Pride from humiliation

: When the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, Mao Zedong famously declared, “Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up.” In 1997, when Hong Kong reverted from British colonial status to Chinese sovereignty, the Communist Party returned to the theme of China as victim to help encourage greater nationalism. General Secretary Jiang Zemin pointedly reminded the world that “the occupation of Hong Kong was the epitome of the humiliation that China suffered in modern history.” Since then, much of the talk about victimisation has concentrated on Japan, China’s brutal and still incompletely repentant World War II occupier.

The idea that a nation might restore itself to greatness by emphasising, even “celebrating,” weakness may seem counterintuitive. After all, why would any leader seeking to gain global respect want to constantly remind his people and the world of his country’s former humiliation? Perhaps Chinese leaders (both Nationalist and Communist) calculated that if Chinese could become sufficiently aware, even ashamed, of their weakness, they would be goaded into rising up and reclaiming their national greatness... A significant part of China’s effort to create a new national identity has been based on the dream of restoring the country’s territorial integrity, which patriots viewed as having been fengua, or, “cut up like a melon,” by past foreign incursion. This dream was of reunifying China as a multi-ethnic state composed of Han (central Chinese), Man (Manchurians), Meng (Mongolians), Hui (Muslims), and Zang (Tibetans), as well as bringing back into the fold of “the sacred motherland” those parts of the old Chinese empire that had either been pried loose by imperialist powers or had broken away during times of weakness. (These included Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, the Spratly Island in the South China Sea, and the Diaoyutai Islands near Japan. And, of course, it also meant holding onto Tibet and Xinjiang, whose peoples have long flirted with independence.)