Chauvinism as Catharsis

A Guardian story makes explicit something I've long believed: that the intensity of the hatred expressed by so many young Chinese towards Japan is nothing other than a redirection of discontents they feel with the state of their own society onto an acceptable scapegoat, with government approval and encouragement. To hear some Chinese nationalists rage, one would never know that the Communist Party has taken far many more Chinese victims than the Japanese did throughout their bloodsoaked excursions into adventurism.

At 27 years old, Song Yangbiao is already earning a salary that his parents can only have dreamed of. He is better educated, more widely travelled and can expect to live a longer, healthier, wealthier life than any generation in Chinese history. You might think he is also more content. You would be wrong. Mr Song is not happy. He is furious.

So furious that he spends more than five hours every day venting his frustrations on the internet, where he has set up a site for tens of thousands of like-minded young Chinese people to air their grievances. So vitriolic and widespread are their web-based protests that the domestic media have labelled the affluent, academic and internet-savvy generation that they represent as the "angry young".

Like their namesakes in Britain in the 1950s, China's angry young men and women are the products of a fast-changing society in which rising expectations for the future contrast starkly with frustrations about the past and present. In private, their anger is amorphous, multi-faceted and idealistic. But in public, which usually means internet bulletin boards, their scope to let off steam is largely limited to nationalism. The explosive growth of the web in China, where the number of users is growing by more than 25% a year, is often cited by advocates of political reform as a source of hope for greater openness in the world's last big communist state.

But there is increasing evidence that the opposite may be true. Sites advocating democracy, religious freedom or union rights are closed down by the authorities and their operators often arrested. But there are countless sites like Mr Song's devoted to one of the few political passions permitted by the government: hatred for Japan.

"Two Minutes Hate", anyone? Somehow I suspect that most of these young people would have far more pertinent things to complain about than the lack of a proper apology from Japan, if only they had the freedom to do so. China's "Fascism With Chinese Characteristics" is breeding ugly sentiments that are likely to lead to big trouble some day.

Comments

[Factory]

10:1 if you did a global serach and replace for Japan with Islam on one of these sites, you'd get LGF.

But with that said, Asia as a whole doesn't seem to have gotten over WW2 like Europe has, possibly because of geographic seperation, lack of a credible threat to bind them together like europe had with the USSR, and Japan's dislike of addressing the subject.

[Abiola Lapite]

I think the lack of a common enemy is perhaps the single most important reason for this phenomenon, that and the fact that China remains a totalitarian state whose leaders profit from stoking up anti-Japanese hatred. One sees much the same mechanism at work in the Middle East, where all forms of discontent are stifled by saying "Fix the Palestinian problem first!"

[dsquared]

I've always thought that the irrational hatred of "red-state" Americans for the states of New York, Massachusetts and California has a similar basis. Elias Canetti's book on the mass psychology of fascism is good on this sort of thing.

[Finnpundit]

The "irrational hatred" of those Americans is only matched by the utter disdain and scorn of blue state liberals for those worker-consumers that actually comprise the key economic engine of not only of the US, but the entire world.

[Finnpundit]

However, to get back to the thread, it is ironic that this Chinese state-directed hate campaign can only reverberate as a boon to the US, binding Japan's dependency to the American security umbrella even further.

[Chuckles]

Japan's obduracy over WW2 isnt helping matters now, is it?
Who wouldnt get mad when one hears statements like "The Alleged Nanking Massacre"?

[lamin]

And since the Chinese live in China and would therefore have generational knowledge of internecine misdeeds one should be cautious about accepting carte blanche the fantastic kill numbers that Western commentators love to ascribe to Mao and others, post-Opium wars. If the Chinese still revere Mao but excoriate the Nippons over Nanking then unless one can prove cognitive dissonance on their part--with hard evidence then maybe they know best where to direct their ire.

[Abiola Lapite]

"one should be cautious about accepting carte blanche the fantastic kill numbers that Western commentators love to ascribe to Mao and others, post-Opium wars"

What a load of bunk! We know from China's own census figures as well as the reports of numerous survivors right up through the Communist Party heirarchy that Mao's programmes were disastrous for China's population.

