously said that “He who controls the past controls the future; He who controls the present controls the past.” A present with treacherous deep currents is making the past ever more slippery for the Party to hold on to. Much of the pain has been self-inflicted. In an article published last year, a PLA Major General explicitly criticizes past party propaganda about the Sino-Japanese War:

“In the past, our account of the War was often shaped by immediate political needs, which led to biases and exaggeration. Because of our post-war hostility towards the United States, and in order to highlight the power of ‘people’s war’, American victory in the Pacific was downplayed, while land mines and tunnels were depicted as the major weapons defeating the Japanese. After the Reform and Opening, mainland China proactively upheld Kuomintang’s role in the War. However, in the process some media outlets went too far by exaggerating the overall importance of the China theater in World War II. Even if this could somehow elevate the public’s spirit and pride, in the long run this would create distrust in such propaganda in general.”

So the real enemy is not so much “historical nihilism” but rather historical cynicism. Indeed, the victor CAN write history if he chooses to. But now he’s concerned that nobody gives a damn about what he has written.

Love Thy Country

mtj828 Ideology , ,

TG

In early 2007, a chic, young CCTV news anchor called Rui Chenggang posted a blog on Sina.com titled “Why Starbucks Needs to Get Out of the Forbidden City?” In the blog, he declared the presence of a Starbucks shop in the Forbidden City “obscene” and demanded its removal. In a distinct style that later became his signature, he incidentally brought up, with apparent pride, his encounter with Starbucks CEO Jim Donald at a Yale event where he made the latter “flushed” in front of the audience with his challenging questions. The blog created a wave of support from the Chinese public, generating half a millions clicks, tons of media reports and awkward responses from both Starbucks and the Forbidden City administrator.  Six months after the blog’s appearance, the Starbucks store was closed, ending a 7 year presence in the very heart of Beijing.

The Starbucks incident in 2007 was a landmark of China’s surging nationalism at that time. And Rui stood for its new face: young, well-educated, confident and most importantly, sufficiently exposed to Western ideas and values. The last one was a defining feature of China’s new brand of nationalism: participants considered their nationalistic stance a well informed choice, rather than brainwashed parroting. The sense of agency, the feeling that “I know exactly what you Westerners are talking about yet I beg to differ”, adds to the vitality and potency of the surge, whose rising crescendo ultimately reached a peak around the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In Evan Osnos’s resounding piece (“Angry Youth”) that featured this new generation of young nationalists, his subjects were PhD students in western philosophy who took their ideas partly from the likes of Leo Strauss and Harvey Mansfield. Like Rui Chenggang’s criticism on Western businesses’ disrespectful encroaching into the sanctity of Chinese culture, these “angry youths” had their own target: the Western media’s biased portrayal of China. The “anti-CNN” website was the most well-known product that captured the Zeitgeist of the time.

Seven years have passed since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The interval has not only seen the relative decline of nationalism in Chinese online discourse, but also its complete degeneration into something unrecognizable. The recent controversy surrounding a “patriotic youth” called Hou Jusen demonstrates how nationalism (or “patriotism” more specifically) has changed into an obscure sub-culture of young people that contains troubling elements. And increasingly, this new nationalism is used against domestic, rather than foreign targets.

On Jul 22, in what seemed to be a regular street fight among a group of adolescents in Shandong province, a high school student called Hou Jusen was injured. He posted photos of his wounds on his Weibo account and cursed the ones who attacked him. He called them “Na Qu” (纳蛆), a code name that literally means “the Na maggots”. The post quickly got the attention of the Shandong Provincial Youth League, whose official Weibo account tweeted about the incident and @ed the police. Furthermore, it added a spin to the incident: “a patriotic youth was brutally attacked by a mob for expressing patriotism on the internet.” The framing immediately raised a few eyebrows. Elevating a street fight to an assault on patriotism is to excessively politicize the incident and further polarize the society, one argument goes. And this time, unlike previous cases that involved law enforcement, the local police reacted swiftly on the internet. It declared the case a mutual provocation, where both sides agreed on a rendezvous place for a fist fight. The conclusion negated the Provincial Youth League’s framing of the incident and won the police rare compliments on the internet.

