When China’s leaders look at the outside world, what do they feel? Admiration? Love? Envy? Perhaps even pity or arrogance? From time to time, Chinese leaders sound like they shared all of these different attitudes. Even something as seemingly insignificant as Premier Li Keqiang going out of his way to praise any non-Chinese looking journalist who asked a question in Mandarin at his annual press conference in mid-March betrays something of what key Chinese think of the world around them. It’s a mixture of confidence verging on arrogance about China and its unique cultural, social, and historic attributes, often tinged with brittleness and shades of vulnerability, with flattery deployed to cover this over.
In The Improbable War, a stimulating and short book published recently, London School of Economics professor of international relations Christopher Coker hones in on one emotion in particular that he finds characterizes the current mood of China’s geopolitical self-image and the ways it ‘feels’ toward the outside world. This mood can be summarized as a constellation of feelings clustered around resentment.
Zheng Wang in his excellent Never Forget National Humiliation wrote in some detail about the “inner lives” of Chinese people. The historic narratives promoted by China’s government support the idea of victimhood, of the Chinese people finally emerging from a long period as colonially repressed and bullied subjects. This feeling of being put upon is the passive side of the coin. The active side, resentment, comes when people start considering actions like revenge — getting even or rectifying history’s injustices.
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