“My country, right or wrong” seems to be the mantra to which Chinese people must adhere whether via indoctrination in schools or by command of the national security law. However, noted the British writer G.K. Chesterton in a 1901 essay, that phrase was “the last thing” that a true patriot would say. Patriotism involved principles and behaviour, not to be conflated with the specific actions of one’s national government.
Thus, were the many in Britain who opposed 19th-century imperial expansion such as the war by which it acquired Hong Kong unpatriotic? Indeed not. Neither were the Germans who opposed the 1939 invasion of Poland, or Americans opposed to the invasion of Iraq.
Only the most rabid jingoists saw criticism of such excesses of nationalism as unpatriotic.I regard myself as a patriotic Briton who views the United Kingdom as threatened by the English chauvinism implicit in Brexit. But I do not doubt that Brexiters view themselves as patriotic, something not defined by specific policies. Differences of opinion on such matters are inevitable.
But, in the case of China today, the communist version of nationalism almost precludes such choices. Quite how the national security law is interpreted in Hong Kong remains to be seen, but subversion, secession, collusion with foreign forces, together with mainland agencies being granted investigation and oversight power, make for a powerful cocktail to suppress dissent and define “love of country” for Chinese people as it suits the current leadership in Beijing.
Marx and Lenin were critics of imperialism, and the Chinese Communist Party followed suit. But, once in power, the communists retained, indeed set out to strengthen, the imperial systems inherited from the Tsars and the Qing.
Chairman Mao did allow language and cultural space to groups such as Uygurs, but also flooded Xinjiang with Han who were only around 5 per cent of Xinjiang’s population in 1949.
Russia’s empire fell apart with its communist system giving independence to Kazakhs, Uzbeks and many others. Partly in response, China stepped up efforts to impose Han dominance on its Qing-acquired periphery, with its actions to suppress Islam as well as Turkic identity in Xinjiang, Tibetan identity in Tibet, Gansu and Sichuan, the Mongolian language in Inner Mongolia and even the dress code of the tiny Utsuls Muslim community in Hainan.
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Xinjiang’s vanishing mosques reflect growing pressure on China’s Uygur Muslims
Territorially, China has endeavoured to enforce a claim on most of the South China Sea on a basis which has no grounding in history and is an insult to the non-Han peoples who for centuries have occupied most of the sea’s littoral.
The revival of chauvinism is also seen in attempts to enlist, even demand, support for Beijing’s strategic goals from ethnic Chinese who have chosen to live as minorities in other countries. Anti-Chinese sentiment is never far below the surface in Indonesia, and China only last week demonstrated contempt for the rights of Canadian citizens of Chinese descent in Hong Kong. That is an invitation to other governments who want to get rid of ethnic Chinese to declare them all citizens of China.
I can write these things because I am not Chinese. But there is, it now seems, near-zero space for Chinese citizens to oppose Han chauvinism in Xinjiang, or elsewhere, or imperialism in the South China Sea. Even ethnic Chinese in Australia or Canada, especially those with close relatives on the mainland, may be reluctant to speak their minds about Beijing’s actions as the law was written to apply globally.
Indeed, with only two months to go before 2021 and the 100th anniversary of the originally Soviet-funded Chinese party, now is a good time to reflect on some who contributed hugely to the party, only to be denounced on losing personal power struggles wrapped as ideological differences.
Some of these were rehabilitated usually long after their deaths following another change of path. Think of former Chinese president Liu Shaoqi and his wife Wang Guangmei, writer Wang Shiwei and other victims of Mao between the 1920s and the Cultural Revolution. The communist revolution in China devoured its own, just as it did in the Soviet Union.
Zhao Ziyang, hero of post-Mao reform, is a non-person and former Chongqing party boss
Philip Bowring is a Hong Kong-based journalist and commentator
Comments
4 responses to “What does loving China mean? The Communist Party decides (SCMP Oct 25, 2020)”
Some observation about the above article.
