My book project explores the source of national humiliation narratives and their unintended effects on international conflict. In the most prominent case, the Chinese government launched the Patriotic Education Campaign in the early 1990s to spread a narrative of China’s historic humiliation by foreign powers. Scholars have also suggested that national humiliation has influenced foreign policy in Russia, France, and the United States. However, why national humiliation narratives originate and when citizens embrace such narratives remain unclear. The primary contribution of the book is to answer these questions, and its secondary contribution clarifies how these narratives shape policy preferences. I investigate this topic using a variety of methods, including case studies, experiments, and large-N observational analysis.
I argue that political parties strategically propagate narratives of national humiliation when they can avoid responsibility for the event they are framing as humiliating and tie their political opponents to this event. This explanation is pathbreaking in that it challenges existing assumptions that certain events, such as defeat in war or colonization, drive these narratives and instead argues national humiliation is an ‘invented tradition’ constructed in narratives that selectively emphasize, and sometimes even fabricate, past events. I find evidence for this explanation in case studies of political parties in China and India in which I make use of a combination of primary and secondary sources, including Chinese-language sources and fieldwork in China.
Further, just because a political party promotes a narrative of national humiliation is no guarantee that this narrative will gain citizen support or that this party will gain power. I find that four factors determine whether narratives of national humiliation resonate with citizens. First, the more salient national identity is relative to competing cross-cutting identities, such as class or caste, the more likely national humiliation narratives are to find a receptive audience. Second, narratives only resonate with citizens if the government does not target them for repression. Third, the denser the media and institutional networks that link narrative propagators to their audience, the more likely national humiliation narratives will resonate. Finally, national humiliation narratives are more likely to resonate with citizens whose basic subsistence needs are met.
Next, I turn to the effects of these narratives on foreign policy preferences. Drawing on research from psychology, I theorize that humiliation increases individuals’ preference for conflict by decreasing their sensitivity to the cost of conflict. I find support for this argument using survey and lab experiments that are the first to be able to distinguish among potential mechanisms through which humiliation might influence conflict.
Finally, I argue that emotions spread and influence conflict preferences within identity groups through emotional contagion. I find support for this account with a nationally representative data set of more than 1.6 billion Chinese social media posts, which I have labeled for national humiliation narratives and foreign policy preferences using supervised machine learning.