China's Demand for Apology Is Rooted in Tradition

By FOX BUTTERFIELD

To the Chinese Communists, extracting an apology, or confession, has long been a favorite technique in dealing with anyone seen as an adversary, especially when the person is in custody, according to several American experts on what is known as thought reform. Beijing's demand for an apology for the spy plane incident, these specialists say, is therefore standard procedure.

The demand for an apology "is consistent with the whole thought-reform ethos, which focuses on confession, self-criticism and apology" before the person can be freed, said Robert J. Lifton, professor of psychology and psychiatry at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Professor Lifton wrote the pioneering examination of the Communists' use of thought reform on coming to power in 1949, "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Chinese Brainwashing," first published in 1961. The Chinese Communist emphasis on apology grew out of both the old Confucian tradition of conformity and the Soviet show trials of the 1930's, Professor Lifton and the other experts said.

One of them, Lucian Pye, professor emeritus of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: "When the Chinese have the moral high ground, they can be unrelenting in exploiting the situation. It goes back to the Confucian tradition, in which the ruler is morally superior, and therefore when your opponent apologizes it proves they are morally inferior and cannot be the legitimate ruler."

At first, the Communists used thought reform to try to convert millions of former soldiers and officials of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, but they have also used thought reform against dissidents.

Merle Goldman, a history professor at Boston University and a specialist on China's treatment of dissidents, said thought reform was "stronger under Mao Zedong, but the remnants remain." Usually the first apology is insufficient, Professor Goldman said, "so they make you do it again and again, to make you say what you did or thought was terrible. You have to be increasingly apologetic."

Professor Goldman says the origins of the Chinese emphasis on apologies lies in the Confucian value system, which stressed the need for "conformity to the views of the patriarchal father, and then to the emperor." He added, "This kind of internalized consensus was the way China was ruled for thousands of years."

When the Chinese originally called for the United States to apologize over the Navy plane, they were saying "Washington must accept their view of what happened," Professor Goldman said.

Professor Lifton said that the American spy plane touched on sensitive Chinese feelings about Western imperialist nations taking advantage of a weakened China in the 19th and early 20th centuries to seize Hong Kong as a colony and carve out several special "treaty ports," like parts of Shanghai. When the Communists came to power, they arrested a number of even those Westerners who had been sympathetic, forcing them to undergo thought reform and confess to having been spies. "It was a way to discredit all Western influence in China," the professor said.

In the current situation, he added, "we would do well to avoid provoking the more suspicious and anti-Western and more thought-reform- minded groups within the regime."

Professor Pye said the plane incident also fed into a long-held "Chinese sense of victimization," of having been the world's greatest nation only to be humiliated in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

"Other countries in Asia have actually had a much worse time, of actually being turned into colonies, like India, Vietnam and the Philippines," he said. "But the Chinese make the most of being mistreated."

Professor Pye suggested that this attitude had its origins in Chinese child-rearing practices, "in which parents shame their children into proper behavior." This has carried over into other areas of society, he said, so people "often find themselves in a game-playing situation, or struggle, in which you prove you are the superior party by shaming the other party."

How, then, would Chinese themselves end a stalemate like the current one?

Professor Pye's answer: "Chinese culture is a bargaining, haggling culture. You are constantly bargaining. You win some, you lose some. And then you come back and bargain some more." This is what seems to have happened in negotiations between Beijing and Washington.