1)’I will always support the USA, right or wrong’, Herbert W. Bush, while president of the USA. 1991. This sentiment is exceedingly common amongst Americans. And very common here in Australia.
2) The security legislation introduced this year into Hong Kong was a requirement of the agreement signed by China and the UK in 1997, but unfulfilled by the Hong Kong Legislature, and if the US, the UK and other countries such as Australia, had not been interfering in Hong Kong politics in 2019, it is doubtful whether Beijing would have felt impelled to have introduced them this year. Hong Kong is not an autonomous region, it is semi-autonomous, and Beijing has responsibilities for its security.
3) Mosques are not ‘disappearing’ from Xinjiang, and a plethora of western tourists and westerners working in places like Shenzhen travel to the place, commenting on the large numbers of mosques (there are an estimated 30,000 mosques in China) and regular attendances by muslims, and the streets and shops that are run and used by Uighurs, who speak their own language, despite claims by westerners and Uighur emigres that their language is banned there.
These stories and others proliferate in western media, but whatever truth they contain is obscured by the relentless hyperbole that accompanies them. All states have security laws that can be abused, and often are. Australia is no exception , the UK is no exception, and China is no exception. Individuals are harassed and persecuted in China no doubt. Meanwhile in the west the top Huawei official, Meng Wanzhou is presently being held in Canada, while Washington seeks her extradition to the US on fraud charges, and Julian Assange languishes in Belmarsh prison on spurious charges of espionage.
I agree with Teow Loon Ti. This article seems motivated by something malign. Personally I would expect any British person, including myself, would comment with grace on China matters, given the way we have abused China in the past 150 years or so.
Sir,
I am not a Chinese from China. However, as a Chinese who lived half his life in the same part of the world as Lee Kuan Yew and as one who at various times felt the brunt of bigotry as suggested by the sentence “Lee’s power was built on his opposition to such chauvinism in Singapore and Malaysia”, although the more accurate description is racism instead of chauvinism, I would suggest that the article above does nothing to ameliorate misunderstandings between the US (and its supporters) and China. I sense that it is a partisan view of an aggrieved person for reasons to which one, as a reader of this article, is not privy. Moreover, I am afraid it will lend support to the hawks in this country and around the world.
As a person who has been watching the evolution of China, not from the perspective of a famous writer and journalist as the writer above obviously is, but as a person interested in his own ancestry and its associated history, I would say the mitigating factor to the negative portrayal and criticism of China (of which there is always a grain of truth which can be exploited and tweaked to advance an argument) lies in viewing the changes over a period of time. China has come a long way since Mao was in control. The Chinese are now allowed to travel about freely within and outside China a contrast from the Mao era when they were required to get the permission from the local cadre even to go from one village to the next. I knew as a child that they were living in abject poverty because my mother received letters from her siblings in China requesting for cooking oil and shoes amongst other basics. They are now allowed to own property which is one of the fundamental rights of democracy and unheard of in Mao’s China. They have brought 2/3rds of their 1.4 billion people out of poverty. They are investing in developing economies to mutual benefit, countries which were otherwise overlooked by the wealthy nations of the west.
Any country surrounded by hostile military bases such as those in Japan, Hawaii, South Korea Guam, Australia, Singapore, Philippines and Thailand etc. would naturally develop a level of paranoia that China is displaying. That is a lot more honourable than a paranoia developed by the threat of losing supremacy or dominance. If one is feeling threatened, the response is as predictable as the imprisonment of Japanese Americans, or for that matter German and Italian Australians, during WWII, let alone requiring the country’s citizens to articulate patriotism. Why is the criticism levelled only at the Chinese and not those who initiated the military and economic threats in the first place? Even in peacetime, we see this tendency to coerce in senators like Eric Abetz.
