1996: China Can Say No, and a Bigger Wave of Nationalism | What Kind of China Do Best-Sellers Show Us? ④

Part of this is a look back at the stories of these legendary books. The larger question, of course, is this: why do we have the society we have today? What have we lived through? What have we gained and what have we lost? What wealth and what consensus have we built up? How did we get here?

As a society is, so is its book market.

We picked a number of books that made a deep mark on China, tracked down the authors or editors behind them, and asked each to tell the story of one book.

Part of this is a look back at the stories of these legendary books. The larger question, of course, is this: why do we have the society we have today? What have we lived through? What have we gained and what have we lost? What wealth and what consensus have we built up? How did we get here?

This is the fourth book.

"Looking back, it was certainly a rough piece of work, but it really did cut a mark into history. Who wrote it doesn't matter much — the times produced it," Song Qiang, one of the book's authors, told QDaily 21 years after China Can Say No came out.

China Can Say No was a best-seller published in 1996, subtitled "Political and Emotional Choices in the Post-Cold War Era." In it, five authors — Song Qiang, Zhang Xiaobo, Qiao Bian, Gu Qingsheng and Tang Zhenyu — set out their views on China's foreign relations and domestic politics, most of which came down to criticizing the United States and questioning Western hegemony. The collection of current-affairs essays sold "an estimated 7 million copies," was translated into eight languages and drew coverage from more than a hundred news organizations around the world. "This may be the book with the largest influence in the West since reform and opening up," Song said.

In the 1990s China's economy grew fast and the country grew stronger. In the 1980s China had met the West at a distance, through books, films and other cultural products; in the 1990s it was pulled much further into the world's political, economic and cultural system, and its interests began to collide directly with the West's, above all with America's.

For instance: after 1989, China and the United States held several rounds of large-scale talks on intellectual property. In 1991, 1994 and 1996 the US Trade Representative put China on the list of "priority" countries for intellectual-property infringement in reports to Congress, and imposed trade sanctions.

On July 23, 1993 came the Yinhe incident. The United States accused the Chinese freighter Yinhe of carrying chemical-weapons ingredients to Iran and threatened to sanction China. The Yinhe was forced to submit to inspection at the port of Dammam. On September 4, Chinese and Saudi representatives and an American adviser signed an inspection report confirming that the ship carried no banned chemicals.

On September 24, 1993, China's Olympic bid failed: Beijing lost to Sydney by two votes. Around the same time the country was grinding through its talks to join the WTO. All of this was read at the time as obstruction by the United States and other Western countries — international relations, it seemed, were a hard and pitiless business.

In 1995, Wang Xiaodong, a researcher at the China Youth and Children Research Center, had dinner with three other men — Fang Ning, a researcher at the Institute of Political Science of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; Ma Mingjie, a reporter at China Youth Daily; and Yang Ping, a reporter at Beijing Youth Daily — at the Red Mansion, a restaurant beside the Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio on Beijing's North Third Ring Road. Over the meal Wang proposed a survey called "Chinese Youth Look at the World." China Youth Daily ran it in the end, and 150,000 questionnaires came back and were counted. In the results, the Chinese respondents named the United States the least friendly country and the one they liked least. Wang took this as the voice of ordinary Chinese at the time.

"The authors of China Can Say No said so themselves: writing that book was heavily influenced by the 'Chinese Youth Look at the World' survey," Wang told QDaily. Years later Wang joined Song Qiang and Zhang Xiaobo, two of the authors of China Can Say No, to produce the best-seller Unhappy China, and foreign media took to calling him "the standard-bearer of Chinese nationalism."

Around then, the private book dealer Zhang Xiaobo caught these shifts in the Chinese mood of the 1990s. "They started to think that defending the national interest should come first. They cared about our country's place in international relations, about how our people live. These are things you feel emotionally, by instinct," Zhang said in an interview. In the 1980s Zhang, like many young people of the time, loved writing poetry and was himself a poet. To make a living he later became a book dealer; today he is president of Beijing Phoenix Liandong Culture Media.

