Making of the Angry Chinese: Colonial Gaze, Anti-Colonial Sentiments & Rise of Chinese Nationalism

Presented by Xin Fan of the University of Cambridge as part of the Anger in History series at the Ohio State University Department of History's Center for Historical Research.
The vast distance between the Far East and the Far West is not only a gap in geography but also one in feelings. As early modern European thinkers failed to emotionally connect themselves to the Chinese body, they were debating the hypothetical question of killing a mandarin (Ginzburg, 1994; Hayot, 2009). This lack of sympathy continued to exist in the twentieth century, and it became a root of the Western bewilderment of the Chinese anger. To many, this anger seems to register an irrational, xenophobic aspect of Chinese nationalism engineered by the party state. Chinese propaganda further reinforces this stereotype, according to which Chinese people are always angry and their feelings are so easily hurt by foreign countries (King, 2017). Yet the making of the angry Chinese is more than just a state project. In this paper, I attempt to contextualize and humanize the Chinese anger by historicizing this emotional feeling to the live-or-die experience during the War of Resistance against Japan. As the case study on Ping-ti Ho’s critique of New Qing History shows, the cultural memory of the war and the emotional attachment to one’s culture together contributed to Chinese educated elite’s growing resentment against Western perspectives on China. The Chinese anger is not just a far cry of nationalist emotions but also a bodily experience of war and national survival.
About Xin Fan: Xin Fan is a Teaching Associate in Modern Chinese History at the University of Cambridge. His most recent publication is "World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century" (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He also co-edited "Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia" (Brill, 2018) with Professor Almut-Barbara Renger at the Free University Berlin. He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled, “The Right to Talk about China: The Rise of Emotional Politics, 1900 to 1949,” as well as collaborating with scholars in Europe, America, and Asia on several projects on nationalism, historiography, and conceptual history.
Co-sponsors of this talk are the Institute for Chinese Studies, the Department of Political Science, the Center for East Asian Studies, and the Mershon Center. Find out more about the Center for Historical Research at chr.osu.edu