Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 01:43:00 WET

From: Chinese Community Forum, Issue 9646

Joseph Wang 45

Letter for submission in response to Mr. Wu's letter.

Mr. Wu's article reminded me of something of two paradoxes of nationalism. The first is that the more influenced by the outside world someone is, the more nationalistic they tend to become. The second is that the strongest nationalists tend to come from "border" regions rather than from "core" regions.

In Chinese history, you can see that the groups which were most influenced by nationalism and more anti-Western were generally more Westernized groups such as intellectuals, and people from southern provinces which were more exposed to the West than northern ones. The same tends to be true in other parts of the world. In Russia, the leading Bolsheviks and Russian nationalists tended to be Jewish or ethnic minorities. Stalin, himself one to the strongest nationalists this century, was Georgian not Russian. You see the same sorts of things happening among Arab nationalists, an extremely large fraction of whom are Western educated and Christian rather than Muslim.

From my own personal life, I can guess the reason behind this. When someone starts adopting habits from the outside world, there becomes a stronger psychological pressure to define his or her own identity. If you have someone in the countryside who has not been exposed to the West, he or she doesn't feel a need to assert that they are non-Western. If you have someone who eats Pizza Hut Pizza, listens to rock and roll, then there is much more psychological pressure to assert that they are not Western.

What is happening in the world is that communications technology is making people more similar. Ironically, this pressure is causing people to feel more and more the need to assert that they are not. The fact that young people in the PRC have adopted American culture does not reduce anti-Americanism. It increases it as people try to prove to others (and to perhaps more importantly to themselves) that they are not American.

It use to be that only people in the "border areas" felt the pressures to define who they are and who they are not and the people in the "core areas" were safe from this.

Now because of the internet, everyone lives at the border and the world has no more core areas, and people feel much more of a need to define who they are and who they are not.