I'm reminded of something the Englishman G. K. Chesterton wrote when he visited America shortly after World War I:
"But there was something else that made me uncomfortable; it was not only the sense of being somewhat boisterously forgiven; it was also something involving questions of power as well as morality. Then it seemed to me that a new sensation turned me hot and cold; and I felt something I have never before felt in a foreign land. Never had my father or my grandfather known that sensation; never during the great and complex and perhaps perilous expansion of our power and commerce in the last hundred years had an Englishman heard exactly that note in a human voice. England was being *pitied*. I, as an Englishman, was not only being pardoned but pitied. My country was beginning to be an object of compassion, like Poland or Spain. My first emotion, full of the mood and movement of a hundred years, was one of furious anger. But the anger has given place to anxiety; and the anxiety is not yet at an end."
I can see a couple of other people have contributed their perspective as British people; I'd like to add mine, particularly in gratitude for all the work you do on this!
I think the phrase that's relevant here is, "the axe forgets, but the tree remembers". Which is to say that every country where the British committed atrocities remembers the details of all of those atrocities; every Irish person, for example, can list every detail of what Britain did there, whereas the average British person is aware of the Great Famine and maybe a general sense of historical guilt, and that's it.
That's not surprising. There are 197 countries in the world and Britain did terrible things in quite a lot of them. Even listing all of the countries that were at some point under the control of the British Empire is a significant exercise in memorisation. I don't think the average British person is aware of what Britain did in China, and if they were told, the reaction would be something like "oh, there too?" Most people now learn about the worst of the British Empire at school (read: slavery) but not the details of everything the British Empire did, in part because there wouldn't be any time left to learn about anything else.
If you are someone (generally left-leaning) who feels that the British Empire was especially bad and people in the modern day do have a moral responsibility to atone for its actions (and a majority do not think that, either because they think the British Empire was a good thing/less bad than other contemporary empires, or because they don't think we bear a responsibility for the actions of our ancestors), then China is _still_ very far down the list of countries to apologise to or to return artefacts to. I think for the average person there are three reasons for that.
1. Because we did much worse in other places. Find any list of the worst atrocities of the British Empire, and China doesn't feature. (This is - I hope obviously - not a defence of the British Empire in China). Apologies should, intuitively, be given to the worst affected first, and I'd note that we have apologised to Ireland and to Kenya. (Personally I feel we should be giving a LOT more apologies than that, but I'm trying not to make this about my views).
2. Because modern China is doing reasonably well. I think for the average person, if we are going to apologise for our history, and especially if that comes with financial recompense, it should be to the countries that are still suffering the worst consequences. Some people want UK aid spending to be explicitly treated as reparations for British colonialism. Outside of disaster support, very few people want the UK to send aid to China.
3. Because British people are generally hostile to the Chinese government. Not, I would say, to Chinese people, culture, etc, but decidedly towards the CCP. If actions to atone for colonialism - an apology, a return of artefacts etc - would strengthen the CCP, then I would expect most British people to be against it.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I think something that's really important to understand is that British culture is very much in favour of supporting the underdog. You see this in the massive popular support for Ukraine here. There are quite possibly more Ukrainian flags flying in Britain today than British ones. Most British people are extremely proud that our country is one of Ukraine's top supporters globally.
This is not because of any particular attachment to Ukraine, a country that most British people couldn't have found on a map before February last year. It's because, regardless of how out of step this might sound with our country's history, British people love to support an underdog, particularly an underdog fighting for values of democracy and freedom that we share.
China is not an underdog and never really has been. That affects the British view of the past - instinctively, British people feel much more guilt about atrocities in countries that were completely unable to defend themselves, where we had machine guns and they had spears and shields. (Is this an accurate view of historical battles? It doesn't really matter - it's one that a lot of people here would share). Whereas Britain v China was one empire against another.
I think this is also where Britain's view of itself differs considerably from China's view. We see ourselves (ahistorically, but nonetheless) as an underdog. A lot of British writing refers to Britain as "a small island" or similar. Even when the British Empire was at its height, there was a lot of insecurity about falling behind Germany or the USA.
You didn't ask this, but the preference for the underdog also affects the British view of the present - in particular, in the context of Taiwan. If China were to invade Taiwan, I don't think there would be quite the same surge of support for Taiwan as there was and still is for Ukraine, partly because it's further away, partly because the British economy is so much more dependent on China than on Russia. But nonetheless, even for people who know nothing much about either country, of course you side with the smaller, weaker country, especially if it's a democracy.
That's why I think there's so much more similarity between China and Britain than China and America! This is kind of really hard to tell, because the CCP loves nothing more than making up numbers to make it look like China is doing super great and everything is going well. But the average person living in China right now know very viscerally how difficult their lives are, how little hope they have for the future, how hard they have to work just to eke out survival. In the rural areas where I live, people still literally starve to death in bad years. The Chinese population absolutely sees themselves as the underdog to the superpowers like America and the EU.
