“Inside the Chinese Mind” The Wilson Quarterly 29 no4 49-82 Aut 2005

What Does China Want?     The world marvels at China's spectacular rise to economic success, and worried speculation grows about the future role of the country as a political and military power. But what do the Chinese themselves want? That question would be difficult to answer even if this land of more than a billion people were not an authoritarian state ruled by a tiny elite. Our authors search for clues in the historical and cultural currents that will shape the Chinese future.     When China first intrigued America, in the late 18th century, we desired its tea and silk. The American missionaries and traders who reached Canton and other ports did not trouble to reflect on what China might want of us--nothing more than the Christian gospel and gadgets and tobacco, they seemed to assume. In the years since, Americans seldom have had occasion to ponder the question. The historical pattern was that America influenced China, and that unequal dynamic climaxed in the World War II alliance with Chiang Kai-shek's shaky Kuomintang government against the fascist powers. In the 1940s it was presumed that China desired simply to recover from Japanese occupation, poverty, disunity, and corruption.     When "our China," the Nationalist regime of Chiang, went up in a puff of smoke at the end of the 1940s and file Communists took over Beijing, China became The Other. In the acrimonious years after Mao Zedong's triumph in 1949, China was beyond our influence. But we knew what China wanted: Mao had warned that he would "lean to one side," and soon he declared, "The Soviet Union's today is China's tomorrow." We were the "imperialists," and Mao was against us.     After Moscow and Beijing quarreled in the early 1960s and the Vietnam War escalated later in the decade, what China wanted became more complex. In the so-called Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, Mao's realm seemed irrational to the United States--and also to Moscow and most of the world. Yet, in 1971, Beijing indicated to President Richard Nixon its desire to lean to the American side to counterbalance the (assumed) coming eclipse of the United States by a rising Soviet Union.     Today, China's goals have again become hard to read; yet understanding them has never been so urgent. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the worldwide spread of democracy, China embodies an enigma: economic success under a Communist regime. The world knows what the United States stands for: free markets and democracy wherever possible. And it knows what Osama bin Laden wants: a return to the Caliphate. But China's goals are less clear. What do the post-Mao, post--Soviet Union, money-minded Chinese want? The question puzzles--and worries--many Americans.     Despite its enhanced influence in the past few years, Beijing still tends to behave reactively rather than pursue distinctive goals beyond China's borders. This comforts some people; they see China as a cautious, even conservative, power. And, to an extent, it is. But that's not the whole story. Beijing indeed behaves defensively in three fundamental respects: It sees itself as recovering from economic backwardness; it copes in quiet frustration with its relative weakness as compared with the strength of the United States; and it participates in a great number of international organizations for the limited purpose of keeping their agendas from inconveniencing China. This defensive behavior may suggest that Beijing is uncertain about whether to seek to return to a past imperial primacy in Asia, the "Middle Kingdom," or to join what people other than the Chinese style the "international community." It may, of course, be simply that China is playing for time, hiding plans that for now seem too hard to pull off.     Unlike the United States, which trumpets its goals, China does seem to keep its intentions under wraps. If you read the speeches of President Hu Jintao, who is also Communist Party chief and head of the military, or those of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, "peace and development" seem to be the goals of Chinese foreign policy. The phrase reveals but also misleads. Peace and development are means rather than ends for Beijing's foreign policy. To say they are China's goals is like saying Hu Jintao's purpose tomorrow is to put on his trousers and brush his teeth.     China is unusual in today's world because it is part empire and part modern nation. A modernizing Marxist-Leninist party state has been built upon a very old and successful tradition of governance and the imperial mentality that went with it. This extends autocratic empire into an era otherwise done with multinational empires. Communist China, astonishingly, inherited the borders of the Qing empire at its grandest, including Tibet, southern Mongolia, and the Muslim west that was once East Turkestan. But a modernizing China is torn: Hold on to empire for the sake of Chinese glory? Or yield to a postimperial politics made natural by the new society and economy visible in today's Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beijing?     The impulse to transmute the old Middle Kingdom into a hegemony based, this time, not on Confucian ethics but on economic power, is still there, but two forces cut against it. International economic and cultural interdependence will at some point collide with political paternalism. And the United States, Japan, India, and other powers may not permit a neo-Middle Kingdom.     Because China remains an authoritarian state, we cannot know what the Chinese people want. Still less can we assign a direction to the future of Chinese civilization, saying, for example, that it will "clash" with Islam or Western civilization. We can answer the question about China's goals only in terms of the actions of the current Beijing party-state. What are the nine male engineers who make up the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seeking for China? We can discern perhaps six goals in their actions.     China pursues a foreign policy that maximizes stability at home. This is true of many other nations as well, but acutely so of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Control of the populace has seldom been taken for granted by post-1949 Beijing, as indeed it could not be taken by Chinese rulers through the 150 years of foreign pressures and domestic troubles that marked the decline of the Qing dynasty. From file beginnings of the PRC to the present, Beijing has been wary of losing its grip on its far-flung realm.     China's three largest provinces, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia, were historically not Chinese territory, and their rooted inhabitants differ in religion, language, culture, and typical livelihood from Chinese people. Dealing with minorities who may prefer independence to rule by Chinese has led Beijing to employ semicolonial methods. In Tibet, higher education is open only to Chinese speakers, the vast west of the PRC is all on Beijing time, and the Muslim Uyghur population in Xinjiang has been purposely diluted by Chinese internal immigration, to cite just a few examples. In addition, the claim of the CCP to be the fount of truth as well as power creates numerous forbidden mental zones that must be policed. Any philosophical heterodoxy is treated, with or without justification, as a political threat to the CCP. The regime trusts you with your money but not with your mind.     In 1998, Jiang Zemin gave a startling 20 speeches on World War II during a visit to Japan. The Japanese chief cabinet secretary eventually said in frustration, "Isn't that all behind us?" But Japan's past transgressions will never be "all behind us" so long as the imperial state in Beijing feels a need to legitimate itself with the Chinese people by shouting "Japanese militarists!" Insecurities of this sort shape foreign policy. Thus, dealings with South Asia are intended to weaken the links between Tibet and the Tibetan government in exile in India--much as dealings with Central Asia are intended to dampen the hopes of Uyghur separatists in Xinjiang. The same eye to domestic control guides policy toward Mongolia, Korea, Thailand, and other neighbors. In sum, the PRC is a diverse semi-empire, with many inhabitants sharing racial, religious, or historical links with peoples just across one of China's borders. And the PRC is an authoritarian regime that, as if in response to self-induced nightmares, often acts like a state afraid of its own citizens.     The first goal, then, is internal stability.     A second goal of Beijing's foreign policy is to sustain China's economic growth. As Marxism fades and no official public philosophy replaces it, an improved standard of living and pride in the nation have come to legitimate a regime that never faces an election. The economic achievements in the quarter-century since Deng Xiaoping took the reins in the post-Mao era are certainly worth protecting. The economy has quadrupled in size, and its yearly growth continues at eight to nine percent (by government figures). Foreign trade has increased by a factor of 10 overall; recently, the volume of foreign trade has been expanding by 25 percent annually. The post-Mao economic surge is fueled by foreign money, and urban coastal areas benefit most from the trade, technology, and managerial skill generated by this investment. Farmers did well in the initial rounds of the reform period, but they have since lagged badly behind city dwellers, some 15 percent of whom enjoy characteristic trappings of contemporary middle-class life: cell phones, Internet access, cars, homeownership, and international vacations.     