Revanchism, from the French revanche or “revenge”, is the will to reverse territorial losses following war or social upheaval. The term originated in the 1870s, after the Franco Prussian War, for nationalists who wanted to revenge the defeat and the reparations extracted by Germany, and to reclaim the lost territories of Alsace-Lorraine.
Revanchism is also linked to irredentism — the drive to expand nation-state territory to claim fragments of the cultural and ethnic nation outside the borders of the core.
When Mao Zedong took power in 1949, he set an immediate goal of re-establishing the “greater China” of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912).
And he achieved that goal following the supposed “peaceful liberation” of the East Turkestan Republic (now Xinjiang) in 1949 and the invasion of Tibet in 1950, increasing China’s size by more than one-third. The politics of this “greater China” are similar to those of the “greater Greece” plan of the early 20th century, or the “greater Hungary” drives.
Every Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader since has carried forward this vision of a greater China, adjusting and expanding it as the country’s power has grown. Under President Xi this has become even more explicit.
The CCP’s overseas agents and apologists usually, however, dress up the message in the language of contemporary western peace movements. That is what makes a recent statement by the No Cold War group so extraordinary.
The statement (published in the Morning Star of 8 December) is a denunciation of Biden’s “summit for democracy” and starts out with a (mainly fair) catalogue of US aggression over the years, as though that somehow makes all criticism of China mere hypocrisy. The statement puts quote-marks round the words “human rights” and “democracy” as though these concepts simply have no meaning. China’s brutality in Hong Kong is justified by the fact that “Britain ruled as a colonial power [there] for more than 150 years [and] never allowed an election of the Governor General.”
Criticism of Chinese state misdeeds is further dismissed: “From 1840, Britain waged two ‘opium wars’ against China, forcing opium onto millions of Chinese people at gunpoint over several decades.” And: “During the Second Opium War [1856-60 — JD] 3,500 British troops destroyed China’s Old Summer Palace in Beijing, burning the palace to the ground and stealing much of its contents. Many artworks from the palace, including sculptures, porcelain, jade and gold objects, are today kept in the British Museum in London.”
The Opium Wars were indeed a disgrace and Britain probably should return the plunder looted from the Summer Palace.
But none of that justifies the CCP’s vicious clamp-down on democracy campaigners in Hong Kong, or its atrocities (probably amounting to genocide) in Xingjiang, unless your view of history is essentially revanchist.
Revanchism and irredentism are similarly central to Putin’s objective of reclaiming the territories of the old USSR: hence the stationing of more than 175,000 Russian troops and heavy weapons around Ukraine’s borders.
The same edition of the Morning Star that carried No Cold War’s CCP propaganda piece, also carried (right alongside it) an article of pure Putinesque propaganda describing the government of Ukraine as, effectively, fascist, and claiming that Ukrainians and Russians “are part of the same families.” This is clearly in preparation for a Russian invasion of Ukraine and a sure sign that if and when that happens, the Morning Star will support it.