But on the other hand, all the statistics that we publish to the world and the attitude we take on diplomacy very much gives the international community the impression that China is practically already a superpower. They don't need help or sympathy. And that coldness worsens Chinese people's impression of other countries, as fundamentally selfish and only out for their own profit. Which helps with the CCP's propaganda efforts.
Like, I'm not saying that China deserves an apology more than any other colony, or that it deserves compensation or anything. (I honestly think most of the atrocities that happened during western colonisation of China is more the fault of the Chinese government than colonial powers. Though, uh, returning our stuff would be nice). But I really do think that there's not going to be any shaking the CCP's control of China without that apology and outreach.
But then we have a chicken and egg problem. The CCP's been so aggressive and hostile this past decade that other countries feel very much like they're threatened too. And when they're all baring their teeth and hissing at each other, nobody wants to look weak by being the first one to back down.
I'm English. On your questions at the end, here's a few thoughts:
- Mostly we don't think or care about Empire very much at all. A few political obsessives rail against how terrible it was, and a few of basically the same personality type try to defend it; but normal people don't think about it much. In England, it is less important to our sense of identity than how we did in the football World Cup in 1966.
- The analogy with China is very, very, very weak. There are two parts to that. (1) China was the centre of its world for thousands of years. Britain has been a semi-barbarian backwater of Europe for almost all of its existence. Sure, for a hundred years this was reversed, and for a few hundred years before that the UK was becoming a more major power; but even at the very height of Empire it didn't dominate its immediate neighbours in Europe in the same way as China has almost always dominated its surroundings. (2) The idea of a unified China is ancient. The UK unified in 1707, which is moments ago for a nation, and the idea of it has nowhere near the same cultural weight. Most Scots and Welsh identify as Scottish or Welsh, and even the English are beginning to identify as 'English' again more than 'British'. British identity is not hegemonic in Northern Ireland! In other words, outside of the political-media class (which is one entity here), very few people give a shit about 'Britain' at a deep in-the-bones level. Lots of the elite class identify more with 'Europe' than 'Britain', even post-Brexit. Most normal people identify more with their constituent nation-state.
- Stolen treasures in our museums are mostly just fuel for comedians. Opinions differ, and some people might argue about it in the pub; but no-one normal is losing sleep over it.
That's surprising. I guess it might just be that I was mostly looking at British writings in like 1890, but I always got the sense that Britain was just as proud of its long history, and believe they were always a great empire going back to King Arthur. Whether that's historically true isn't that important, I just always got the sense that people at that moment in time was very much like, "The British Empire has always been a superpower and will always be a superpower!"
I guess today, after the shock of two world wars, British people probably feel very differently about the British Empire. Sort of the same way that Chinese people certainly don't identify as strongly with Dynastic China.
I don't think I've made clear how weak the analogy is: China unified over 2200 years ago and, in Mohism, already had a sophisticated philosophy that integrated all the levels of social organisation from the individual to the Empire. Britain unified 300 years ago; and liberalism, the overwhelmingly popular philosophy at every level of society, expressly places the state and all other levels of social organisation in conflict.
In China it might be natural to integrate natural pride of place with pride in the state apparatus. In the UK, despite the attempts of the high-Empire writers and their (much inferior) current media descendants, it is not. It is normal to be proud, even intensely proud, of being from England, for instance, while hating the apparatus of the British state and wishing we would stop pretending to be important on the global stage. Even our soldiers thought our recent involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan were a total waste of time and money from the start, and our soldiers are all volunteers.
There's a couple of further points on this:
England is not Britain: you and half the commentators mix the two together, but they are not the same thing politically or culturally. This really matters when you're trying to disentangle patriotism, loyalty to a place, from nationalism, loyalty to the state; and you have to do that to understand attitudes to Empire within Britain.
Many of the books you've been reading, if they are from that era and now classics, are also the product of and attempting to justify a massive process of internal colonialism that was then ending: a couple of centuries of 'enclosures', 'land improvement', 'clearances' had displaced large swathes of the population from its ancestral places; and the sort of people who were writing books were mostly from the class of people who had an interest in justifying this process because they had done very well out of it.
>wishing we would stop pretending to be important on the global stage
That's a very different mindset, and yeah, I see what you mean. There's enough of a solidified identity of China as the top dog, that there's a very unified national drive to get back to that place. Even all the way back in 1949, when China was probably one of the most war-torn and poorest places in the world, people weren't just concerned about getting to a point of being functional again. They were worried about becoming powerful, being on equal standing as the European powers.
