Opinion | The Making of a Chinese Patriot

To many mainlanders, for example, the recent protests in Hong Kong brought back humiliating memories of the Chinese Empire at its weakest. When I saw pictures of Hong Kong protesters hanging a British colonial flag in the legislative building, I could feel, even in my own blood, the fury slowly gathering. The next day, I happened to talk to a Chinese friend, who had been forwarding sympathetic posts about the protests only a few days before. “If they want to kiss up to the previous colonizer,” she said, “leave them alone.”

When more violent pictures of the Hong Kong protests filled Chinese social media, I was having dinner with an old friend in Shanghai, a consultant trained in both China and America. “How can the protests,” he asked me, “be so well-organized if they are not orchestrated by the United States in the first place?” The logic was flawed, I thought. The Hong Kong protests were a leaderless movement, organized through the internet. But I didn’t want to say so, because I didn’t want to quarrel.

Of course we should remember our history. But when I try to understand my friends in China, and those horrible overseas Chinese nationalists, I think about the way lessons about our colonized past have morphed into a crackdown on voices that differ from Beijing’s. We have been victims in the past, and so now Chinese people must share “one heart” and “one faith.” We must all want to see China grow into a strong nation, one that defies the best efforts of our collective enemies to thwart us — and anyone who criticizes government policy or doubts a government narrative is “un-Chinese,” a “running dog” of foreign forces.

We are trapped in this rhetoric. Nobody wants to seem unpatriotic, so in the increasingly tense political climate in China, moderate patriotism is silenced and extreme patriotism is becoming the loudest, if not the only, voice.

Most of us love our country. It’s almost an instinct, like the attachment we bear toward our kin. Perhaps the bigger question is how to make patriotism a matter of education, not indoctrination. There is a lesson here for every country, not just China. If patriotism is taught first and foremost to perpetuate power, to control people, to prepare them as soldiers for potential conflict and war, the result is the same: It is a young man, holding a sign, telling another person to kneel down in front of his master.