Nationalism Gives Xi a Boost, but Comes With Risk

WALL STREET JOURNAL
8-9-15

Nationalism Gives Xi a Boost, but Comes With Risk

Power parade rallies the masses, but sets up new tensions

By Andrew Browne

BEIJING—Nobody could have predicted the sequence of disasters striking when it did.

With just weeks to go before a military extravaganza on Tiananmen Square to mark victory over Japan in World War II, the stock markets collapsed, speculators bolted for the exits after the currency fell, taking billions of dollars with them, and a chemical explosion ripped a huge crater in the port of Tianjin. Many global investors lost faith in the Chinese leadership’s vaunted ability to steward the world’s second largest economy. Suddenly, President Xi Jinping looked like he was on the losing side.

But on the day itself, reviewing the parade from a “Red Flag” limousine, Mr. Xi rode over all these concerns. He needed a boost; goose-stepping soldiers, tanks, drones, missiles and jets gave him one.

Though the war against Japan ended 70 years ago, the Chinese Communist Party keeps demonstrating that the surest way to rally the country at times of crisis is to go after the old enemy. This was how the party recovered from its near-downfall in 1989 during the Tiananmen protests.

And it’s how it continues in power. By constantly reminding citizens about Japan’s wartime atrocities, it deflects frustrations at home toward an external threat.

Mr. Xi has mastered the playbook. The buzz on the streets of Beijing, and the more reflective views of China watchers, is that he turned last Thursday’s pageant of power into his coronation as the country’s new strongman. In his speech to the crowds he celebrated a “great triumph” that had “crushed the plot of the Japanese militarists to colonize and enslave China and put an end to China’s national humiliation.” Mr. Xi made that success his own.

Yet feeding the public’s hatred of Japan is a risky tactic: The appetite for Japan-bashing enlarges over time; emotion could spin out of control.

In the run-up to the parade, party propagandists ran out of credible story lines to drive nonstop anti-Japanese dramas aired on state TV. Public complaints forced authorities to yank one long-running series—“Together We Fight the Devils”—after a jail-cell scene in which the condemned Communist hero removes a grenade hidden in his wife’s crotch (Japanese guards allowed her in for a final moment of intimacy) and blows everyone up.

The silly anti-Japanese narratives of an exhausted propaganda machine point to a much more troubling question.

With the economy now struggling, will the government be tempted to stir an even more impassioned patriotism? Rising nationalism and sinking growth is an unstable mix anywhere, but particularly in China where the party’s legitimacy rests so firmly on delivering ever-higher living standards.

And it sets up new tensions between China and the world. The mood around a summit later this month between Mr. Xi and President Obama in Washington is already sour over U.S. complaints about Chinese trade and currency practices, accusations of cybertheft, and China’s island-building in the South China Sea.

Modern Chinese nationalism has its roots in a popular movement led by intellectuals and students to resist Japan’s territorial encroachments in the early 20th century. Its mainstream promotes a pride in China’s cultural accomplishments and rich civilization; as elsewhere in the world, however, its fringes are occupied by xenophobes, racists and military fanatics.

In his third year in office, Mr. Xi is moving further along the spectrum. He’s pushing a resentful strain of nationalism that harps on China’s “century of humiliation” at the hands of Japan and the Western imperial powers starting with the Opium Wars, and he adamantly rejects liberal Western values. Talk of democracy is banned on college campuses.

Western businesses complain they feel less welcome than before. Security forces are stepping up restrictions on the activities of foreign NGOs and their local affiliates. State media speak of CIA plots to destabilize Tibet and other border areas. When students paralyzed Hong Kong’s central business district last year to demand democracy, the People’s Daily blamed “hostile foreign forces” for whipping up trouble.

And Mr. Xi’s challenge to the West is growing more muscular. While his Tiananmen address was laced with references to peace, and the parade ended with a flock of 70,000 peace doves ascending into the skies, what caught everybody’s attention were the DF-21D ballistic missiles built to destroy American aircraft carriers, the symbol of U.S. global power. Out of sight thousands of miles away, meanwhile, the Pentagon reported five Chinese navy ships nosing around Alaska. Mr. Obama was there on a visit.

Mr. Xi doesn’t want to risk conflict with the American superpower. Political observers argue that the muscle-flexing on Tiananmen was designed primarily to arouse a domestic audience, not to intimidate Japan or throw down a challenge to the U.S.

For now, Mr. Xi seems confident that he can rally the masses with a parade, inspire them with ceremonial cannon fire and give them confidence with rockets pulled along on wheels. What’s not clear is whether, once economic hardship starts to bite, they’ll be so easily satisfied.