I just kind of assumed that anyone from a former superpower empire feels the same way. I mean, it does sort of seem like Russia wants to go back to the glory days of ruling the Soviet block, doesn't it? It's very interesting to hear that British people really just want to be ordinary. Why is that? Is it cultural? Or is it political? Like, is it that Britain's got a good enough relationship with the current superpower that it just doesn't seem worth it to put in the effort and money and time to try? Since they're mostly getting everything they need/want anyways?
I think you've hit the nail on the head at the end: life for almost everyone in Britain is far better under American hegemony than it ever was under our own Empire. This is why there has been absolutely no-one of any significance calling for a return to Empire in the last 50 years. Our political arguments are about what we should do within the world order, never about remaking it.
Another factor is that, on the whole, we like Americans. We love the music and movies, and in terms of culture, language, and legal system we are often closer to them than to our European neighbours. Sure, there's been a degree of cultural domination; but it came with burgers and rock and roll. We haven't minded.
And, again, 'Britain' is a young and shallow construct. It was easy to support when it had the whole world at its feet, in the same way as its easy to support a sport team on a winning streak. Almost no-one alive remembers those days now, though, so older and more culturally ingrained loyalties - for instance to Scotland, or even to subnational entities like Yorkshire, Cornwall, or the Orkneys - are reasserting themselves. The political-media class have 'loyalty' to 'Britain' but only because they're busy squabbling among themselves about who gets to take money from the population. Outside of them, disillusionment is normal.
I highly recommend the podcast ‘Stuff the British Stole’ for a better look into why artifacts aren’t returned. Legally, the Royal British Museum cannot repatriate anything. It’s written into law, and changing it would require repealing or amending those laws. There is definitely a sense of entitlement, but that is slowly changing. Unfortunately, it will have to change a lot more before there’s enough political will to rewrite the laws. Until then, museum curators aren’t allowed to use their own discretion (which is how repatriation mostly works in other former colonial powers).
I’m finding that certain aspects of China actually remind me of Quebec. I think in the way that they both went from colonizer to colonized? But that sense of grievance past any point of utility is very familiar. The outrage over the oppression of Franco-Canadians under British and then Canadian rule turned first into Quebec separatism (and screw all francophones outside Quebec; they’re not politically useful), and then into out-and-out white supremacy and xenophobia! Never mind they weren’t even white until the 70s…
Oooh, that's interesting! It's a take I haven't seen before! I gotta research more into Quebec. I know, like, nothing about Canada or Canadian history.
Pure speculation, and I have to emphasize it's pure speculation: I think Britain doesn't think of itself as a continuation of the British Empire in the way that the CCP and KMT think of themselves as the inheritors of a cultural legacy 3000 years long. And I believe they're not big on the whole "sins of the father" kinda thing, so it's "no longer" "their fault".
Really? It doesn't? Why not? I mean, the royal family is still the same continuation as the British Empire, right? That's actually super surprising to me! That a nation can identify as a different entity, despite having the same governmental structure and the same ruling family and the same territory and the same make up of population. I wonder how that happened?
I don't think this is right, I'm afraid. I'm a Brit, and I think that the country has just never got to grips with the idea that the British Empire was a bad thing. Like, in 1997, people were genuinely mad that we had to return Hong Kong to China. And I don't think it was really concern for the plight of the poor Hong Kong residents.
I dunno, I've been out of the country for the last 20 years, so maybe things have changed a bit. But unlike Japan and Germany, where losing WWII forced a reckoning with the fact that their 30s regimes were bad, Britain never lost on home ground. (There was that embarrassing incident of being defeated by nonviolence in India, but it seems to have been forgotten - I never learned about it in school, and it rarely comes up as a subject for documentaries or background for novels, etc.) So my impression is that British people don't feel much guilt about empire because they genuinely don't think it was bad.
Neat! That's kind of the impression I got, based on British memos at the time that things were going down. There was no moustache-twirling machinations of like, "Oh, yes, we're deliberately getting China addicted to opium so we can take China over and rule it with an iron fist!" It seems like almost everybody involved was really doing what they thought was best? Like, they thought that their actions in China were helping China?
Yeah, I reckon. Certainly a lot of the religious types thought they were helping by converting the heathens. I think there were also some who had a kind of trade fundamentalism: if China's trade with us is imbalanced, then something is wrong, and it's our duty to rebalance it. If opium is the only way, then so be it! It sounds bizarre when we say it now, but that does seem have been a justification put forward...
I mean, whatever the justifications were, though, they don't really matter. Villains always have reasons for why they're doing what they're doing.
Well, no, it makes sense. It's not like anyone really thought Opium was evil? Like I said, it's not like Victorian Londoners weren't doing a lot of opium themselves. They were giving heroine to their own babies. Why would anyone think it was wrong to sell it to the Chinese? I don't think there was any research into the harms of opiates until well into the 20th century.
