At the very beginning of the twentieth century, Beijing was a cosmopolitan city where the presence of foreign power was keenly felt by its denizens.

The Legation Quarter of the Forbidden City was carved up like a cake between the world’s foremost imperial superpowers. The French possessed the old palaces of an impoverished Manchu noble, close to a French school and their own church of St Michel. The building which now houses the People’s Supreme Procuracy was once home to a Russian embassy. The city’s Communist Party headquarters today were then the base of the Japanese Legation. The British, meanwhile, resided in a palace they rented from an imperial prince.

The boxer rebellion: a national humiliation

Foreign influences were as visible then in Beijing as they are today at a time when visitors to Tiananmen Square will see the familiar red-and-yellow McDonald’s sign towering over them like the Stars and Stripes, and where – until it was recently shut down after protests – you could find a Starbucks in the Forbidden City.

Angered by the foreign influence in the north of China, and galvanized by their belief in a pure Chinese nation, the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists – better known to us as 'the Boxers' – emerged as a shadowy sect which soon became a violently anti-foreign, anti-Christian movement. In June 1900, the Boxers descended on Beijing and besieged the Legation Quarter. The Empress Dowager of Cixi, who had ruled behind the scenes for decades, had to decide whether to quash the rebellion and protect the foreigners, or to allow the Boxers to destroy them. But she did nothing.

The siege was only lifted by an expeditionary force comprised of armies from eight different imperial powers that came to rescue their nationals. When they triumphed, the foreigners staged a victory parade in the Forbidden City. The Empress Dowager fled, and the Qing dynasty which had ruled since 1644 was so weakened that within little more than a decade it would be overthrown.

In his recent article, James Kingston was correct to identify the strain of nationalism which flows through the veins of the Chinese body politic. He elucidated how this nationalism has been the muse to which the Chinese state has appealed through the centuries in its attempts to establish a Chinese historical narrative which would have the primary effect of cementing the place and power of her rulers in the present.

Hence today, the Chinese government keeps the more distant territories over which it rules – distant, both geographically and culturally – on a very tight leash. When the spark of rebellion is lit, as it was when the people of Beijing, not just students, protested in Tiananmen Square during 1989, and as it was most recently when racial tensions boiled over bringing the native Uighur Muslims into conflict with Han migrants in the far-flung Xinjiang province, the authorities lay the blame on hostile foreign influences.

What is absent from this gloss is that although Chinese rulers have traditionally had this preoccupation with their history, they have held up their history as a source of humiliation sometimes more than as a source of pride.

With the abdication of the last Chinese emperor in 1911, the Republic of China was born. Still, memories of past defeats remained vivid in the collective national consciousness. It was not just the defeat of the Boxers by a foreign alliance that stirred them, but a series of humiliations: the concession of Hong Kong to the British after the Second Opium War when Lord Elgin’s Anglo-French force reached Beijing and sacked the Summer Palace; the Chinese defeat at the hands of the Japanese navy in a clash in 1894 which led to the loss of Taiwan, the Liaodong Peninsula, the Pescadores Islands, and Korea under the Treaty of Shimonoseki.

To borrow a phrase that Nietzsche once applied to the English for the Christian morality they preached in spite of apparently surrendering their faith in God, it is possible to speak today of “the Chinese consistency”: that China pursues aggressive economic liberalisation, introducing free market reforms which have dramatically increased standards of living at all levels of Chinese society; and yet China continues to stand guilty of human rights abuses, of restricting the freedom of the press, of continuing to accept a totalitarian dictatorship.

Yet there is a far deeper “Chinese consistency” which the aftermath of the 1911 Revolution points toward. The republican movement which emerged became the vehicle for a Chinese nationalism that placed the revival of the Han Chinese race at the centre of its agenda. The “yellow race”, the first president of the new republic Sun Yat-sen warned , was facing extinction in a global fight for racial superiority. Simultaneously, intellectuals and young radicals became overwhelmed by a desire to reject everything from the Chinese past and to embrace western technology, politics, morality, knowledge, art, copying western music, dress and architecture, seeking to refashion schools, prisons, armies, banks, even the economy and the political system according to western ideas. A nation scarred by humiliations at the hands of foreigners now saw that they had to learn from the foreigners in order to survive and to prosper.

