Chinese Exceptionalism, National Humiliation, and the ‘China Dream’

On June 9 the International Communication Association began its 66th annual conference at the Fukuoka Sea Hawk Hotel. The call for papers for the opening event invited discussion on China’s media industries, hoping “to move beyond the ‘China exceptionalism’ by taking an explicitly global and comparative perspective.”

But is Chinese exceptionalism incompatible with a global perspective? Joseph Stalin popularized the term “American exceptionalism” to insult the Communist Party USA for not hewing to orthodox principles, and since then, it’s come to denote the idea that America is unique, superior and destined to change the world. But its cultural uniqueness, economic superiority and worldwide influence profit from a global perspective, so what about China? What precisely is “Chinese exceptionalism?”

“I am no longer interested in how China will transform Asia by its sheer economic weight over the next decade, but rather how it will transform the world,” former president of the East-West Center, Victor Li, says in Laurence J. Brahm’s Fusion Economics. Others, such as London School of Economics research fellow Martin Jacques, are even more enthusiastic: “China will change the world, not only economically, but also politically, intellectually, ideologically, and culturally.”

It certainly appears destined to change the global sociopolitical landscape at least as much as America has done. In fact, doing so, as detailed in Michael D. Swaine and Ashley J. Tellis’ book, Interpreting China’s Grand Strategy, is one of China’s three grand objectives, along with maintaining domestic social order and defending against territorial threats.

As for its claims to uniqueness, like America’s, they rest upon its age (one so young, the other so old), size, cultural diversity (China’s 56 ethnic groups), and political structure (“socialism with Chinese characteristics”). Also, like the United States, China’s claims to uniqueness, and superiority, have been asserted by natives and foreigners alike.

America has Alexis de Tocqueville and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, who asked, “what then is the American, this new man? … which you will find in no other country,” and Ayn Rand, who called it “the greatest, the noblest and … the only moral country in the history of the world,” as well as Dinesh D’Souza, who wrote, “America is the greatest, freest, and most decent society in existence” and, of course, many others.

The case for China has likewise been made by outsiders. In fact, according to Yang Zhong in Political Culture and Participation in Rural China, sinology began largely as an exercise in orientalism – an obsession with China’s supposed uniqueness and “mystery.” China hands have long expressed its insoluble singularity by saying, “China is China is China,” but Yang points out that post-1960s studies have, as social sciences matured in the West, moved away from explanations that reference “Chineseness.”

Native writers, too, have become critical of such outlooks. In his famous 1971 article, “An Obsession with China,” Columbia University professor Hsia Chih-tsing, also known as C.T. Hsia, writes, “There has been no modern Chinese writer consumed with the passion of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, of Conrad or Mann, to probe the illness of modern civilization. But at the same time every important Chinese writer is obsessed with China and spares no pains to depict its squalor and corruption.”

For Hsia, contemporary Chinese writers were unable “to turn their attention to anywhere outside China,” says Harvard professor of Chinese literature David Der-wei Wang. This wasn’t Chinese exceptionalism, however; their egocentrism was decidedly pessimistic, and while it may have helped throw a spark on the fading embers of an old empire, he says, it came at the cost of alienating Chinese from the world.

“Kafka, Joyce, and Proust would never have ghettoized the problems of their own civilization,” says Wang, whereas for Hsia, he adds, “if China had a problem, that problem had to be understood in the universal context of humanity … cosmopolitanism was the bottom line of his argument. For good and for ill. Never say, ‘China is the worst’ or ‘China is the best.’”

What complicates all this is that claims about China’s inferiority fuel claims about its superiority. Unlike American exceptionalism, the Chinese variety is, argues professor of international relations Feng Zhang in “The Rise of Chinese Exceptionalism in International Relations,” predominantly defensive.

“Their navel-gazing developed into an obsession as perceived national humiliation and personal prestige were intertwined,” Louise Edwards, professor of modern Chinese history at the University of New South Wales, writes in a January 2008 review published in the Journal of Contemporary History.

This insecurity is what sets Chinese exceptionalism apart. American exceptionalism argues that America is superior to other nations, while Chinese exceptionalism argues, defensively, that China is inferior to none. This makes the American argument, at its worst, arrogant, and the Chinese argument, at its worst, paranoid.

“The challenge for Beijing,” therefore, “is to ensure that its suspicion of the international community does not become a self-fulfilling prophecy in which a paranoid China adopts an increasingly confrontational regional posture.”

This is from Bejamin Yze Ern Ho’s 2013 working paper, “The rising chorus of Chinese exceptionalism,” which concludes that China’s rise is a good thing, as long as it doesn’t provoke “tit-for-tat” political snapping. Indeed, Ho says, Chinese exceptionalism may even become “a force for greater global goodwill,” if, that is, Beijing can get along with its neighbors.

Whether it will remains to be seen, particularly in light of works such as Liu Mingfu’s 2010 book The China Dream, which, according to William A. Callahan’s “Sino-speak: Chinese Exceptionalism and the Politics of History,” tells of an upcoming “Yellow-Era Fortune” and describes Chinese as the “superior race” and “better than the white race.”

If Ho is correct that Chinese exceptionalism can contribute to a more cosmopolitan world, a world that would make Hsia smile, then it must outgrow its own insecurity, and the kind of small-mindedness such insecurity breeds, lest we find ourselves reflecting upon Chinese mediocrity instead. For as political events in America now show, no matter how high you climb, you’re only ever one step from the ground.