Would be interesting to hear your take on Adam Curtis' Can't Get You Out My Head, Episode 5, on the consequences of the Opium War, English empire guilt and pop culture sinophobia
What Britain did or even what Japan did is irrelevant. What matters is that the chinese government needs to ramp up xenophobia so anecdotes from a brutal past are always kept in the spotlight. This butthurt nationalist propaganda used to be the widespread in Europe, and given how brutal european history is there were plenty of nasty events to be angry about. But after 2 devastating World Wars that left Europe in ruins politicians started to understand that they need to chill with the ultra nationalist hatemongering and as they started to build the European Union past grievances were mostly laid to rest.
And the demand for apologies is absurd. Qing China had no qualms about invading, conquering and looting other countries and communist China feels no shame in justifying her rights over the non-Han parts of of the country on Qing conquests. That's how morality was back then and in reality it is how it still is.
Yeah, but other aspects of CCP propaganda isn't nearly as successful as this part. They've been trying to convince people that the Chinese economy is doing great, and nobody really believes it. They've been trying to convince people first that it's necessary to have less kids, and now that it's necessary to have more kids, and nobody really believes it. To some extent, they try to erase their own evils in the past, and even with it entirely cut out of textbooks and banned on the internet, people have some concept of what happened still through word of mouth.
But this narrative of western powers always lurking by just waiting for an opportunity to re-colonise China again is deeply popular, and was believed by people even back in the 80s and 90s, when China was the most open and friendly to the west. It's just that back then, it wasn't the official government narrative, and now it is.
For what it's worth, the CCP always uses propaganda to whitewash the Qing government a lot. Out of all the dynasties in Ancient Chinese History, you're not allowed to write fiction where you travel back in time to overthrow the monarchy in precisely the Qing Dynasty. You can write about going back and ensuring that Li Longji was never born. But you can't write about going back and making sure Aisin-Goro Xuanye was never born. And yet, the average person is still pretty fucking upset about the Qing Dynasty. People hate the Qing government. But the Qing government is definitely dead and gone now, so it's not an anxiety-inducing current threat people feel the need to worry about, the same as America or the EU.
That's because the topic of historical grievances is always popular, it's a meme that goes viral quickly so it can be used to stir up hatred very easily. Note how much of public discourse is about historical grievances even in the US, especially about black slavery, racism, native americans, the Holocaust etc.
Just in the last few years, NYT, the so called newspaper of record, has pushed The 1619 Project, a pseudo-historical fabrication about slavery and they bring up Emmet Till hundreds of times a year despite being a racist murder that happened all the way back in 1955.
Fear of other countries is also a very popular meme with a long and bloody history. Combine the 2 memes and you have a formidable instrument of manipulation.
No, though, Chiang Kai Shek was literally kidnapped by armed men and was forced at gunpoint to declare war on Japan. I literally mean he literally had a gun to his head.
I think it's only valid because after he was released, he still stuck by the terms he agreed to, instead of instantly turning around and going back on what promises he made. I guess the threat on his life was secondary to the shock of discovering just how much popular support was behind declaring war on Japan, and just how much of China he was alienating by holding out.
Don't see where the contradiction is between "Where people believe that money needs to go towards some nebulous “making China stronger” purpose, instead of actually keeping its own citizens alive." that you claim to see, but of course it's all a sample size of one
I will literally never understand why China throw money at making aircraft carriers that don't have nuclear propulsion instead of subsidising hospitals for treating poor people. I guess from a certain point of view, people think that military investments are more important because it keeps China safe. That if China's military is weak, then more people will die than just from leukemia.
But for me, it's like, surely, they know, that an aircraft carrier with no nuclear power and has never performed an operation in blue waters is completely and utterly pointless, and it won't make a difference at all in a war. But there are people dying of perfectly treatable illnesses because hospitals don't provide payment plans. It's not even that expensive. I wouldn't mind if you make it an option only available to minors under 18, to cut out the unending medical expenses of old people.
As a boring technical answer, learning how to fly aircraft from and land on an aircraft carrier is really hard. The non-nuclear carriers are basically training carriers where the pilots can learn and then the more senior officers can learn how to coordinate aircraft from a carrier.
They'd be no use in a war, but neither would a nuclear carrier for ten years until they learned how to use it and they can do eight of those ten years on the non-nuclear carrier.
Aircraft carriers are *hard*. The Japanese spent the entire 1930s getting ready for Pearl Harbor.
But your point is right even if your example isn't.
