How ideational factors affect international relations has been one of the most bewildering puzzles for researchers of conflict resolution. Our own research in this case therefore was intend on contributed to the discussion regarding the methodology of using identity as a variable in helping to explain political action.The U.S.-China relationship has become one of the most important bilateral relationships in the world. The evolution and management of this relationship will have a decisive impact on international peace in the twenty-first century. The research results of this project could help both the U.S. and China to develop more effective mechanisms for managing the conflicts that will inevitably arise in the future, improving their ability to handle future crises.
In this particular research, we have examined (1) how the Communist government uses the content of history and memory to construct the rules and norms for the ruling party; (2) how the beliefs of history and memory influenced Chinese leaders' interpretation and judgment regarding the conflict situations.
As indicated, we started by taking a look at history and memory in China today, and see if this might have been of influence to date. As we have seen particularly in the case of China today, this particular approach has yielded insights that allow us to understand how China might react in the future when faced with other situations like the three we have discussed.
More particular, we started by examining two questions: (1) How did the Chinese communist leaders use history and memory to reshape national identity so as to strengthen their legitimacy for ruling China after the end of the Cold War? (2) How did this reconstruction of identity influence China's conflict behavior during this period of time?
This allowed us to explore a "history and memory" theme that as we have shown, is indeed an explanatory model for all three of the recent China-US crises events: the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis, the 1999 crisis after the NATO bombing of the P.R.C. Embassy in Yugoslavia, and the 2001 crisis after the collision of warplanes off the Chinese coast.
Analyzing these three allowed us to discover what happens to politics when historical hatred, national humiliation and insecurity come to the center of the political discourse.
This led us to by three primary conclusions:
(1) After the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the most serious challenge for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the 1980s was a crisis of faith in socialism, crisis of belief in Marxism, and crisis of trust in the party. When the official Communist ideology lost credibility, the Communist regime became incapable of enlisting mass support behind a socialist vision of the future. There was a spiritual vacuum resulting from decades of communist repression of both traditional and Western belief systems. Under these circumstances, some intellectuals, particularly the younger generation of intellectuals, turned to Western liberal ideas and called for Western style democratic reform. The belief and faith crises finally evolved into a pro-democracy movement and eventually led to the large-scale Tiananmen demonstration in the spring of 1989. These crises became even more evident following the international collapse of the communist ideology itself. China's communist rulers feared that, in the mind of ordinary Chinese, they had already lost the "mandate of heaven" to rule china.
The ''patriotic education campaign", launched shortly after the "Tiananmen Incident" was used to redefine the legitimacy of the post- Tiananmen leadership in a way that would permit the Communist Party' s rule to continue on the basis of a non Communist ideology. Chapter Four of this dissertation provides a large amount of evidence and detailed description of how the communist government conducts the Campaign of Patriotic Education and related policies on history and memory issues since the end of the Cold War.
As a central part of the "patriotic education" campaign, Beijing called upon the whole nation to study China's humiliating modern history and how much the country has been changed by the Chinese Communist revolution. The education focuses on China's "chosen trauma" ("a century of humiliation" starting from the Opium War in 1840) and "chosen glory"-its splendid ancient civilization and the recent achievements. In fact, Beijing is using patriotism as a new ideology to fill the "spiritual vacuum." The Campaign is a nationwide mobilization targeting mainly the youngster. Since its beginning in 1991, the Campaign has continued without any signs of decline. The CCP has set the entire propaganda machine in motion for this Campaign.
This showed how the content of history and memory remains politically significant over time, with a focus on the process of institutionalization-that is, how the content of history and memory became embedded in organizations, education systems, popular culture and public media.
The Party conducted a major revision of the school history textbooks in 1991. In the new textbooks, the old class struggle narrative was replaced by a patriotic narrative. With nation-centered patriotism replacing class-based ideology as the key component of history education, an education campaign using past history of resisting foreign aggression swept Chinese schools. After the reform, Chinese Modern and Contemporary History-"education on national humiliation" (guochi jiaoyu)- has become a required core course in high school and a subject of the nationwide university entrance examinations for all candidates.
