neophytor

China’s Agony of Defeat
中国对失败的苦恼

It's impossible to understand what the Games mean to the Chinese without understanding their history of humiliation.
如果你不明白中华民族蒙羞的历史，你就不可能理解本届奥运会对中国人意味着什么。


作者：Orville Schell
翻译：Neophytor
出处：《新闻周刊》NEWSWEEK

Updated: 2:38 M ET Jul 26, 2008

The Olympics are an irresistible stage for athletes—but also for those who wish to act out their grievances before the world. The Beijing Games, which kick off on Aug. 8, are hardly an exception. While Chinese leaders furiously insist they're not, and should not be, "political," these Olympics promise to become one of the most charged in history. Rarely has a more varied array of contentious issues crystallized around a single sporting event.
奥运会，对于运动员而言，是充满诱惑力的舞台；对于那些想在世界面前表现自己不满情绪的人而言，也是如此。对于8月8日开幕的北京奥运会，也不例外。尽管中国的领导人愤怒地坚持说他们不是，也不会，使奥运会“政治化”，但他们的这些关于奥运会的承诺，已经成为历史上最受争议的话题。围绕同一个体育事件，极少形成如此众多争议话题。


China is bedeviled by internal problems—human-rights violations, media censorship, corruption, pollution, labor abuses and lack of due process, to name a few. Several "domestic" issues—Tibet, Taiwan and Hong Kong—have also regularly spilled over into the international realm. At the same time, a host of relatively new, purely international problems have accrued to China as the country has aggressively sought access to natural resources around the world. By dealing with pariah states like Burma, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Iran in order to feed the country's voracious appetite for oil, timber and metals, Chinese leaders have been accused of playing an irresponsible global role. Their critics would like nothing more than to flay Beijing before a worldwide television audience of hundreds of millions.
中国倍受国内问题的煎熬，这些问题仅举几例：侵犯人权、新闻审查、腐败、环境污染、劳动力“压榨”及缺乏适当的法律程序。几个国内（注，原文有双引号，本人认为不应该加双引号）话题：西藏问题、台湾问题和香港问题，这些话题经常与国际问题联系在一起。同时，对于东道国（中国）相对较新的，比较纯粹的国际问题是：中国在全球范围内采取了积极的自然资源搜索工作。为了满足国内对于原油、木材和矿石的贪婪胃口，中国与一些“流氓国家”进行了交易，这些“流氓国家”包括缅甸，苏丹，津巴布韦和伊朗，中国的国家领导人为此被一些人指责为在全球扮演了一个不负责任的角色。没有什么比到北京，在全球亿万电视观众面前，表现他们的批评更有可能的了。


Chinese officials are doing everything possible to block such protests. They've designated three remote sites in Beijing in which to corral a few neutered "demonstrations." Rarely have the Chinese military and police been more anxious or at a higher state of alert. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Tens of thousands of police, paramilitary troops and regular soldiers have been deployed to guard Olympic facilities, major buildings and public spaces. Many foreign NGO staffers based in Beijing have been asked to leave for the summer. Visa applications to attend the Games—now requiring not only letters of invitation but hotel reservations, round-trip airline tickets and bank statements—have frequently been turned down with no explanation. Indeed, the whole bureaucratic structure of the Chinese government and party seems coiled like a spring, ready to release into action if any errant soul emerges to make a disturbance, or even express unacceptable views, in a public way.
中国官方采取了一切可能的方法去阻止如此抗议。他们在北京指定了三处偏远的地点作为游行示威的地点，使之成为“围困”示威者的围栏。中国军队和警察从未如此紧张或者如此高度戒备。监控探头到处都是。成千上万的警察、准军事部队和正规部队，被部署在奥运设施、主要建筑物和公共场所进行戒备。很多驻北京的国外非政府组织的职员，被要求在这个夏天离开北京。现在申请参加奥运会的签证，不仅需要邀请信，而且还需要提交酒店预订文件、往返机票、银行资信文件等，而且，这些签证申请，常常被无理由拒绝。事实上，中国政府整个官僚机构和政党，就像缠起来的弹簧，一旦制造混乱的幽灵进入，或者公开出现不可接受的观点，他们就会“弹开”，立即行动。

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Now, I am the first to admit that the Chinese government gives ample cause for protest. Nor is vigorous dissent always counterproductive when dealing with Beijing. But I would argue that this is not the time—and not just because any unauthorized protest is quite likely to fail. The Beijing Games present a fraught and sensitive moment. China has made a Herculean effort to prepare the way for this spectacle, in which ordinary Chinese, not just their leaders, can announce themselves to the world as having regained their national greatness. Protests would almost certainly spark the kind of nationalist and autocratic backlash that they're meant to remedy. Remember what followed the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations—a nearly 20-year period of reaction and restoration from which China has still not recovered.
现在，我首先承认中国政府对于抗议拥有大量的理由。在处理与北京关系时，并不是所有的积极异议都会适得其反。但我认为现在并不是时候，不过并不是因为任何未经许可的抗议很可能失败。北京奥运会处于一个紧张且敏感的时刻。中国付出了艰巨的努力，以准备着盛大的场面，在这里，普通的中国百姓，而不仅仅是他们的领袖们，可以向世界宣布他们已经恢复了往昔的荣光。抗议活动几乎肯定会引发某种民族主义和专制的反弹，以他们的方式进行补救。回想一下1989年天安门事件后发生的那些事情吧——近20年期间，政府（对此事的）反应和（专制主义的）复辟，从那时起，中国（的民主）至今没有恢复（到原来的水平）。