It is not the natural right of the US and its allies to police the region and to teach other countries as to how they should behave through the threat of military action or economic embargo. Many of them neither have the wealth nor inclinations to behave like Americans. It is necessary for nations with goodwill towards other countries to teach by setting an example of good behaviour. For those nations and journalists who claim the high pedestal of human rights and “holier than thou” attitudes, let me say that you are not Plato’s form against which all the other lesser beings in Asia, Middle East, Africa and Latin America are but a poor imitation.
The media is full of news about the bad treatment in the US of black people, the inordinate number of deaths cause by arms ownership, the rising gap between the rich and the poor, the wars wage against other countries and the interference in their internal affairs that had resulted millions of innocent people being killed. Are these not violations of human rights?
I wish that this article is delivered in a more temperate manner and not use unsettled disputes in a manner that favours one side. Criticisms are good for nations and people because they provide a window to the country’s or person’s shortcomings and wrongdoings. It is bad when it creates more misunderstandings and hatred. I have experienced what it is like to be hated on the basis of race. Has the author?
NB. I wonder if the readers have noticed that Bo Xilai was portrayed as a victim in the last paragraph. Bo Xilai is a neo-Maoist. I think one Mao Tse-tung is more than the world can take.
Sincerely,
Teow Loon Ti
Your comment seems to be trying to refute a number of stated facts and like most written pro-CCP defences, ignores legitimate concerns about Chinese state behaviour from the last decade and tries to deflect by changing the subject to the United States as well as paint unprecedented aggressive behaviour as ‘misunderstandings’. So that there’s no further misunderstandings, let me assist you:
Paragraph 2: “investing in developing economies to mutual benefit” – does this mean Sri Lanka? Djibouti? Malaysia? Egypt? Bangladesh? Nigeria? Tanzania? Pakistan? I’m listing some of the countries who were BRI partners and are pretty unhappy about it, and have been cancelling and scaling back projects. Even Fiji is now having a quiet rethink, after two Chinese diplomats attacked a Taiwan official there recently. It would seem that you overstate the mutual benefit.
Paragraph 3: “Any country surrounded by hostile military bases” – when was the last time ANY of those bases were hostile to China? Seventy years? More? How on earth can you size up Australia’s and Hawaii on a map, and decide that it constitutes being surrounded by a “hostile military bases”? These two locations aren’t exactly close to China and before China’s South China Sea build-up they offered a grand total of zero military threats.
Military relations went unchanged right up until China decided to draw the Nine Dash Line and began militarising the South China Sea. You know this, why didn’t you mention it? Even that didn’t get challenged right up until armed and organised flotillas of Chinese ‘fishing vessels’ began asserting territorial rights in other countries’ waters, as far south as Indonesia. If anyone is being militarily hostile in Asia right now, it is undoubtedly China. When this article talks about being patriotic without examining the morality of the actions of the group you identify with, this would undoubtedly be an example.
Additionally, if someone asked each SE Asia country – particularly Taiwan – who they think is being hostile right now, what do you think the answer would be? On what basis does China send military jets through Taiwan’s airspace on a daily basis?
Paragraph 3: “That is a lot more honourable than a paranoia developed by the threat of losing supremacy or dominance”. Here’s an intellectual exercise for you – tell us about how many countries were ‘threatened’ by Chinese trade, state, or diaspora back in 2010? Short answer, no-one. We could not trade with, immigrate, or educate the Chinese fast enough.
There’s a small chance you may realise that this ‘paranoia’ is actually a direct result of Jinping’s actions since 2012: namely the expansion of the PLA (particular the PLAN), politics of economic coercion, ‘Wolf Warrior’ diplomacy, state intervention in private trade (ie; the sale of Bellamy’s), incarceration of Uighurs in Xinjiang, and so on. There have been a LOT of actions in a small time period for neighbours to be rightfully concerned about.
Paragraph 3: “Why is the criticism levelled only at the Chinese and not those who initiated the military and economic threats in the first place” – because China initiated the military and economic threats in the first place. The entire world has been invested in China’s growth and peaceful rise, which is why the West is reluctantly coming to action now. If you don’t believe this is correct, please outline which economic and military threats from the West came first. I’m kind of interested to see if you reference incidents a century ago back when we were getting around in steamships.