Beijing is crafting foreign policy to sustain the economic growth that keeps its legitimacy intact. Hence China's bow to stringent demands by the United States and others when it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001; hence its relatively transparent juggling act over the yuan-dollar exchange rate; and hence its restraint this past June when Australia allowed a defecting Chinese diplomat to be accepted as a resident in Australia. (China relies increasingly on Australian liquefied natural gas, coal, and iron ore.) It was surely in part to avoid damage to China's huge exports to the American market that Beijing suspended the provocative missile tests it had staged off the shores of Taiwan to show its displeasure with a pro-independence candidate in the island's 1996 presidential election. (President Bill Clinton had dispatched two aircraft carriers to the vicinity.) And in 2001, after a collision between U.S. and Chinese military planes near Hainan Island, Beijing abruptly switched off its initial "antihegemonic" rhetoric and returned the distressed American crew--again to protect the key bilateral relationship that furthers China's economic modernization.     The third goal of Beijing's foreign policy is to maintain a peaceful environment in China's complicated geographic situation. The PRC is the only country in the world that has to deal with 14 abutting neighbors, seven of which share borders of more than 600 miles, and four others close by China's extraordinarily long coastline. In its first 30 years, the PRC went to war on all five of its flanks. In the Korean War, it suffered more than a million dead and wounded. The PRC fought India in 1959 and 1962. It sent 320,000 engineering and anti-aircraft troops to help Ho Chi Minh win the Vietnam War. In 1969, putative socialist brothers Moscow and Beijing took to the sword at the Amur and Ussuri rivers in the northeast. In 1979, Deng's China attacked Vietnam to "teach Hanoi a lesson."     To China's credit and Asia's relief, Beijing in the 1980s adopted a new foreign policy of omnidirectional smiles, labeled a "policy of peace and independence." Fighting no war after 1979, Beijing soon smoothed relations with the Soviet Union, mended the shattered fence with Indonesia, stunningly recognized South Korea and stuffed a cloth down North Korea's angry throat, established a shared gatekeeper role with Moscow in Central Asia, joined international agencies by the month, and eventually became more enmeshed with the United States (except in military relations) than at any time in Chinese history. In a striking change from what was true for most of the PRC's history, Beijing today has no enemies.     Caution to gain time continues. In today's ongoing six-party talks on the Korean peninsula, Beijing, in its own opaque fashion, pursues a policy (not in American interests) of keeping the peace by clinging to the status quo. A divided Korea, however hair-raising Pyongyang's gyrations may continue to be, is better for China than a united Korea of uncertain orientation. In Central Asia, Beijing likewise opts for "talks" on border demarcation and "splittist" issues that sweep problems under the carpet and sustain the status quo.     By the turn of the 21st century, it had become clear that Beijing was moving beyond omnidirectional smiles to lay the groundwork for a Chinese version of the Monroe Doctrine in East Asia. This fourth goal of the PRC is, of course, unstated. China bids to replace the United States as the chief influence in East Asia. Unfortunately, the Washington-led projects in Afghanistan and Iraq may have distracted the Bush administration and the American public from the preparations Beijing is making for future dominance, when they ought to pay close attention to these moves.     Goal four is built on China's enhanced reputation in the aftermath of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, which left it undisturbed, and on its two decades of economic success. More concrete, if still negative, aims are coming into view. On a few global issues where Chinese and American interests coincide, or Beijing cannot effectively resist U.S. policy, it goes along with the United States, "abstains," or opposes Washington with a limp wrist. But in Asia, Chinese leaders are doing much to frustrate and exclude the United States. They drive a wedge between Japan and the United States at every opportunity. They whisper in Australian ears that Canberra would be better off looking only to Asia and not across the Pacific. In December, a milestone will be reached when an East Asia summit convenes in Malaysia without U.S. representation, thanks in part to Chinese pressure. Beijing sees the summit as a step toward forming an East Asian organization that will not include the United States.     In the Southeast Asian theater, the overture to a Chinese Monroe Doctrine can be heard unmistakably in Burma (Myanmar) and several other countries. Burma receives substantial Chinese aid, including funds for important infrastructure projects. The Burmese leaders are nervous about Sinicization of northern Burma, where ethnic Chinese live and trade. But like the tribute Burma traditionally paid to the Chinese court in centuries past, the smiles toward Beijing are an insurance policy. The result is that Burma has entered China's sphere of influence, as has Laos. Thailand and even Malaysia could be future candidates.     All the while, Beijing fosters a perception of China as the equal of the United States--a precious fifth goal. Consider Jiang Zemin's visit to America in 1997. "American negotiators preparing for the visit," reported The New York Times, "have said they were perplexed by the way their Chinese counterparts seemed extremely particular about the details of protocol and symbol." These included the size and color of carpets, the positioning, in photos of Jiang, of Harvard University's Veritas emblem and Philadelphia's Liberty Bell, and the style and design of the ties worn by Jiang and President Clinton. All such details were plotted to further an image of the PRC as being on a par with the United States. A Times editorial after the visit must have heartened Beijing: "[Jiang] used his appearances with Mr. Clinton to present himself as a statesman who could meet on equal terms with the leader of the world's richest and most powerful country."     The next year Clinton went to China, and Beijing pulled similar strings to punch above its weight. It negotiated fiercely to have Clinton not stop in Japan en route, the better to showcase his China visit, and to stretch the visit to eight days so that it would exceed the historic seven days Nixon spent in China in 1972. In a secret speech after the trip, the Chinese premier expressed delight that Clinton "made no stopover in Japan on his way to China … with the result that Japan has lost face." The Chinese official press pounced on any morsel of comment from outside China that Clinton and Jiang had met as equals. It declared that the "two leaders together" (forget Europe, Japan, and India!) had made Asia "more stable" and the "world more peaceful."     Goal six of China's international policy is to "regain" territories that Beijing feels rightfully belong within the PRC. The list of such territories runs from areas of trumpeted intent to ones of secret hope and includes Taiwan and a large number of islands in the Yellow Sea, South China Sea, and East China Sea. In the case of Taiwan, Beijing awaits an opportunity that will consist of some combination of a favorable (to Beijing) evolution in Taiwan's domestic politics, U.S. fatigue at the strain of supporting Taiwan, greater PRC capacity to transport troops and materiel quickly across the 100-mile Taiwan Strait, and a Japan more malleable to China's wishes than it is at present. In the case of the Spratly Islands, spread across crucial Southeast Asian sea routes and claimed in part by six countries, Beijing awaits sufficient naval capacity to "resume" control; the islands are essentially uninhabited but are rich in oil and other resources. Not a few Vietnamese, Koreans, Thai, and Indians also expect China, when it is able, to lay claim to parts of their territory that were once Chinese.     Of China's aspirations for territories on its northern flank, Mao said this in 1964: "About 100 years ago, the area to the east of Lake Baikal became Russian territory, and since then Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Kamchatka, and other areas have been Soviet territory. We have not yet presented our account for this list." In due course, the account could be presented. By 1973, Mao had augmented the roster of territories he felt had been stolen by Moscow. Out of the blue, during a conversation on other topics with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, he complained that "the Soviet Union has carved out one and a half million square kilometers from China." In the 1960s and 1970s, the same Communist Party that now rules in Beijing claimed as Chinese territory parts of today's Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Should Russia's hold over its far east weaken, and the movement of Chinese people to live and trade in border areas continue, China may "present its account" for a portion of Siberia.     