Paul A. Cohen

From a Q & A at China Beat with Paul A. Cohen, professor of history emeritus at Wellesley College and associate at the Harvard Fairbank Center and author of the forthcoming Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China:

China Beat: I assume you've seen Orville Schell’s recent piece in Newsweek, in which he mentions your work on the power of the idea of “national humiliation” in Chinese historical memory. I was wondering if you had any thoughts to share about Schell’s essay—or about the longer version that appeared in the New York Review of Books?

Paul Cohen: I liked Schell’s piece (which I read in the NYRB version). His take on continuing Chinese sensitivity to “national humiliation” is well-articulated and persuasive. At the same time it must be said that this is a large and complicated topic, one that cannot easily be covered in a short article. Let me touch briefly on a few points that would need to be dealt with to create a fuller understanding of the issue:

(1) The views of different sectors of the population—urban/rural, highly educated/less well educated, young/middle-age/elderly—need to be disaggregated and analyzed carefully. It shouldn't be assumed that they’re all identical either in nature or origin.

(2) The mystery of the young, who are identified in the article as being among the most intense in their sense of victimization in spite of having been born in the post-Mao years, is a conspicuous example. There was a major effort beginning in the early 1990s to indoctrinate this part of the population with the importance of “not forgetting” (buwang) the suffering and humiliation of the imperialist interval in China's history—an interval they themselves hadn’t experienced. This was part of the broader phenomenon of resurgent nationalism that marked these years and was strongly pushed by the state, in part to supply a substitute form of legitimation for a Communist party whose original Marxist-Leninist-Maoist vision had lost much of its shine. It’s important to look at the content and approach of the modern Chinese history this sector of the population has been exposed to. Yuan Weishi got into trouble a few years back for pointing out how little it has to do with reality.

(3) The situational character of many nationalistic outbursts...[read on]

Read the complete interview.

--Marshal Zeringue