Never Forget National Humiliation.

• Author: Rogers, Joe O.
• Position: Book review

Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations, by Zheng Wang, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012, ISBN-13: 978-0231148900, 312 pp., $29.25 (Hardcover), $23.75 (Paperback), $13.99 (Kindle).

Zheng Wang is an Associate Professor at the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University and a global fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Along with several other distinguished positions, he has been a Dr. Seaker Chan Endowed Visiting Professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs (SIRPA) of Fudan University in Shanghai. Never Forget National Humiliation won the International Studies Association's Yale H. Ferguson Award for the best book of the year.

Professor Wang's current volume provides a fascinating look at the efficacy of the propaganda machine of the Chinese Communist Party as Jiang Zemin and his successors worked to reestablish legitimacy of the CCP following the collapse of its Communist ideology in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution.

Wang takes the reader through the collapse of Mao's internationalist, revolutionary ideology where "the CCP made class distinction rather than ethnicity the foundation of political identity" through to the current legitimization of the CCP as the sole force capable of, as Wang quotes Jiang, "achieving independence of our country and liberation of our nation and putting an end to the history of national humiliation once and for all."

Chapter 2 provides a concise description of the very real century of national humiliation suffered by China from the Opium Wars to the conclusion of WWII. Chapter 3 takes the reader through the period of burgeoning nationalism from the late 19th century, Sun Yat-sen's Revive China Society and the May 4th Movement to Mao's rejection of nationalism ("[D]uring the Cultural Revolution, nationalism and even patriotism were rejected as 'bourgeois ideology') and China's role as 'the center of world revolution'."

Chapters 4 and 5 are the meat of the book. Here Wang describes how the loss of legitimacy of the CCP as the sole political power in China led it change from the great victor over the bourgeoisie establishing the new China to the adoption in 1991 of the "patriotic education campaign" which established the CCP as the leader of the revolution which expelled the Japanese and ended Western incursions.

Beginning with a quote from Deng Xiaoping five days...