"If the Chinese still revere Mao but excoriate the Nippons over Nanking then unless one can prove cognitive dissonance on their part--with hard evidence then maybe they know best where to direct their ire."

You do realize that this is a totalitarian state where nothing is said or written that doesn't meet Communist Party approval, don't you? What sense does it make to write of such a state as if people were free to study what they please and come to their own conclusions about contentious issues?

[Abiola Lapite]

The following Google cache page has references to some research done on the Great Leap Forward and its consequences. Unfortunately I can't get the original page to load up, but at least you can use the references on the cache page to seek out the relevant material yourself:

http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:MMTGyAiVYZgJ:xgc.merseine.nu/wh/famine/Research/references.html+%22great+leap+forward%22+deaths+famine++-shopping+-directory&hl=en

If you're using Windows, just click three times to select the whole line, then copy it into your address bar.

References quoted on the page include:

1 - Basil Ashton, Kenneth Hill, Alan Piazza, Robin Zeitz, Famine in China, 1958-61, Population and Development Review, Vol. 10, No. 4. (Dec., 1984), pp. 613-645.

2 - Xizhe Peng, Demographic Consequences of the Great Leap Forward in China's Provinces, Population and Development Review, Vol. 13, No. 4. (Dec., 1987), pp. 639-670.

3 - Justin Yifu Lin, Collectivization and China's Agricultural Crisis in 1959-1961, The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 98, No. 6. (Dec., 1990), pp. 1228-1252.

[Chuckles]

Amartya Sen is also a good one.
Is there a difference between deaths from Policy Failures and deaths from Military Aggression ? I mean, by way of Moral culpability.

[Abiola Lapite]

Also see the following BMJ article

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/319/7225/1619

which mentions that China's *official* census statistics, published in 1982, put the death toll for the Great Leap Forward at the very same 30 million figure that Western sources use, and unpublished material puts it as high as 40 million. It simply isn't on to attempt to minimize the crimes of the Chinese Communist Party against its own subjects.

[Abiola Lapite]

"Is there a difference between deaths from Policy Failures and deaths from Military Aggression ? I mean, by way of Moral culpability."

To the farmers ordered off their rice fields and told to build furnaces in their backyards while their harvests were rotting, I don't see that there would have been much of a difference. At least with war one has good odds of dying quickly, as opposed to slowly starving to death.

[JuJuby]

It's definitly not comparable. For one, the Chinese do make a good case that the moral culpability of mascaring people in cold blood surpasses that of ignorance and incompetence. Two, Japan still has not apologized for their crimes against humanity while the CCP have admitted to incompetence and "grave errors" during the GLF which caused many deaths (although they still have not given a number to just how many). Third, the Japanese in general to this day, are very disparaging and racist towards Chinese (as with many people).

I definitely think the party officials that were responsible for the millions who starved to death and suffered because the ignorance and incompetence of those policies where inexcusable, and those responsible for the purges during the CR should be brought to justice but this is not likely. I am just saying from the Chinese perspective, they do have a point.

[Abiola Lapite]

"For one, the Chinese do make a good case that the moral culpability of mascaring people in cold blood surpasses that of ignorance and incompetence."

Oh really? I'm waiting to hear it ...

"Two, Japan still has not apologized for their crimes against humanity"

A false claim. How many apologies from how many Japanese Prime Ministers will suffice? Even the present Emperor has done his own share of apologizing. Do you want Willy-Brandt-style grovelling or what?

"Third, the Japanese in general to this day, are very disparaging and racist towards Chinese (as with many people)."

As you yourself acknowledge, this isn't a peculiarly Japanese trait, and in any case, modern Japanese racism hardly compares to, say, Chinese students rioting and beating up Africans because one was rumored to be dating a Chinese girl ...

" I am just saying from the Chinese perspective, they do have a point."