Arising power does not always attain its goals. For modern authoritarian states, success has mostly been shortlived. Thus, the goals of all three fascist powers, which caused World War II, were abruptly canceled by 1945, and the foreign-policy goals of the Soviet bloc disappeared without trace in 1991. The prospects that China will achieve its six foreign-policy goals depend, I believe, on the Chinese political system and on how other powers react to China's ambitions.     The next Chinese drama will probably unfold not in foreign relations but at home: A middle-class push for property rights, rural discontent, the Internet, 150 million unemployed wandering between village and city, and a suddenly aging population bringing financial and social strains will dramatize some of the contradictions of "market Leninism." Traveling one road in economics and another in politics makes it difficult to arrive at a stipulated destination. How China resolves the contradictions between its politics and its economics will determine how strong a role it is to play in the world.     The current rise of China, like the rise of Germany and Japan beginning in the late 19th century, displays high purpose, a sense of grievance, and heightened nationalism. But the rise of nations can have diverse outcomes. The United Kingdom, for example, eventually accepted with equanimity the rise of the United States in the Western Hemisphere. By contrast, the rise of Germany and Japan culminated in two world wars and the destruction of the two countries' political systems--to be replaced by totally new polities and totally new international behavior. Democracy, not civilizational traits or any vast difference in relative national economic levels between today and the 1930s, makes Germany and Japan well-behaved powers in our era. Having great influence, which both now do, is not the same as being a threat to others, which both once were. China's future role in the world will be substantially determined by what happens to its out-of-date political system during the next two decades.     It is sometimes overlooked that rising to the position of successful new hegemon, in any region during any epoch, presupposes three factors: the intention to be number one on the part of the rising power, the capacity to achieve that goal, and the acceptance of the new pretender by other affected powers. Beijing has the intention. The capacity is not clearly beyond it. But non-Chinese acquiescence?     East Asia retains a memory of the Chinese Middle Kingdom. Every Vietnamese and Korean knows about the age-old hauteur of the Chinese imperial court toward China's neighbors. For better and for worse, some 60 million Chinese reside in East Asia outside the PRC, reminding Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and other host countries of the primacy of Chinese civilization in the region; in some cases, the state of coexistence remains strained. Half the population of Taiwan is flat-out opposed to Beijing's intent to "resume" rule of their island, according to polls; in a 2002 survey, 38 percent saw themselves as Taiwanese, 8 percent as Chinese, 50 percent as both.     China has spent decades in the self-proclaimed role of victim: "carved like a melon" after the Opium War, bullied by the "imperialist" West, and so on. Its initial success as a hegemon would quickly present problems both of image and of practical consequence. China would learn, as the United States has done painfully, that an ascendant king of the jungle feels the bites of other beasts edged aside. A Japan that saw China eclipse the United States, its major ally, whose primacy in East Asia explains six decades of Japanese restraint, would surely challenge China. Once again, as for five decades after 1894, China and Japan would vie--and possibly fight--for control of the region.     An authoritarian China--nervous about control over its own Chinese people and without a comfortable grip on its internal non-Chinese semi-empire--probably lacks the moral appeal to lead Asia. It can be argued that the traditional Chinese empire of centuries past was a stabilizing force, but in the 21st century, any bid by China for extension of its empire, or even for a long continuance of its present multinational realm, is more likely to be destabilizing.     Empire and Communist autocracy were tightly related in the Soviet Union. There's the same interconnection in China, which, like Russia, is a landmass that did not have an empire but was one. The breakup of the Soviet Union ended the Cold War as much as did the cracking of the Communist Party's monopoly on political power in Moscow. What Zbigniew Brzezinski said of Moscow is true of Beijing as well: "Russia can be either an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both."     Moscow, under pressure, is redefining its national interest as it leaves behind decades of Communist empire. China has hardly begun this process. The Chinese leaders must ask whether they could smoothly rule a society as distinct from the PRC as today's Taiwan. They might ponder whether having Tibet as a state associated with China--under China's shadow, to be sure, but sovereign--might be better than everlasting tension between Lhasa and Beijing. These questions have not been asked because China is still in transition from Communist empire to modern nation, and pulled between what it wants and what it really needs. National myths (a victimized China) are beguiling; the beckoning national interest (a prosperous China) seems more compelling.     Additional questions arise about China's capacity to be the new global hegemon. Today's Beijing cannot project its power far; in the tsunami disaster of December 2004 it could not do so even to South and Southeast Asia. Problems would surely arise in Africa and Latin America, beginning with language and including race and religion and culture, if China sought to have the impact in those regions that Europe and the United States have had. There is also some doubt that China is philosophically equipped for world dominance of the kind that Britain once enjoyed through sea power, or that the United States now enjoys through business dealings, military power, popular culture, and ideas about free markets and democracy. The Maoist sense of mission was certainly strong, like the Protestant-derived Anglo-American sense of mission. Yet without communism's sharp edge, Chinese nationalism lacks a message for the world. The United States under President George W. Bush bristles with a message, even as it controls almost no non-Americans. The PRC today has no message, but is assiduous in its control at home and ambitious for a sphere of influence.     I speak of China as ambitious. Is China not rather a conservative power? Each proposition has passionate adherents, yet the two have a yinyang relation. The expansionist claims of Beijing are transparent and unique among today's powerful nations. But the Beijing regime, while a dictatorship, is a rational dictatorship. It can count the numbers. It is often patient in fulfilling its goals. Equipped with a growing cadre of younger, well-trained officials, Beijing does not, like the Ming and Qing courts, deceive itself with beautiful fictions to hide the gap between reality and China's preferred worldview. China, in sum, is an ambitious power that, if faced with countervailing power, will act prudently in its long-term strategy. It surely knows that a formidable list of powers--the United States, Japan, Russia, India-has many reasons for denying China the opportunity to be a 21st-century Middle Kingdom. China was not as weak as it seemed when it was the "sick man of Asia." It may not be as endurably strong as it now seems to those who fear or admire it. China's rapid military modernization causes alarm, and Beijing clearly intends to make its weight felt in Asia. Yet while China is the world's second-biggest military spender, with a $67 billion annual budget, the United States still outspends it five to one.     In 1925, the left-wing writer Guo Moro published a short story called "Marx Enters the Confucian Temple," hoping to reassure the Chinese people that communism was not as alien as it seemed. The story tells of a somewhat comical encounter between Confucius and Karl Marx in which the two discuss whether their visions of the good life are compatible. After Marx describes his communist utopia, Confucius claps his hands in delight. "Ah, yes!" he exclaims. Marx's utopia and the traditional Confucian concept of datong, or the Grand Harmony, "unexpectedly coincide."     Datong is to be found not in the afterlife but in a real human community on earth, a community said to have actually existed long before Confucius's own time. In his story, Guo cites a much-quoted Confucian description of datong:     When the Grand Harmony was pursued, a public and common spirit ruled all under the sky. They chose men of talent and ability, whose words were sincere, and they cultivated harmony. Men did not love only their own parents, or nurture only their own children. The elderly were cared for till the end of their life; Provisions were made for widows, orphans, childless men, and the disabled; Possessions were used, but not hoarded for selfish reasons. Work was encouraged, but not for selfish advantage. In this way, selfish schemings were repressed. Robbers, thieves, rebels, and traitors had no place, and hence the outer doors remained open, and were not shut. That was what we called the Grand Harmony.     