National Pride In China and America

Two days ago the Wall Street Journal published an article on Chinese national pride. Focusing on the seemingly inexorable rise of Chinese national pride, the article does not address America’s diminishing national pride. Still, it addresses a point that I have often emphasized: personal pride, personal confidence and self-esteem are often influenced by pride in one’s nation, one’s community, one’s company.

Therapists tend to set off in search of some mental mechanism, some brain trigger to explain why people feel demoralized and depressed. They can’t see the forest for the twigs.

In another sense, this article counters the narrative advanced by Francis Fukuyama, namely that liberal democracy was destined to triumph because Hegel said so. In truth, Hegelian individualism has nothing to do with free enterprise or liberal democracy. If we expect people to emulate the American democratic system we need to show that we can make it work. Otherwise, nations around the world will follow the Chinese model of authoritarian capitalism. 

When Chinese people look at America today, they are seriously unimpressed.

The Journal story opens:

Li Xiaopeng once idolized the West. While a student, he broke through China’s internet firewall to read news from abroad, revered the U.S. Constitution and saw the authoritarian Chinese government as destined to fade away.

Now the 34-year-old urban consultant, who studied at both Cambridge and Harvard, thinks it’s China that is ascendant and the U.S. that is terminally weakened by income inequality, divided government and a polarized society. He says so volubly to his more than 80,000 followers on social media.

“In the end, China will supplant America to be the world’s No. 1 strong country,” he wrote on Weibo, China’s homegrown version of Twitter .

President Xi Jinping is holding up China as a confident global power at a time when U.S. leadership seems uncertain. Increasingly, his government can count on swelling national pride among its own citizens.

Li is too kind to say so, but the declining American pride must have something to do with having a decadent president like Bill Clinton, a hapless president like George W. Bush, and an apologetic self-critical president like Barack Obama. If you also have a cultural movement setting out to destroy American pride, to diminish America’s extraordinary success by saying that the nation is an organized criminal conspiracy run by and for white people, you are going to embolden people in China who believe that the future belongs to them.

America has persuaded the Chinese that democracy does not work:

While some Chinese still believe the country will need to embrace democracy to reach its full potential, many others are convinced the country has reached this point, not in spite of the government’s crushing of pro-democracy protests in 1989, but because of it.

Apparently, the Chinese leadership did not misread the national mood in 1989.

As for what Chinese students are learning when they study abroad, it’s not what we would expect:

A small survey of 131 Chinese students studying in the U.S., Europe, Australia, Japan and South Korea published in 2014 in the journal China Youth Study found that while most weren’t markedly patriotic before leaving China, close to 80% reported feeling more patriotic after going abroad. Roughly two-thirds said they agreed with Mr. Xi’s “China Dream.”

While most Americans are dissatisfied with the direction the country is going, such is not the case in China:

Annual surveys by the Pew Research Center since 2010 show more than 80% of Chinese are satisfied with the direction of their country. Three-quarters of the Chinese surveyed by Pew last year see China playing a bigger role in global affairs than 10 years ago, and 60% view China’s involvement in the global economy as positive.

Chinese bloggers have been exploring the possibility that China’s authoritarian capitalism is better than America’s obsession with invented rights and election results:

On his blog, between digressions on Socrates and Ming Dynasty economic policy, Mr. Li writes at length on the superiority of the Chinese political system. Unlike the U.S., where he says charisma is prized over professionalism and money is needed to win office, he argues that China promotes officials based on their performance in spurring economic growth and managing large cities and bureaucracies.

“Among people in my generation, there aren’t many of us now who think we should totally study the West,” says Mr. Li. “To them, China is already a great country.”

America looks more like an international spectacle than a great nation. The more the Chinese know about it, the less they want to emulate it:

The sense that China is on the right track challenges a decades-old tenet of U.S. foreign policy, one that argued exposure to the West would lead Chinese to embrace Western values.

In the wake of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election, and amid global fears about terrorism, a generation of Chinese patriots like Mr. Li are projecting an assurance about China as a beacon of strength and stability in an uncertain world.

We are talking about national pride, something I once called psychological capital. Some believe that it’s a function of increasing power, but that feels like too Western an analysis. It’s more about the face you gain when you accomplish something:

“What people are starting to feel is pride. It’s the pride of being listened to, or forcing people to listen to you,” says Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “The idea of greatness for China—because they’ve experienced weakness—gravitates around the idea of power.”

China’s government exercises near-absolute authority over education, media and the internet. That, along with determined campaigns to quash dissent, give the Communist Party unparalleled power to frame public debate. As a result, patriotism and pro-government views are amplified. Criticisms tend to get drowned out.

And yet, for all the authoritarianism, people are not unhappy. They take pride, not in their power, but in their achievements:

More than anything, Chinese say, their current patriotic sentiment is built on pride about how rapidly the country has emerged from poverty and how well its economy compares with others.

What did one Chinese student see when he attended the greatest universities in Great Britain and America. He saw signs of degeneration:

Doubts about the West crept in when he spent a half-year at the University of Cambridge as part of his doctorate in economics. Compared with China’s brand-new infrastructure, the buildings in most British cities looked shabby. Getting a bank card took days.

A year at Harvard University’s Kennedy School as a visiting fellow starting in 2010 accelerated his change in thinking. He was appalled at the number of panhandlers in subway stations and how unsafe he felt.... 

Seeing the West up close, Mr. Li says, was a defining experience for him. He’s fond of citing an expression now common among Chinese youth: Once you leave your country, you love your country. “If you don’t go abroad, you don’t actually know how great China is,” says Mr. Li.