Which is ... what? That it's okay to rant and rave about killing the "Japanese Devils" even as your own rulers with much more blood on their hands keep sending your fellow citizens to concentration camps for speaking out of turn?

[Danny]

These arguments are tricky, comparing degress of evil. If something is less evil, some people hear that as saying that it's the lesser of two evils, which sounds like apologetics, which is not what (most) people mean to say in the first place.

This discussion reminds me of arguments about whether the crimes of Stalinism or Naziism were worse (FWIW, I don't think that anything the Japanese did compares to the Holocaust, in terms of its industrial organization, extent, ideological motivation and especially in its utter gratuitousness, but then I'm a Jew so perhaps I'm not objective).

After the fall of the Iron curtain, my father made inquiries about lost relatives in Russia. The search trail stopped upon learning that some relative had been murdered during Stalin's purges. In terms of my emotional reaction, the death sounded random, it was as if hearing that the relative had been killed in a car accident, it lacked any greater significance, completely unlike the way I think about relatives who were murdered by the Germans. With the Jewish holocaust, I can re-live it constantly: If I were transported back in time to WWII Europe, I would have known with 100% certainty that I would have been a hunted man, whereas were I transported back to 30s USSR, I would have had no such certainty. I should think that I wouldn't have been a hunter, but in any case, there were no distinguishing marks between the hunters and the hunted. We have no idea whether the parents of Song Yangbiao, the angry Chinese man mentioned in article, were perpetrators or victims. They could have been both. That being the case, it resonates far less than the crimes of a distinct & well-defined enemy.

The same phenomenom can be observed with regard to the African Slave Trade. In popular imagination, historical opprobium is attached mostly to the white slaveowners, less to the Africans who sold them. Even Africans who stayed in Africa are regarded as victims (because of the enormous side effects of the slave trade).

Conservative intellectuals complain we do not place enough emphasis upon the crimes of communism because of some left-wing cabal. That isn't true. The problem is that for most of Communism's crimes, perpetrators and victims were of the same nationality. We need to put a face on historical injustices. We need to visualize the victim, we need to visualize the executioner. When the victim and the executioner have the same face, the picture becomes less vivid. It's a horrible thing to say, but in terms of historical memory, blood trumps all, even mass murder.

Anyway, I hope Japan hatred in China is not too widespread. Having the second most powerful country in the world intent on exacting revenge from the second largest economy in the world is probably not a good thing, and yes, of course its a diversion that suits China's despots very nicely.

[lamin]

"Fantastic Kill Numbers"

But if China is/was as closed as is claimed, then how do we know whether statements such as "Mao killed 30 million peasants" is true or not? The question is: what kind of confirmation instruments did commentators use to measure the actual "kill numbers" in a walled-off China? In such a vast country of more than 1 billion how can a mere commentator sitting in an armchair somewhere in the West make such claims with any amount of certitude?

[Abiola Lapite]

"In such a vast country of more than 1 billion how can a mere commentator sitting in an armchair somewhere in the West make such claims with any amount of certitude?"

And how do you know that the world you see isn't a figment of your imagination. There's no such thing as knowledge with "certitude", not unless you're talking mathematical certainties, but that doesn't mean we're therefore free to absolve ourselves of the responsibility of weighing evidence, which is what your argument sounds like to me. Let me put it slightly differently, so you can see what I'm getting at:

["If Nazi Germany is/was as closed as is claimed, then then how do we know whether statements such as "Hitler killed 6 million Jews" is true or not?"]

One has to be a conspiracy theorist or a Mao apologist to imagine that the Chinese Communist Party would ever willingly release information that would prove so damaging to its image as the fact that 30 million perished under one of its former leaders (and in fact they waited two whole decades to do so, and are probably still understating the true scope of the crime).

Only you can say what's pushing you to make these arguments of yours, but it smells awfully like ideologically motivated "revisionism" to me. If you have evidence to indicate the numbers are exaggerated, fine, but all this questioning just seems weird otherwise.

