Another notable feature of the Chinese is their enormous sense of self-confidence, born of their long history and the dazzling success of their civilization for so much of it, a self-confidence which has withstood quite remarkably the vicissitudes and disasters of the century between the Opium Wars and the 1949 Revolution. These, nonetheless, have left their mark. In a book entitled The Ugly Chinaman, which was widely circulated in China in 1986, Bo Yang, a Taiwan-Chinese, described the Chinese as constantly wavering between two extremes — ‘a chronic feeling of inferiority and extreme arrogance. In his inferiority, a Chinese person is a slave; in his arrogance, he is a tyrant. In the inferiority mode, everyone else is better than he is… Similarly, in the arrogant mode, no other human being on earth is worth the time of day.’ [845] This captures the way in which the ‘century of humiliation’ has affected the Chinese psyche, and the consequent brittleness of emotion. It would be wrong, however, to suggest, as Bo Yang does, that the Chinese have ever felt inferior to everyone: towards whites at times, but never towards those of darker skin. Nonetheless, what remain most striking are not the periods of doubt but, given the problems that have beset the country for most of the modern era, the fact that the Chinese have continued to regard themselves as being at the summit of the global hierarchy of race. True, in moments of vulnerability, the Chinese sometimes acknowledge that they are second to whites, or perhaps equal with them, but this is only regarded as a temporary situation before normality is again restored. Chen Kuan-Hsing argues:

This universal chauvinism… has provided a psychic mechanism for the Han to confront imperialist intervention and to make life more bearable and more live-able — ‘These (white) foreign devils can beat us by material force, but can never conquer our mind’ — … but at the same time, exactly the same logic of racist discrimination… can be utilized to discriminate against anyone living at the periphery of China. A sharp-edged shield can be used for self-defence, but can also be a weapon to kill… [846]

Another Taiwanese writer, Lu Liang, is unambiguous about underlying Chinese attitudes: ‘Deep down the Chinese believe that they are superior to Westerners and everyone else.’ No other people from a developing country possess anything like this sense of supreme self-confidence bordering on arrogance.

It would be wrong to regard this feeling of superiority as purely or perhaps even mainly racial in character. Rather it is a combination of both cultural and racial, and has been such for thousands of years. [848] The steady expansion of the Chinese empire rested firstly on a process of conquest and secondly on a slow process of absorption and assimilation. As we have seen, Chinese attitudes fluctuated between regarding other races as incapable of adaptation to Chinese ways, or alternatively believing they could be assimilated, depending on how self-confident the Chinese felt at the time and the precise balance of power. Expansion, in other words, was a hegemonic project, a desire to absorb other races, to civilize them, to teach them Chinese ways and to integrate them into the Chinese self. Given that the notion of ‘Chinese’ was constantly being redefined in the process of expansion and absorption — including the case of those dynasties, like the Qing, that were not Chinese — it is clear that the idea of ‘race’ was not — and could not be — static or frozen: it was steadily, if very slowly, mutating. Thus, while race is a particularistic and exclusionary concept in the present, this did not prevent the process of hegemonic absorption and assimilation in the long run.

The fact that the Chinese regard themselves as superior to the rest of the human race, and that this belief has a strong racial component, will confront the rest of the world with a serious problem. It is one thing to hold such attitudes when China is relatively poor and powerless, quite another for those attitudes to inform a country when it enjoys huge global power and influence. Of course, there is a clear parallel with European and Western attitudes, which have similarly been based on an abiding sense of superiority rooted in cultural and racial beliefs. [849] There are, though, two obvious differences: first, China ’s hubris has a much longer history and second, the Chinese represent one-fifth of the world’s population, a far larger proportion than, for example, Britain or the United States at their zenith have ever constituted. Precisely how this sense of superiority will inform China ’s behaviour as a global superpower is a crucial question.

The Chinese believe that China ’s rightful place is as the world’s leading power, and that the last two centuries represent a deviation from the historical norm. Every Chinese leader over the last century has regarded it as their historic task to overcome the national humiliation represented by the colonial era and to restore China to its lost grandeur. [850] A nation like Germany may have felt a need to right past wrongs, but these grievances were invariably of relatively recent origin; uniquely, China ’s have lasted well over a century. The idea of China ’s restoration is rather succinctly expressed by Yan Xuetong, one of China ’s leading international relations experts:

The rise of China is granted by nature. The Chinese are very proud of their early achievements in the human history of civilization. In the last 2,000 years China has enjoyed superpower status several times, such as the Han dynasty, the Tang dynasty and the early Qing dynasty… This history of superpower status makes the Chinese people very proud of their country on the one hand, and on the other hand very sad about China’s current international status. They believe China ’s decline is a historical mistake which they should correct… The Chinese regard their rise as regaining China ’s lost international status rather than as obtaining something new. [851]

Or, as Lucian Pye puts it: ‘The most pervasive underlying Chinese emotion is a profound, unquestioned, generally unshakeable identification with historical greatness. Merely to be Chinese is to be a part of the greatest phenomenon of history.’ [852] The rise of China and its restoration as the number one nation in the world is widely regarded as a matter of historical inevitability.

The roots of China ’s sense of difference, superiority and greatness lie not in its recent past as a nation-state — indeed, its period as a nation-state largely overlaps, at least until very recently, with its historical ignominy and humiliation — but in its much longer history and existence as a civilization-state. There are two key elements to this. First, there is China ’s belief in its cultural superiority, which dates back at least two millennia and which underpinned the expansion of the Chinese empire. Second, there is the idea of China ’s racial superiority, which is closely linked to its cultural hubris and which anchors the latter in nature, that to be born Chinese, rather than as a ‘for eigner’, ‘barbarian’ or ‘foreign devil’, carries a special status and significance. Together they constitute what might be described as the Middle Kingdom mentality. The historically arresting fact is simply how old these beliefs and convictions actually are. The obvious parallel is with Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilizations: but it is unimaginable that modern Egyptians, Greeks or Italians would believe that the efflorescence of their civilizations in ancient times would offer any guide or solace as to their present or future fortunes — yet that is precisely what the Chinese almost universally believe. This is not to suggest that the Chinese identity is fixed: on the contrary, the creation of a Chinese modernity is subjecting ‘Chineseness’ to a process of restless change, disorientation, reconstruction and turmoil. [853] That these belief systems date back to antiquity, however, suggests that they not only possess extraordinary historical stamina and resilience but that they are unlikely, in important respects, to change in the near future: rather, China ’s rise is likely to strengthen them.