Introduction

After brief, symbolic discussions, National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China passed the National Defense Act during its annual session in March 1997. The Act reflects an interesting state of mind unfamiliar to the outside world; namely, there is an unambiguous emphasis on what can be called inward defense. According to the Act, one of the major functions of national defense in the PRC is to prevent any potential split of the nation from arising internally, a mission that immediately incurs concerns from observers in Taiwan where a separatist movement has been gaining increasing ground in the past decade.<1> Similarly, this concern over internal subversion in association with some unnamed external enemy recalls the Tiananmen incident of June 4, 1989 where the People's Liberation Army forcefully stopped a rare pro-democracy rally.

Inward defense is a concept seldom heard in the Western defense circles. In fact, this notion of inward defense may well arouse anxiety from outside observers as it seemingly contradicts the meaning of national defense.<4> Indeed studies of national defense invariably center around the protection of national territories in times of foreign intrusion while the National Defense Act provides the legal basis for the PLA to engage in military actions against its own civilians. Contrary to the territorially oriented national defense concepts in the West, I argue that national defense in postcolonial China responds to an anxiety about disharmony in society, where human relationships are guided by Confucianism, Daoism, or even Maoism. Not only because territorially-oriented defense in the past would have indicated the moral decay of an emperor, but contemporary Beijing authorities also cannot entertain the idea of a Great Chinese civilization being territorially contained, hence reiteration of China’s modality for third world countries.<5> Nonetheless, since the failure of the Boxers' Rebellion (1899-1900) whereby the Allied Forces of eight countries completely demoralized the Chinese dynastic court, the fixation to obtain a correct human relationship among all Chinese has evolved into an obsessive pursuit of a unified front in the face of imperialist intrusion.

In brief, while national defense presupposes the existence of a permanent threat outside of Chinese sovereign borders, inward defense aims to prevent a harmonious social being from splitting. Without such a social entity, national defense, which juxtaposes external threat and internal order, would lose its bearings. Inward defense therefore refers to the mechanism that justifies as well as practices the prevention of dissident voices from arising within sovereign borders. Accordingly, national defense, by targeting external enemies, inevitably presupposes, in an ultimate sense, a united social order which territorial boundaries define.

Consequently, the contemporary Chinese identity is less defined by one's relationship with the Emperor, as Son of Underheaven, than with the Chinese nation in its confrontation with an invading imperialist Other. Although this defensive mentality has led the Chinese military in both the Republic and the People's Republic periods to defend the territorial borders to which the Chinese people consider themselves entitled, the military’s practices continue to demonstrate that national defense embraces essentially an introspective state of mind.<6> It is not merely a material, objective capacity for sovereign, excluding power; rather, it is a determined search for a path to return to a pure national identity no longer extant. As a result, the Chinese military could ironically lose or surrender territory with a feeling of superiority, or display a compulsive attachment to a piece of land regardless of the sacrifices required. All this performance, in the end, enacts a position of moral incorruptibility with a spirit reaching far beyond secular territory, therefore reproducing a difference that distinguishes the Chinese from the imperialist Other. Ironically, Chinese nationalism that supports this difference becomes itself highly dependent on the maintenance of that difference. The discursive circle thus formed perpetuates imperialism through national defensive mobilization and, in turn, reproduces nationalism through the presumed presence of imperialism.

A Historicist Reading of National Defense

Postmodern critics hold that diplomacy, which supposedly manages mutually exclusive sovereign relations, is in fact both a product and a reproducer of mutual estrangement among sovereign nation states.<13> The unstated position that people represented by diplomats are one harmonious whole is obviously unattainable, but when disputes among sovereign actors are heated, the presumption of harmony, i.e. solidarity, gains strength. As a result, forces that contradict the harmony assumption become elements of anti-diplomacy for it defies the very foundation of the sovereign binary of order inside versus chaos outside. Similarly, all national defense behavior is necessarily an act of mutual estrangement and forces which contradict the harmony assumption are anti-defense. Anti-defense is much more serious than anti-diplomacy because, unlike the discursive nature of diplomacy, national defense is physically as well as discursively demanding loyalty from those encompassed by it.

Sovereignty-based national defense, which the world almost universally practices today, nonetheless requires more efforts to implement in China than in the Western nation-state system. This is because national defense based on territorial security is historically a product of Western sovereign order. For in the earlier Chinese hierarchical world, where a celestial court ruled universally, no secular leaders possessed the authority of excluding others; leaders were leaders because they embodied people’s heart, nor could they discriminate on a territorial basis. All were subjects of the sovereignty of a morally or religiously supreme being. In contrast and by definition, the goal of modern sovereign defense is to protect the nation from foreign intrusion. An imagined enemy becomes critical in that the national defense establishment must decide upon or justify the amount of resources sufficient for the defense build-up. A balance must be struck between the unlikely prospect that a nation can prepare itself to fight all the countries in the rest of the world, and the risk of under-investment in the defense sector.<14> In addition, to have each individual citizen invest in their own defense on the market would be obviously inefficient, for rarely would a nation face simultaneous attacks from all directions. National defense thus conceived is predicated on three assumptions, which reinforce one another, yet none is familiar to traditional Chinese thinking: clear national borders to be defended, an imagined enemy or group of enemies, and professionalism. For example, if no defined borders exists, there could be no enemy located outside of national borders; if no professionalism exists to guard borders, resources cross borders at will to the effect of downplaying borders; if there is no imagined enemy, why would one need professional defense?