I'm reminded of something the Englishman G. K. Chesterton wrote when he visited America shortly after World War I:
"But there was something else that made me uncomfortable; it was not only the sense of being somewhat boisterously forgiven; it was also something involving questions of power as well as morality. Then it seemed to me that a new sensation turned me hot and cold; and I felt something I have never before felt in a foreign land. Never had my father or my grandfather known that sensation; never during the great and complex and perhaps perilous expansion of our power and commerce in the last hundred years had an Englishman heard exactly that note in a human voice. England was being *pitied*. I, as an Englishman, was not only being pardoned but pitied. My country was beginning to be an object of compassion, like Poland or Spain. My first emotion, full of the mood and movement of a hundred years, was one of furious anger. But the anger has given place to anxiety; and the anxiety is not yet at an end."
Wow, that is evocative.
I can see a couple of other people have contributed their perspective as British people; I'd like to add mine, particularly in gratitude for all the work you do on this!
I think the phrase that's relevant here is, "the axe forgets, but the tree remembers". Which is to say that every country where the British committed atrocities remembers the details of all of those atrocities; every Irish person, for example, can list every detail of what Britain did there, whereas the average British person is aware of the Great Famine and maybe a general sense of historical guilt, and that's it.
That's not surprising. There are 197 countries in the world and Britain did terrible things in quite a lot of them. Even listing all of the countries that were at some point under the control of the British Empire is a significant exercise in memorisation. I don't think the average British person is aware of what Britain did in China, and if they were told, the reaction would be something like "oh, there too?" Most people now learn about the worst of the British Empire at school (read: slavery) but not the details of everything the British Empire did, in part because there wouldn't be any time left to learn about anything else.
If you are someone (generally left-leaning) who feels that the British Empire was especially bad and people in the modern day do have a moral responsibility to atone for its actions (and a majority do not think that, either because they think the British Empire was a good thing/less bad than other contemporary empires, or because they don't think we bear a responsibility for the actions of our ancestors), then China is _still_ very far down the list of countries to apologise to or to return artefacts to. I think for the average person there are three reasons for that.
1. Because we did much worse in other places. Find any list of the worst atrocities of the British Empire, and China doesn't feature. (This is - I hope obviously - not a defence of the British Empire in China). Apologies should, intuitively, be given to the worst affected first, and I'd note that we have apologised to Ireland and to Kenya. (Personally I feel we should be giving a LOT more apologies than that, but I'm trying not to make this about my views).
2. Because modern China is doing reasonably well. I think for the average person, if we are going to apologise for our history, and especially if that comes with financial recompense, it should be to the countries that are still suffering the worst consequences. Some people want UK aid spending to be explicitly treated as reparations for British colonialism. Outside of disaster support, very few people want the UK to send aid to China.
3. Because British people are generally hostile to the Chinese government. Not, I would say, to Chinese people, culture, etc, but decidedly towards the CCP. If actions to atone for colonialism - an apology, a return of artefacts etc - would strengthen the CCP, then I would expect most British people to be against it.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I think something that's really important to understand is that British culture is very much in favour of supporting the underdog. You see this in the massive popular support for Ukraine here. There are quite possibly more Ukrainian flags flying in Britain today than British ones. Most British people are extremely proud that our country is one of Ukraine's top supporters globally.
This is not because of any particular attachment to Ukraine, a country that most British people couldn't have found on a map before February last year. It's because, regardless of how out of step this might sound with our country's history, British people love to support an underdog, particularly an underdog fighting for values of democracy and freedom that we share.
China is not an underdog and never really has been. That affects the British view of the past - instinctively, British people feel much more guilt about atrocities in countries that were completely unable to defend themselves, where we had machine guns and they had spears and shields. (Is this an accurate view of historical battles? It doesn't really matter - it's one that a lot of people here would share). Whereas Britain v China was one empire against another.
I think this is also where Britain's view of itself differs considerably from China's view. We see ourselves (ahistorically, but nonetheless) as an underdog. A lot of British writing refers to Britain as "a small island" or similar. Even when the British Empire was at its height, there was a lot of insecurity about falling behind Germany or the USA.
You didn't ask this, but the preference for the underdog also affects the British view of the present - in particular, in the context of Taiwan. If China were to invade Taiwan, I don't think there would be quite the same surge of support for Taiwan as there was and still is for Ukraine, partly because it's further away, partly because the British economy is so much more dependent on China than on Russia. But nonetheless, even for people who know nothing much about either country, of course you side with the smaller, weaker country, especially if it's a democracy.
That's why I think there's so much more similarity between China and Britain than China and America! This is kind of really hard to tell, because the CCP loves nothing more than making up numbers to make it look like China is doing super great and everything is going well. But the average person living in China right now know very viscerally how difficult their lives are, how little hope they have for the future, how hard they have to work just to eke out survival. In the rural areas where I live, people still literally starve to death in bad years. The Chinese population absolutely sees themselves as the underdog to the superpowers like America and the EU.
