In a 2015 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), declared: “The Nansha [Spratly] Islands have been China’s territory since ancient times. This is fully backed by historical and legal evidence.”1 While many of China’s neighbors may disagree about the veracity of the “evidence” cited by Xi, his pronouncement highlights the importance PRC policymakers place on historical precedent. History is not merely a list of dates and events. Instead, history, when properly interpreted, is the basis of a narrative that forms and justifies the PRC’s strategic actions. Regardless of whether the narrative is historically accurate from a Western viewpoint, it is crucial to be aware of it and to understand its role in PRC strategic decision making.
Learning from History
A moralistic view of history is not a recent development in China. As early as the Zhou Dynasty (1100–300 BCE), the purpose of history was considered to be didactic. The actions of forebears, both good and bad, were analyzed and used to guide political and military decisions. Events recorded in the sparse histories of the period were selected for their instructional value and were supplemented with exegetical commentaries that explained their moralistic significance. This use of history further was refined with the publication of the Records of the Grand Historian (200 BCE), an amalgamation of three millennia of mythical, legendary, and verifiable events that presented the orthodox interpretations of the imperial court.2 This text formed a template for subsequent dynastic histories, and acceptance of the didactic role of an officially endorsed view of history continues to the present day.
It is difficult to overstate the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in controlling the PRC historical narrative. The CCP holds all political authority in China. The party’s implicit fiduciary relationship with the Chinese people is that it will take care of the people and they are expected to gratefully acquiesce. Integral to this process is an official historical narrative used to validate and justify the CCP’s actions and policies. Since acceptance of unorthodox interpretations of history could cause people to question the actions of the CCP and potentially put the legitimacy of the government at risk, historical accounts are carefully curated.3 Unapproved interpretations are suppressed and their originators can be jailed.4
The Humiliation Narrative
A key theme of the current PRC historical narrative is national humiliation. As one scholar explains:
Chinese nationalism is not just about celebrating the glories of Chinese civilization; it also commemorates China’s weakness. This negative image comes out most directly in the discourse of China’s Century of National Humiliation. . . . Chinese books on the topic generally tell the tale of China going from being at the center of the world to being the Sick Man of Asia after the Opium War . . . only to rise again with the Communist Revolution.5
The humiliation narrative begins in 1840 with the First Opium War. For the first two centuries of its rule, the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) government provided minimal support to China’s navy, leaving the nation vulnerable to sea-based threats. Supported by vastly superior warships, British forces easily defeated the Chinese, acquired Hong Kong, and also gained access to other treaty ports. Western powers continued to take advantage of China’s military weakness for the next six decades, routinely defeating Chinese forces in battle and establishing foreign enclaves in China as concessions. During the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), the Chinese Navy suffered tremendous losses at the hands of the superior Japanese Navy. China’s chaos continued into the 20th century with the fall of the Qing Dynasty, more than two subsequent decades of domestic turmoil, Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, World War II, and the continuation of the Chinese Civil War.
The century of humiliation ended with the establishment of the PRC in October 1949:
when Mao Zedong told the world . . . : “Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up.” In other words, the narrative of national salvation depends on national humiliation; the narrative of national security depends upon nation insecurity.6
This theme has been referred to as an “official Maoist ‘victor narrative’ (China won national independence).” In the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen incident, however, this Maoist narrative “was superseded by a new ‘victimization narrative,’ which blames the ‘West’ for China’s suffering.”7 Zheng Wang describes the so-called patriotic education campaign used to propagate the new narrative:
The major foci of this campaign are educating Chinese people . . . about China’s humiliating experience in the face of Western and Japanese incursion, as well as explaining how the CCP-led revolution changed China’s fate and won national independence.8
Omitted from the narrative were significant events in Chinese history, such as China’s devastating civil war and the Taiping Rebellion (1851–64), “because [they did] not fit in with the moral narrative of national humiliation: foreign imperialism encouraged by domestic corruption.”9
By many accounts, the campaign has worked well, and the youth of China have been imbued with the sort of nationalistic fervor envisioned by the CCP. However, according to political scientist William Callahan, this success has proven to be a double-edged sword:
[Nationalism] could help authorities to consolidate. . . power and promote political solidarity in Chinese society by focusing animosity on external opponents, rather than domestic issues. But the rise of nationalism can also put pressure on the government’s policy-making. . . .The government needed to be tough to maintain its legitimacy . . . “[t]he government struggles to maintain its version of the master narrative, but the effort to both promote and contain nationalism is fraught with danger.”10
A recent example of such nationalistic expectations stems from the U.S. Navy’s freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) in the South China Sea. At international conferences, senior PRC officials have complained that well-publicized FONOPs threaten China’s national security because of the public pressure they create.
