China: The Pessoptimist Nation

China: The Pessoptimist Nation, by William A. Callahan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. xxvii + 262 pages. £25.00 (hardcover). William Callahan's study addresses the perplexing ambiguity at the heart of China's self image, and the image it projects to the rest of the world, in the modern era. For this highly divided identity, Callahan coins the phrase "pessoptimist". While it doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, it captures at least some of the highly conflicted nature of what China, and Chinese, thinks about itself, and what outsiders think about it. Callahan asserts that much internal discourse on China's image is based on a "structure of feeling". This is based on a narrative of recent history which is primarily of hurt - humiliation since the Opium wars in the mid- 19th century, and then the breakdown of national unity in the Republican Period, leading to the devastating war with Japan. The Communists were the cure at least for the unity issues, largely pulling China together as one after their victory in 1949. The historical stain of suffering and grief remains, however, even to this day, and can be resurrected at will when countries are accused of "hurting the feelings" of China through diplomatic slights. This happened most recently when President Obama "hurt the feelings of the 1 . 3 billion Chinese people" by meeting with the Dalai Lama in Washington in late February 2010. Callahan has chosen rich albeit controversial territory. It is odd diplomatic behavior for what is now one of the world's largest economies, and most powerful countries, to constantly speak in this wounded way as though it were the underdog. During 2008, as Callahan documents carefully, there were multiple sources of misunderstanding between China and the outside world in the build up to the Beijing Olympics in August that year which arose from this image that China projects. The torch ceremony through various foreign capitals became a cause celebre of mixed messages and clashing values, with demonstrators battling with nationalist young overseas Chinese students. The nadir was the snatching of the torch flame from a disabled Chinese athlete in Paris, something which in part inspired the temporary boycotting of Carrefour stores in China itself. Callahan is wise in not denying the deep historic wounds left by the Second World War. The handling of this by the right wing in Japan, in particular, with a refusal to deal with the historic record robustly, especially in governmentsanctioned school textbooks, has been a constant source of anger in China. Tellingly, even the very well-meant joint committee between Japan and China in its report on the war issued late in 2009 did not commit itself to specific figures for fatalities in the 1937-45 conflict. It remains a source of deep anger and controversy. There is a distinction, however, between this and the political uses of the Second World War almost 50 years after the event. In Maoist China, particularly during the Cultural Revolution from 1967, the preoccupation was with class straggle, purging enemies within and fighting foreign revisionists. The real fire of anger at that time was reserved for the USSR, with the US and Europe a close second. The anger against Japan slept. In the 1980s, these feelings were resuscitated, with various formulations of national humiliation movements, culminating in the early 2000s in a National Humiliation Day, and finally the National Defense Day which is still observed. In his tour around this newly articulated sense of hurt, Callahan describes visits to the museums of humiliation in China, including the very powerful Nanjing Massacre Memorial. Here he sees the dominant portrayal of China as being like a violated female, invaded, raped and then mutilated by Japanese male troops. This self image reappears in language about the "century of humiliation" from 1 840 onwards, in which the virtue of China had been sullied by the new technologies of the west. …