The moment was not to be missed. Zhang asked four friends — Song Qiang, Qiao Bian, Gu Qingsheng and Tang Zhenyu — to write China Can Say No, about 30,000 characters each. Song was then a department head at Chongqing Economic Radio; Qiao Bian, a pen name, worked at the Beijing Landscaping Bureau and wrote poetry under another pen name, "Mofei"; Gu Qingsheng was a freelance writer who had been scraping by in Beijing for two years; Tang Zhenyu was a reporter at China Business Times who had covered China's WTO accession talks. By Zhang's account the writing was a loose affair: no assignments were handed out, everyone wrote what he liked, and Song, for one, picked the United States. A month later Zhang had all the manuscripts. A month or so after that, in the summer, China Can Say No was published. The title borrowed from The Japan That Can Say No: A Strategy for New Japan-US Relations, co-written by Shintaro Ishihara, a member of the Japanese right-wing group Seirankai, and the Sony director Akio Morita.

Perhaps it was coincidence, but 1996, the year China Can Say No appeared, was also the year of the Taiwan Strait crisis. In June 1995 the Taiwanese leader Lee Teng-hui visited the United States, drawing condemnation from the mainland. In March 1996 the mainland fired missiles into the waters around Taiwan. The United States answered quickly, sending two carrier battle groups into the strait. One spark would have set the two countries off. That is part of why many people abroad mistook the book for a product of Chinese government propaganda.

What Zhang and his authors had not expected was how fast the press would come to the book once it was out, and how quickly it would start selling. Within a few months of publication they were interviewed by Asiaweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the four big American television networks, the Voice of America, NHK and many others, and the book went back to press again and again. Reference News, then China's highest-circulation newspaper, reprinted the foreign coverage, which pushed sales higher still. "In a sense it was exported and then reimported," Song said. The book also changed the course of his own life. "From then on my life was in publishing," he said.

Still, Song thinks it "sad" that China Can Say No had such a large effect in the West. "The West wants the exotic out of China. It assumes a third-world country must be having a coup, or unrest, or a nationalist awakening — that is the kind of thing that has news value to them. So this was not a good thing," Song told QDaily.

At home, the book's success turned some of its slogans into catchphrases and set Chinese nerves jangling. Lines like: "America can lead no one; America can only lead itself. Japan can lead no one; sometimes Japan cannot even lead itself. China wants to lead no one; China only wants to lead itself"; "America's collapse is only a matter of time!"; "In less than ten years, fifteen at most, the American economy will run into serious trouble"; "The 21st century will be a century belonging to the Chinese"; "There is not a single peace or advance in this world that does not owe something to China's merit."

The slogans inside were not the only provocation; the cover made the same case. Beneath the Great Wall, standing for China, is the body of an American GI, hands on hips, topped with the head of the Statue of Liberty — two symbols set hard against each other. "As a cover, by design standards, it fails," Song told QDaily, "but precisely because Chinese readers then were in a restless frame of mind, you needed some emblematic words and images to get their attention. So at that moment the cover succeeded."

China Can Say No also drew criticism. "China Can Say No is its authors' emotional choice about world politics, but emotion cannot take the place of policy. If a great power in the 21st century says no at the drop of a hat, does that not drag the theme of the age back from peace and development to Cold War confrontation? China must not speak about world affairs so rashly and irresponsibly," wrote Shen Jiru, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in his book China Should Not Play Mr. No. China Economic Times ran an article saying that "an extreme nationalist mood is brewing inside China, and it could lead the country down the wrong road. History shows that a rising great power easily makes the mistake of overrating its own strength." The author was the paper's deputy editor-in-chief, Zhang Jianjing, now executive deputy editor-in-chief of Caixin's China Reform. Southern Weekly published a piece by its editor Yan Lieshan saying that China Can Say No "treats an extremely serious question of foreign and domestic politics with an extremely rash and flighty attitude." The well-known writer Wang Xiaobo also wrote a critical essay, "Commoners, Foreigners and Officials: On China Can Say No." In the end the government had to say something too. Shen Guofang, then the Foreign Ministry spokesman, told Chinese and foreign reporters: "China Can Say No does not represent the government's views."

Song, for his part, thinks that saying "no" is the posture of the weak, or of a new challenger — which, to a degree, assumes an unequal relationship beforehand.

