Opinion | No more a victim: China must leave its past behind and embrace its strength
- China’s ‘century of humiliation’ is long over. As it looks to the next 100 years, the focus should be on how it can help to improve the world
- It must continue to caution against the use of force to discourage wars, share its anti-poverty lessons and encourage healthy competition with the US
When Deng Xiaoping met Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Beijing in 1989, he talked for quite some time about how China was maltreated by imperial Russia before he said “let’s put an end to the past and face the future”. In other words, he would not be able to talk about the future without first talking about the past.
China is not alone in succumbing to a sense of victimhood. I once saw a senior Finnish official become suddenly agitated because someone in the room mentioned “Finlandisation”. And victimhood can be a card. The best player is possibly Donald Trump, who once said: “Come to think of it, who gets attacked more than me?”
As president-elect, he misled American voters into believing the strongest nation on earth was in “carnage” and that he could “Make America Great Again”. In the Oval Office, he lashed out at adversaries and allies alike as if the United States were a victim of the whole world.
In contrast, the US government did not declare the 1994 Rwandan war a genocide until it was practically over, out of concern that it would create an expectation that it would intervene.
