Explaining China’s Modern Transformation Through “Trauma–Healing”
- Shirley Meng Lafond, PhD.
- Dec 30, 2025
- 10 min read
A Review of Paul U. Unschuld, The Fall and Rise of China: Healing the Trauma of History
Introduction
Paul U. Unschuld’s The Fall and Rise of China: Healing the Trauma of History (2013) is an interpretive work written for a broad readership. From the perspective of an external observer, the author characterizes China’s successive setbacks since the nineteenth century, arising from multiple external shocks and institutional pressures, as a series of “historical traumas,” and proposes a trajectory of transformation defined by “self-diagnosis, institutional learning, and reorganization” in response to perceived Western scientific and technological superiority.
The book’s most distinctive feature is its analytical use of the author’s background in medical history and health systems: Unschuld brings metaphors of “diagnosis,” “pathology,” and “healing” into his narrative of China’s modern societal and state transformation, tracing a logic of self-strengthening across science and technology, education, medicine, and institutional change. In terms of length, the book is concise but wide-ranging and is well suited as an introductory text for understanding China’s modern “setback–response–re-emergence” narrative.
At the same time, certain chapters would benefit from correction and supplementation, particularly in the conceptual treatment of East Asian cultural transmission and in the periodization of China’s “learning from the West.” For example, in discussing Sino-Japanese relations and cultural influence, the author underscores the profound impact of Chinese civilization on Japanese institutions, religion, and thought, and invokes a Western characterization of Japan as a “moonlight culture” to emphasize an image of “reflection/borrowing.”
China, Japan and the Opium War
If one refines the analysis through historical periodization and mechanisms of transmission, a more accurate formulation would be as follows: Japan’s systematic absorption of Chinese writing, legal-administrative models, and religious-intellectual traditions did not originate from a single dynastic “starting point,” but rather accumulated over a longer period and reached a major peak during the Sui–Tang era through formal exchange mechanisms such as official missions to Sui and Tang China. With respect to the Tang missions in particular, Japan dispatched repeated delegations to Tang China between 630 and 894; their influence on Japanese political institutions, religion, and culture was structural. Yet the book does not explicitly address the Tang dynasty’s influence on Japan, an omission that departs from a widely recognized historical baseline in Chinese historiography.
In the discussion titled “First Steps to a New Beginning,” the author emphasizes China’s systematic engagement with Western systems and ensuing institutional adjustments but gives limited attention to “marker” concepts commonly used in Chinese historiography and narratives of modern Chinese history. To avoid leaving readers with the impression that institutionalized learning began only at a later stage, at least two key historical nodes should be incorporated: first, early post–Opium War intellectual mobilization and technical-oriented learning often summarized as “learning from foreigners’ strengths to counter them” (师夷长技以制夷); and second, the Self-Strengthening Movement of the 1860s–1890s, oriented toward “self-strengthening and enrichment” (自强—求富), which drove experiments in military industry, education, and modern enterprise institutions. In terms of large-scale, state-level, institutionalized introduction of Western technology and associated practices, the Self-Strengthening Movement that emerged in the 1860s is particularly emblematic. While the author references the concept of “self-strengthening,” he does not explicitly identify the Self-Strengthening Movement as a distinct historical category. Likewise, the earlier intellectual mobilization represented by “师夷长技以制夷,” which provided an important ideational prehistory for Self-Strengthening efforts, is not addressed. These additions would not necessarily alter the book’s overarching argument, but they would align the starting point and stage demarcations of “learning from the West” more closely with established Chinese historiographical conventions and facilitate more direct dialogue with existing scholarship.
Cultural Concepts
In addition, the book contains misreadings of certain Chinese cultural concepts. One example is its simplified explanation of “诛九族” (exterminating the nine clans). The author translated it as “nine generations” instead of “nine clans.” “Nine clans” does not refer to a strictly vertical genealogical concept equivalent to “nine generations of ancestors and descendants.” Rather, it denotes broad kin-based collective punishment extending across multiple concentric circles of relatives, typically including paternal, maternal, and affinal (in-law) relations. The precise composition of the “nine clans” varies across dynastic interpretations, but the core meaning is horizontal expansion of collective liability, not a purely vertical “nine-generation” structure.
The book was published in August 2013, during the early period following the leadership transition from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping. Many policy shifts that later became widely discussed—particularly a more systematic “reconstruction of national narrative” and changes in external communication style—had not yet fully unfolded or had not yet been broadly recognized internationally. Under the previous leadership (Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao), China generally prioritized development, maintained a relatively low external profile, and emphasized stability and growth.
Scholars often use the notion of “keeping a low profile” (韬光养晦) to describe one dimension of China’s post–Cold War foreign policy orientation. Meanwhile, slogans such as Hu Jintao’s “harmonious society” (和谐社会) were widely treated as emblematic of domestic governance objectives. However, multiple studies link the more proactive or more assertive features of China’s external behavior in the 2010s to leadership change and shifting international conditions, describing an evolution from reactive firmness toward more active international participation.