In comparison with previous propaganda campaigns launched by the CCP, especially those in the Maoist years, the patriotic education campaign was carried out in a much more practical and sophisticated way of "selling" the CCP' s ideas and agenda. As a new approach propaganda, the CCP uses China's memory sites as the major content of education. Beijing has constructed more than ten thousand "patriotic education bases" nationwide-museums, memorial halls, and monuments in memory of China's past wars with foreign countries, civil wars and the myths and national heroes in history. Visiting these memory sites has become a regular part of school curriculum. The state-controlled popular culture producers have made a large amount of films, songs and books on the theme of patriotism-many of them have drawn materials from China's modem and contemporary history. State-run newspapers, magazines, radio and TV programs all have special columns or sections on the theme of patriotic education.Since 1991, the ruling party has successfully made the education available at all times and everywhere in people's daily lives. The content of history and memory has become institutionalized in China-embedded in political institutions and the Chinese Communist Party's new ideological tools. Although all nation-states, from Western democracies to non-democratic societies, have laid great emphasis on teaching their national history, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the Campaign for Patriotic Education in China is one of the most massive attempts of using national history to conduct ideological re-education in human history.
(2) China's "chosen trauma" and "chosen glory" have been used by the Communist government, especially its top leaders, to construct the rules and norms of the ruling party. The discourse of national humiliation has become embedded in patterns of political discourse and the identity of the ruling party, and also, an integral part of the construction of Chinese nationalism. The CCP leaders are the educators or the manipulators of history and memory in China, but at the same time, they are also the believers of their own ideology.
We where able to show in this case, how the content of history and memory becomes embedded in patterns of political discourse in China-particularly, how the Communist government, especially its top leaders, use the content of history and memory to construct the rules and norms of the ruling party. The main findings of this analysis include:
(A) the CCP is no longer "the vanguard of the Chinese working class," but "the firmest and most thoroughgoing patriot."
(B) For this ruling party, some nonmaterial interests that have been defined by the content of history and memory, such as national dignity and face, and respect from other countries, have become equally important or even more important than China's material interests, such as trade, security and territory.
(C) For many Chinese, the countries in the world can be divided into two groups: those who have bullied them in the past-all of them developed countries, and those who have similar experiences with them-the other third world countries.
(D) The content of history and memory not only defines group goals and missions (the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation) but also leads the Party to interpret the world through lenses defined by the particular purpose. The wounded national pride has made restoration of the past glory the most profound and active factor in shaping China's modem history.
In fact, the content of history and memory has provided a whole set of theories to define the identity and worldview of the Chinese Communist Party: The Party's responsibility and leadership role have been entrusted by the history of the past century the Party has made the biggest sacrifices and contribution in the struggle to "put an end to the past humiliation." Therefore, the Party is "the firmest and most thoroughgoing patriot." The CCP has claimed legitimacy through a portrayal of itself as the history agency that restored national unity and independence. The central myth of the Party and also the "theory" that has been used to explain how the world works for the Chinese people is this statement: Only the Communist Party can save China; only the Party can develop and rejuvenate China. Since history tells us that "backwardness incurs beatings by others," the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation thus has become the unswerving goal and grand mission of the Party.
Another important finding of this research is, although the national-humiliation discourse certainly is propaganda in today's China, it is more: it has a large and sympathetic audience. For the Chinese people, the foreign invasions, the military defeats, the unequal treaties and all the details of invaders' atrocities during the "100 years of national humiliation" are not merely a recounting of national history. They learn these sad stories from their parents or grandparents, from school textbooks and from media, films, novels and posters in their daily life. The discourse of national humiliation is the key to understand the contemporary Chinese psyche of nationalism. It is no doubt that the current CCP leaders are utilizing China's humiliating past to arouse people's historical consciousness and promote internal cohesion. But for people such as Wen Jiabao, Jiang Zemin and Deng Xiaoping, what they said or wrote, as has been investigated, also indicates that each of them has a very strong historical consciousness about the country's traumatic national experience. They are the educators, the manipulators, but at the same time, are also the believers of their new ideology.
During the 20th century, the Chinese Communist Party utilized first communism and then patriotism to mobilize the population. Both times, the tremendous power of mobilization was seen and its implications shocked the whole world. In two different periods of time and in quite different international and domestic contexts, both communism and then patriotism were truly welcomed and accepted by many Chinese people. All this was obviously not just the evidence of the power of communist propaganda. In fact, behind the two massive ideological movements, we can see the power of history and memory.
(3) Chinese people's collective historical consciousness about the country's traumatic national experiences and the state's political use of the past constitute a powerful force in the way the Chinese conceptualize, manage and resolve external conflict. In crisis situations of confrontation and conflict, especially when confrontation is perceived by the Chinese as an assault on fundamental identity, face, and authority, history and memory very often serve as a major motivating factor.
In regards to the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis, the 1999 crisis after the NATO bombing of the P.R.C. Embassy in Yugoslavia, and the 2001 crisis after the collision of warplanes off the Chinese coast.