Eighty tumultuous years after Guo wrote--after a world war, civil war, and several gigantic utopian attempts to transform Chinese society--the communist dream is all but dead in China, but the 2,500-year-old idea of datong is very much alive. Datong plays a role in China much like that of freedom in American society: It is a lodestar of Chinese attitudes and thinking--and is also more prescriptive and all-encompassing than the American idea of liberty. This ideal of a prosperous and harmonious political and social order still defines the future imagined by many in China's large and influential intellectual class. "When China's intellectuals and leaders speak or write about their hopes for their nation's future, elements of the notion of the Great Unity are still strongly evident--in spite of 50 years of Marxist ideology," writes Suzanne Ogden, a political scientist at Northeastern University, in Inklings of Democracy in China (2002).     No second Guo Moro has emerged to proclaim that the new capitalist order created by the Communists since 1979 is compatible with the vision of China's great sage. Yet in its outlines the official post-Map ideology conforms rather strikingly to Confucian precepts. The new theory announced in the early 1980s by Hu Qiaomu, the Communist Party's ideology czar, holds that the realization of communism in China must be put off to an indefinite future. Map Zedong and his followers, said Hu, had committed the error of trying to rush into socialism by skipping the stage of capitalist development. In Confucian terms, the Communists were saying that datong would need to wait; China would have to settle in the meantime for what party leaders call xiaokang, or small prosperity--a word borrowed from ancient Chinese thought that describes a condition of relative social stability and wealth marred by an imperfect hierarchy of human relations and an unequal distribution of wealth.     The need for a larger sense of meaning and purpose--for hope--is a universal in human society. In the Christian West, that hope traditionally resided in the afterlife, a Kingdom of Heaven reached by those who obeyed Cod while living in a sin-ridden world. The Chinese datong is a secular and pragmatic hope. Confucius is not a religious figure, and Confucianism is a code of ethics rather than a religion. (Two other sources of Chinese tradition, Taoism and Buddhism, are religions, but China's governing class has traditionally been secular and Confucian.) In the Confucian worldview, hope lies in hard work and the benevolence of others, especially rulers. There is no original sin, nor are there any saviors or miracles. "Benevolence" is believed to be an inherent human quality. In Confucius's Analects (c. 500 B.C.), the word ren benevolence) appears more frequently than any other.     Because of their religious tradition, Westerners tend to accept as natural the imperfect nature of human society. The checks and balances built into the U.S. political system, for instance, reflect a frank recognition of the imperfection of human society. As James Madison put it, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." To a Chinese, the American tolerance of disharmony in the social and political realms is remarkable. When the sensational 1995 murder trial of O. J. Simpson ended in a not guilty verdict, I was fascinated to see that the American public eventually accepted the outcome and lost interest, even though no one else was ever charged with the crime. In China, the failure to achieve a full resolution of the crime would be much harder to accept. If a government hopes to retain its credibility, high-profile murders must somehow be "solved."     During the past 2,500 years, the Chinese quest for harmony and order in this world has inspired many extraordinary, and sometimes utopian, undertakings. In A.D. 191, for example, the peasant rebel Zhang Lu seized a part of central China and ruled over a kingdom boasting a welfare system, controlled market prices, and rehabilitation rather than punishment for petty criminals. For most of its history, however, China has lived under authoritarian feudal leaders, who have governed more in the spirit of xiaokang than datong. Yet always there remains a commitment to prosperity, pragmatism, and a belief that the collective good overrides the good of individuals.     The imperative to create a more perfect world on earth was one of the forces that drove China's premodern emperors to pour enormous resources into a system of irrigation works and waterways that exceeded in scale and scope even the great works of the Roman Empire. The Great Wall and the Grand Canal, created over the centuries to carry rice and other goods more than 1,000 miles into China's north, are by far the best known examples, but there are many others.     Unlike Egypt's pyramids, which served religious and ceremonial purposes, these massive public works were meant to ensure relative stability and freedom from want for generations of Chinese. Although Confucian ethics impose limits on how far rulers can go in pursuit of the common good, enormous human costs accompanied these works. At the Shan-hai-guan Pass, the eastern end of the Great Wall, there is a temple in memory of Meng Jiangniu, a woman who lived during the Qin dynasty (221-205 B.C.), which began construction of the Great Wall. According to the story, which is still told to schoolchildren today, Meng's husband was one of the thousands of peasants who died doing forced hard labor to build the wall and was buried beneath it. Upon learning of her husband's death, Meng went to the site, where she cried so hard that her tears achieved a magic power and brought down a vast length of the cruel emperor's Great Wall, allowing her to recover her husband's body.     The Opium War of 1840-42 and the general trauma of China's encounter with the Western imperial powers forced Chinese elites to realize that they must reform; but even as they sought to learn from the West, they took their inspiration from datong. They viewed the creation of a constitutional monarchy not as an end in itself, but as only the first step on a new path toward datong. In 1898, for example, Emperor Guangxu designated an intellectual named Kang Youwei to devise a set of political reforms for China. Even as he labored on his plan, Kang was also secretly writing his Datong Shu, or Book of Datong. It was, in essence, an attempt to reimagine the world along Confucian lines:     To have states, families, and selves is to allow each individual to maintain a sphere of selfishness; States should be abolished, so that there would be no more struggle between the strong and the weak. Families should also be done away with, so that there would no longer be inequality of love and affection. And finally, selfishness itself should be banished, so that goods and services would not be used for private ends; The only [true way] is for all to share the world in common; To share in common is to treat each and every one alike. There should be no distinction between high and low, no discrepancy between rich and poor, no segregation of human races, no inequality between sexes.… All should be educated and supported with the common property; none should depend on private possessions.     With the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, the leaders of the two major political parties that emerged from the ashes, the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, both embraced the concept of datong. Mao Zedong read the Datong Shu in 1917, when he was 24 years old, and soon after produced an article describing his own prescription for a utopian "new village." In 1940, writing in explicitly Confucian terms, he spoke of the need "to eliminate class and to realize datong" as China developed into a communist society. During the disastrous Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), when virtually all of China's peasant farmers were organized into "people's communes," Mao even ordered the Communist Party officials in charge to use Kang Youwei's Datong Shu as their guide.     During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), no effort was spared in the drive to make Chinese society conform to Mao's plan for utopia, with tragic consequences for millions. A small incident from my own life illustrates the degree of this zeal. One day in 1968, when I was 12 years old, a poster was found on a wall of my school that read "Down with Chairman Mao." The poster was immediately torn down and taken to be analyzed by the Little Red Soldiers, a junior version of the Red Guards, who found that it was written on the back of a math homework assignment. It was quickly determined which teacher had given the assignment, and all the students in her class were required to write "Long live Chairman Mao," so their handwriting could be compared. Soon the author of the poster was identified: a girl in the second grade whose parents had been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. The girl was not severely penalized; her parents very likely were.     