Indeed no exaggerated image of the enemy could occur in a cultural vacuum. The construction of any imagined enemies relies upon certain psycho-cultural foundations to appear real for the citizen-defenders. One component of these foundations deals with the specific political context of the defending nation. For example, the specification of the USSR as the enemy of the United States emerged partially as a product of the US self-image as a capitalist, democratic country, yet the perception of socialism’s evil and its fundamental confrontation with capitalism takes place outside the conventional definitions of national defense.<15> Therefore, the defense sectors cannot help but reproduce the image of a Soviet threat actually created by politicians and society’s ideologues.

At another, deeper level, national defense reflects a profound need of anyone acting in the name of the state to consider its external environment to be filled with hostility.<16> As a matter of fact, the origins of sovereign states can be traced back to a number of religious wars. Sovereignty as a theory grants a prince the right to determine to which religion his state would subscribe. Sovereignty of the people later replaced sovereignty embodied in the prince as capitalism and democracy overthrew the monarchy. Not much change occurred, though, in terms of the external hostility each civilized state faced except that it was no longer the Dark Ages, the city of Gods, the heresy, etc., but the authoritarian, socialist, feudalist regimes. National defense in the West is supposed to prevent these regimes from engaging in any external intervention.

This second level provided the persistent motivation for States in the modern era to search for enemies outside of territorial boundaries.<17> Earlier colonialism reflected this mentality by establishing colonies for religious as well as secular reasons, forgetting that often these reasons were themselves mutually incompatible throughout the European history. As a result, secular expansion of capitalism and missionary movement to spread religion together promoted colonialism and eventually caused World War I among the contending colonial masters. Germany, demoralized after the war and struggling to breathe in their imagined “living space,“ cooperated with a Japan determined to throw all white races out of Asia. Both acted in the name of establishing a rightful boundary, i.e. a ”living space” for Germany and the Great East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere for Japan, to camouflage the racist sentiment.

National defense as a mechanism to secure an enemy for the European states survived after World War II. Colonies gained independent statehood one after another, providing increased anxiety toward the possibility that their immaturity would expose them to the co-option or coercion by one's enemy. The US national defense, for example, also must therefore defend the borders of its strategic post-colonial allies.<18> Actions that targeted domestic groups of these allies exemplified a kind of inward defense that occurred outside of the US borders but within the confinement of the borders, which the US national defense claims to protect.<19> Inward defense of one‘s own ally thus secured the sense of an enemy’s threat to oneself. This is especially true for a global sovereign power such as the US.

The practices of inward defense by an allied state incur anxiety for the American people as to the meaning of national defense. Inward defense allows a government to impose terror on its people and violates democratic principles, which justify the existence of national defense against potential threats posed by external authoritarian regimes. There develops the need to overly stress the threat of the enemy said to be in collusion with the targets of inward defense in the ally-states, be they the fifth column, the communist rebels, or simply dissident intellectuals. With the power of religious and capitalist ideologies, the US government seemed to have worried its own people much less than an allied state’s citizens, who were believed to be dependent, traditional, and weak, and hence vulnerable to subversion.

In other words, there is a fundamental difference in the approach Western states adopt to sovereign borders. Sovereign borders for them are protective shields against external threats of human rights violation, but coming to the non-Western states, sovereign borders appear to be a way of covering up human rights violation. Indeed all this discursive practice of distrust toward non-Western sovereignties justifies, yet also undermines, the sovereign order. For a non-Western state such as China, national defense is harder since their sovereignty is imbedded in a historically essentially and fundamentally different concept and multi-ethnic society, but easier with the identification of external imperialist intervention appearing as a real threat.

Contemporary inward defense emerged from the expansion of Western civilization. Newly independent states began this awareness of national defense implanted during their colonial legacy. Their definition of national defense and their enemies naturally received heavy influence from their former colonial masters. However, these states became states without sharing a common religious or cultural root as their European counterparts had. The European sense of common roots was embodied in a shared anxiety toward a certain external interference. As the symbol of a typical European state changed from the Prince to the citizens, the perceived external threat concomitantly shifts from being the church to colonial competitors, communists, and more recently authoritarian regimes. Today any state that does not share the same respect for the citizens' subjective position, primarily defined in property and participatory rights, threatens the Western states.<20> This emphasis on the civic culture does not exist in the newly independent states, including China.<21>

Many newly sovereign states won independence through war with their colonial masters or their neighbors. The colonial master is simultaneously both friend and enemy since colonialism assists in defining the path of future national development yet, in spirit denies equal sovereign status to its former colony. The obscurity of national identity in many of these states creates ambiguity along the national borders drawn by the former master. For newly independent states, therefore, the national defense issue is intrinsically a national identity issue, and thus an internal issue from the European perspective. Once national defense becomes an internal identity issue, the military unavoidably enters in all political struggles, damaging its professionalism and credibility in specifying the imagined enemy for the whole country,<22> whose borders were arbitrarily drawn by colonialism.