Thus, it is evident that China’s history, as construed by the CCP, plays a pivotal role in establishing the humiliation narrative that the party uses to establish its strategic path, unite China’s citizenry, and legitimize its all-embracing role in Chinese society.
Maritime Lessons from Humiliation
For nearly three decades, China has been unrelenting in its pursuit of both maritime territory and a world-class navy. Much of the justification for these activities has been rooted in the humiliation narrative.
The chapter entitled “China’s Recent Maritime Defense Strategic Thought and Sea Power Concepts” in China’s Historical Strategic Thought, a People’s Liberation Army Academy of Military Science (AMS) textbook, presents the century of humiliation saga in a manner that calls out the political and military decisions that resulted in such ignominy.11 While acknowledging the inferiority of China’s navy during the era, the text also notes the role of several strategists who proposed various ways of mitigating China’s naval shortcomings, but who were consistently stymied by a Manchu bureaucracy that favored “the principle that ‘defending the sea is inferior to defending land.’”12
The AMS historical narrative validates three important points that have provided a strong rationale for the recent expansion of China’s navy.
- China needs a strong navy to protect the nation against foreign seaborne threats. Both Western and Japanese naval forces were able to attack an essentially defenseless China from the sea and plunder Chinese territory.
- Naval supremacy demands technological superiority. While foreign navies were attacking China with state-of-the-art naval vessels, the Chinese Navy was ineffectively attempting to defend itself with antiquated ships and weaponry.
- Naval experts (not bureaucrats) should be responsible for formulating and implementing naval strategy. Throughout the final 70 years of the Qing Dynasty, forward-thinking naval strategists identified and proposed solutions to China’s maritime defense deficiencies. Their proposals were rejected and the Chinese people suffered the disastrous consequences.
The humiliation narrative also plays an important role in the PRC’s maritime strategy. In an overview of the evolution of the PRC’s policy, She Hongyan of Zhejiang Maritime University explains that, since the 1980s, PRC leaders had done their utmost to placate neighboring states that had competing territorial claims, but time and time again the states attempted to take advantage of China. By June 2012 the PRC had had enough and “[w]hen provoked by neighboring states’ principles of ‘setting aside [China’s] sovereignty,’ our nation responded by beginning to adopt a proactive approach of defending our rights.” China’s actions now are based on “safeguarding national sovereignty, security, development benefits, and national ecological culture.”13 While these four principles lack specificity, they imply that China’s navy will continue to have a significant role in supporting the PRC’s maritime strategy.
Counternarrative: Rejecting Bad History
China has a long tradition of using carefully curated historical narratives to guide and justify its strategic actions. While narratives may appear to be contrived to provide rationale for China’s actions, they are still the official Chinese position. Unless erroneous details explicitly are refuted, China will argue that its narrative is both accurate and reasonable. Developing effective refutations will require a wide-ranging understanding of Chinese history, a thorough comprehension of the Chinese historical narrative and its shortcomings, and an ability to craft counternarratives that clearly and convincingly explain how the PRC narrative does not justify China’s intended course of action. While the immediate public response to such a counternarrative likely would be an emphatic reiteration of the humiliation narrative, the long-term goal is to effect the desired changes to China’s behavior.
The primary audience for such a counternarrative is PRC decision makers and the international community. However, aggressive dissemination of the counternarrative also is important because it will create a domestic reaction that will demand a CCP response. This is because there is an underlying insecurity about how other nations view China and how they will respond to China’s actions. The origins of such concerns are rooted in a sense of national prestige, or “face,” and a realization that, although China is a great and/or powerful nation, only foreign states can give China the international standing it craves. The United States, by publicly expressing displeasure with a specific PRC action (and perhaps responding with an appropriately chastening undertaking), can cause the PRC to lose international face. Such actions also can cause the Chinese organization responsible for the action (e.g., CCP) to lose domestic face and raise doubts about that organization’s competence or legitimacy.14
Responding to Adolescent Behavior
One of the joys of raising teenagers is dealing with the reality that they are neither children nor adults. Savvy adolescents frequently attempt to take advantage of this situation by deciding when they should be treated as a child and when they should be treated as an adult. When a parent does not conform to the child’s demands, another tactic is to claim that a parent’s action demonstrates that “you don’t care about me.”
