Communist, Nationalist, and Dangerous: The problem of China

National Review, April 30, 2001 by John Derbyshire

This psychopathological aspect of Chinese nationalism was on display in the Hainan affair. Chinese e-mail forums buzzed with demands for the captured U.S. servicemen to be beaten, or sentenced to life imprisonment. Years of relentless propaganda about historical grievances, real and imagined, and the need to restore ancient glories, have created a febrile atmosphere of hyperpatriotic agitation to which it is hard to think of any Western parallel other than the banal and obvious ones of early-20th-century fascism.

Yet while race-conscious and intensely introverted, Chinese nationalism does not-like, for example, Irish nationalism-see its scope as limited by strict geographical bounds. The ambitions of Chinese nationalists are not restricted to Chinese territory, they are hegemonic. Indeed, they are imperial. In the early 1950s, when the world's attention was distracted by events elsewhere, Mao set about reassembling the old Manchu empire by asserting control over Eastern Turkestan, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet. The base populations of these regions are not Chinese, and their cultures have nothing in common with Chinese culture-not even an alphabet. They were, however, claimed as subjects by the Manchu rulers of China, and Mao looked on them as a part of his proper sphere of influence.

The Manchus had taken a minimalist approach to these possessions, demanding from them token allegiance but very little else. Under Manchu rule, the Tibetans went on speaking Tibetan, practicing their religion, and running a theocratic administration in which government bureaucrats bore titles like "Grand Metaphysician." The Uighurs and Mongolians tended their flocks, conducted their vendettas, and said their own prayers unmolested, except when the occasional uprising needed to be suppressed. There was no real Sinification of these regions. The Manchus, a Siberian tribe with a language and script of their own, were too busy Sinifying themselves. (Unsuccessfully, to judge from the attitudes of modern Chinese. Watching the recent movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, my wife, who is Chinese, shook her head in dismay at Chow Yun-fat's hairstyle-the front half of the head shaved, the back bearing a long pigtail. "Ridiculous! I hope Americans don't think that's a Chinese style. That was forced on us by the Qing [i.e., Manchu] bastards.")

This hands-off approach would not do for modern dictators, for whom control must be total, and the superiority of Chinese culture impressed on all subject peoples. Both Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist party and Mao's Communists claimed all the Manchu dominions as part of China. Chiang never had the strength to enforce his claims, but Mao did. Sinification and colonization of the old Imperial suzerainties have been unrelenting, and accompanied by numberless horrors. In some regions, the native population was annihilated in the wars of resistance that went on through the 1950s and 1960s-wars like the one described with such desperate passion in Michel Peissel's book Cavaliers of Kham. Tibet, which had the strongest sense of nationhood, has been the main sufferer, but the other occupied regions endured similar atrocities. In the early 1960s, a quarter of a million people fled out of Eastern Turkestan to the comparative sanity and tranquility of the old USSR-the only known case of mass flight into that state.