However, internal defense is not restricted to the newly independent states. Domestically, Western states have derived a kind of internal defense, though in a more indirect manner. Colonialism historically absorbed a great number of immigrants whose descendants have generally acquired citizenship in the master country generations later. Many of these immigrants left home unwillingly and were regarded at best as secondary citizens. The immigration actually continues into the current postcolonial ages. Collectively, they easily become scapegoats of the mainstream particularly when things go wrong.<23> Chinese immigrants, for example, evoked the image of Yellow Peril more than once in modern US history. Now Inside one’s borders, these religiously, culturally, ideologically and socially different classes of people naturally cared for their home lands and thus are considered as potential external threats due to their pledge of nationalism or socialism. They become the targets of inward national defense for the Western capitalist states.<24>

Since their native countries are now typically non-Christian, authoritarian, and sometimes socialist states which are themselves portrayed as, or at least vulnerable to, an enemy, the decedents of people originally from these countries unavoidably subvert the integrity of the colonial master states by simply residing inside of them. American Indians, Africans, Chinese and Japanese experienced similar discrimination in different historical periods. Globalization at the end of the 20th century has led to deeper identity crises within both the immigrant groups and the mainstream societies.<25> The drive to clarify or even purify one's own identity continues to obscure the national boundaries upon which national defense build-up rests. Globalization detracts from the amount of loyalty a national identity can claim and diverts resources a national government can control. This trend exacerbates the concern over the likelihood of foreign intrusion in a non-military form.<26> The notion of national defense concomitantly broadened to include issues such as the war on drugs, trade merchandise dumping, and foreign political contributions. Conceptually unprepared for this change, national defense sectors are perhaps compelled to extreme exaggeration of the threat imposed by an imagined enemy.

The Passivity of Chinese National Defense

Consequently, the meaning of sovereignty in China falls back on one ultimate, familiar task--people‘s final awakening--and because of this aspiration, family, society and the emergence of the Chinese sovereign state are morally indivisible, as a postcolonial writer notes:

Secondly, the beginning of the modern Chinese state did not entirely model that of other postcolonial states in a number of ways. To begin with, no such dominant colonial power existed in China to the extent that the subsequent building of Chinese sovereignty could not possibly follow the path laid down by one external master. In contrast to the colonial legacy elsewhere, therefore, the specification of just one external enemy was not enough for solidifying a united nation. In addition, the sheer mass of the Chinese territory disallowed colonial powers from dividing and ruling its entirety. There remained a strong, indigenous voice in China that never succumbed to the colonial powers.<32> The subsequent independence claimed by the Chinese after the Republican revolution of 1911 posed a particular threat to the extant sovereign states in that the assimilation of the Republic into the European sovereign state system seemed unlikely to succeed.<33> For the Chinese, the construction of a Chinese identity was not to clarify relationships against just one colonial master, but to expel them all.<34> Nonetheless, each former colonial power could identify certain forces within the Chinese sovereign borders to be their faithful agents. China's total expulsion approach thus encountered enormous difficulty from within.

The four factors mentioned in the first volume are property structure, class relations, social consciousness and the condition of the ruling party, none of which is the subject of mainstream national security research, be it sovereignty-related or enemy-driven. The second volume divides national security threats into two groups: those jeopardizing the interests of the Chinese nation and those jeopardizing the social system; it lists four categories of fundamental threats: a new cold war offense, internal peaceful evolution, separatism, and territorial disputes, with peaceful evolution considered “the key.” Eight forces leading to these threats are described as:

Thirdly, the Dao discourse in traditional Chinese politics, compared with tangible territorial sovereignty, is highly abstract and necessarily boundary crossing. Dao is an expression of sincere regard for people’s welfare, a spirit of selflessness, and capacity for empathy. Chinese Confucians, Legalists as well as Daoists all speak of the spirit of Dao when dealing with issues concerning national unity.<37> The universal nature of Dao prescribes that a prince should win people's hearts but warns against the open use of coercion and rewards lest this would tarnish the supreme incorruptibility of a prince. People's hearts remain the sole judgment of a prince's legitimacy. As a corollary, all enemies are internal, for it must be the prince's misconduct that has alienated people's hearts or lost the respect of the outsiders. The solution lies in the rectification of mind, referring to the return of everyone to their rightful roles.

Since colonialism became an unbearable burden upon the Chinese sense of superiority, expulsion of the White race has occupied the agenda of all Chinese national leaders, who disagreed with one another over how soon and through which practical measures the expulsion should be executed. Having been a countermove in the face of imperialist and colonial invasion, this expulsion approach by no means released the people from attending to the issue of people's hearts.<40>

The National defense establishment provides a conceptual tool of transforming this internal enemy into one outside of territorial borders. Even there, the Daoist legacy remains strong. For example, the troops are the "people's liberation" army, and the troops sent to Korea in 1950 were the "people's voluntary" army. The justification of sending troops was understood to benefit the Korean people as if they were a part of the Chinese Under-heaven. Therefore, the official discourse on China‘s intervention was not merely the familiar national interest argument but that helping Koreans was considered helping “neighbor,“ and helping neighbor was “to protect families and the nation“ from imperialism.<41> In the Chinese Under-heaven, there were no sovereign borders to separate one people from another; all were subjects of the rulers’ concern. There were no such things as territoriality, sovereignty or national borders. While the sovereignty principle assumes the lack of order among sovereignties, Daoist regards for people were universally applied norms regardless of which land territory was in question. Political campaigns and counter-revolutionary movements were always associated with involvements in war<42>, indicating the intimate relationship between the rectification of public consciousness and national defense. Zhou Enlai‘s celebration of the victory of land reform during the Korean War signified that the war was and, perhaps, had to be on two fronts simultaneously. The purpose of any mass rally during the Korean War was necessarily against both imperialism and feudal land ownership:

Chinese national identity is not always a product of sovereign territory. In the sense that the display of military strength does not serve to protect national borders, national defense cannot be a tool of state sovereignty. No doubt the Chinese have accepted the Western discourses of national defense and seem to treat national territory as an intrinsic element of national identity; yet between the lines, the logic has been modified to be Chinese. For example, Chinese national leaders proclaim that they would rather lose thousands of troops than give up one inch of their land and that they would sacrifice and bleed one after another to protect territory.<44> This seems an intensified version of the rationality of the sovereign state. National territory should never be absolute but fluid in accordance with the nation’s capacity as well as the choice of its citizens.