Given the fact that all the three crises caused military confrontation between the two countries, and the latter two even involved casualties and injuries, the three crises were actually China' s only "hot" conflicts with foreign countries during this period. We explored the extent to which the factor of history and memory has influenced China's approaches to conflict and reconciliation. We particularly explored two phenomena during the three crises: theory of conspiracy and the demand for an apology.
The evidence indicates that, from the standpoint of many Chinese people, the United States has a master plan against China. Neither Chinese leaders nor the Chinese people seem to believe that the bombing of the Embassy was a technical mistake. Instead they perceived a vast conspiracy to conduct the bombing within the US government. There were also various conspiracy theories regarding the China policy of the United States that have been widely spread in China since the end of the Cold War. Every time there is an incident between the two countries, conspiracy theories erupt assuming there is a big D.S. conspiracy behind the current event. At the same time, the demand for an "apology" has become commonplace in Chinese diplomacy. Apology became a sticking point in negotiations between China and the U.S. in 1999 subsequent to the NATO bombing of the P.R.C. Embassy in Belgrade and in April 2001 in the wake of the military aircraft collision.
Conclusion:
As a likely indicator for at least the near future, our research indicates that the cognitive content of history and memory, especially the "sense of victimization" and "suspicion syndrome," deeply affected Chinese people's attitudes, interpretation and judgment regarding the conflict situations:
*International confrontations are perceived and experienced by the Chinese as assaults on fundamental identity, dignity (face), authority and power.
*A deep historical sense of victimization by outside powers and long-held suspicions about foreign conspiracies against China deeply affect Chinese people's attitudes, strategies and policies concerning conflict and conciliation.
*Oversensitivity to grievances of old (closely connected with this nation's historical memory and its "chosen trauma") renders the country prone to tantrums at the slightest international offense, real or imagined.
*The historical memory variable helps explain why Chinese leaders did not choose to resolve the three incidents through cool diplomacy. When the incidents were perceived as bullying and new humiliations, and when the central myth and the legitimacy of the government are highly dependent upon maintaining China's "national face," it became natural and understandable that the government needed to be "tough." "Cool diplomacy" would not pass the domestic test and therefore was curtailed as an option.
This research has also compared the three U.S.-China crises (Taiwan Strait Crisis, Embassy Bombing Crisis and the EP-3 Crisis) with three non-conflict U.S.-China events (WTO Negotiations, Arms Control Negotiations and the Yinhe Incident) and another three non-U.S. cases (territory disputes with Vietnam, Philippines and the 1998 anti Chinese riots in Indonesia). Based on this analysis of these comparative cases, this investigation suggests that the following conditions or factors very often activate Chinese historical memory:
*Emergency (e.g., accident or unexpected events) and urgeney;
*Incident that involves Chinese suffering (e.g. casualties and injuries);
*Dispute with a country that has historieal problems with China.
The historical memory variable helps explain why China generally cooperated with the U.S. in the same period of time on some issues but turned aggressive on the three incident, and why China treated the U.S. differently from other countries when dealing with conflicts. This study argues that even though existing theories and explanations, such as the realism model, the clash of civilizations and the strategic culture theories, illuminate certain aspect of the three U.S.-China crises, full explanatory pictures emerge only after this phenomenon is also analyzed through the lens of history and memory.
The place of history and memory in the conduct and understanding of international conflict and conflict resolution is still a much understudied field. We therefore contributed a detailed case study of in this case China to explore how history and memory manifest themselves in a specific people's identity formation and approaches to external conflict.
It is also the first ever, systematic research exploring the deep structures and implications of in this case history and memory in Chinese foreign-policy decision-making and conflict behavior.
Although many specialist researcher today will acknowledge the prominence of history and memory in Chinese politics, the bulk of research touching on their relationship to Chinese foreign affairs behavior does so only indirectly and tangentially.
Thus while to date almost no research existed on Chinese conflict behavior. By deepening our understanding of the Chinese case, these our research results can also assist in the development of broader theories based on Western plus as shown, also non-Western cultures.
Furthermore, the research presented on this website as a whole, can help strengthen the link between theory and practice in the field of international conflict prevention, especially between theories of national approaches to conflict and the practice of cross-cultural conflict management.
Why Chinese Enmity towards the USA? P.1: Six Questions, more Answers Sinocentric Historiography Research P.2: It's a Conspiracy Theory
Sinocentric Historiography Research P.3: The Chinese Dilemma Sinocentric Historiography Research P.4: "Foreign Powers"
Sinocentric Historiography Research P.5: Tradition
Sinocentric Historiography Research P.6: New Propaganda
Sinocentric Historiography Research P.7: Final Analysis