Chinese Students Renew Emphasis on Patriotism

You could hear it in their voices as they peppered President Clinton with questions.

“You said that the reason for your visit to China is because China is too important, and engagement is better than containment,” the young man told Clinton during the president’s trip to Beijing University last June.

“Is this a . . . commitment you made for your visit, or do you have other things hidden behind [your] smile? Do you have any designs to contain China?” the student asked skeptically, as his peers applauded.

Almost a year later, this suspicion toward the U.S. and a strong sense of national pride burst violently forth as tens of thousands of young people took to the streets to protest NATO’s bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia.

The images of angry young Chinese pelting U.S. diplomatic missions with rocks and chanting “Down with America!” shocked the West, which tends to associate youthful protest in China with the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

But, as evidenced by Clinton’s reception at Beijing University last year, nationalism is no new phenomenon in China. Instead, it has been on the rise, especially among young people, throughout the past decade, analysts say. And it springs from a strong tradition of student nationalism in China this century.

As the next millennium dawns, this increasing sense of national assertiveness may pose a daunting challenge--not only for foreign governments as they try to figure out how best to deal with Beijing, but also for the Communist regime as it tries to encourage such sentiment and harness it at the same time.

“It is very much a double-edged sword--and could easily backfire,” said Stanley Rosen, a Sinologist at USC who has closely monitored the swelling tide of nationalism in China.

The patriotic fervor sweeping China has been growing ever since the Tiananmen Square crackdown 10 years ago, in which hundreds, if not thousands, of people died.

In part, it is the natural outgrowth of China’s rapid economic development and emergence from decades of isolation. As the country has grown stronger, so has the loyalty of its citizens.

But China’s waxing nationalism has also been fostered by government leaders, who have promoted the idea of national confidence and the image of China as a resurgent world power.

In the wake of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the government launched a campaign of “patriotic education” in the mid-1990s in an effort to fill the void left by a collapsing Communist ideology. Secondary school students were taught patriotic songs. University freshmen were required to take a course in modern Chinese history emphasizing the achievements of the Communist Party and to visit “patriotic bases,” such as Mao Tse-tung’s birthplace.

At the same time, an influential set of Chinese thinkers began rejecting what they saw as an excessive love during the 1980s for all things Western, from ideals to institutions to pop culture. They argued instead for “Chinese solutions to Chinese problems.”

“In the past, we held to the idea of the collective and the commonwealth, but in the first decade after China’s opening up [in 1979], it was drowned by Western individualism,” said Sun Jin, a sociologist at China Agricultural University in Beijing. “Now it’s resurfacing, which is contributing to the growing sense of patriotism.”

The state-sponsored drive to instill love of country has been effective. In a 1995 survey of 10,000 young people across China, a large majority of respondents said they expected to see major improvements in China’s political, economic and military status in 30 years.

Another study of youths in Shanghai showed that patriotism had risen to No. 2 on the list of important personal values, up from No. 5 in 1984.

More ominously, those polled in the 1995 nationwide survey also listed the United States as the country most unfriendly to China and the country they most resented. But experts caution against reducing China’s nationalism to a form of new and highly threatening xenophobia.

“Nationalism tends to become a code word for aggression,” said Joseph Fewsmith, a China scholar at Boston University. “Though some forms of Chinese nationalism have had an aggressive, anti-American tone to them, most are far more nuanced.”

Hostility Directed at U.S. Government

In fact, many of the students who hurled stones and paint bombs at the U.S. Embassy here are the same ones sporting Calvin Klein T-shirts and hoping to study abroad in the U.S.--part of the complex love-hate relationship with America.

“It’s not as though Chinese students are hostile toward all of America or American people,” said Meng Huadong, a senior at prestigious Qinghua University, China’s version of MIT. “They’re only hostile toward U.S. policy and hegemonism.”

To Meng, an increased sense of Chinese national interest does not mean keeping other countries down but building up his own.

The history of student nationalism in modern China harks back to the beginning of the 20th century. In an eerie precursor almost exactly 80 years before last month’s embassy protests, students marched on foreign diplomatic missions in China to protest what they felt was the humiliation of a weak and impotent China at the hands of foreign powers after World War I.

Even the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square began as a patriotic movement by students who wanted to strengthen China through political reform.

The danger now for the government, as then, lies in whether it can prevent nationalism from turning into a threat to Communist rule rather than a tool of it.

The protests three weeks ago sounded a warning shot. After the Chinese Embassy bombing in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade--an event many here believe was a deliberate attack by NATO to destabilize China--public anger nearly spun out of the government’s control. Much of the authorities’ efforts were directed at trying to manage the outburst of fury rather than fan it.

To the government’s dismay, many of the protesters felt that China’s leaders had been too weak in their response to the bombing and accused President Jiang Zemin of being soft.

“Leaders nowadays can’t do anything,” said Beijing resident Li Jianfeng, 39. “If Mao were alive, he would already have sent troops to [help] Yugoslavia, just as we helped the North Koreans beat the U.S. Army.”

In addition, the demonstrations came at a highly sensitive time for Beijing: less than a month before the 10th anniversary Friday of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

“Now that street protests have, in a real sense, been re-legitimized, . . . that threatens the government even more,” said USC’s Rosen. “The last thing the government wanted was to have people on the streets,” even for “the right causes.”

The problem with playing on nationalist sentiment, he said, is that the government is setting up the populace to judge whether the Communist Party is fulfilling its promise of making China strong--and to take action if people think the government has failed.

“If the regime is unable to meet such rather high expectations,” Rosen wrote in a recent paper, “it may find, to use an old Chinese expression, that in playing the nationalism card, it has ‘mounted a tiger and can’t easily dismount.’ ”

*

* TIANANMEN REVISITED: Columnist Jim Mann sorts facts, fiction as 10th anniversary of Chinese crackdown nears. A5