To further elaborate, territory is absolute for the Chinese when dealing with subversion, real or fabricated. The uncompromising criterion is to show one's wholehearted devotion to Chinese nationalism. This does not imply anything essential about Chinese territoriality ready to be protected;<45> rather it is some territorially based anti-foreignism that produces and reproduces nationalist narratives for the citizens of new Republic. Yet there exists many instances whereby the Chinese gave up territory without feeling inferior, or gained legitimacy despite a retreat (discussed later). Both absoluteness and casualness in the Chinese approach to territorial integrity imply the ultimate insufficiency of territory in maintaining the Chinese state identity. In other words, the emphasis on people’s hearts distracts concerns for defense of specific territories, The discourse of national defense is far more important than the achievement of national defense.

Given that Chinese moral incorruptibility is all-compassing, preoccupation with territorial integrity would look awkward if not self-contradictory. The selfless propensity dictates a disdain for trivial battles over land. However, when the Chinese need to signal their willingness to sacrifice for the cause of nationalism, the national defense of a seemingly worthless land may become absolute; the occasional casualness, on the other hand, implies China's transcendence over secular issue of state sovereignty. Sacrifice as well as transcendence stress humanity and morality over territorial integrity. These ethics frustrate many a Western defense watcher of China, as one experienced observer of Chinese national defense even claims that there is virtually no rule exists to explain Chinese defense behavior.<46>

Non-territorial Defense Thinking

As early as in the 17th century, for example, China's Qing dynasty yielded a large quantity of land to Czarist Russia, and a missionary who cared little about China's territorial integrity carried out the negotiations. Emperor Kangxi, considered one of the very few expansionist leaders in Chinese history, relinquished the land easily to Russia, though. Later in the 19th century, Emperor Daoguang yielded to the British the island of Hong Kong and agreed to open five trading ports for the sole purpose of placating the “barbarians” so as to limit their activities to the periphery of China. Upon signing the Treaty of Nanjing honoring all the above concessions, Guangxu forgot his earlier instruction to expel the barbarians or his later wish to renovate China‘s navy. Compared with face-saving, the loss of territory or of sovereignty was really an nonexistent issue, as he instructed:

The heated issue which led to the 1860 invasion of Beijing by the British-French allied forces was unambiguously the right of the “barbarians” to station diplomats in Beijing, a right Emperor Xianfeng found extremely difficult to accept. Having known perfectly well that he would lose and had actually fled before the defense of Beijing ever started, he would still rather be defeated than simply grant their wish. In fact, however, with weak artillery, small numbers and the onset of winter, the Allied forces would have been in trouble if serious resistance had been mounted. The walls of Beijing were as much as 40 feet high and 60 feet thick while the Chinese forces were still potentially formidable. The capture of thirty-seven Allied hostages by the Chinese could have been a portent of things to come. The escape of the emperor, who ordered the fight but refused to win, simply turned the balance of power through the collapse of Chinese morale. Obviously Xianfeng's willingness to fight had little to do with the chance of victory, but with the position that the “barbarians” should not enter the heart of the dynasty on an equal footing.

Equally dramatic was the Sino-French war in 1885 wherein China refused to yield to France its protectorate status over Vietnam. The exchange of fire between the two warring parties in Vietnam, Taiwan and along the China’s coast afforded the French forces virtually no advantage at all. China then decided to yield its sovereign position in Vietnam to France in order to preserve their then existing achievement of having not been defeated. The emperor who was worried that the French would revenge their earlier defeats, instructed the officials:

The land of Vietnam clearly held less importance than the status of the Dynasty. In other words, to prove that China continued to occupy a superior position, the moral emperor bestowed upon the French a land toward which he should have had no concern.

The Sino-Japanese war that occurred a decade later witnessed the most humiliating defeat in Chinese modern history. For the Chinese could not imagine themselves defeated by the “dwarf” Japanese, especially since, if the Chinese “treated them well,” the Korean people would assist in “isolating the Japanese troops” and the Chinese troops “could go back and forth at will.”<50> Despite the military advisor Li Hongzhang‘s urge to avoid military confrontation, the court scorned any diplomatic resolution lest this would damage China’s national dignity and even began to suspected Li Hongzhang’s intention. It was believed that if the court called back the diplomatic delegation, “the national face can be saved and the people‘s will can be solidified.”<51> None worked in the end and China was compelled to yield Taiwan to Japan. The dynastic court, however, expressed no eagerness in gaining the land back in the aftermath. Instead, the court focused on other events, conceding to other imperial powers some treaty rights and treaty ports in order to secure their support for collusion between Empress Dowager and court officials to install a new emperor. Apparently, even after the dynasty's repeated defeats in the past four decades, the loss of sovereign integrity still proved an inadequate criteria in judging the Empress's legitimacy.

