FINANCIAL TIMES

22-3-17

Out of China by Robert Bickers — nationalism by another name

A history of the country’s 20th-century efforts to reassert itself is a corrective to the official narrative

by: Julian Gewirtz

In November 2012, freshly anointed as China’s leader, Xi Jinping made one of his first stops a history museum. Xi took in an exhibition in Beijing that surveyed the foreign abuses beginning with the opium wars before shifting to the glories of the “New China”, including the “reform and opening up” after Mao Zedong’s death that created the world’s second-largest economy. Flanked by the six other members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the general secretary promised to steer the country to even greater heights: “In my view, to realize the great renewal of the Chinese nation is the greatest dream for the Chinese nation in modern history,” he said.

Xi’s museum visit made two dynamics clear: history sits at the heart of Chinese politics today, and its leaders believe there is one acceptable narrative, a story of overcoming foreign domination and re-emerging strong. Robert Bickers illustrates both dynamics in Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination, a beautifully written history of China’s 20th-century interactions with the outside world. But instead of the narrow, legitimacy-enhancing story peddled by the Chinese Communist party, Bickers tells a far more complex tale of the forces of attraction, rejection and interdependence that have consistently defined China’s varied dealings with the world.

Bickers, a professor at the University of Bristol and the author of The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914, adopts a wide lens in capturing the diversity of Sino-western interactions. Few nuances escape his eye as he chronicles the myriad ways that Chinese people have sought to define themselves and their country in a world that imposed definitions upon them, sometimes by force. He shows how China’s connections with foreigners in the 20th century produced far more than just the moments of humiliation frequently invoked today in Beijing. Foreign experts, humanitarians and evangelists travelled to China, providing everything from refugee relief to Comintern guidance (even if selfishly motivated), and cosmopolitan, self-confident Chinese sojourned abroad and engaged with the world.

Out of China demolishes many favourite motifs of official history in China. For example, it depicts the more favourable sides of the often-derided Nationalist government, while also revealing how the Communist regime’s nationalism can be traced back to its predecessor. “The calendar was peppered with official ‘humiliation days’, . . . and these created a nationalistic rhythm for the year,” Bickers writes. “No one in public life could afford not to align themselves with the nationalistic consensus.” China watchers today will find this observation familiar indeed.

Although China’s quest to overcome “western domination” may seem to be the realm of high politics, Bickers rightly gives great attention to the cultural interactions that have also been an important arena and are ongoing today. Reporting on the International Exhibition of Chinese Art in London in 1935, he shows how the Nationalist government sought to earn foreign sympathy through culture, conceiving of it as a global front in the war against Japan. To be sure, they were not above giving orders; the Nationalist government also freely banned foreign films that it felt negatively portrayed China, causing the head of Paramount Pictures to promise “nothing will be incorporated in any picture which we may produce in future which will in any way affect adversely the sensibilities of the people of your country and of its government”. Through both attraction and coercion, this earlier government sought to build up China’s cultural prestige, just as Xi’s regime does today.

Displays of cultural strength were accompanied by an enduring paranoia that Chinese culture had been infiltrated by hostile influences. In 1939, a self-proclaimed “Blood and Soul Traitor Extermination Corps” exploded bombs in Shanghai nightclubs, seeking to stop the blithe foxtrotting under way and purge “the odour of a conquered people”. Nearly 30 years later, amid the violence and xenophobia of the Cultural Revolution, adolescent revolutionaries assaulted Chinese citizens with allegedly foreign coiffure and sliced off their hair in the street. The persistent dread of foreignness and “westernness” continued to fuel China’s search for national security and cultural purity even as the country opened to the world in the 1980s, when attacks on “spiritual pollution” remained common.

Interweaving political and cultural history, the detailed narratives of this book are essential correctives to the tale spun by Beijing’s current rulers. Each regime chronicled in this book sought to contort history to serve its purposes, and Xi’s today is no exception, promulgating its own version of the past and policing all alternative interpretations for the crime of “historical nihilism”.

It is a quirk of human psychology frequently on display in recent years that if we repeat the same story often enough, we start to believe its veracity, especially if we do not hear alternatives. Teeming with nuances while assailing the Communist party’s nationalistic narrative, Bickers’ book is a reminder of the importance of uncovering the past’s messy, contradictory truths.

Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination, by Robert Bickers, Allen Lane, RRP£30, 576 pages

Julian Gewirtz is the author of ‘Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China’ (Harvard University Press