But why would a group of adolescents taunt each other to a street fight in the first place? And what does it have to do with “patriotism”? A probe into those questions leads us to the curious and troubling world of online “adolescent political rivalry” that runs almost completely outside the spotlight of the grown-up occupied media .

Our first key is “Na Qu”, the supposedly derogative term used by Hou to refer to his attackers. To understand the meaning behind the code name, people should first get to know an online animation series titled “That Year, That Rabbit, Those Things”, which is apparently a “cult animation” popular among a quite large audience (the first episode so far has collected more than a million clicks on Youku.com). Viewing the animation (which now contains 11 episodes) is an utterly weird aesthetic experience. In terms of visual style, it betrays a heavy influence of Japanese manga; in terms of language, it is filled with the puns and catchphrases of today’s Chinese internet; and yet in terms of its theme, it touches upon an essentially solemn topic: contemporary Chinese history. The hero of the animation is a bunch of white rabbits with red stars on their bellies. Without further hints you can easily figure out that these rabbits represent the Chinese Communist Party. Their opponents are also humanized animals: Japan is represented by a chicken, Russia a bear and the United States, not surprisingly, an arrogant eagle. In a worse-than-simplistic way, the first episode of the series depicts how the rabbit, after witnessing other animals humiliating his hometown, allied with a bald head (reference to the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek) to beat the chicken (with the help of the eagle) and in turn kicked the dishonest bald head out of the country.

Why the rabbit? Some speculates that it’s a subtle reference to “TG”, a commonly used acronym on the internet that makes fun of the Party’s peasant roots (“Tu Gong”, meaning the country pumpkin communists). And in Chinese, Tu shares the same pronunciation as “rabbit”.

With the popularity of the animation also comes disparage. There are those who regard it as stupid and disgusting, who self-organized to attack fans of the animation. Their battle field is Baidu Tieba, a topic-based online forum created by China’s biggest search engine. To ridicule the Rabbit forum, netizens created the “Na Year, Na Rabbit, Na Things” forum (already banned), in which “Na” is simply a wordplay with the same pronunciation of “That”. Participants of the two forums taunt and abuse each other online. One side calls the other “Tu Za” (Rabbit Bastards) while the other refers to their enemies as “Na Qu” (Na Maggots). Their areas of dispute go way beyond the merit of the animation to touch on recurring debates that polarize Chinese cyber space constantly: Kuomintang vs. Communists; China vs. U.S./Japan; Democracy vs. Stability. Most of the time they are not real discussions but rather simple declarations, caricatures, and, worst of all, obscene personal attacks. “Bao Ba” (Burst the Forum) is a commonly used tactic which means posting tons of nonsensical shit on the other side’s forum to bury unfavorable contents.

The young Hou Jusen emerges out of such online shit fights. Materials dug up by netizens about his online track record depict a disconcerting picture. As a staunch Rabbit defender, he argues indefatigably with those who he disapproves. And this strong political leaning leads him into even weirder realms of online sub-culture: Soviet worship. He seems to be an ardent supporter of the Soviet Union and frequents the “Soviet Red Army” forum at Baidu. Participants of the forum share a common contempt for Gorbachev, referring to him as “Gorba-pig“. In one earlier exchange, Hou complained to fellow Soviet lovers that “My history teacher was again smearing the Stalinist model. I objected in class but he insisted.” Someone replied approvingly, “I recommend you to read ‘Da Guo Bei Ju’ (A Great Nation’s Tragedy). Next time you can challenge your teacher with those materials.” At one point, his allegiance to the Soviet cause even led him to question Mao directly: “If not for [Mao]’s petulance, we would not have departed with the Soviet Union!”

