How Nations Remember by James V. Wertsch

Author:James V. Wertsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

4.3.2. The Century of Humiliation as a PEN for China

For members of the Chinese national community, the Century of Humiliation story serves as a privileged lens in ways similar to how the Great Patriotic War does for the Russian community. It is a story about the humiliation of China in the Opium Wars with England and other European powers in the 1840s and includes other chapters of humiliation at the hands of the West and Japan, including the first Sino-Japanese (1894–1895), the Boxer Rebellion (1900), the dismemberment of Chinese territory in the wake of World War I, and the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s. This century came to an end in 1949 when Mao Zedong announced that China was finally able to rise up off its knees.

Zheng Wang (2012) has documented the relentless efforts in schools and other settings to ensure that Chinese citizens “never forget national humiliation,” and as a result, the slogan is known to virtually every Chinese citizen. It is part of the “historical consciousness and its complex of myth and trauma [that] are the dominant ideas in Chinese public rhetoric” (p.xiii). Wang argues that this is part of a rhetoric of “chosen glory” (p.37), a framework in which “Chinese view themselves as possessing both a strong sense of both cultural and moral superiority” (p.47), which makes the events of 1840 to 1949 seem particularly humiliating by contrast. Indeed, it might be argued that assumptions about cultural superiority are what make it possible for the Chinese to be secure enough to talk about humiliation in the first place and include it in the title of this national narrative. It is a term that virtually no other modern country makes overt in its account of the past even though national communities invariably can point to at least one humiliating episode.

This combination of moral superiority and humiliation has been a focus of intense discussion for decades in China. It can be found in the writings of Lu Xun (1881–1936), for example, a writer whose powerful impact on Chinese society remains to this day. In A Madman’s Diary, Lu (2014) recounts the shock of being awakened to China’s weakened state when he saw a photo of a Japanese soldier beheading a Chinese captive from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. What he found particularly disturbing was the passive, indeed apathetic, state of the Chinese witnesses in the photo. For him, this was a starting point for anguished self-criticism and a call to action by the Chinese. His unforgiving criticism of the slavish mentality, timidity, and passivity by the Chinese was the topic of many of his essays and short stories that are part of the curriculum of China’s schools today and are widely known in the general public.

These and other efforts by the Chinese state have contributed to a set of habits around the Century of Humiliation story, making it into a PEN. Wang (2012) points to elements of the schematic nature of this narrative when writing of how historical memory “functions at a preconscious or subconscious level” (p.

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