"After Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour talks, the whole of 1996 was a fairly noisy time in China. Everyone seemed to feel that their own life and career was on the way up, so they cared more about how the country's rise connected to their own — that is why you got some genuine reactions then," Song told QDaily.

The so-called great power was beginning to rise, but its international standing was not climbing as fast as its strength; that standing stayed "low." The gap pricked Chinese pride and nationalist feeling, and gave anti-American, anti-Western thinking a solid psychological base.

Nor was the current confined to the mass public that China Can Say No spoke for. After the 1990s the intellectuals split as well: Gan Yang and Cui Zhiyuan's theory of institutional innovation, Zhang Yiwu and Chen Xiaoming's postcolonial cultural criticism, Sheng Hong's comparison of civilizations — each criticized the West in its own way. This was nothing like the atmosphere of the 1980s, which had been seen as an heir to the May Fourth Movement and was called the "New Enlightenment Movement."

At the end of 1996 came Behind the Demonization of China, written by eight authors including Li Xiguang, Xiong Lei and Liu Kang, which pushed the anti-Western, nationalist wave that China Can Say No had started. "The American media represent the interests of the big bourgeoisie and the multinationals, and nothing else. Any report out of China has to serve one purpose: to plant in the American public the prejudice that China is a totalitarian, despotic, anti-human-rights, last remaining communist country, and that now the Soviet Union has fallen apart, China should be next," the book says.

On May 8, 1999, an American B-2 bomber hit China's embassy in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with three precision-guided bombs, or Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), killing three Chinese journalists — Shao Yunhuan, Xu Xinghu and Zhu Ying — on the spot, wounding dozens and wrecking the embassy building. The United States called it an accident. Many Chinese people did not accept that, and anti-American and nationalist feeling reached a new peak. They demonstrated outside the embassies of the United States and other NATO countries in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenyang; some set fire to American fast-food restaurants and damaged American diplomatic missions. Song feels the bombing "bore out what we had said."

Why did Chinese nationalist talk suddenly run high again after the 1990s, when its first modern surge had come in response to Western invasion? The journalist Ma Licheng explained it in his book Eight Social Trends in Contemporary China: "First, China and the West differ in values and in systems, and the friction never stops, so relations between them are tense from time to time. Second, after the upheaval of the late 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the once-huge socialist camp vanished. Ideology had no choice but to turn to nationalism to hold off Western power, so nationalism shot up, and moved quickly from a subject discussed in small intellectual circles to a mass emotional frenzy."

By the 2000s China had won the Olympics and joined the WTO. Its GDP moved from seventh in the world (1996) to third (2008), behind only Japan and the United States; GDP per head rose from 5,898 yuan (1996) to 24,121 yuan (2008); cars went from 1.49 million (1996) to 9.3455 million (2008). At the same time, the financial crisis changed how eager Chinese officials were to learn from the West, and many ordinary Chinese began to doubt it too.

In 2008 China held the Summer Olympics. During the torch relay before the Games the torch ran into obstruction or protest in a number of countries and regions. In France, where the police were seen as handling the protests badly, Chinese internet users started a boycott of Carrefour. The Games, a ceremony with enormous power to bind people together and swell national pride, pushed Chinese nationalist feeling to another high.

Once again Zhang Xiaobo caught the change of mood, and decided to publish Unhappy China, which was taken as a sequel to China Can Say No. "We felt the moment was right," Song told QDaily.

On October 3, 2008, Zhang Xiaobo, Song Qiang, Wang Xiaodong, Song Xiaojun, Liu Yang and Huang Jisu, among others, came to a farmhouse courtyard near the Shangzhuang Reservoir in Beijing. Song Xiaojun was a military commentator for CCTV and Phoenix TV; Huang Jisu was a playwright and sociologist whose plays included Che Guevara and Accidental Death of an Anarchist; Liu Yang was a media figure and scholar.

Most of them were old friends of many years. They talked for three days straight, and Zhang recorded and took notes on the whole conversation. He then sent the tidied-up transcripts to the five authors to add to or revise. In March 2009, during that year's "Two Sessions," Unhappy China was published. The theme they had started with, "China's conditional break with the West," ended up as one chapter, and the section on "domestic grievances" was cut back.