If the hope of the Cultural Revolution was for "good politics," the hope of the post-Mao era is for prosperity and "good economics." This change is reflected in the composition of China's leadership and the Communist Party's ideology. Most Maoist leaders, especially during the Cultural Revolution, were literary intellectuals given to dreams of proletarian unity--the writer Guo Moro, for example, became president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences--but most of the post-Mao leaders have been pragmatic technocrats. Graduates of Tsinghua University, China's MIT, dominate the party's upper echelons. The party once lionized as popular heroes people such as Lei Feng, a Communist soldier who loved everyone but himself. Today's heroes are the rich, regardless of their individual character. The contemporary Chinese obsession with wealth is reflected in a popular saying: China has a population of a billion, and 900 million of them are businessmen--a singsongy line that seldom fails to elicit cynical laughter.     That hollow laughter reflects the fact that the post-Mao zeal for wealth has fulfilled only part of the hope of the Chinese. It has emphasized the pragmatic this-worldly quest for prosperity encouraged by the datong ideal but has neglected the complementary pursuit of the collective good. Even among those Chinese who have done well during the economic boom, there is widespread discontent and unease. The unrelenting materialism of the new China no doubt helps account for the popularity of quasi-religious movements such as the Falungong, along with Christianity and other more traditional forms of religious expression. (The government has banned the Falungong, and it strives to suppress other movements.) In the eyes of many Chinese, the growing income gap between rich and poor--now larger by some measures than it is in the United States--and rampant corruption in government and the ranks of business are evidence of a society in which all are out for themselves. China's leaders will not be able to continue indefinitely to meet the nation's deeply rooted desire for datong with empty rhetoric. Yet the persistence of Grand Harmony as an ideal also suggests that China's evolution in the direction of Western-style liberal democratic capitalism is not very likely. "Despite all the references to ziyou (freedom) in the many constitutions of the successive regimes of 20th-century China," notes historian Philip Huang, "ziyou has never quite been able to shake its associated negative connotations of selfishness, with obvious consequences for Chinese conceptions of 'democracy.'"     For a glimpse of how China may evolve, many scholars look to Asia's other Confucian societies, such as Taiwan and South Korea. The continuing strength of the datong mentality in those countries can be seen in the relatively narrow gap between rich and poor--narrower than in many Western countries--that is maintained as a matter of government policy. Yet this emphasis on the collective good often goes hand in hand with some variety of authoritarian role. While Taiwan and South Korea took several decades before they embarked on the path to democratization, China may take longer, given its official communist ideology and the size and diversity of the country. For better or worse, the datong tradition will remain a powerful influence for a long time to come as China struggles toward modernity.     When Fei Xiaotong died in April 2005 at the age of 95, most of China's ranking leaders attended the funeral. President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao were there, and so was former president Jiang Zemin. Fei was China's leading sociologist. But he was also one of the country's most revered public intellectuals, a man who descended often from the ivory tower to reach a broader public. He spoke persuasively and colorfully to both China and the West, educating his English readers about rural China and using his native language to inform China about the West. He served for years as the chairman of China's Democratic League. He was also a longtime member of the National People's Congress, China's nominal legislature, and one of its vice chairmen from 1988 to 1998.     For many years, Fei's colleagues in the West assumed he was dead. In the spring of 1957, when party chairman Mao Zedong launched a massive campaign against China's intellectuals, Fei was designated one of the country's leading "rightists." It is hard now to believe how tightly China was controlled back then, how little news seeped out. Nothing was heard of the once vocal and active Fei. When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, and China's intellectuals again came under attack, there was still no news of Fei.     Fei Xiaotong was not dead. But sociology in China was. And in 1979, Fei was given the task of reviving it.     I first met Fei Xiaotong on the tarmac of Dulles International Airport in April 1979. China and the United States had re-established diplomatic relations in January of that year, and Fei was a member of the first delegation of social scientists and humanists to visit America since the hiatus in relations had begun some 30 years before. The visit was an occasion of joy rarely experienced in academia. Three decades of silence between friends and colleagues were suddenly broken.     Several of China's finest scholars were members of the delegation, and the American academics with whom they met were charmed. But Fei Xiaotong--roly-poly, ebullient, outgoing, and invariably smiling--was nay favorite. I found him dazzling. He changed nay life. Fei had something to say. He made China real.     Born in 1910, a year before the collapse of the last of China's dynasties, Fei grew up in a time when only a tiny elite received a higher education. Fewer still had the opportunity to study abroad. Fei was extraordinarily privileged. After studying in Beijing, where he graduated from American-founded Yanqing University and received a master's degree at Tsinghua University, he was given a fellowship to the London School of Economics, where he received his Ph.D. in 1938 under the mentorship of the esteemed anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Fei's dissertation, published as Peasant Life in China, remains a classic.     Fei's pursuit of his chosen profession brought him repeated tragedy. In the summer of 1935, accompanied by Wang Tonghui, his new wife and fellow sociology student, he went to Guangxi Province for what both expected to be a year of fieldwork. The area was mountainous, remote, and desperately poor, and the couple traveled on foot, accompanied by porters and guides. They were in particularly rugged terrain, separated from their guides, when Fei fell into a tiger trap, plunging into a deep pit as stones crashed down upon him. Wang Tonghui set off alone to find help for her badly injured husband.     She never returned. A week later, her body was found in a river. Depressed and burdened with guilt, believing that his wife had died for him and wishing that he had died instead, Fei spent months in a hospital. Instead of returning to Guangxi, he joined his elder sister in the village of Kaixiangong, on the banks of Lake Tai in his native province of Jiangsu. It was there that he conducted the research that would become Peasant Life in China.     Fei was already a professor at Tsinghua University when the People's Republic was established in October 1949. The reality of the Chinese Communist Party confronted him, as it did many of his generation, with difficult choices. In the mid-1940s, the rivalry between the Communists and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party was building toward civil war. Fei had joined the Democratic League, a group of prominent intellectuals searching for a third, more democratic way. When the third way failed and the corruption and misrule of the Nationalists became intolerable, Fei came finally to welcome the Communist victory. The account he wrote of his first year living under Communist rule contained a mixture of acceptance and enthusiasm. Fei was not a revolutionary. He was not a proponent of violence. His propensities were democratic. But he found much to admire in the newly victorious Communist Party--its focus on the poor, its insistence that education be practical, its critique of isolated, arrogant academics, its widespread popular support. He welcomed his own participation in the party-directed process of "thought reform" as a means of divesting himself of his "bourgeois" past and joining his compatriots in pursuit of a common, socialist goal. He was swept up in the patriotism of a united China free from the vestiges of foreign intrusion.     Fei's second professionally induced tragedy came shortly thereafter, in 1951, when sociology was declared a "bourgeois pseudoscience." The discipline was abolished. The only true science in China, as Fei's biographer, David Arkush, points out, was Marxism-Leninism. Without a profession, Fei was sent to the newly established Central Academy of National Minorities to become one of its three vice presidents. He could no longer teach or do serious research.     Fei Xiaotong was granted new life in 1956, when the policy toward China's intellectuals began to change. Zhou Enlai, China's sophisticated and cultured premier, began calling for greater appreciation of the country's intellectuals, and Mao Zedong promoted a new blossoming of academic freedom. "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend," Mao proclaimed.     