Online quarreling more often than not degrades into genital spattered mutual curses. And it creates enemies that transfer their online hostility off line. To intimidate each other, forum fighters deploy far more threatening tactics. “Gang search” is used to dig out one’s off-line personal information. And it is then used in many a “creative” ways. Hou has often been on the victim side of those tactics. His ID card information was leaked onto the internet. Before long, photoshopped pictures of him in shameful positions started to appear. His nemeses also posted his contact information on gay dating sites, which became an annoying intrusion of his daily life. Later on, his girlfriend was harassed, and had to put an end to their relationship. Hou claims that he only fought back verbally, often just by copy pasting the dirty language that was used against him. In Jun this year, he posted a long article on his Weibo account, lamenting his poignant experience of being a “patriot” but at the same time showing determination to persist. Weeks later, the aforementioned street fight happened.

What ultimately turned this high school kid into a national figure was the high pitched response of the country’s political establishment. Not only did the provincial Youth League tweeted about his experience, the Central Youth League also got publicly involved and tried to escalate the matter to the attention of the Ministry of Public Security. The central party organ adopted the same patriot-got-attacked narrative and made it into a hashtag. But the move backfired in a big way. Rarely do Chinese netizens side with the police on controversial issues, yet this time even some leftists criticized the Youth League for interfering with the due process of police investigation and over-politicizing an otherwise mundane case of affray. Probably emboldened by the support they enjoyed online, the local police defiantly talked back at the Central Youth League on Weibo, expressing frustration that their hard work to maintain social order was not appreciated, even though the post was later deleted.

The most urgent appeal came from Tsinghua University sociologist Sun Liping. Deeply troubled by the violent tendency of youth “patriotism”, the professor called for the stop of “any political mobilization among the juniors, especially the kind that stirs up hatred and violence.” The concern harks back at an earlier warning that China, especially its youth, is increasingly prone to the influence of militarist ideas. As a 2005 article by intellectual Wang Yi puts it, “Among all the countries, China is where military magazines are the most popular. Almost every middle school boy reads one or two military or weaponry related publications. It is probably also one of the few countries that not only do not restrict, but actually organizes children to watch war movies.”

The years in between Rui Chenggang and Hou Yusen witnessed Chinese nationalism’s metamorphosis from an expression of the young generation’s new found cultural confidence and assertiveness to an obscure sub-cultural phenomenon that is seething with anger and hatred. More importantly, the new brand of patriotism is becoming more and more introverted. Instead of bringing substantive grievances before multinational corporations, Western media and rival governments, the young patriots of today are busy chasing and intimidating Chinese “traitors”, speaking languages that only they themselves can understand.

* A side note on Rui Chenggang’s dramatic turn of fate: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-28291107

China’s Ideological Spectrum and Why Those Behind It Are True Visionaries

mtj828 Ideology , ,

ideology

Polling is a tricky business in China. For something that pollsters in a Western democracy do on a daily (or even hourly) basis, Chinese researchers and survey companies either cannot touch at all or need to get their questionnaires scrutinized by the statistical authority for approval. So you don’t just pick up the phone and start asking people questions like “on a scale from 1 to 5, how do you rate the President’s performance so far?” You can ask them about what toothpastes they use, but not on those questions. A few years ago, some group got into big trouble for doing “illegal surveys” in China. So you get the picture.

That’s why the dataset accumulated by the Chinese Political Compass project over the course of 8 years (2007-2014) becomes so unique. For those who don’t read Chinese, you may just go to the original Political Compass to get a general idea. Basically, it is an online test that locates a person’s ideological stance based on their reaction to 50 statements. A sample statement looks like this:

“Indiscriminately imitating (systems of) western style freedom of speech will lead to social disorder in China.”

A test taker chooses from “Strongly Disagree”, “Disagree”, “Agree” and “Strongly Agree” before s/he moves on to the next statement. After completing the whole survey, the test taker gets scores to indicate how liberal/conservative he or she is politically, economically and culturally. All 50 statements are tailor-made to capture the actual divides in the Chinese society that can be quite idiosyncratic. For instance, as the above sample statement shows, freedom of speech is still up for debate in China while in most Western democracies it is taken as a shared foundation of the society no matter whether you are liberal or conservative.

