William A. Callahan is Professor of International Politics and China Studies at the University of Manchester, and Co-Director of the British Inter-University China Center at Oxford University. The following excerpt is from his new book: China: The Pessoptimist Nation. The book “shows how the heart of Chinese foreign policy is not a security dilemma, but an identity dilemma. Through a careful analysis of how Chinese people understand their new place in the world, the book charts how Chinese identity emerges through the interplay of positive and negative feelings in a dynamic that intertwines China’s domestic and international politics. China thus is the pessoptimist nation where national security is closely linked to nationalist insecurities.” From the Danwei blog:

Many credit (or blame) Samuel P. Huntington for making us think about the international role of civilizations in the post-Cold War era. But civilization has been an enduring theme in Chinese discussions of foreign policy and world order for millenia. As we saw at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics, China’s concept of civilization provides a national aesthetic that unites elite and mass views of identity and security in the PRC. This book will show how China’s current structure of feeling that looks to national pride and national humiliation is an outgrowth of China’s “Civilization/barbarian distinction” [Huayi zhi bian]. Both of these structures of feeling work to integrate the party-state’s propaganda policy with grassroots popular feelings.

China’s domestic policy of “harmonious society” and its foreign policy of “peacefully rising” in a “harmonious world” are both based on the idealized view of Chinese civilization as open to the world, and tolerant of outsiders. Hua, which has come to mean both “civilization” and “Chinese,” more literally means “magnificent” and “flourishing,” and is a homonym for “transformation.” Rather than seeking to conquer those who violently challenged it, we are often told how China’s magnanimous civilization inclusively embraced difference1. Even when China itself was conquered by outsiders, the attractiveness of Chinese civilization was able to assimilate non-Han groups: nomadic Mongolians were transformed into the Yuan dynasty that built Beijing’s Forbidden City. Pre-modern China thus utilized the soft power of Confucian rituals to unify All-under-Heaven [Tianxia] through attraction rather than conquest. The PRC’s current foreign policy, we are told, likewise is based on the “Peaceful Orientation of Chinese Civilization.”