But on the other hand, all the statistics that we publish to the world and the attitude we take on diplomacy very much gives the international community the impression that China is practically already a superpower. They don't need help or sympathy. And that coldness worsens Chinese people's impression of other countries, as fundamentally selfish and only out for their own profit. Which helps with the CCP's propaganda efforts.
Like, I'm not saying that China deserves an apology more than any other colony, or that it deserves compensation or anything. (I honestly think most of the atrocities that happened during western colonisation of China is more the fault of the Chinese government than colonial powers. Though, uh, returning our stuff would be nice). But I really do think that there's not going to be any shaking the CCP's control of China without that apology and outreach.
But then we have a chicken and egg problem. The CCP's been so aggressive and hostile this past decade that other countries feel very much like they're threatened too. And when they're all baring their teeth and hissing at each other, nobody wants to look weak by being the first one to back down.
I'm English. On your questions at the end, here's a few thoughts:
- Mostly we don't think or care about Empire very much at all. A few political obsessives rail against how terrible it was, and a few of basically the same personality type try to defend it; but normal people don't think about it much. In England, it is less important to our sense of identity than how we did in the football World Cup in 1966.
- The analogy with China is very, very, very weak. There are two parts to that. (1) China was the centre of its world for thousands of years. Britain has been a semi-barbarian backwater of Europe for almost all of its existence. Sure, for a hundred years this was reversed, and for a few hundred years before that the UK was becoming a more major power; but even at the very height of Empire it didn't dominate its immediate neighbours in Europe in the same way as China has almost always dominated its surroundings. (2) The idea of a unified China is ancient. The UK unified in 1707, which is moments ago for a nation, and the idea of it has nowhere near the same cultural weight. Most Scots and Welsh identify as Scottish or Welsh, and even the English are beginning to identify as 'English' again more than 'British'. British identity is not hegemonic in Northern Ireland! In other words, outside of the political-media class (which is one entity here), very few people give a shit about 'Britain' at a deep in-the-bones level. Lots of the elite class identify more with 'Europe' than 'Britain', even post-Brexit. Most normal people identify more with their constituent nation-state.
- Stolen treasures in our museums are mostly just fuel for comedians. Opinions differ, and some people might argue about it in the pub; but no-one normal is losing sleep over it.
That's surprising. I guess it might just be that I was mostly looking at British writings in like 1890, but I always got the sense that Britain was just as proud of its long history, and believe they were always a great empire going back to King Arthur. Whether that's historically true isn't that important, I just always got the sense that people at that moment in time was very much like, "The British Empire has always been a superpower and will always be a superpower!"
I guess today, after the shock of two world wars, British people probably feel very differently about the British Empire. Sort of the same way that Chinese people certainly don't identify as strongly with Dynastic China.
I don't think I've made clear how weak the analogy is: China unified over 2200 years ago and, in Mohism, already had a sophisticated philosophy that integrated all the levels of social organisation from the individual to the Empire. Britain unified 300 years ago; and liberalism, the overwhelmingly popular philosophy at every level of society, expressly places the state and all other levels of social organisation in conflict.
In China it might be natural to integrate natural pride of place with pride in the state apparatus. In the UK, despite the attempts of the high-Empire writers and their (much inferior) current media descendants, it is not. It is normal to be proud, even intensely proud, of being from England, for instance, while hating the apparatus of the British state and wishing we would stop pretending to be important on the global stage. Even our soldiers thought our recent involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan were a total waste of time and money from the start, and our soldiers are all volunteers.
There's a couple of further points on this:
England is not Britain: you and half the commentators mix the two together, but they are not the same thing politically or culturally. This really matters when you're trying to disentangle patriotism, loyalty to a place, from nationalism, loyalty to the state; and you have to do that to understand attitudes to Empire within Britain.
Many of the books you've been reading, if they are from that era and now classics, are also the product of and attempting to justify a massive process of internal colonialism that was then ending: a couple of centuries of 'enclosures', 'land improvement', 'clearances' had displaced large swathes of the population from its ancestral places; and the sort of people who were writing books were mostly from the class of people who had an interest in justifying this process because they had done very well out of it.
>wishing we would stop pretending to be important on the global stage
That's a very different mindset, and yeah, I see what you mean. There's enough of a solidified identity of China as the top dog, that there's a very unified national drive to get back to that place. Even all the way back in 1949, when China was probably one of the most war-torn and poorest places in the world, people weren't just concerned about getting to a point of being functional again. They were worried about becoming powerful, being on equal standing as the European powers.
I just kind of assumed that anyone from a former superpower empire feels the same way. I mean, it does sort of seem like Russia wants to go back to the glory days of ruling the Soviet block, doesn't it? It's very interesting to hear that British people really just want to be ordinary. Why is that? Is it cultural? Or is it political? Like, is it that Britain's got a good enough relationship with the current superpower that it just doesn't seem worth it to put in the effort and money and time to try? Since they're mostly getting everything they need/want anyways?