She and her followers became furious and frustrated after knowing that all imperialist powers supported incumbent Emperor Guangxu, who supported reform, and eventually forced her to abort the installation of a new emperor. Projecting its fury, the court then utilized the Boxers to summon them in killing all “barbarians.” When the Boxers entered Beijing, the indulged Empress could not resist appealing to the hearts of the People under Heaven and, in 1900, declared war on all powers having treaty relations with China. This took place without any particular incident occurring between China and the world. In fact, no war plan or even goal was announced.<52> With fifty times more soldiers and the powerful Krupp cannons, which could have easily decimated the foreign legation walls in one day but fired seven symbolic shots only on the last day, the whole event seemed to be a drama of showing China‘s displeasure with foreign intrusion. As an on-site observer recalled:

Before the Allied Forces could catch them, Empress Dowager took Guangxu to Xian. Upon leaving, she did not forget to execute those who once cautioned her during the court debate and called them ”betrayers”. The contrast of the reluctant attacks on the Legations and resolute execution of one‘s own loyal officials revealed most vividly where China’s enemy resided. This anxiety toward an internal enemy has remained till today and reduced national defense efforts against the external imperialist intrusion to no avail. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Massacre, a contemporary writer provides a new, long list of internal enemies, all famous writers of the 1980’s, and concludes:

Before the official outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese war in 1937, the Kuomintang regime had struggled to avoid armed conflict with Japan, whose troops had first taken Manchuria and then moved into Northern China. The KMT wanted to eliminate the Communist power contenders before engaging in any premature warfare with Japan. Obviously, Japan's invasion did not fundamentally challenge the legitimacy of the government. In fact, the KMT continued to negotiate for a cease-fire even after the government had officially announced the beginning of the war of resistance. Moreover, the pursuit of cease-fire did not depend upon the return of the territory previously taken by the Japanese troops!<55>

The repeated defeats and setbacks of the KMT troops did not invite substantive criticism concerning the government's capacity for leadership. The regime specifically called on the citizens to resist Japan by building a “Great Wall of people's hearts.” Further wartime losses seemed ironically to consolidate the regime's legitimacy. The confidence of the government rose after the bombardment of Peal Harbor since China has now been declared a formal member of the Allies. This confidence did not fade even though Japan continued to dominate on the battlefield for the years after. In fact, the KMT's effort to take the city of Changsha illustrated the symbolic function of territory in China's state-building process. Believing that the whole world scrutinized this front, the KMT felt it imperative to seize the city although it was unable to defend it later. Chiang Kaishek felt that the battle over Changsha was “watched by the whole world” and thus pushed his troops to achieve a victory “at any sacrifice.” Upon recovering the city, he celebrated that “our supreme moral and spiritual authority has been established now.”<56> Becoming a showcase battle decades after the war, the simple performance of taking Changsha, losing, re-taking and again losing it would supposedly demonstrate the courage and the determination of the Chinese troops. The emphasis lies not upon taking the territory, but displaying the unity of “people's hearts“ through sacrifice.

Despite the dramatic increase of fighting morale and capacity after 1949, the People's Liberation Army certainly disregarded territorial occupation as a central war objective. Several times, the PLA enacted the drama of unilateral withdrawal after gaining ground in the first series of skirmishes.<57> The Western military certainly never encountered the philosophy that all the bloody sacrifice results in telling the opponent that there never had been any territorial ambition. It was difficult to imagine that the military in the West would return the land they capture simply for the sake of sending political signals. Once arriving at a place, it would be extremely difficult to get troops out, even though they were not there to procure territories. For the Chinese, the psychological capability to oscillate between taking and relinquishing land indicates moral supremacy.

The PLA’s first display of this approach involved the Korean War. The PLA intervened in the war in the guise of the People's Voluntary Troops to indicate the appearance of peace between the Chinese and American state and the abdication of territorial ambition for the Chinese. The initial stage of contacts effectively pushed the US troops back to the Pacific, yet the Chinese armies did not pursue. Instead, the PLA unilaterally ceased fire. The Chinese communicated the message that they could win, but would not take advantage and only acted purely defensively. One veteran told me a story of PLA’s self-restraint which he still cannot understand today. He was involved in a rescue mission offshore during the Korean War, but unfortunately was stuck due to a mechanical problem of the boat. When they were eventually towed away by another rescue craft, the Chinese began to shell the water behind them. I think this indicates a typical Chinese style of confrontation, aiming at showing determination and fearlessness while executing self-restraint at the same time, leaving both sides room to compromise without losing dignity.

Not only did people in China look unified despite political purges which went on in the country side, in churches as well as in factory, but also the Chinese and the Korean people were claimed to be unified:

It is the American imperialist Other that had helped foster this cross-sovereignty brotherhood and the national security issue for China could no longer be national per se. It is a statement of lofty relations among all Chinese people, Asian people, and people of the world.

In 1958, Mao ordered the shelling of the offshore islands defended by the US-supplied KMT troops. The purported purpose was to cut the supply line to these islands. While this failed to be accomplished, Mao decided to extend the engagement by symbolic shootings every other day. No intention to seize the islands existed, for simple act of shelling served to symbolically continue the Chinese Civil War between Beijing and Taipei.<60> Similarly, the Taipei authorities decided to heavily guard the island, which from the American point of view remained unimportant for the defense of Taiwan, to suggest its intention to eventually retake the Mainland. The occupation of the offshore islands never was the real issue. In fact, in a dramatic statement given by Marshall Peng Dehuai, a two-week cease fire was offered to the Quemoy troops in exchange for their agreement not to depend on the US 7^th Fleet for logistical support:

Another more intriguing offer was to supply Quemoy from the Chinese side:

While the statement was insufficient to win Taiwanese people‘s heart, it was a try nonetheless and it was far off the track of national defense thinking from a Western point of view.in the English literature. The dramatic nature of these announcements could not be clearer here: the whole point of shelling was a demonstration that Taiwan was a part of China and China was daring enough to defend against US intervention even without the Soviet back up.

