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When did China’s “Century of Humiliation” end? Official Chinese sources frequently
declare that it ended in 1945 with Chinese participation in the Allied victory over Japan. Many
Chinese, however, are haunted by the belief that Japanese and Westerners do not acknowledge
China’s victor status in World War II, assigning victory instead to the US and the atomic bombs
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Victory over lowly “Japs” (wokou), in any case, is not very
gratifying for those Chinese who maintain a Sinocentric view of Asia.
Official sources also sometimes declare that “Liberation” in 1949 marked the end of the
“Century.” The Civil War with Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Party was over, foreign
influence had been driven from the Mainland, and, from an ideological perspective, socialism had
defeated capitalism. According to Mao Zedong, “China has stood up!” To many Chinese,
however, China’s victories in 1949 were incomplete and unsatisfying. Taiwan and Hong Kong
were yet to be “liberated”; the country was not united. And although the US had backed the
Nationalists, the Communist victory over their corrupt political rivals was not particularly glorious.
There was nothing unprecedented about Chinese killing Chinese.
Victory over the US, however, can be construed as something special. Mao’s need to
dismiss the US as a “paper tiger” revealed an anxiety about US power – an anxiety that persists
today. 1996’s The Sino-American Contest, written by members of a State Security Bureau think tank,
refers to the American military of the 1950s as the “world’s number one military power” and
asserts that the Chinese people, “relying on their own strength,” defeated it.
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Defeating the
champ, it seems, made China into the new champion. This argument, notably, completely
dismisses North Korean contributions to the Korean War. Chinese nationalism dictates that
China win on her own.
Pride in this Chinese “victory” over America is an important psychological resource which
builds self-confidence when tensions with the US rise. In 1990 the Beijing elite, facing US-led
international sanctions following the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989, capitalized on the 40
th
anniversary commemorations of the onset of the Korean War to bolster their self-confidence,
issuing a barrage of nationalist articles and books on Korea. The role of Korea as a psychological
resource is often explicit. In his Preface to A Paean to the War to Resist America and Aid Korea, for
instance, veteran Yang Dezhi is blunt: “The psychological riches (jingshen caifu) that the War has left
me are precious. I am confident that China will prosper.”
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In 1996, following the deployment of two American aircraft carriers near Taiwan, both
state and popular nationalists also used the “victory” in Korea to revive what appears to have been
a shaken confidence about conflict with America. Premier Li Peng warned that if America “uses
Convention