I think you've hit the nail on the head at the end: life for almost everyone in Britain is far better under American hegemony than it ever was under our own Empire. This is why there has been absolutely no-one of any significance calling for a return to Empire in the last 50 years. Our political arguments are about what we should do within the world order, never about remaking it.
Another factor is that, on the whole, we like Americans. We love the music and movies, and in terms of culture, language, and legal system we are often closer to them than to our European neighbours. Sure, there's been a degree of cultural domination; but it came with burgers and rock and roll. We haven't minded.
And, again, 'Britain' is a young and shallow construct. It was easy to support when it had the whole world at its feet, in the same way as its easy to support a sport team on a winning streak. Almost no-one alive remembers those days now, though, so older and more culturally ingrained loyalties - for instance to Scotland, or even to subnational entities like Yorkshire, Cornwall, or the Orkneys - are reasserting themselves. The political-media class have 'loyalty' to 'Britain' but only because they're busy squabbling among themselves about who gets to take money from the population. Outside of them, disillusionment is normal.
I highly recommend the podcast ‘Stuff the British Stole’ for a better look into why artifacts aren’t returned. Legally, the Royal British Museum cannot repatriate anything. It’s written into law, and changing it would require repealing or amending those laws. There is definitely a sense of entitlement, but that is slowly changing. Unfortunately, it will have to change a lot more before there’s enough political will to rewrite the laws. Until then, museum curators aren’t allowed to use their own discretion (which is how repatriation mostly works in other former colonial powers).
I’m finding that certain aspects of China actually remind me of Quebec. I think in the way that they both went from colonizer to colonized? But that sense of grievance past any point of utility is very familiar. The outrage over the oppression of Franco-Canadians under British and then Canadian rule turned first into Quebec separatism (and screw all francophones outside Quebec; they’re not politically useful), and then into out-and-out white supremacy and xenophobia! Never mind they weren’t even white until the 70s…
Oooh, that's interesting! It's a take I haven't seen before! I gotta research more into Quebec. I know, like, nothing about Canada or Canadian history.
Pure speculation, and I have to emphasize it's pure speculation: I think Britain doesn't think of itself as a continuation of the British Empire in the way that the CCP and KMT think of themselves as the inheritors of a cultural legacy 3000 years long. And I believe they're not big on the whole "sins of the father" kinda thing, so it's "no longer" "their fault".
Really? It doesn't? Why not? I mean, the royal family is still the same continuation as the British Empire, right? That's actually super surprising to me! That a nation can identify as a different entity, despite having the same governmental structure and the same ruling family and the same territory and the same make up of population. I wonder how that happened?
I don't think this is true, most Brits think of their country as having been founded in 1066.
I don't think this is right, I'm afraid. I'm a Brit, and I think that the country has just never got to grips with the idea that the British Empire was a bad thing. Like, in 1997, people were genuinely mad that we had to return Hong Kong to China. And I don't think it was really concern for the plight of the poor Hong Kong residents.
I dunno, I've been out of the country for the last 20 years, so maybe things have changed a bit. But unlike Japan and Germany, where losing WWII forced a reckoning with the fact that their 30s regimes were bad, Britain never lost on home ground. (There was that embarrassing incident of being defeated by nonviolence in India, but it seems to have been forgotten - I never learned about it in school, and it rarely comes up as a subject for documentaries or background for novels, etc.) So my impression is that British people don't feel much guilt about empire because they genuinely don't think it was bad.
Neat! That's kind of the impression I got, based on British memos at the time that things were going down. There was no moustache-twirling machinations of like, "Oh, yes, we're deliberately getting China addicted to opium so we can take China over and rule it with an iron fist!" It seems like almost everybody involved was really doing what they thought was best? Like, they thought that their actions in China were helping China?
Yeah, I reckon. Certainly a lot of the religious types thought they were helping by converting the heathens. I think there were also some who had a kind of trade fundamentalism: if China's trade with us is imbalanced, then something is wrong, and it's our duty to rebalance it. If opium is the only way, then so be it! It sounds bizarre when we say it now, but that does seem have been a justification put forward...
I mean, whatever the justifications were, though, they don't really matter. Villains always have reasons for why they're doing what they're doing.
On this subject, I really recommend a novel by Rebecca Kuang called Babel. https://www.amazon.com/Babel-Necessity-Violence-Translators-Revolution-ebook/dp/B09MD95S5V/
Well, no, it makes sense. It's not like anyone really thought Opium was evil? Like I said, it's not like Victorian Londoners weren't doing a lot of opium themselves. They were giving heroine to their own babies. Why would anyone think it was wrong to sell it to the Chinese? I don't think there was any research into the harms of opiates until well into the 20th century.