Wolf Warrior Deplomacy
“Wolf warrior diplomacy,” as a more confrontational style of public diplomacy, entered global discourse prominently around 2019–2020 and became a common label for changes in China’s external messaging. In recent years, when Sino-Japanese relations have faced friction over specific issues, observers have repeatedly noted the politicization of economic and trade measures; in some disputes, China has been described as employing economic leverage or “economic coercion,” including trade and import restrictions.
During the COVID-19 period in 2020, Chinese messaging also intensified in ways that reinforced a public impression of “institutional superiority,” with frequent claims that China’s system outperformed Western democratic systems. This pattern has been documented in multiple observations and studies.
For example, an April 2020 report in The Economist noted that Chinese state media emphasized that the pandemic response demonstrated the “superiority” and “distinctive capacity” of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Related scholarship and commentary likewise discuss “institutional advantage/governance demonstration” narratives deployed domestically and internationally during the pandemic. Overall, since 2013, China’s discourse has placed greater emphasis on national confidence and institutional confidence, and external narratives have more consistently highlighted “national rejuvenation” and major-power positioning. Accordingly, a methodological caution is warranted: while the book provides a long-horizon “trauma–repair” framework, it does not capture the pronounced changes in external communication style and international narrative competition that became more salient from the late 2010s through the 2020s.
Trauma–Diagnosis–Repair
Within the book, Unschuld uses the “trauma–diagnosis–repair” medical metaphor to organize a concentrated account of humiliations and crises experienced under war, treaty regimes, and external intervention, and he seeks to understand how China could re-consolidate and rise rapidly in a historical context approaching fragmentation. In terms of writing strategy, the author offers an interpretive framework rather than a single causal explanation. He emphasizes the interaction of multiple factors, external shocks, institutional learning, knowledge transfer, and the rebuilding of state capacity, without reducing China’s “rise” to one decisive explanatory variable. This invites a natural extension: if “rejuvenation” is not explained by a single cause, which factors among many possess greater structural and enduring weight?
The Five-Year Plan
In my view, rather than treating China’s rise as an “accidental leap” within a particular period, it is more productive to view it as the cumulative outcome of long-term, institutionalized developmental mobilization. Across different historical phases, political forces differed in background, ideology, and policy instruments, yet they broadly shared a consistent priority objective: rebuilding state capacity and pursuing modernization catch-up. This does not imply a linear trajectory, late Qing, Republican China, and the PRC involve multiple ruptures and turns, but it highlights a more stable throughline: following repeated setbacks, China’s political narratives and policy practices repeatedly elevate “development, strengthening the country, and preventing renewed humiliation” to the highest level of national agenda-setting.
This throughline is observable in policy structures, most notably the Five-Year Plan. Official and research sources commonly note that since the first Five-Year Plan began in 1953, China has formulated fourteen Five-Year Plans, with the Fourteenth covering 2021–2025; by the end of 2025 it is in a closing phase rather than “fully completed” in a strict sense.
On a longer horizon, China’s “Two Centenary Goals” provide a cross-generational macro timeline: the first goal (building a moderately prosperous society around 2021) has been officially declared achieved; the second goal targets building a modernized strong country around 2049. Within this framework, strategies such as “reinvigorating the country through science and education” and major national science and technology programmes embed “catch-up” objectives into concrete technology pathways. For example, the 863 Program (National High-Tech R&D Program) launched in 1986, with one stated orientation being breakthroughs in key areas approaching or surpassing international advanced levels. Likewise, “Made in China 2025,” introduced in 2015 as an industrial upgrading policy, emphasizes manufacturing capability upgrading and greater autonomy in critical technologies.
Century of Humiliation
In China’s official discourse and social memory, a highly condensed explanatory formula persists: “backwardness invites defeat; development enables self-strengthening” (落后就要挨打，发展才能自强). Such formulations are often used in political texts and academic discussion to summarize how experiences of humiliation shape developmental mobilization as both psychological driver and narrative foundation. The related “Century of Humiliation” narrative, often defined as the historical period from the Opium War era to around 1949—has also been identified by scholars as a key resource in contemporary Chinese state narrative, used to imagine external risks and to construct the legitimacy of internal cohesion.
Accordingly, the narrative structure “external invasion, humiliation due to backwardness, must catch up to prevent renewed humiliation” is not merely an expression of popular sentiment; it can be traced through policy slogans, educational narratives, and national strategic framing.
In official Chinese discourse, the overarching objective is more commonly framed as “national rejuvenation” (民族复兴/国家复兴, rejuvenation), rather than merely “economic rise.” Official texts that describe the achievement of the first centenary goal and future development frequently situate these goals within a longer narrative of “advancing toward national rejuvenation.” This framing generates a structural tension: on the one hand, the narrative emphasizes that China historically occupied a leading and central position and depicts modern decline as a temporary “interruption”; on the other hand, it continually stresses “never forget national humiliation” and “remain vigilant,” sustaining a sense of urgency and collective mobilization. This juxtaposition does not necessarily constitute a contradiction; it can be understood as a functional combination that provides both “civilizational confidence/historical normality” as a source of legitimacy and “trauma memory/risk anticipation” as a mobilizing mechanism.