Unhappy China was subtitled "The Great Era, the Grand Goal, and Our Troubles at Home and Abroad," and the belly band carried, in large type: "Speaking Out for the Nation, Carrying Out Heaven's Will, the Nation's Fortunes, Upheaval in Diplomacy, A Society Adrift." China leading the world is "heaven's mandate," the book says; "we should be number one, we should lead this world, with Westerners second"; and it praises a "martial spirit" and "doing business with a sword in hand."

The five authors also named and attacked well-known intellectuals: Long Yongtu, Li Yining, Justin Yifu Lin, Fan Gang, Ding Xueliang, Cui Weiping, Zhu Xueqin, Yu Shicun, Ma Licheng, Wang Meng, Wang Shuo, Wang Xiaobo, Li Yinhe, Zhou Xiaozheng. Most of them were seen as figures of the liberal camp.

As the authors saw it, China Can Say No had said China did not want to lead the world, only itself, while Unhappy China wanted China to lead the world. What had changed in those 13 years was the country's strength; the so-called great power was rising. The year before Unhappy China came out, Zhang had also published a nationalist book by Wang Xiaodong, Destiny Belongs to the Great Powers: On Being a Heroic Nation and a World Leader.

So, Wang says, the main readers of Unhappy China were the science-and-engineering men at elite universities. "Science and engineering men understand how China has developed over these years, the huge progress in technology and industry. Arts students don't understand it — all they know is how to talk big; they have no idea what the real situation is," Wang told QDaily.

As with China Can Say No, Unhappy China drew heavy press coverage, including The Economist, the Financial Times, the BBC and Phoenix TV. Wang says that by an incomplete count, in the issues of Reference News he saw alone there were as many as 16 pieces about the book. The coverage naturally drove sales.

In the end Unhappy China, with a first print run of only 70,000, sold more than a million copies and spawned a run of books with similar titles: China Is Very Happy, What Gives China the Right to Be Unhappy, Why Is China Unhappy, Who in China Is Unhappy, Why China Is Unhappy, China Has No Role Model. It was another runaway hit.

"China Can Say No and Unhappy China were both products of an explosion of thinking at a particular moment in China's history. We still want to write. We think there is a need for another Unhappy China — not written by me, of course, because there are more representative people who could write it," Song told QDaily, eight years after Unhappy China, 21 years after China Can Say No, and a career in publishing later.

Song explains the books by "the right moment" and "a particular historical period." Wang Xiaodong does not. He thinks Unhappy China sold because nothing like it was on offer. The men of letters who hold a monopoly on supplying cultural products in China, he argues, are out of joint with the cultural market as a whole. Wang calls what they practice "reverse racism" — a racism of self-belittlement and self-denial, contemptuous of one's own and fawning on the foreign, "which holds that China is no good at anything, that the Chinese are an inferior race."

"Things that hate China and curse China — society doesn't actually like them. Writing that loves China, that says China should be strong, that China is formidable — society likes that. Among ordinary people, patriotism has always been the mainstream," Wang told QDaily.

Like its predecessor, this book brought plenty of criticism. Time magazine wrote that if nationalist feeling were not properly checked, it could push Beijing onto a belligerent, isolationist path. The Chinese scholar Wu Jiaxiang published an article in China Youth Daily, "Make China Obey My Mood: On the Sick Nationalism Unhappy China Is Selling," arguing that the book peddled a sick nationalism with four features: wearing scars as medals; narcissism paired with exclusion; eyes set in the back of the head; and a taste for war. In short, from victim's psychology to the swagger of the newly rich.

He Xiongfei, the publisher behind the "Grassland Tribes" series, moved fast after Unhappy China appeared and enlisted Zhang Yihe, Li Ming, Wang Wenyuan, Li Jianjun and Zhou Fei to write, with him, a rebuttal called Why China Is Unhappy. "We felt that, in terms of the Enlightenment spirit, the core of Chinese thought since May Fourth is still democracy and science — Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science. It should be a marriage of Chinese and Western, not a rejection of the West. Because rejecting the West can only mean closing the country off. You fall further and further behind, and falling behind means being beaten; China can never truly stand up that way," He told QDaily.