Would be interesting to hear your take on Adam Curtis' Can't Get You Out My Head, Episode 5, on the consequences of the Opium War, English empire guilt and pop culture sinophobia
What Britain did or even what Japan did is irrelevant. What matters is that the chinese government needs to ramp up xenophobia so anecdotes from a brutal past are always kept in the spotlight. This butthurt nationalist propaganda used to be the widespread in Europe, and given how brutal european history is there were plenty of nasty events to be angry about. But after 2 devastating World Wars that left Europe in ruins politicians started to understand that they need to chill with the ultra nationalist hatemongering and as they started to build the European Union past grievances were mostly laid to rest.
And the demand for apologies is absurd. Qing China had no qualms about invading, conquering and looting other countries and communist China feels no shame in justifying her rights over the non-Han parts of of the country on Qing conquests. That's how morality was back then and in reality it is how it still is.
Yeah, but other aspects of CCP propaganda isn't nearly as successful as this part. They've been trying to convince people that the Chinese economy is doing great, and nobody really believes it. They've been trying to convince people first that it's necessary to have less kids, and now that it's necessary to have more kids, and nobody really believes it. To some extent, they try to erase their own evils in the past, and even with it entirely cut out of textbooks and banned on the internet, people have some concept of what happened still through word of mouth.
But this narrative of western powers always lurking by just waiting for an opportunity to re-colonise China again is deeply popular, and was believed by people even back in the 80s and 90s, when China was the most open and friendly to the west. It's just that back then, it wasn't the official government narrative, and now it is.
For what it's worth, the CCP always uses propaganda to whitewash the Qing government a lot. Out of all the dynasties in Ancient Chinese History, you're not allowed to write fiction where you travel back in time to overthrow the monarchy in precisely the Qing Dynasty. You can write about going back and ensuring that Li Longji was never born. But you can't write about going back and making sure Aisin-Goro Xuanye was never born. And yet, the average person is still pretty fucking upset about the Qing Dynasty. People hate the Qing government. But the Qing government is definitely dead and gone now, so it's not an anxiety-inducing current threat people feel the need to worry about, the same as America or the EU.
That's because the topic of historical grievances is always popular, it's a meme that goes viral quickly so it can be used to stir up hatred very easily. Note how much of public discourse is about historical grievances even in the US, especially about black slavery, racism, native americans, the Holocaust etc.
Just in the last few years, NYT, the so called newspaper of record, has pushed The 1619 Project, a pseudo-historical fabrication about slavery and they bring up Emmet Till hundreds of times a year despite being a racist murder that happened all the way back in 1955.
Fear of other countries is also a very popular meme with a long and bloody history. Combine the 2 memes and you have a formidable instrument of manipulation.
Chinese economic -> Chinese economy
practically non-existence -> practically non-existent
There was simply -> There were simply
literally had a gun -> figuratively had a gun
historical artefact -> historical artefacts
No, though, Chiang Kai Shek was literally kidnapped by armed men and was forced at gunpoint to declare war on Japan. I literally mean he literally had a gun to his head.
Huh. I'm surprised that's considered a valid declaration of war.
I think it's only valid because after he was released, he still stuck by the terms he agreed to, instead of instantly turning around and going back on what promises he made. I guess the threat on his life was secondary to the shock of discovering just how much popular support was behind declaring war on Japan, and just how much of China he was alienating by holding out.
Don't see where the contradiction is between "Where people believe that money needs to go towards some nebulous “making China stronger” purpose, instead of actually keeping its own citizens alive." that you claim to see, but of course it's all a sample size of one
I will literally never understand why China throw money at making aircraft carriers that don't have nuclear propulsion instead of subsidising hospitals for treating poor people. I guess from a certain point of view, people think that military investments are more important because it keeps China safe. That if China's military is weak, then more people will die than just from leukemia.
But for me, it's like, surely, they know, that an aircraft carrier with no nuclear power and has never performed an operation in blue waters is completely and utterly pointless, and it won't make a difference at all in a war. But there are people dying of perfectly treatable illnesses because hospitals don't provide payment plans. It's not even that expensive. I wouldn't mind if you make it an option only available to minors under 18, to cut out the unending medical expenses of old people.
As a boring technical answer, learning how to fly aircraft from and land on an aircraft carrier is really hard. The non-nuclear carriers are basically training carriers where the pilots can learn and then the more senior officers can learn how to coordinate aircraft from a carrier.
They'd be no use in a war, but neither would a nuclear carrier for ten years until they learned how to use it and they can do eight of those ten years on the non-nuclear carrier.
Aircraft carriers are *hard*. The Japanese spent the entire 1930s getting ready for Pearl Harbor.
But your point is right even if your example isn't.