China's evolving relationship with 'barbarians'

“That means the Chinese are developing a more realistic sense of who foreigners are,” says Dan Lynch, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who has been visiting China for a quarter of a century.

Cultural fear

Historically, says Chan Kwok-bun, a Hong Kong-based sociologist, “Chinese people are quite on guard against strangers in a general sense,” and “foreigners are doubly strangers. There is a deep-seated cultural fear of things that are strange.”

That attitude was fed by China’s experience of foreign invasion by British, French, American, Japanese, Russian, and German armies during the 19th century, he points out, during the period known here as the “century of national humiliation.”

Nor has that experience been allowed to gather historical dust. Chinese government propaganda harps on it constantly in a bid to remind citizens of the fate that awaits a weak nation, and “patriotic education” textbooks used in Chinese schools teach a clear lesson, argues William Callahan, author of “China, the Pessoptimist Nation.”

That lesson, he writes in his book, is that “foreigners – especially Westerners and Japanese – are barbaric imperialist invaders who only seek to exploit the Chinese people” and that “China still cannot trust foreigners and their running dogs today.”

China's confidence

But while China’s historic weakness has inculcated a sense of inferiority, that attitude is countered by Chinese people’s pride in their civilization and in their country’s extraordinary economic achievements over the past 30 years.

“There’s a dichotomy between a sense of inferiority and a sense of superiority,” says Professor Chan. “This sudden move from the lowest to the highest sets up inner turmoil in the Chinese mind.”

Xia Xueluan, a professor of Sociology at Peking University, sees no contradiction in Chinese attitudes. Rather, he says, “people are generally happy to accept foreign products and culture, but they are proud of China’s development which gives them more confidence in themselves and their country.”

“The strain of nationalism is still there,” argues Professor Lynch, “but it is based much more on self confidence rather than on a sense of insecurity and inferiority” as it was a decade ago.

That sense of confidence seems to have fed some of the online debate surrounding a poll organized this week by a famous childrens’ author, Zheng Yuanjie, which asked people whether foreigners should be subjected to stricter visa requirements. Ninety-five percent of respondents said yes.

“We should require of them what they require of us” when Chinese citizens travel abroad, read one comment. “We should not lower our standards to be inferior.”

“There is a perception that foreigners, especially whites, are treated better in Chinese society in terms of position, salary, and perks,” says Chan. “Chinese think that foreigners have a much better life than they enjoy. So incidents of foreigners behaving badly set people off very easily.”

The young Englishman is in police custody. The Russian, who turned out to be a cellist with the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, has been dismissed. And the 600,000 foreigners living in China who generally get by without offending local sensibilities can only keep their heads down and hope that the current storm blows over soon.

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