Additionally, you mention Senator Abetz. To which I’d say have you examined the reasons why he made his ham-fisted attempts at extracting declarations of patriotism? – please note that I’m able to criticize a member of parliament from my country. Are you aware of Peter Zhuang from the LNP who was rebuffed for election this weekend, and his comments “China should strike hard against Australia”? Are you aware of the Liberal member Gladys Liu and her refusal to condemn China redrawing the boundaries of the South China Sea or threatening Taiwan? Aware of the bribery case against former Labor member Sam Dastyari involving bribes from a CCP bagman? Of pro-CCP Labor MP Shaoquett Moselmane calling Australians “the obsolete scum of White Australia” in the same speech as he praised Beijing’s coronavirus leadership (despite supposedly representing Australia)? Exactly what do you think is the right way of dealing with these people? In most countries, they’d be charged with sedition. Asking them where their loyalties actually lie seems the least we can do. Alternatively, we can always look to Beijing for inspiration on how they’d handle a foreigner holding public office but speaking out in preference of their country of origin.
Paragraph 4: “Many of them neither have the wealth nor inclinations to behave like Americans”. No one is suggesting they should (particularly as in the very next paragraph, you begin listing their transgressions thus invalidating your own point). But behaviour such as economic coercion, debt trap diplomacy, and wholesale incarceration based upon religion or ethnicity has no place in the modern world. This is again the point of this article. Patriotism to an idea, country, or cause does not permit you to gloss over action that you know is wrong. We’re an ally to the US but call out some of their behaviour, and they’re not adverse to doing the same to us.
The CCP has taught ethnic Chinese to equate criticism of the state to criticism of China and the Chinese. Unfortunately, this is not how the rest of the world relates to each other.
Paragraph 5: “Are these not violations of human rights?” – Yes, they are. The difference which you’ve failed to observe is that the populations of these own countries (right up into the public service) can protest and stand against these violations even when enshrined in law, which gives the ability for these countries to eventually change for the better. Tell me, are many ethnic Chinese standing against Jinping and his destruction of modern-day China? Anyone who hasn’t been purged and locked up by Jinping in an unknown location for an unspecified period of time, that is? Incidentally, I find it kind of stands out that you don’t mention his name.
Your entire comment is an example of why the world is having a fraught relationship with the Chinese right now. Despite you having an intellect and a grasp on history – and having read the article as well – you overtly prefer a nationalist ethnic take on the article’s content. Your last two sentences are almost cliché in their endless portrayal of Chinese victimhood (yes, other races than Asian have experienced racism). This, like China’s swerve towards authoritarianism and hostility to its allies, is disappointing.
Sir,
Your response is exactly what I have been seeking, an affirmation of what effect the mainstream media has on their readers and viewers in recent years. I sense unnecessary emotion and a lack of informed judgement. If one were to collect the worse of the anti-China rhetoric from the Murdoch Press and the 9 network, and put them together, we get your response which has already been aired over a long period of time. By the way, Taiwan is not in Southeast Asia. It is in East Asia just off the mainland of China.
Only time can tell the effect that attitudes like yours will have on Australia’s well-being in the future. One scenario is that as the country loses its main market and people begin to lose their jobs, those responsible will continue to rant and rave about their entitlement to the worlds markets, forgetting that a lot of hard work had been put in by the country’s diplomats in establishing good relations with others. It is easier to destroy than to build. We saw that in the college age kids that went on the rampage in Hong Kong. It is easy to see the villain in others and a lot harder to see it in ourselves. Remember, wars were started by countries that exaggerate differences to the extent that others that do not think like them are a blight on the landscape.
As I said before, for our own good, we must be able to separate fact from fiction. There is reality and there is what we wish for. Unfortunately what we wish for and what is reality does not always match – as demonstrated by your response. Have a good day.
Sincerely,
Teow Loon Ti