To mark the 75th anniversary of China’s victory in the War of Resistance against Japan on September 3 this year, Beijing held a symposium at the Great Hall of the People. But there could not possibly be any real discussion. Those in attendance were merely part of the background of an event where top leader Xi Jinping delivered a speech. The gist of Xi’s speech was: “The Chinese people will absolutely not agree with the attempt of anyone or any force to separate the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from the Chinese people and pit one against the other!” Obviously, the comment was a rebuttal of U.S. State Secretary Mike Pompeo’s recent remark that the CCP should be distinguished from the Chinese people.

When he was in power, Mao Zedong repeatedly thanked the Japanese for invading China. He had told the Japanese that “had Japan not invaded China, the Communist Party would not have won”. The War of Resistance had brought disasters to the Chinese people, and yet the CCP turned it to the party’s advantage. In the 1960s, when China needed to build friendship with Japan, Mao met with Kuroda Hisao, advisor to the Socialist Party, and told Kuroda: “Relations with people and relations between governments should be treated differently.” He also said “Japan’s monopolistic capitalist government and militarists should be held responsible, not the Japanese people”. However, now that Pompeo is calling for the world to treat Chinese people and the Chinese government differently, Xi disagrees, claiming that “the victory of the Chinese people’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was a great victory of the national spirit with patriotism at its core, and a great victory of the Chinese Communist Party that had played a mainstay role”. This claim effectively proves the legitimacy of Xi’s “Chinese dream”. As he said: “To achieve the great revival of the Chinese nation, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party must be upheld.”

The bloody battles 75 years ago have become a show tailor-made for Xi to push his “Chinese dream” and a tool to refute Pompeo. Following the end of the war, the CCP had managed to lead the discourse on nationalism. When Mao met former Japanese major general Saburo Endo in 1956, he said: “We want to thank you. It was you guys who fought this battle and educated the Chinese people. By waging the battle, you unified the otherwise disunited Chinese people.”

Like Marxism, the ideology of nationalism, which the CCP keeps flirting with, originated from the West. In a famous book that he wrote, American scholar Benedict Anderson defines nationalism as a “cultural artefact” and nation as an “imagined political community”. The “official nationalism” that the CCP excels in pushing was borne out of the need of European monarchies in the mid-19th century to maintain political stability. When leaders lost their legitimacy, they seized on the emerging nationalist ideology, dominating the discourse on the “imagined nation” and turning themselves into a representative of the state.

During the Anti-Japanese War, Chiang Kai-shek decided to abandon the policy of “pacifying the country before resisting the external threat” and gave room for the CCP to survive. For the CCP, saving China was not only a matter of combating a crisis facing the Chinese nation but it was also an all-important task for the party’s own sake. The CCP, which did not contribute much on the frontline in the war, was acutely aware of the importance of political discourse. Eventually, nationalism and patriotism were combined and the concept of “Chinese people” firmly attached to the CCP was created. It was the “Chinese people” who defeated the Japanese, defeated Chiang, initiated the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the reform and opening up, and also came up with the “Chinese dream” of today. “The Chinese people will absolutely not agree” with anything that does not conform to the CCP’s will to power.

When Mao was in power, this “Chinese people” “would rather have the grass of socialism than the seedlings of capitalism”. Yet in the era of Deng Xiaoping, they preferred a market economy and “letting some people get rich first”. During the Cultural Revolution, Confucian temples were demolished and there was a campaign to destroy the “Four Old Things”. Today, however, one has to defend traditional culture to death because it is the foundation of the “Chinese dream”.

Can Pompeo separate this “Chinese people” from the CCP regime? In his speech at Richard Nixon Presidential Library on July 23, now known as “New Iron Curtain Speech”, Pompeo said: “Communists almost always lie. The biggest lie that they tell is to think that they speak for 1.4 billion people who are surveilled, oppressed, and scared to speak out.” The CCP cannot represent the Chinese people. “Quite the contrary. The CCP fears the Chinese people’s honest opinions more than any foe,” he added.

Anyone with a modicum of knowledge in totalitarian politics would agree with Pompeo. Yet the CCP is well aware the “Chinese people” is a concept it concocted, and that this concept is part of totalitarian politics. “Chinese people” surely will oppose to the separation of the concept from the CCP.

In general, people believe there are two kinds of “Chinese people” in the world: one is the “Chinese people” in the CCP’s words and the other are the real Chinese people. But if only things were this simple. Apparently the CCP is fully confident that its nationalist policy is capable of creating an “imagined community” loyal to the party. As long as the CCP keeps a firm grip on all discourses, there is no space for the real Chinese people.

(Chang Ping, commentator)

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