In 1969, the PLA exchanged fire with the Soviet patrols on Zhenbao Island. The conflict reaffirmed Mao's claim that China was a true world revolutionary, whom both superpowers treated as their enemy. The contact on the islands ceased as the PLA pushed out the Soviet patrols and then unilaterally withdrew. No one could doubt the Chinese claim that they dared to oppose the Soviet social imperialist. At the CCP‘s 9^th National Congress, Lin Biao reported that China was the true world revolutionary for it was China’s honor to fight both superpowers at the same time.<63>

There was apparently no intention to keep the Zhenbao Island after the successful initial seizure of it. To highlight the Soviet Union as the most formidable enemy of China assumed the utmost importance in this conflict. In fact, Zhou Enlai was ready to make peace with the Soviet Union. The lesson seemed to be that concern about sovereign terrotory does not explain Chinese national defense behavior, but indeed it provides a clue as to how to resolve conflict once broken out. Thus Zhou Enlai and Soviet Premier Kosygin met eight months later to reach a cease-fire understanding where Zhou stressed the familiar five principles of peaceful coexistence,<64> the first of which was to respect sovereignty. Sovereignty as an expedience provided China breathing room, but rarely motivates specific defense initiatives.

The tactics of unilateral withdrawal appeared also in the Sino-Indian war of 1962 and in the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979. In the former case, the PLA themselves withdrew 40 kilometers after forcing the Indian troops back 40 kilometers; while in the latter, the PLA withdrew after reaching the city of Liangshan. The PLA demonstrated its ability to defend the territory in 1962 and its determination to punish Vietnam in 1979 while at the same time proving its lack of territorial ambition. This logic presupposes then, that the war must have originated from the other side's territorial intent. In the Indian case especially, the notion of sovereignty as a solution rather than motivation cannot be clearer. For the Chinese, the war was imposed upon them, not asked by them. Obviously they felt no anxiety facing the ambiguity in the Sino-Indian border lines, therefore unilateral withdrawal did not hurt Chinese feeling, either. China‘s willingness to tolerate the lack of clear sovereignty is considered a good place to start building China’s image :

Similarly, the three missile exercises the PLA launched in 1995 and 1996 in the Taiwan Straits actually suggests no intention to occupy Taiwan as long as the exercises could rebuff any potential foreign intervention. The exercises propounded the political statement that indeed Taiwan belongs to China; occupation would have proved meaningless or even damaging because an armed invasion would only suggest that the Taiwanese people’s heart was no longer on the side of the Chinese. Accordingly, it is critical for the PLA to demonstrate that the missile exercises were not aimed at the Taiwanese people. China subsequently repeated the claim a number of times that the PLA’s job in the Taiwan Strait was to prevent foreign intrusion. In a dramatic statement made in 1995, China’s President Jiang Zemin declared that the Chinese would not fight the Chinese, presumably warning against separatists on Taiwan to think twice before declaring themselves legally no longer Chinese. In fact, the solution Beijing came up with the reunification of China and Taiwan is “one country, two systems,” presumably to maintain everything in Taiwan as it is after reunification takes place and, perhaps, provide more room for Taipei to participate in international inter-governmental activities. National defense in terms of the rights to resort to armed solution is thus in no way to enhance Beijing’s control over the land of Taiwan; rather, it is simply a statement of national unity, which is ironically preserved by granting a separatist type of autonomy for Taiwan.

In brief, national defense in China is psychological defense. The issue of national defense per se did not exist in past Chinese history. Discussions on strategic defense ultimately concerned one's identification with the ancestor, the prince, the emperor, etc. As a result of their contacts with imperialist invasion, the Chinese only recently began to accept the notion of national defense. Consequently, national defense in modern China embraces nationalism. For Daoguang and Xianfeng, separating the Chinese from the “barbarian” embodied their concept of nationalism. For the Empress Dowager, nationalism referred to the gathering of the people's hearts in Beijing; for the KMT, it alludes to national unity. Finally, for the PLA, nationalism relates to anti-imperialism, the forces that had driven its predecessors to care about national defense in the first place.

In other words, national defense is an emotional rather than a rational project. In the past, Chinese Daoist spirit embraced all of Underheaven with no boundary. Only when the Emperor who personified the Daoist spirit was humiliated did national defense become a substitute. At this juncture, the Chinese character became constructed upon China's acquired national territory and not the Emperor. However, territorial sovereignty has proved to be an uncertain element in defining the Chineseness of China, and yet the pursuit of this Chineseness defines the meaning of territorial sovereignty. To establish the lofty and supreme morality of the Chinese character relies on the manipulation of territory. Without the Emperor, there is nonetheless imperialism, which the Chinese mold into an Other/outsider/invader against whom they no longer worried about their identity.

To show China's higher status vis-a-vis outside imperialism, China can usurp the land from imperialist “agents” and then return it as in 1962 and 1979. National defense becomes a mechanism to project nationalist emotion,<66> which explains the timing of Chinese military action. It often occurs when the Chinese feel internally vulnerable and need to demonstrate their moral supremacy. Since the concept of national defense is associated with the experiences of imperialism and colonialism, it is always ready to explode in face of any reminder of China’s past shame. Any reference to national defense in China would therefore signal a rising nationalism. By the same token, however rational or cool-headed they appear, studies of Chinese national defense would in themselves stimulate nationalism in China if they degrade China to a mere territorial identity.