This proud prickliness has deep historical roots that involve China, the West and even Japan. As I argue in the current New York Review of Books, the most critical element in the formation of China's modern identity has been the legacy of the country's "humiliation" at the hands of foreigners, beginning with its defeat in the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century and the shameful treatment of Chinese immigrants in America. The process was exacerbated by Japan's successful industrialization. Tokyo's invasion and occupation of the mainland during World War II was in many ways psychologically more devastating than Western interventions because Japan was an Asian power that had succeeded in modernizing, where China had failed.
这引以自豪的转折点有深厚的历史根源，涉及中国，西方，甚至日本。正如我在纽约书评中所说的，形成中国的现代认同感的最关键因素，是国家的在外国人手里的“令人羞耻的”遗产——开始于19世纪中期的鸦片战争的失败以及中国在美国移民的悲惨遭遇。日本成功的工业化，加速了这个（形成现代国家认同感的）过程。在二战期间，东京在大陆的侵略和占领，对人们心理上的破坏，甚至强于西方的干预；因为日本是亚洲成功实现现代化的力量，而中国则没有实现现代化。

This inferiority complex has been institutionalized in the Chinese mind. In the early 20th century China took up its victimization as a theme and made it a fundamental element in its evolving collective identity. A new literature arose around the idea of bainian guochi—"100 years of national humiliation." After the 1919 Treaty of Versailles cravenly gave Germany's concessions in China to Japan, the expression wuwang guochi—"Never forget our national humiliation"—became a common slogan. To ignore China's national failure came to be seen as unpatriotic. Since then, China's historians and ideological overseers have never hesitated to mine the country's past sufferings "to serve the political, ideological, rhetorical, and/or emotional needs of the present," as the historian Paul Cohen has written.
这种自卑情结成为中国内心的一部分。在20世纪初，中国将苦难史作为一个主题，并使它成为其不断发展的集体认同的一个基本元素。围绕这种想法，出现了一种新的短语“百年国耻”——“ 100年的民族耻辱” 。在1919年维也纳条约将德国在中国的租界转让给日本后，“勿忘国耻”——“永远不要忘记民族的耻辱”成为一种共同的口号。忽视国家的失败，逐渐被视为一种不爱国的行为。从那时起，中国的历史学家、思想界的领袖毫不犹豫地将国家过去的苦难埋在（心中），“去服务现实政治的，意识形态的，修辞的，和/或情绪的需要”，历史学家Paul Cohen这样写道。

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Sun Yat-sen, for instance, described China in 1924 as being "a heap of loose sand" that had "experienced several decades of economic oppression by the foreign powers." In his 1947 book, "China's Destiny," Chiang Kai-shek wrote: "During the past 100 years, the citizens of the entire country, suffering under the yoke of the unequal treaties which gave foreigners special 'concessions' and extra-territorial status in China, were unanimous in their demand that the national humiliation be avenged." And when the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, Mao Zedong declared, "Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation."
举个例子说，孙中山在1924年将中国描述为“一盘散沙”，“长期受到国外势力的经济压迫”。1947年，蒋介石在他的书《中国的命运》里写道：“在过去的100多年里，整个国家的公民们，在不平等条约的束缚下历经磨难，这些不平等条约，给予在中国的外国人特别‘特许权’和特别领土地位。那些遭受迫害的公民们，一致要求为民族的耻辱复仇。”当中华人民共和国在1949年成立的时候，毛泽东宣布：“我们的国家将永不再是受侮辱和羞辱的主体。”


Highlighting their victimhood has led Chinese leaders to rely on what historian Peter Hays Gries calls "the moral authority of their past suffering." This was especially true during the 1960s, when non-Western countries vied with one another to appear the most "oppressed" by imperialism, and thus the most authentically revolutionary. But it has continued to the present day. In 2001, the National People's Congress passed a law proclaiming an official "National Humiliation Day." (Of course, so many historical dates were proposed that delegates couldn't agree on any particular one.)
为了突出他们的苦难经历，中国领导人就依靠历史学家Peter Hays Gries所说的“他们过去所遭受苦难的道德权威”。在上世纪60年代，当非西方国家相互比较，看谁更受到帝国主义压迫因而谁最革命的时候，尤其如此。但这种事情，一直持续到现在。2001年全国人民代表大会通过了一项法案，宣布了官方的“国耻日”（当然，代表们无法就如此众多的历史时刻选择一个作为国耻日）

This history pretty much guarantees that certain traits will express themselves again and again whenever China responds under stress to the outside world. "The question of Western humiliation is always unconsciously inside us," filmmaker Chen Shi-Zheng—whose recent film, "Dark Matter," explores this theme—told me. "There is something almost in our DNA that triggers autonomic, and sometimes extreme, responses to foreign criticism or put-downs." Or as Lu Xun, China's most famous essayist and social critic, lamented almost 75 years ago, "Throughout the ages Chinese have had only one way of looking at foreigners. We either look up to them as gods or down on them as wild animals."
无论何时，当中国处于外部压力的时候，他们一次次表现出某种特征，这种特征正是由历史所保证的。“西方耻辱问题，总是藏在我们内心，却不被发觉，”电影制片人Chen Shi-Zheng在他最近的电影“暗物质”中探索了这个主题，他告诉我：“当我们面对国外的批评或异议时，我们基因中的某种东西就会自动触发，有时甚至是剧烈反应。”或者就像75年前逝世的鲁迅，中国最著名的随笔作家、社会评论家，所说的那样：“我们中国人，看外国人，只有一种方式。不是把他们看成上帝，就是把他们看成禽兽。”