Friends again: Carter and Xiaoping

Ultimately, it was foreign influence that would determine China’s development for at least the next half-century. But it was not the constitutionalism of Europe and the United States that they studied; rather, it was the Marxist theory they watched transform Russia into the most modern state of all. Marxism provided western imperialism and exploitation as an explanation for China’s hardships, and when the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921 it was with a conviction that this means of ordering society could best strengthen the nation.

When Chairman Mao ultimately rose to power in 1949, the USA became China’s main enemy, but it also found itself in a rivalry with the Soviets. Mao fell out with the Soviet leadership after Stalin’s death, accusing the Russians of abandoning the goal of world domination, and even went so far as to prepare for nuclear war with the superpower which had installed him. In his Great Leap Forward, Mao abolished private property, money, markets, and even endeavoured to bring an end to the notion of family, striving to build a communist utopia of “people’s communes”. The outcome, with all the inevitability of a story we have heard over and again: economic collapse; hunger; disease. Thirty million dead – at least.

The crisis opened a split within the party leadership between the diehard Maoists and the faction calling for reform. One of the latter was Deng Xiaoping, who would become president through a coup in 1976. Mao’s Cultural Revolution was a final attempt to purge party officials and “capitalist roaders” like Deng, but it was hopeless. When Deng seized power after Mao’s death, he initiated economic reform on an unprecedented scale, opening the door to foreign investors, establishing special economic zones, and restoring diplomatic relations with the rest of the world. He spoke of the great virtue of getting rich, of introducing western technology and western management, of learning from the west once again.

The dissatisfaction of the late eighties was to a degree about disillusion with communism and a yearning for democracy. But it was also an expression of anger at the corruption, unemployment, and high prices that plagued the nation’s cities. Westernisation brought higher standards of living in the rural areas which had been devastated by Mao, but in the cities the newfound prosperity passed many by, crime rates soared, and inflation spiralled out of control. Dissatisfaction was widespread and general. No matter how we of the west like to persuade ourselves, Tiananmen Square was not simply a brave stand for western democracy; it was also a desperate backlash against the uglier consequences of westernisation.

The government’s response was heavy-handed. The party attempted to consolidate its power, arresting Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang who had backed the protestors, and staging a witch-hunt for his supporters. Deng was forced into retirement by the party leadership for allowing the Tiananmen Square protests to escalate. State control was re-imposed over key sectors of the economy and private entrepreneurs were arrested. And, of course, the authorities blamed it all on foreign influence.

What can be taken from this long-winded yet potted summary of a very short period of China's ancient history?

Over the last century, China's development has not been a narrative of linear progression but a series of false starts, doors opened, paths explored. China has been a bullish nation, eager to display herself on the world stage; yet whenever the world has taken a closer look, she has run away. The country has jerked back and forth, swinging unpredictably between periods of westernising reform and bouts of communist fallback. Rather like an insecure adolescent for the past century China has been self-absorbed, fraught with fears and anxieties and soul-searching; looking around for a lead to follow, be it the Soviet Union or the United States; swinging between moods, scarred by humiliations from other powers, and yet still looking up to those other powers for direction.

The awkward superpower

China is the awkward superpower, still unsure of what to be and what to stand for. The latest news from Beijing tells us that the courts are seeking to reduce the use of the death penalty. Such steps are to be praised and encouraged. They are proof that as soon as a populace develops a taste for the ideals at the heart of liberal democracy, the taste becomes too tempting to stifle: as John F Kennedy reminded Berliners, that in spite of the many confessed failings of our political systems, “we never had to put a wall to keep our people in, to prevent them from escaping”. But if the west begins to wag the finger as it has done in the past, if it lambastes the country's record on human rights or atrocious treatment of the media, China will simply turn away and isolate herself.

China manipulates history for the purposes of establishing unity and maintaining the power of its present regime; but so have the west. How else would an Englishman characterise the once-fashionable Whig myth that the country took a harmonious, progressive course from feudalism to liberal parliamentary democracy? How else would an American describe their old lie that the United States is and always has been a great racial melting pot? Even after the departure of the arrogant Bush administration, whenever we observe a foreign power with laws and values that differ from ours, we judge so easily but never reflect on our own shortcomings.

If we continue to look down on her, to bring more humiliation to a nation long scarred by episodes of its past, we will push China back into darkness.