Since its founding a mere seven decades ago, the relatively young PRC has exhibited juvenile behaviors on the international stage. When asked to conform to global environmental standards, the PRC may argue, as a developing country (i.e., childlike), for decades of relief from undesired standards. Conversely, the PRC is quick to demand to be treated as a great power” (i.e., an adult) when to its benefit. When foreigners reject PRC assertions they are accused of “not respecting” the Chinese people and unwanted verdicts of international tribunals are denounced as null and void.15
Part of the reason for these behaviors is the unwillingness of the international community to confront the behaviors. For example, when the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ruled against the PRC’s South China Sea claims, Xi Jinping declared that “China’s territorial sovereignty and maritime interests in the waters would not, under any circumstances, be affected by the verdict.”16 While some nations expressed displeasure with such intransigence, nothing was done to hold China accountable as it continued to expand its South China Sea military facilities, and the country did not change its behavior.
Such behaviors must not be tolerated. Instead, the United States should demand that the PRC be accountable for its actions and answer such fundamental questions. Does the PRC consider itself to be a developing country or a great power? Why should the PRC receive special treatment regarding this particular issue? How does disagreeing with this specific action disrespect China and its people? Why isn’t the PRC willing to conform to established international norms? These types of questions should be raised in both U.S.–PRC and multinational forums. Should the PRC’s response prove unsatisfactory, such intransigence should be met with a response that is both swift and commensurate. As with the counternarrative, the goal of such actions is to challenge China’s misconduct by making it consider, among other consequences, the potential damage to its international and domestic prestige.
A more provocative response to such Chinese behaviors would be to ignore illegitimate policies imposed by the PRC. For example, instead of conducting FONOPs in the South China Sea, the United States could announce that it considers the South China Sea to be high seas and will act accordingly. No longer would U.S. Navy vessels and aircraft comply with the restrictions of innocent passage when in the proximity of Chinese artificial islands. Instead, China’s South China Sea fabrications would be considered man-made hazards to navigation (and “monuments” to maritime environmental devastation) in international waters. U.S. forces would conduct South China Sea activities in accordance with international law and U.S. military operational requirements. If confronted by Chinese naval vessels in the South China Sea, U.S. naval forces would operate in compliance with the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea and demand the same from their Chinese counterparts. As reiterated in the 2016 PCA ruling, the Chinese case for sovereignty over the entire South China Sea is not supported by objective historical facts. The U.S. military should routinely conduct operations in the region to demonstrate that it concurs with the PCA ruling.
There is a window of opportunity for taking action that can deter or avert China’s reckless maritime policies. While China’s naval inventory has increased in recent decades, its actual warfighting capabilities are open to debate. It also seems improbable, given the likely outcome, that the CCP is willing to risk its naval forces (or its South China Sea facilities) to engage in a shooting war with the United States to save face or defend its humiliation narrative. Accordingly, given sufficient encouragement, China may be willing to creatively edit its humiliation narrative in a face-saving way that allows it to rationalize compliance with international norms without impugning the legitimacy of the CCP.
1. Full Transcript: Interview With Chinese President Xi Jinping, Wall Street Journal, 22 September 2015.
2. These three millennia plus the two millennia of the Common Era (CE) are the basis of the frequently asserted claim of “5,000 years of Chinese history.”
3. “Off the Charts: Why Chinese Publishers Don’t Want Maps in Their Books,” South China Morning Post, 19 May 2018.
4. “China May Bring in New Law to Punish Those Who Slander National Heroes,” South China Morning Post, 22 December 2017.
5. William A. Callahan, “National Insecurities: Humiliation, Salvation, and Chinese Nationalism,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 29, no. 2 (Mar–May 2004): 202.
6. Callahan, “National Insecurities,” 203.
7. Zheng Wang, “National Humiliation, History Education, and the Politics of Historical Memory: Patriotic Education Campaign in China,” International Studies Quarterly 52 (2008): 784.
8. Wang, “National Humiliation, History Education, and the Politics of Historical Memory,” 788–89.
9. Callahan, “National Insecurities,” 205.
10. Callahan, “National Insecurities,” 800.
11. Yu Rubo and Liu Qing, “Lectures on China’s Historical Strategic Thought” (Beijing: Academy of Military Science Press, 2013), 201–12.
12. Yu and Liu, “Lectures on China’s Historical Strategic Thought,” 206.
13. She Hongyan, “The Historical Development of ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ View of Maritime Strategy,” Management Observer 598/35 (December 2015): 41.
14. In response to the PRC’s ongoing development of military facilities in the South China Sea, the United States disinvited PRC military forces from the 2018 RimPac exercise. The action resulted in a tremendous loss of both international and domestic “face” by China.
15. “China’s Xi Jinping Rejects Any Action Based on International Court’s South China Sea Ruling,” South China Morning Post, 12 July 2016.
16. “China’s Xi Jinping Rejects Any Action,” South China Morning Post.