Following the author’s medical metaphor, China’s long-term planning system (Five-Year Plans, science and technology programmes, and cross-generational targets) can be interpreted as an institutionalized “treatment regimen,” while the “Century of Humiliation/backwardness invites defeat” narrative resembles an enduring “immunological memory.” By repeatedly invoking past trauma, it sustains vigilance and mobilization, generating a dynamic tension between “rejuvenation narrative” and “trauma memory.”
Western commentary and some academic discussions often raise a recurring question: why did China’s rapid economic growth and rise in state capacity not produce sustained, widespread institutional opposition consistent with the expectation that modernization necessarily leads to political liberalization? A more careful formulation is that this is not a “myth,” but a classic question within the authoritarian resilience framework; any adequate explanation typically requires integrating multiple variables, including performance legitimacy, state narrative and historical memory, organizational/governance capacity, and political opportunity structures.
In relation to Unschuld’s “trauma–diagnosis–repair” framework, a particularly important dimension concerns how the institutionalization of narratives about modern humiliation shapes public risk perceptions and political choices.
At the level of verifiable policy and educational structures, China has institutionalized and intensified “patriotic education” since the 1990s. Many scholars view the Patriotic Education Campaign/propaganda as an important pathway for rebuilding ideological cohesion after the 1989 Tiananmen crisis; the 1994 Outline for Implementing Patriotic Education is commonly treated as a key policy milestone. Relevant studies also note that the primary target has been youth, with implementation through schooling, commemorative sites, and ritualized practices. Under Xi Jinping, multiple studies describe the approach as further strengthened and institutionalized, emphasizing alignment among patriotism, loyalty to the Party, and socialism, and presenting at higher frequency within education and public memory governance.
Within this system, “Century of Humiliation” functions as a high-intensity collective memory resource used to interpret external risks, the costs of national weakness, and the legitimacy of “strengthening the country and self-strengthening.” Research on war commemoration, anti-Japanese war narratives, and national memorial-day arrangements frequently highlights “remembering history/never forgetting the past” as a standard mechanism of mobilization and cohesion. At the same time, the prominent presentation of Japan’s wartime invasion and related themes (including the War of Resistance and the Nanjing Massacre) in secondary-school historical narratives has been repeatedly documented by curriculum and textbook studies, including emphasis on wartime atrocities, casualty figures, and “national contradiction” framing.
In addition, older cohorts in the early PRC era—especially those who experienced the Great Famine of 1959–1961 and those shaped by the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976, retain strong social memories of turbulence and scarcity. Post-reform improvements in living standards provide a classic foundation for performance legitimacy: a wide range of studies explain contemporary regime support through “development–stability–governance capacity,” and the Harvard Ash Center’s longitudinal survey findings report high and rising satisfaction with the central government during 2003–2016 (alongside lower satisfaction at local levels). Against the backdrop of specific historical experience and risk narratives, a significant portion of the public may prioritize order, development, and security, adopt greater caution toward the risks of institutional change, and evaluate the political system closely through governance performance.
Conclusion
Finally, comparisons with early North American colonization should be stated with caution. Some early migrant groups (e.g., Puritans/Pilgrims) indeed carried distinct motivations related to religious freedom. In China’s case, traditional society was long structured around smallholder agrarian life, and the “family–livelihood–land” social world shaped organizational forms and value orientations over extended periods. The pastoral ideal in Chapter 80 of the Dao De Jing (“a small state with few people; the sounds of chickens and dogs heard across the fields”) is often cited as an illustration of classical imaginaries emphasizing settled life and low-conflict social order.
In environments where survival and economic security are more salient or perceived as more fragile, publics are more likely to place higher priority on economic well-being and order; this “priority structure” can shape patterns of political participation and institutional preferences, but it should not be interpreted as a categorical rejection of democratic values.
Overall, Unschuld’s contribution lies in his use of cross-disciplinary metaphors and an accessible narrative to interpret China’s modern transformation as a “trauma-driven process of self-reconstruction.” His principal limitation is that, in service of narrative economy, he compresses elements of East Asian cultural transmission and key historiographical stage concepts in modern Chinese history, leaving correctable gaps and occasional conceptual misreadings.
In sum, the book remains valuable as a readable macro-level interpretive framework, especially for applying “diagnosis/healing” metaphors to China’s institutional learning and rebuilding of state capacity. However, readers should recognize its limits of contemporary coverage: published in 2013, it cannot account for later developments such as intensified international narrative competition, shifts in external communication style, and the strengthening of “institutional advantage” messaging during the pandemic period. To explain post-2013 changes in national narrative and international behavior, additional scholarship and empirical cases from the late 2010s through the 2020s are required.
Chinese Language
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