After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

by Ben Rhodes

The twenty-first century is about identity. Identity is something that you cannot put into a framework. But that’s where the emotion is.” And that identity, of course, is defined by both who you are and who you are against. “The driving force,” Bao Pu told me, “is the rise of a Chinese identity versus the West, versus Japan. So this is the major issue—the modern Chinese identity is the key to understanding every present-day China issue on the world stage.” Bao Pu went through his own list: China’s humiliations at the hands of Western powers in the nineteenth century; China’s subjugation by Japan during World War II; the American abandonment of the Chinese Republic to Mao’s advancing armies in the war’s aftermath. To Bao, these veins of humiliation, betrayal, and fear of chaos run deep through the Chinese body politic, and the Party has proved capable of tapping them. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the Party dialed up anti-Western and anti-Japanese themes in official media, stirring up lingering resentments over Western colonization and Japanese atrocities. They scrubbed the school curriculum of the Western materials that Bao Pu recalled from the 1980s. They buried the historical memory of Mao’s catastrophic mistakes and rehabilitated Confucius, the preeminent ancient Chinese philosopher whose thought had been sidelined under Mao, as a justification for a society focused on collective effort over individual rights. “Confucius was rejected in the twentieth century,” Bao tol...