Fei became active again in the newly revived Democratic League, traveling the country to meet with fellow intellectuals, becoming a public spokesman for their academic and economic interests. Then, cautiously at first and following the lead of his senior colleagues, he began to build a case for the reintroduction of sociology. He did not regret the dissolution of sociology, nor, he said (disingenuously, perhaps), had it affected his ability to do research. But social development is inevitably accompanied by problems. Better to study those problems than to claim they do not exist. The label of the discipline did not matter. Call it social investigation rather than sociology. But rely on educated specialists to conduct the research.     Fei Xiaotong was able to conduct his first significant research in well over a decade when, in the spring of 1957, he returned to Kaixiangong. His report combined the necessary lip service to the miracles of socialist collectivization with a profound critique of its consequences for the peasants of that village. The changes that had occurred since his first visit, 21 years earlier, in 1936, he wrote, were absolutely unprecedented. The society of exploitation of man by man had been transformed, and a new era of prosperity and happiness was at hand. But Fei, as always, focused on problems--and how best to solve them. The reality was that many in Kaixiangong thought that they had been better off when Fei first visited. Many village children could not even afford to attend school.     A major reason for the decline in peasant welfare was the absence of sideline occupations--activities such as raising silkworms and transporting goods--that had been banned as "capitalist" with the introduction of agricultural collectives. Villagers could never prosper through farming alone. The collectives were creating a new psychology as well. Peasants had become dependent on the state, unable to make their own economic decisions. Morale was suffering.     While Fei was in Kaixiangong, the tide was turning against him. In the spring of 1957, the policy of greater academic freedom had merged with Mao's campaign to reform the Communist Party. Concerned that the party had become corrupted by power, Mao encouraged, then prodded, China's intellectuals to identify the party's faults. Initially, the criticisms were mild and slow to come, but when the floodgates opened, the party was subjected to wholesale rebuke. Intellectuals, it seemed, still preferred genuine democracy to a dictatorship that called itself democratic. After a mere six weeks, Mao suddenly reversed course, launching an "anti-rightist" campaign against those who had spoken out. Hundreds of thousands of China's intellectuals were declared rightists. Many lost their jobs. Others spent decades in labor reform or in exile in poor rural areas. All were silenced.     Two leaders of the Democratic League, Luo Longzhi and Zhang Bojun, were deemed China's most egregious rightists, accused of leading a nationwide plot against the Communist Party. Fei Xiaotong was accused of having been a member of their clique. He became rightist number three.     The evil genius of Mao was his ability to turn Chinese against one another, and neither Fei nor other Chinese intellectuals were immune. In a stilted language unlike anything he had previously penned, Fei confessed to a crime of rebellion against the state, divorcing himself from the "adventurist" leaders of the Democratic League. Fei's colleagues also spoke out against him, their attacks ranging from erudite, well-footnoted academic critiques of the "reactionary functionalism" of Malinowski, and hence of Fei, to vicious personal attacks. One of Fei's closest colleagues asserted, preposterously, that within a week of the death of Wang Tonghui, Fei had fallen in love with another woman and completely forgotten his wife.     Fei's fate was less extreme than others'. He lost his job, but he continued to live on the campus of the Central Academy of National Minorities. He was never sent to a labor reform camp, though he did spend several years laboring in the fields at a "May Seventh Cadre School" during the Cultural Revolution. But for 22 years, during which some 30 million peasants died in the famine brought on by Mao's Great Leap Forward and the country was ripped apart by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Fei Xiaotong was silent.     Then, in 1979, Hu Qiaomu, president of the newly established Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a close associate of Deng Xiaoping, asked Fei to begin a process that would lead to the reintroduction of sociology in China. Hu told Fei that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences had been asked to send a delegation of scholars to visit the United States. He wanted Fei to be a member.     "We did not know what had happened in sociology outside China during those years," Fei told me later. "It was my task both to learn something of recent developments in Western sociology and to begin to establish some contacts with Western scholars."     Fei's task was daunting. Restoring sociology to China meant training a new generation from scratch. But there were no Chinese faculty members to train them and no books. Fei turned to Chinese sociologists from the United States and Hong Kong, who led a series of workshops that were crash courses on the rudiments of sociology. The best and most enthusiastic participants were sent abroad to study.     Fei was determined not to repeat the mistakes of his past. He never repudiated his previous work, but he accepted much of the criticism against it, coming to see his writings as a Chinese intellectual's view of the peasantry. To the consternation of some of his American colleagues, he rejected the notion of a "universal" social science, arguing instead for "a people's anthropology" or a Chinese sociology--"a sociology in the service of the Chinese people, a sociology in the service of Chinese socialism." The ultimate purpose of Chinese sociology, he believed, was to help ordinary Chinese people solve their problems. The determination of what those problems were would be made not by sociologists but by the people who were living them.     Many say that China today is in the throes of a moral crisis, as an entire generation rejects every value but self-interest. Fei Xiaotong's generation faced constant moral dilemmas--the daily choice, as Vaclav Havel would say, of how far to compromise in order "to get along." But there were values that Fei held constant. His fundamental concerns were the concrete problems of everyday life. He believed that intellectuals have a responsibility to understand and help the less fortunate. And more than 40 years after joining the Democratic League, he still believed in the basic democratic values that had led him there.     Thus, in the spring of 1989, he could hardly avoid the great political upheaval that rocked the country to its core. Massive protests broke out in Beijing, led by students and fueled by popular anger against the corruption of the Communist Party and the growing sense that millions of ordinary Chinese people had yet to share the fruits of economic reform. Democracy was the protesters' watchword. Fei stood clearly on their side. When the students staged a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square, he wrote to party chief Zhao Ziyang urging China's leaders to enter into a dialogue with the students and embrace their just demands. Later, he visited the square, supporting the students, yes, but exhorting them, for the sake of China and their health, to call off their hunger strike and return to their schools. On May 19, when Premier Li Peng declared martial law, Fei joined the chorus of his colleagues calling for an emergency session of the National People's Congress to end military authority and bring about a peaceful resolution to the confrontation.     The special session was never convened. Instead, on the night of June 3-4, 1989, the People's Liberation Army marched into Beijing, to considerable resistance from its residents, and retook the city by force.     Three weeks later, I visited Fei at his home. He was at the time sufficiently high ranking to merit a bodyguard, but he was not certain whether the guard was solely for his protection or had the additional task of monitoring his activities. He had deliberately chosen a Sunday for the visit. The guard was off on Sundays.     What I remember most about our conversation is not recorded in my notes. Perhaps I misremember. But I think not. I think that Fei, like many Chinese officials, waited until the end of our conversation, when my notebook was closed and we were walking to my car, to speak off the record and from the heart, to say what was uppermost in his mind. What I remember him saying is, "We were so close, so close." And what I interpreted him to mean was that if he and his colleagues had been successful in convening an emergency session of the National People's Congress, overturning the declaration of martial law, meeting many of the students' demands, and thus transforming the National People's Congress into more than a rubber stamp, China's democratic breakthrough would have begun.     My notes from that day record a Fei Xiaotong sick at heart--"walking in darkness" were the words he used. The country had suffered a huge setback, he thought, and the future was uncertain. His mood changed as he weighed one possible future against another. He proclaimed himself too old to solve this latest of China's puzzles. He was pessimistic about the future of sociology in China. Research would be too difficult. The brightest students would go abroad.     