INTRODUCTION

Since the disillusionment with Party orthodoxy and the resultant ’crisis of faith’ in the late seventies, Chinese society seems to have been trying to reinvent itself in ways different than those that existed earlier. The most striking feature of this complex social change was the sprouting of new sets of practices that brought back symbols that belonged to an older culture. It appeared that China had fallen back on the traditions and rituals of its distant past.

Myths and legends, hitherto considered as lores of superstition, entered everyday lives. Confucianism again became a popular faith. This return of traditional culture, however, coincided with the market-facilitated celebration of Western modernity. These trends, which began in the wake of economic reforms, later found their way into official discourse as wlll. The ancient splendour of China was celebrated with official sanction and sponsorship against a vastly transformed urban landscape. The leaders of the Party and the government, in televised public rituals, paid homage at the Confucius Temple. It appeared that at both levels, that of popular imaginery and idioms of the state, China was trying to redefine its identity outside the canons of socialism.

This article reviews and analyses the recent debates that have occurred, both within China and amongst Western scholars, on China’s changing perspective on ’nationalism’. The West, including its political elite, academics and news editors, have responded to these developments in a manner that shared many politico-cultural assumptions of what is being called the ’clash of civilisations’. The most influential explanation being advanced in this context is that of the emergence of a characteristically new type of Chinese nationalism in post-socialist China.¹ These writings of course provide insightful analysis of present Chinese society, but make formulations that have serious implications. For many Western authors Chinese foreign policy is actually a potent vehicle of aggressive nationalism. Pejorative adjectives that often bring in imageries from the classical period of European nationalism and war are frequently used to qualify the Chinese case. This paper thus is a survey of the growing literature on this question, and critically examines this idea of resurgent Chinese nationalism in Western writings. In order to understand China in the present context, emphasis has been given to the conceptual history of the ’nation’ in contemporaryi China.

THE FADING GLORY OF NATION-STATES

The view that contemporary China is a resurgent nationalist state came, strangely, at a time when the glory of the nation-state was on the decline. The nation-state was of course the most celebrated political formation in modern times. But at the close of the twentieth century it appears that the idea had become less inspiring for its early protagonists in the heartland Europe. The latecomers (from the Third World), who instantly jjmped on the bandwagon of nationalism, soon realised that their project was fraught with serious internal tensions. In our time nation-states have been formed (and forged), lacerated and destroyed in a manner and with a speed that could never be imagined. Apart from internal discontent, a host of factors from without have endangered the efficacy of the nation-state. As observed by David Beetham, a combination of historical forces-the economic, the military, and the politico-cultural-raise an increasingly serious question mark over the ability of sovereign nation-states to protect the economic welfare, physical security and cultural identity of its inhabitants.²

In the era of late capitalism the primacy of the nation-state in the international system has been challenged more directly by the promiscuous flights of finance capital from Europe, North America and Japan. In parallel with this development, the electronic media has emerged as a powerful and global force that promotes a universal paradigm, obliterating the specificity of local national cultures. In the Third World each state has conveniently accommodated itself into the very logic and structure of international political economy by trying to articulate and sell the interests of transnational corporations to their respective local subjects. At the same time these peripheries have emerged as the most potent repositories of state nationalism, creating a rhetorical site that seeks to legitimise the cohesiveness and forward march of the idea of the nation-state.

The historical conjecture in which India and China become republics in the late forties had all the ingredients that promised a long and fraternal coexistence. At the outset it looked like a perfect script that history had enacted on the Asian continent. The people in the Indian subcontinent and on mainland China had been shouldering similar historical burdens. Paramount among them were colonial subjugation, feudal despotism and economic backwardnsss. National salvation meant for both these predominantly agrarian societies the immediate improvement of such conditions. The freedom movement forced the British Raj to leave the subcontinent in 1947. Just two years later in China a coalition of an essentially subaltern social classes, led by the communist peasant army, successfully completed a prolonged revolutionary war that finally liberated China from its semi-colonial dependency and feudal despotism.

Two distinct state formations notwithstanding, India and China began their existence as post-colonial states that promised their people, among other things, livelihood, social justice and development. The two nations encountered an inherently unjust international order, and found the domination of global capitalism a stumbling block to their political independence. The euphoria that was kindled at the Bandung Conference (1955), which resulted in an eloquent declaration of Sino-Indian solidarity was short-lived. India and China, owing to a host of reasons, soon allowed the Bandung fraternity to collapse. Perhaps this stalemate created the conditions for the contemporary questioning of an older understanding of nationalism.

IMAGINING THE CHINESE NATION

For more than a quarter of a century Western writings on Chinese nationalism have been greatly influenced by the culturalism-to-nationalism thesis, well formulated by Joseph Levenson in his Confucian China and Its Modern Fate.³ According to Levenson, Imperial China was essentially a cultural entity defined in terms of Confucian and traditional culture. The emperor’s mandate to rule under heaven presumed sway over the whole world. So the boundaries of the Chinese state were not taken permanently demarcated. For the empire, a vague notion of universalistic culturalism was its defining world-view. The concept of nation and culture remained closely tied at the conceptual level until the nineteenth century. It was only in the wake of China’s troubled encounter with European powers that a theoretical separation between the two was realised.