[Abiola Lapite]

Danny,

I think "blood" has far less to do with the primary direction of Chinese rage than the mere fact that many of those who perpetuated the crimes in question are not only still alive but still powerful, and the subject is therefore too dangerous for most Chinese to touch. The Chinese media and educational system routinely downplay the impact of past Communist Party misdeeds, while losing no opportunities to hype up the crimes of foreign devils of all persuasions.

As for why the Stalinist purge has less salience, I'd venture that the absence of graphic evidence in the form of photographs and TV footage might have something to do with that, as opposed to the supposed common nationality of the victims and their killers. With the Soviet Union I don't buy the common ethnicity argument, as most of Stalin's victims in the late 1930s were Ukrainians, and it was largely *because* they were Ukrainians with suspected separatist tendencies, and not Russians, that he could manage to get away with starving millions of them to death. The Volga Germans, the Chechens, the Kalmyk and the Ingush he had deported into the emptiness of Siberia would quibble with the notion that they were "Russians" in any way, shape or form.

Another important reason why the Soviet Union's crimes are less spoken of is simply that Stalin won his war with Hitler, and because he was Britain and America's "ally" during the war, his supporters and sympathizers in the West were therefore never brought to account for the deeds they cheered on - it would have been difficult to prosecute people whose support one had happily taken on when the fighting was raging. There really IS substance to conservative claims that socialists, "progressives" and the like were loathe to lambast the Soviet union for its misdeeds - the likes of George Bernard Shaw, Walter Duranty, Jean-Paul Sartre and other Western leftists too numerous to name are proof positive that this was true.

[dsquared]

In popular imagination, historical opprobium is attached mostly to the white slaveowners, less to the Africans who sold them

This is in general because the British did not present getting involved in the slave trade as an attractive investment opportunity so much as a possible option for military survival. The African half of the slave trade were not entrepreneurs; they were the agents of the buyers and their alternative to being involved in the slave trade as vendors was in general, being involved in the slave trade as commodity.

In the case of the Chinese, it is true that they have a somewhat different attitude toward history from that with which we are familiar; a brief review of the Chinese experience with famines and natural disasters suggests that they may have different standards of what constitutes an atrocity from what we do. And, one can (kinda sorta) see that a modern day survivor of the Mao era might look back on it and say that when Mao showed up China had lost its status as a world power and that today it is one again, and that has to be worth something. On the other hand, I'm not Chinese; I'm British and I'm an economist and as a result my sacred creed is that the costs ought to be proportionate to the benefits. On that criterion, the Chinese regime of the postwar era was one of the worst monsters history has ever seen.

[Abiola Lapite]

"one can (kinda sorta) see that a modern day survivor of the Mao era might look back on it and say that when Mao showed up China had lost its status as a world power and that today it is one again, and that has to be worth something."

Nationalism is the opium of the Chinese masses (and not only them). I believe much the same thinking is at work in Russia, explaining the strange popularity Stalin continues to enjoy in that country, even after the full extent of his brutality has been revealed.

[dsquared]

Abiola: it's also the case that up until the mid 1960s, the rapid industrialisation carried out under Soviet Communism was actually delivering the goods and was providing material goods and security of food to people who had never had anything of the sort before. If you were looking at the objective evidence as it stood, say, at the moment that Gargarin was taking off, it would have been much more difficult to say on the weight of evidence that Communism wasn't, on balance, doing better for the Russians than their alternatives.

[Abiola Lapite]

"If you were looking at the objective evidence as it stood, say, at the moment that Gargarin was taking off, it would have been much more difficult to say on the weight of evidence that Communism wasn't, on balance, doing better for the Russians than their alternatives."

Yes, well Stalin was dead by then, so the worst of the killing was already in the past. The question people ought to have asked themselves though is whether the sheer cost of that apparent prosperity was really worth the price that had been paid for it. From what I know about Russian industrialization during the last quarter-century of Tsarist rule, growth then was as impressive as anything the Soviet Union ever recorded, with nothing like the mass brutality of Communist rule or the deliberate underplaying of consumer wants that was the hallmark of the Soviet Union. Was it worth 20-30 million dead for Russians to get back to where they were eating about as much meat as their grandparents did?