He was right about sociology. Many of the best did leave. And during the 1990s, research in China suffered. As American sociologist Richard Madsen points out, Chinese scholars kept unearthing unpleasant facts--which is what Fei wanted, of course. And because so many of China's sociologists are American trained, Fei's hope for a distinctively Chinese sociology, focused more on what is important than merely on what can be measured, has yet to be fulfilled. Still, there are now 120 sociology departments in Chinese postsecondary institutions, and many of the promising sociologists who left China do return periodically to teach.     Part of Fei's tradition continues. The problems in China's countryside today are serious and growing worse. Yu Jianrong, a researcher at the Rural Development Center at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is documenting widespread rural protest against excessive taxation, confiscation of land, and corrupt local officials. He echoes Fei in criticizing China's contemporary intellectuals for prescribing on behalf of China's farmers while excluding them as actors in their own right. He would have the farmers represent themselves.     Increasingly they are. Dotting the social landscape of China today are "social entrepreneurs" with values not greatly different from Fei's--an acute sense of responsibility for the disadvantaged and a mission to find solutions to society's ills. They are generally young, between 30 and 45 years old, and have middle or normal school educations. Many are former teachers, and some are disillusioned former officials. Some have formed small nongovernmental organizations to carry out their goals, thus contributing to the development of civil society in China and to a third, more democratic way. They focus on alleviating poverty and bringing primary schools, water delivery systems, or fuel-saving solar cookers to poor rural villages. A growing number of local organizations are devoted to environmental protection, and some address the rapidly expanding problem of HIV/AIDS.     I saw Fei only rarely during the last years of his life, but the change he wrought in my life is permanent. He taught me that understanding China requires being there, at the country's grassroots, away from officials and guides, listening to the stories of people's everyday lives. When I traveled in America with his delegation in 1979, the stories I heard that made China real were about the political persecutions so many in the group had suffered, particularly during the Cultural Revolution. I determined to go to China and listen to those stories, so that they could be told and never forgotten. In 1981, Fei made arrangements for me to do just that. I saw him often during the 1980s and helped edit several of the pieces he wrote for the West. The two calligraphy scrolls he made in my honor hang prominently in my home, and I still follow the admonition he inscribed for me in one of his books: to remember him always.     Because of his role in my research, and because we were friends, some people think that buried in my 1987 book about China's cultural revolution, Enemies of the People, is the story of Fei Xiaotong. But Fei Xiaotong never told me the more heart-rending parts of his story. I learned about them from others. He was an optimist at heart. He looked forward rather than back. Fei's heirs may be China's new social entrepreneurs, such as Zhu Yongzhong, shown here in a school sponsored by his Sanchuan Development Association.     It was a rude shock for many in the West this past April when tens of thousands of anti-Japanese demonstrators took to the streets of Shanghai and dozens of other Chinese cities for several days of violent protests. Shouting anti-Japanese slogans, they smashed the windows of Japanese stores and restaurants, overturned Japanese cars, and burned Japanese flags and photos of Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi. The demonstrators were reacting to a seemingly mundane event, Koizumi's visit to a Tokyo shrine commemorating Japanese war dead. But it did not escape notice in China that the shrine honored Japanese war criminals as well as ordinary soldiers. The memory of atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking in 1937, when Japanese soldiers killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians, is vivid still in China, and the publication of Japanese history textbooks minimizing these war crimes added fuel to the fire.     In Japan and the West, the nationalist flare-up fed anxiety about the rise of a more aggressive China. Critics suggested that the government itself had cynically manufactured the protests. It is true that, with the decline of communist ideology as a unifying force during the 1990s, Beijing has routinely exploited nationalist feelings to divert attention from domestic problems and to gain leverage in the diplomatic world, among other purposes. The growing self-confidence born of economic success, along with a deep sense of historical grievance against Japan and the Western powers, has made nationalism a potent force. But in April, officials in the capital city watched the demonstrations with genuine alarm. They knew that Chinese nationalism is a double-edged sword that could as easily turn against the government as it did against the Japanese, threatening the very existence of the Communist regime. Anger at the Japanese could lead to open criticism of Beijing's foreign policy--which is unforgivably soft in the eyes of most liberal nationalists--and could ignite a host of popular grievances about corruption, economic inequality, and other troubles.     President Hu Jintao and his government were particularly concerned about an Internet-based campaign to mount much bigger demonstrations on the anniversary of the May Fourth Movement--a patriotic outburst that erupted after World War I when the Treaty of Versailles gave Japan control of a slice of Chinese territory and that has become a symbol of social reform, individual emancipation, and resistance to foreign aggression. Taking advantage of its control of telecommunications, the government broadcast a blizzard of text messages to mobile phone users warning against "spreading rumors, believing rumors, or joining illegal demonstrations." Police in China's major cities were put on full alert. The demonstrations were quashed.     In the West, Chinese nationalism often appears to be a single, worrisome phenomenon. But as April's events suggest, there is more than one variety of Chinese nationalism--and more than one path that it may follow in the future. The demonstrations revealed the face of liberal nationalism, whose partisans among students and intellectuals advocate a China that is more democratic at home but more assertive abroad.     Watching from their offices in Beijing, the officials of Hu's government exemplified the tradition of state nationalism, which has roots deep in the imperial past but today closely identifies the Chinese nation with the Communist state. The Chinese government officially expresses nationalist sentiment as aigu, which in Chinese means "loving the state," or aiguozhuyi, which means "love and support for China," a China that is always indistinguishable from the Communist state. State nationalism demands that citizens subordinate their individual interests to those of the state. And in its relations with foreign powers, China's current rulers believe that the state must prudently balance nationalist imperatives against other objectives, particularly the overriding goal of economic modernization.     In a campaign of "patriotic education" after the 1989 Tiananmen Square debacle, Beijing declared that China was not yet ready for Western-style democracy. Continued one-party rule would maintain the political stability needed for rapid economic development. Amid the anti-Western backlash in reaction to the West's post-Tiananmen sanctions against China, the regime was able to present itself as the defender of China's pride and national interests by preventing Taiwan's independence, securing entry into the World Trade Organization, and, in a victory that swelled many Chinese hearts, bringing the 2008 Olympics to Beijing.     Yet there are limits to how far the regime will go in the name of nationalist pride and principle. Time and again in recent years, Beijing has permitted, and sometimes encouraged, liberal nationalists to take their militant views to the streets, only to call a halt when a threat to China's long-term goal of economic modernization appeared. When U.S. warplanes accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, demonstrations swept China for two days, until then--vice president Hu, perceiving a threat to Sino-American relations (and perhaps to the Beijing regime itself), went on national television to stop them. The People's Daily cautioned that Western countries were issuing advisories against travel to China, threatening tourism and trade. Two years later, when a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese fighter collided over the South China Sea, Beijing accepted something less than the full formal apology it had demanded, opting once again to smooth relations with an important partner in trade and investment rather than stand on a point of national pride.     As China's economic and military power grows in the decades ahead, the tension between the pragmatic state nationalism of the Beijing government and the liberal nationalism of the streets will largely determine what kind of face China shows to the world.     