Dependent Nationalism and the Enemy Within

Accordingly, perhaps like all the other incidents of postcolonial nationalism, Chinese nationalism is highly dependent. It is national defense that reproduces an external imperial threat which then solidifies nationalist unity, hence dependent nationalism. Certainly, nationalism follows no scientific mode because the first target is often in the psyche of the Chinese people, who must prove to themselves that they are intrinsically Chinese. This self-justification can be accomplished most efficiently through resisting those that deny them their Chineseness. The psychological dimension of national defense is a vital consideration for defense practitioners.

For example, defense against imperialism has conventionally depended on rallying the masses. One famous case would be Xu Guangjin and Ye Mingchen who mobilized villagers to block the British from entering Canton in the 1850s. Later instances include the Boxers, the student and worker rioters in the beginning of the Republican period, and campaigners in the subsequent anti-Japan, anti-imperialist, and anti-social imperialist rallies throughout the 1970s. What distinguishes these modern mass rallies from historical anti-foreignism is that they arise primarily out of a position of inferiority, as compared to the former attitudes of arrogance and disdain which were generally actualized through some punishing sanctions.

Dependent nationalism promotes revolutionary diplomacy as a form of national defense.<67> Revolutionary diplomacy was a term first used in the May Fourth Movement and was later adopted by subsequent leaders until 1978, the year that the term finally disappeared from the media. To engage in revolution, there must be an oppressing Other. The existence of this Other is precisely the assumption of every military action of the PLA, who usually describes its action as a "self-defensive counter attack."<68> This passive approach suggests that the Chinese self-identity comes from an oppressing Other. Officially, though, the Chinese have adopted a sovereignty discourse in explaining the concept of self-defense counter attack, which

With this inspirational note, the worry that individual Chinese may fail to pass this nationalist test inevitably takes place each time there is reform to enlist foreign capital, technology, or human resources.

The predicament of dependent nationalism is that there exists a strong element of self-loathing, a form of frustration caused by the realization of unwanted characteristics inside of one’s identity. This self-hatred stems from the understanding that imperialist cultural projects were built into Chinese sovereign establishments long before China had borders to be defended. The thriving of a sovereign China depends on merchants who can bring in capital from imperialist countries, scientists who study there, the military who purchase weapons there, and institutionalists who introduce Western systems to China. Whatever granted China its sense of glory becomes shockingly irrelevant in domain of the modern sovereign state; instead, all this past splendor was conceived of as a soon discarded legacy to be jettisoned if China wished to eventually turn modern.

Self-hatred contains almost inexpressibly subtle ironic overtones.<71> On the one hand, compradors, who facilitate the import of Western civilization to develop the Chinese state, feel superior to their fellow ”primitive” citizens. On the other hand, they face their own indispensable inferiority toward their Western masters and a heightened uneasiness about China's dependence on Western power. Thus in some situations these people would like to distance themselves from the less developed China, yet they still hate their helpless attachment to foreign forces and seek self-dignity from indigenous sources.

Taiwanese leaders keenly reflect this ambiguity. With fifty years under Japanese colonial rule and another fifty years under American tutorship, Taiwan is perhaps one of the most modern regions in Chinese cultural areas. On the one hand, leaders in Taiwan look down upon China as a “feudal, underdeveloped, authoritarian, retarded” country;<72> on the other, they possess a sense of self-pity for not being fully recognized by the United States and Japan from whom they have acquired their perspectives on China.<73>

However, the number of compradors inexorably increases. They are at best partial compradors because they also resist foreign influences at times. But because to resist foreign influences must also mean to resist oneself, this action makes people generally frustrated. Similarly, to despise the underdeveloped also implies a certain scorn toward one's own cultural legacy. All Chinese national leaders are entrapped in this predicament, for they need to occasionally remind their citizens of China's backwardness thus causing amongst them anxiety over their indigenous identities. They also must mobilize nationalism to ensure that Western value systems do not completely overtake People‘s Republic, in the process confusing those engaged in China's pursuit of status under the Western sovereign system. The PLA is affected deeply by this self-hatred. Facing Taiwanese leaders’ claim that the recognition and promotion of Taiwan’s separate sovereign status in the world is a Chinese achievement, a PLA Daily editorial explains this is not true for people in China because Taiwan independence would be a “bitter split of the Chinese people,” hence no achievement. For the PLA, which “is marching toward modernization,” they must stop Taiwan independence for the sake of all the people in the world,

The PLA still cannot decide whether it is a modern, Westernizng or a Chinese traditional establishment. The arts and cultural products in the 1990s celebrate PLA's victory in the Civil War much more frequently than it does other wars the PLA had fought successfully. These films portrayed the defeated KMT as feudalistic. The clear message is that the PLA has jettisoned its past legacy and become truly a people's military. The principles of a people's war are concurrently witnessing revision. For example, the PLA no longer advocates the tactics of mingling with the enemy in face of tactical nuclear weapon, nor do they promote an earlier and greater nuclear war than a later, smaller one. Modernization of national defense, in particular nuclear technology, is called for today.<75> In particular, as Russia is no longer a threat, the PLA quickly develops the ability to fast deploy troops to peripheral areas, including Taiwan. This, ironically, may limit its sovereign ability as one Western observer notes:

First of all, the PLA needs to perform conservatively in the political field in order to distract attention away from their profiteering policy. No one doubts the PLA’s loyalty to socialism after the Tiananmen massacre without appearing extremely politically awkward and naive. This facade allows more room for the PLA to maneuver in the commercial area. Yet with its mission of anti-imperialism, the PLA would inevitably be most sensitive to signs of imperialist influences in China, including the commercialization of the military, for example, to run businesses with military resources for the sole purpose of generating profits. The PLA, more than anyone else, needs to establish that imperialist collusion with its agents in China would eventually prove futile. Therefore, the PLA would have to treat this colluding agent in China seriously. Indeed one author of the aforementioned National Defense Series underscores the dangerous tendency within China itself to loosen up and warns that “the real enemy is ourselves“ for the ”pursuit of individual interests“ has gradually replaced ”concerns over national survival and crisis:”<78>

The PLA reassures itself regarding its capability of self-control by locating and controlling the colluding agents. Taiwan has become a perfect target as many foreign influences are using Taiwan as a leverage against China, and Taiwanese leaders enjoy boosting Taiwan's success at Western-style development. Accusing Taiwan of alienation from China serves as a reminder of Japanese colonial legacy in China since Taiwan was Japan’s colony for fifty-one years.<80> This action both satisfies the anti-imperial anxiety and evokes shame inside the Chinese mind. Inward defense in regard to Taiwan is thus a psychological as well as a national defense, guaranteeing China a chance to cleanse Taiwan, as Japan's postcolonial base, while still including it as part of China's Underheaven. The PLA leaders continue to see Taiwan issue as a matter of “people‘s heart;” any move against it would be “a serious emotional blow to the Chinese people.”<81> While sovereignty seems to be an issue, it never really is since, in the Chinese discourse the sovereignty argument is not to defend against enemies outside but to cleanse imperialism from the inside. It is more emotional than rational:

This self-loathing formed during China's encounter with imperialism and colonialism. It is an inexpressible feeling in Chinese as well as in English due to the poverty of language concerning the hybrid nature of postcolonial thinking. Instead of being a foundation of the Chinese state, territorial sovereignty at best reverts to a tool of identity politics. Fluctuating positions swing from emphasizing territory in one instance to giving it up in another. These instances all make a political statement concerning China's commitment to values at a level much higher than the concept of territorial sovereignty entails. Accordingly, inward defense is not as simple as a regime's oppression of its own people;<83> rather, it is a summons of the people to unite together in the name of the state.<84> In essence, however, a deeper reading may indicate that the state is never as important as the nation and territorial sovereignty rarely is more important than the unity of the Chinese people, which usually takes priority when a discourse, such as the following, ends:

The predicament nonetheless continues in that such psychological defense is meaningful only to the extent an un-Chinese target can be identified, be it feudalism, liberalism, or imperialism. It is always opposition to something that defines national defense in China. The importance of this "anti" defense may further grow in the 21st century because the public can no longer identify Chairman Mao or Comrade Deng, as the personification of Chineseness. With globalization and China's reform increasing Western influences in China, the simultaneous pressure for stronger inward defense necessarily expands. Then, the determination to command seemingly uncontrollable territory and the willingness to relinquish those already under control would likely form a symbiotic dyad deep into 21st century China.

Conclusion

The National Defense Act passed by the National People's Congress of March 1997 may well cause controversy due to its incompatibility with norms of Western sovereign states. For the Western states, inward defense is to prevent imperialist forces from utilizing the so-called liberal settings within the states and thus sabotaging the sovereign order. From the same liberal standpoint, however, China's inward defense is to prevent its citizens from the allurement of Western influences, and thus is disliked by Western observers. Inward defense in China is therefore considered so undemocratic that it defeats the purpose of having sovereignty, which is to protect liberalism from the threat of outside authoritarianism or communism. Ironically, though, inward defense may distract Chinese from attempting to achieve superpower status.

However, as argued earlier, inward defense exists in all states albeit indirect in Western states. In all the countries in the world, inward defense possesses a colonial, imperial origin. The difference lies in the fact that in the Western, imperialist country, inward defense does not cause self-hatred because the national defense thinkers in the West come from a stratum culturally, ideologically and economically different from the targets of their inward defense. The Chinese defense thinkers and practitioners hold no such fate, for every one of them bears imperial legacy acquired from education, work, the market, and the media. Both anti-feudalism and anti-imperialism lead to self-denial due to the hybrid composition of Chinese national identity.

Since the enemy resides within, it is impossible to speak strictly of territorially oriented national defense. To win people’s hearts, the end of Chinese psychological defense, is to deal with these unwanted hybrid influences in the public consciousness inside of everyone‘s mindset, and is therefore to rectify one’s own mind and purify China’s national identity. The hybrid influences unfortunately cannot be purified by their very definition. Consequently, any purifying projects would require an external as well as an internal target to project this unwanted self and to conquer or expel it. On the other hand, the Western observers of Chinese national defense are equally, if not more, confused and anxious about China's inward defense. China's defensive action may cross over or stay entirely within sovereign borders, but never focusing only on the territorial borders themselves. The West either views the Chinese as a threat to their sovereign order (when China crosses borders) or to universal civilization (when China stays within borders). The differing responses from the West naturally reinforce the strength of dependent nationalism in China. Under this circumstance, those Chinese who benefit from or enlist Western techniques, values or institutions, including the PLA, must engage in inward defense to prove their purity and identify an external enemy to consolidate their own Chineseness. This self-perpetuating circle, first originated from Western imperialism in China, is the essence of contemporary Chinese national defense.

Notes