On a related note, looking back on what we now know about the unreliability of Soviet statistics and the quality of Soviet-era growth, one wonders if the same mistake isn't also currently being made with China, whose authorities routinely fib about growth figures.

[Peter Nolan]

"A Guardian story makes explicit something I've long believed: that the intensity of the hatred expressed by so many young [...]towards [...] is nothing other than a redirection of discontents they feel with the state of their own society onto an acceptable scapegoat"

Appropriate that this article should appear in the Guardian, of all papers: It could as easily be describing its role in inciting hatred among the frustrated losers of British society against America and Israel.

[dmitri]

If I were transported back in time to WWII Europe, I would have known with 100% certainty that I would have been a hunted man, whereas were I transported back to 30s USSR, I would have had no such certainty. I should think that I wouldn't have been a hunter

Sad, but, accoring to UC Berkeley Historian Yuri Slezkine (half-Jewish if is important), many Jews were hunters.

(to site owner, sorry, don't know html, can you fix this links.)

http://207.12.160.58/Alumni/Cal_Monthly/November_2004/QA-_A_conversation_with_Yuri_Slezkine.asp

Why were Jews so successful in the early Soviet state?

The story of the Jews in the early Soviet Union is similar to the story of the Jews in America. That is, they were especially successful in the realms of education, journalism, medicine, and other professions that were central to the functioning of Soviet society, including science.

Jews in the Soviet Union were much more literate than any other group, they were untainted by any association with the imperial regime, and they seem to have been very enthusiastic about what the Communist Party was doing. This was to some extent a conscious commitment to ideology, but mostly it was just because there were no more legal barriers against Jews. The doors opened, and they flooded in and did exceedingly well in the 1920s and the first part of the 1930s.

My belief is that you can’t understand the second part of the Jewish story in Russia--the anti-Semitic policies, and what happens to Soviet Jews later, their desire to emigrate, for example--unless you know the first part of the story, which is mostly about amazing success.

You write that Jews were important members of both the secret police and those who ran the gulag. This was news to me.

The fact was not known to me when I was growing up in the Soviet Union. Most people found out about it when they read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. He didn’t make a point of it at the time, but he talks about the people who were running the White Sea Canal labor camps, and they were virtually all ethnic Jews.

What was your reaction?

Mostly surprise, because it seemed so incongruous to those of us who thought of Jews as the primary victims and primary opponents of the Soviet regime. But later I discovered that the role of communism in modern Jewish history was tremendously important. I don’t think you can understand modern Jewish history without considering the Russian Revolution or understand communism without considering the role of the Jews.

[JuJuby]

>>A false claim. How many apologies from how many Japanese Prime Ministers will suffice? Even the present Emperor has done his own share of apologizing. Do you want Willy-Brandt-style grovelling or what?

I don't think they have ever apologized to China directly. They have only made general public statments about their aggression. Not any heartfelt ones. If they did, they wouldn't visit their war criminal's graves.

>>As you yourself acknowledge, this isn't a peculiarly Japanese trait, and in any case, modern Japanese racism hardly compares to, say, Chinese students rioting and beating up Africans because one was rumored to be dating a Chinese girl ...

It is a matter of degree. Japan is more hostile to ethnic Chinese than the other way around. And also, what does that have to do with Japan's hatred of Chinese? You can also bring in the fact that many Asians were kiled by blacks during the LA riots. I don't think it is truthful to say that one people is generally racist against another based on one incident.

>>Which is ... what? That it's okay to rant and rave about killing the "Japanese Devils" even as your own rulers with much more blood on their hands keep sending your fellow citizens to concentration camps for speaking out of turn?

I would hope and think that they do "rant and rave" about attrocities such as the CR and GLF. Do you have any evidence that Chinese people have gone to "concentration camps" for complaining about the monstrous attrocities of the CR and GLF?