Modern Chinese nationalism was born in the wake of China's shattering defeat by Britain in the Opium War of 1840-42, which led to the disintegration of imperial China and the loss of national sovereignty as Western powers carved out zones of influence on the mainland. From Sun Yat-sen in the early 20th century to Hu Jintao today, all of China's leaders have been committed to the quest to blot out China's humiliation at the hands of imperialists and to recapture the greatness of the past. They have seen China's decline as "a historical mistake, which they should correct," as Chinese scholar Yan Xuetong observes. Of all the slogans heard by the Chinese people in more than a century of struggle, zhenxing zhonghua (rejuvenation of China) has had by far the most powerful appeal.     China's first nationalists were ethnic nationalists. In the wake of the Opium War and other encounters with the West, as well as the disastrous defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, the search for national rebirth inspired Sun Yat-sen and other leaders from the ethnic Han majority to seek the overthrow of the long-ruling minority Manchu dynasty and to establish an ethnic state. But after the dynasty's collapse in 1911, Sun recognized that a more inclusive nationalism would be a wiser course for leaders who hoped to rule not only the Han areas along China's coast but Tibet, Mongolia, and Xinjiang. Under Sun, the Chinese nation was redefined as a multiethnic political community, with the state as the great object of loyalty.     Today ethnic nationalism remains very much alive on China's frontiers. Nourished by a sense of grievance over the failure to share the fruits of China's economic boom--incomes in Beijing were three times larger than those in largely Muslim Xinjiang by the late 1990s--and by the global changes that have fueled nationalism and ethnic separatism everywhere, China's ethnic nationalism is a source of great anxiety in Beijing.     Even as officially sanctioned ethnic nationalism vanished in a puff of smoke during the early 20th century, a new liberal nationalism was being born among reformers who looked to the West for political and social models. Then, as now, liberal nationalism was a movement chiefly among intellectuals--though in China, the intellectual class includes virtually everyone with a high school education (currently about a quarter of the population).     It is a distinctively Chinese liberalism. One of the movement's seminal figures, Liang Qichao (1873-1929), wrote that defeat in the Sino-Japanese War woke the Chinese people "from the dream of 4,000 years." Well read and widely traveled in Japan and the West, Liang propounded a new liberalism that elevated individual rights but still put the nation first. At a time of national peril, he argued, citizens should put the survival of the nation before their personal interests. Devotion to the nation rather than Western-style individual rights is also the chief underpinning of the liberal nationalists' commitment to democracy. They believe that citizens have the right and duty to hold the state accountable for the defense of China's national interests. In 1999, for example, Wang Xiaodong, a leading liberal nationalist editor, denounced China's state-controlled news media for failing to report that Beijing had agreed to pay the United States $2.87 million for damage to U.S. diplomatic properties in China during anti-American demonstrations. China needed news media that told the truth and a government that sought the consent of the people before making such concessions, Wang told The Far Eastern Economic Review. The Chinese people, he declared, should have the right to vote out political leaders who inadequately defend their national interests.     Just as today's liberal nationalists criticize the Communist regime for violating individual freedoms and failing to stand up to the imperialist powers, so their predecessors criticized the Kuomintang regime of 1928-49. Some allied themselves with the Communist Party. But when Chairman Mao Zedong's Hundred Flowers Campaign encouraged many of these nationalists to criticize openly the Communists' monopoly of political power in 1957, they were brutally purged, and some were jailed or sent to labor camps.     Liberal nationalism did not re-emerge until the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping's call for "thought liberation" and post-Mao reform created new opportunities. Fearful of criticizing the Communist state directly, many liberal nationalists instead blamed China's "authoritarian culture" for the lack of modernization in China. They called for a rejection of Chinese tradition and an embrace of Western culture and models of development--an agenda that was forcefully expressed in 1988 in a six-part documentary television series, Heshang (River Elegy), that electrified China. The series made no direct attack on the Communist Party, but it highlighted the huge gap between the ideal world constructed by party ideology and the cruel reality of the People's Republic. (The point was sufficiently clear that Beijing prohibited a third broadcast of the series.) It portrayed China as a declining ancient civilization whose modern history compared very unfavorably with Western achievements in the industrial and information revolutions. Using powerful imagery of the Yellow River's muddy torrents rushing into the serene blue of the ocean, Heshang suggested that China must look for its fulfillment toward the vast expanse of the Pacific and beyond.     Even in 1988, however, the liberal nationalists' admiration for the West's success was joined to a view of the West as hostile and aggressive, and within a few years mainstream Chinese intellectual discourse had shifted drastically. The liberal nationalists were angered by Western sanctions and rhetoric about human rights violations after Tiananmen Square. And they were shocked by political scientist Samuel Huntington's prediction of a "clash of civilizations" in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article and by open calls in the West for the containment of China, such as Charles Krauthammer's in a 1995 Time column comparing China with pre-World War II Germany. The instant popularity in the mid-1990s of the "say no" books, such as China Can Say No and China Still Can Say No, reflected the change in sentiment. The books' simple message was that Western nations, particularly the United States, were plotting against China in a new cold war, and that China must stand up to them. The authors of China Can Say No confessed that as students they themselves had craved Western culture and products, until the unconscionable rejection of Beijing's bid to host the 2000 Olympics and the U.S. Navy's show of force in the Taiwan Strait early in 1996 forced them to rethink their hopes and dreams. Before the Chinese could say no to the Americans, the books warned, they first had to say no to themselves, to their lack of nationalist spirit and to their blind worship of the United States.     China's liberal and state nationalists are united in pursuing qiangguomeng, the dream of a strong China, but both camps are also beset by the same set of historically rooted divisions over how to achieve that goal. There are nativists who see the subversion of indigenous Chinese virtues by foreign imperialists as the root of China's weakness. They call for a return to Chinese tradition and self-reliance and take a confrontational stance toward the outside world, as Mao Zedong did during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Anti-traditionalists regard Chinese tradition as the source of the nation's weakness, and they favor the adoption of foreign cultures and models. Although their militant approach to the wider world echoes Chinese nativism, today's liberal nationalists are antitraditionalist in their approach to most issues.     The pragmatists who have steered China's foreign policy since Deng Xiaoping came to power in the late 1970s seek to adapt to the changing world, but they have very few commitments to particular ideological principles. As Deng said, "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it can catch rats." Economic modernization is their overarching objective--because economic prosperity is both a means for the Communist Party to stay in power and the foundation of China's national aspirations to greatness. China's leaders, therefore, have tried to avoid confrontation with the United States and other Western powers, emphasizing peace and development as China's major international goals. They are assertive in defending China's national interests, such as reunification with Taiwan, but they are not antiforeign.     Though they are increasingly constrained by nationalist sentiment and hampered by the absence of a charismatic leader such as Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping, the pragmatists have kept China on a predictable course. Talking tough but acting prudently is the pragmatists' way. As long as they are reasonably secure in Beijing, it will likely continue to be China's way as well. ADDED MATERIAL     Suisheng Zhao is a professor in the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver, executive director of the university's Center for China-U.S. Cooperation, and editor of The Journal of Contemporary China. His most recent book is A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism (2004).