Wang does not find such criticism "fair or serious," because it is not pitched on the same plane. "We never criticized American democracy either. We oppose them [the intellectuals Wang attacks] not because they argue for democracy, but because they always set democracy against nationalism, set democracy and freedom against national interest and national feeling. They tend to treat certain Western things as holy writ," Wang said in an interview. Patriotism, or nationalism, he believes, does not conflict with universal values such as liberal democracy.

More than a decade on, though, Wang's thinking has shifted. "I think Western democracy has its problems and we can't copy it wholesale. China should put forward a new political system, better than that one. For patriots and nationalists, whichever political or economic system makes the country strong and the people prosperous and secure is the good one. The minimum aim is a rich and powerful country — only then can the people be well off," Wang told QDaily.

On the difference between nationalism and patriotism, Wang argues: "Patriotism means official propaganda. Official propaganda is clumsy and a lot of people dislike it. They have given patriotism a bad name. Nationalism is patriotism from below. Many commentators outside officialdom wanted a new word, to get away from the patriotism the authorities had spoiled, and they hit on nationalism."

And yet: "Chinese nationalism naturally needs to resist world hegemony in its many forms, but it also needs to learn from models of modernization around the world, the West's included. Only when this open, modern political content of nationalism is basically in place, and when the members of the community consciously and genuinely accept it through a constitutional process, will Chinese nationalism become truly 'solid' — only then will it have a stable, lasting power to hold things together and become something the whole nation identifies with," wrote Xu Jilin, a professor of history at East China Normal University, in his book Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment in Contemporary China.

Song himself agrees that nationalism is a "double-edged sword," but "in this long historical process in which China, or the world, is playing this game, the future included, nationalism will always be the logical starting point for thinking about anything," he told QDaily.

The year after Unhappy China came out, in 2010, Moluo, once a liberal intellectual, published a nationalist work of his own, China Stands Up: Our Future, Our Destiny and Our Spiritual Liberation, which had some influence as well. As publishing went, nationalism looked like a reasonably good business.

More important, different readings of Chinese history and different attitudes toward the West split the Chinese public apart. "As China developed, that crack in thinking only got wider," Song said. Labels kept appearing: liberals, the Old Left, the New Left, nationalists, populists, democratic socialists, New Confucians, the "50-cent party," the "US-cent party."

China, the great power, kept rising. In 2011 its total GDP passed Japan's, making it the world's second-largest economy after the United States; GDP per head rose from 24,121 yuan (2008) to 53,974 yuan (2016); cars went from 9.3455 million (2008) to 28.119 million (2016).

Nationalist feeling stayed high as the country rose. In 2012, when Japan moved to nationalize the Diaoyu Islands, Chinese people protested and marched in force, and some acted irrationally: Li Jianli, a Xi'an man who drove a Japanese car, had his skull smashed in by patriotic young men and is still being treated in hospital. At the end of 2015 the Taiwanese entertainer Chou Tzuyu waved a Republic of China flag on a South Korean variety show and Chinese internet users called for a boycott. Then the "Diba" forum marched out onto Facebook and flooded the pages of Taiwan's SETN, Apple Daily and Liberty Times, and Tsai Ing-wen's own page, with memes. Right up to the recent sovereignty disputes with Vietnam and the Philippines in the South China Sea, and the protests against Lotte set off by South Korea's deployment of the THAAD missile system, the nationalist feelings of many Chinese have been easy to rouse.

Wang thinks "young people are actually more patriotic than our generation. The China they have seen goes from victory to victory." "As for Unhappy China, I think the readers were a mainstream crowd either way, whether they criticized it or backed it," Song told QDaily. Looking at it now, it does seem to have become the mainstream.

The books we plan to write about:

The Ugly Chinaman (1986)

China Can Say No (1996)

Rich Dad Poor Dad (2000)

Who Moved My Cheese? (2001)

Jack: Straight from the Gut (2001)

Unhappy China (2009)

Wild Fire (1988)

The Birth of Tragedy (1986)

Tolerance (1985)

The Path of Beauty (1981), and more

Cover image: a still from the documentary China: A New Rise, from Douban