This brings us to the very unique situation where the Chinese labelling of “liberal” and “conservative” could be confusing for a Western audience. Part of the reason, as explained by Chinese scholar Qin Hui, is the fact that Western liberals and conservatives all operate above a certain bottom line that does not exist in China. With this bottom line as a basic constraint, “ideological options” are roughly defined by where the line of the state/individual boundary is drawn: those on the left advocate for more state intervention and responsibility (Welfare state), while those on the right stand for more individual liberty and less welfare. The constraint is a social contract that power matches responsibility. In such a society it would be very difficult for politicians to bargain for more state power (social control) and less responsibility (welfare) at the same time. That’s why you seldom see democracies with high tax and low welfare. Yet this is exactly the bottom line that is absent in a country like China, where you start to see ideas that could be unfathomable to a mind so accustomed to the basic social contract. A statist position that calls for an omnipresent state while simultaneously asking the people to make “sacrifices” on their welfare is deemed “leftist” in a Chinese context, but I’m sure Elizabeth Warren would find it horrendous. Much of the ideological split in China is actually along the lines that no longer divide Western societies (things like freedom of speech and constitutional democracy).  That’s why the Chinese left/right debates can be so perplexing. (Below is a table that summarizes the divides in the Chinese context).

left-right

From “China’s Ideological Spectrum”

It is with those considerations that creators of the Chinese Political Compass came up with their original test back in 2007. It has been thence forth operating in a very low-profile way, with personal reference as its major way of spreading. I took the test back in 2008, when a friend of mine sent me the link on MSN messenger as if passing along banned books back in high school (disclosure: I’m a political 1, economic 0.5 and cultural 0.4). But apparently the test collected momentum even in such a discreet manner, with over one million people taking it in total. This approach of course does not generate a representative sample. The self-selected nature of the test takers fills the cohort with politically curious, male, college students. But this is probably as far as you can get in the current circumstances.

Early this year, the test website unfortunately caught the attention of the Great Firewall of China. People inside the country can no longer access the site unless they use a VPN to bypass that firewall. This deals a heavy blow to the site no just in the sense of lower traffic but, probably more damaging, of further strengthening the self-selection process of test takers (now only those who grasp how to handle a VPN can take it). After making the decision that future data will not be meaningful any more, the creator of the test made the raw data from previous years available for download.

As you can imagine, this dataset is a treasure island. Within less than ten days of its disclosue, a joint research paper by two Chinese students from Harvard and MIT emerged on the internet, which is titled “China’s Ideological Spectrum“. By analyzing the more than 170,000 answers from the test’s 2014 dataset, they come to a set of conclusions that shed light on a part of the Chinese national psyche that few have examined before. Probably the most important insight from this analysis is the finding that the ideological spectrum in China is really uni-dimensional (even though the survey is designed in three dimensions). In other words, those who are politically conservative are also likely to be economically and socially conservative, and the same applies to the liberals. In a sense, this shows that ideologically speaking, China is still not as diverse as advanced democracies where, for example, social and economic issues often constitute two separate dimensions. It will be difficult to find someone like Rand Paul in contemporary China, who is conservative on social issues but libertarian on the economics. The authors claim that this conclusion is likely to hold true even if they use a more representative sample. This I’ll leave to statistically savvier minds to judge.

Other findings from the paper are more expected. For example, liberalism in China is highly related with modernization, education and income. Those who are well educated and with a higher income are more likely to embrace free trade, government transparency and gay rights.

The very fact that the existence of an ideological spectrum in China (though uni-dimensional in nature) is being supported by empirical data is ground-breaking. It shows how far the country has moved away from a monolithic state of mind. And it is probably not going to be reversed. With diversity comes balance and equilibrium, as the left can be checked by the right, the fanatics checked by the moderate. That’s also partly why I started this blog: to show that there is diversity in the lively and noisy world of ideas in this country. And that, in itself, is empowering.

But the creators of Chinese Political Compass have done much more. As a bunch of college students back in 2007, they acted on an idea, held on to it and turned it into a great source of political self-awareness for a generation of Chinese and a treasure box of insights for the whole world. It is this kind of progressive volunteerism that is truly changing the spectrum of China. To quote one of the creators, who released a public statement on Apr 1 about his decision to offer the raw data for download:

“We need to better understand our country and its people. This is not easy, and sometimes unpleasant. But this is our responsibility.“