Torbjorn Loden argued that in China nationalism emerges as part of a new state formation.⁴ Varieties of this nationalism, for which national identity is a means and a strong state is the end, has dominated political discourse in China in this century. In twentieth-century China it was a different process, one in which the state tried to invent a nation rather than a nation seeking to establish a state. Loden cites a revealing instance of the ambivalence inherent in imagining ’nation’ in China. Liang Qichao (1873-1929), a great intellectual figure in modern China, had deplored the fact that the Chinese had not managed to invent a proper national name for China. For him national identity was primarily the consciousness of the Chinese citizen. In a polemic against Zhang Taiyan (1869-1936), Liang criticised the idea of an ethnically or racially defined national identity. What he put forward was a concept of a ’great nationalism’, which would encompass the several ethnic groups in China. Loden observed that this notion of ’Chinese nation’ was later made use of by the Communist Movement.

While drawing a historical parellel between processes of nation and state formations in Europe and China, Loden made an interesting observation. For the European nationalists the rights of the individual was the point of departure. Scientific discoveries, economic development and popular interventions gave a distinct character to European nationalism. Deeply influenced by the Industrial Revolution and the Reniissance, Europe finally gave birth to a society whose organising principle was property rights. And its dominant ideology rests on the rights of the individual citizen. In contrast, Chinese nationalism has been in direct conflict with individualism.⁵ For both, the republican nationalists and communists, the ideals of liberation that define the philosophical core of the European enlightenment were not the starting point of their concept of national salvation. According to Loden, Chinese nationalism represents a historical process that conceptually separated China and traditional Chinese high culture. Those aspects of culture that originated in the Imperial period were rejected outright as China marched towards modernity and entered the international system of nation-states. Moreover the conceptual separation of China from the cultural traditions of the empire was in fact greatly informed by Western intellectual currents of the period.

Sun Yat-Sen in his Three Principles of the People articulates an idea of a Chinese nation in which ethnic identity was the defining element. For him, race and state had a corresponding relationship in ancient China. Since the Qin and Han dynasties China has been developing a single state out of a single race, while foreign countries have developed many states from race and have included many nationalities within one state.⁶

The history of modern China can be divided into periods of successive state formations-the Imperial, the early Republican (1912-27) and Communist. All of them aspired to save the nation from its enemies. Each movements of the past century advocated distinctive definition of the national self. As John Fitzgerald observed, for the Confucian literati China represented a distinctive civilisation, liberal Republicans conceived of the nation as a community of citizens. Nttionllist (Guomindang) revolutionaries invoked the idea of a Chinese race. China’s Marxist-Leninists have defined people by reference to social classes.⁷ ’Class’ entered nationalist discourse as a critical category and an alternative to citizen and race.

The Chinese communists employed the idea of class as much as liberals used the ideals of citizen or nationalists used race to assert the essential unity of the Chinese people.⁸ It must also be emphasised that China’s Marxist-Leninists did not abandon the idea of a distinctively Chinese nation when they set out to create a new state based on the solidarity of various revolutionary social classes. They attacked the earlier ’bourgeois’, ’feudal’ and ’bureaucratic capitalist’ state formations on the ground that they failed to represent the nation adequately.

The nationalist ideology constructed by the CPC during the war of liberation and afterwards was intended to serve the project of socialism. Externally, it was pitted against imperialism, and internally it aimed at the overthrow of bureaucratic capitalism and feudalism. The Chinese collective imagination was largely shaped by this ideology. After the revolution in 1949 the CPC’s foreign policy statements articulated a desire for national sovereignty vis-a-vis its powerful former foes. In its anti-impeiialist battle cries the CPC espoused a kind of internationalism that was essentially hierarchical in nature, in the sense that the supposedly fraternal world of the Bandung Conference was placed against North Amrrican and European domination. This internationalism served the goals of state nationalism of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

State nationalism portrays the state as the embodiment of the nation’s will and tries to create a sense of nationhood among all its citizens. To distinguish the state from ethnic nationalism in a country like China is difficult inasmuch as political and cultural communities are largely congruent and reinforce each other. The PRC is a multinational state even though the Han Chinese constitute approximately 93 per cent of the population. According to official statistics, the other 7 per cent non-Han communities are divided among fifty-five minority nationllities. State nationalism claims that the Chinese nation includes all PRC citizens irrespective of their nationality. In conformity with the conventional international norms stcite nationalism of the PRC vigorously the indivisibility of territorial integrity.

Popular movements within China that reflected the ideology of state nationalism have a prominent place in its history. In a broader sense, state nationalism and its nation building project imbued every state policy with nationalism. Accordingly, development programmes become a nationalist movement, a collective effort to transform China into powerful and modernised nation, as well as a new national community integrating all states, territories and people. Scholars on nationalism have pointed out the significant role that social communications play in the growth of nationalism. From this perspective it can be argued that the real nationalist revolution in China came after 1949. It is these post-1949 developments in the field of transportation, postal and electronic communications, media industries, education and the popularisation of the national language that have contributed to the growth of national consciousness.

An important factor that provoked nationalist sentiments in China was the PRC’s international conflicts. As James Townsend has commented, each conflict was backed by popular mobilisation, as in the Resist America-Aid Korea campaign, when the state mobilised popular solidarity for the war effort.⁹ In terms of military action and popular emotion, this 1950-51 episode has no parallel in subsequent conflicts. The Korean model was followed in later instances, albeit with receding intensity. Military action coupled with nationllistic rhetoric and supporting popular demonstrations can be seen in the Taiwan straits crisis of the mid-fifties, the Sino-Indian border war of 1962, the Sino-Soviet border clash of the sixties and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979. The PRC’s efforts to regain Taiwan is also accompanied by a steady outpouring of nationalist appeals in the official media.

An overview of Chinese foreign policy since 1947 would reveal that it remains one of the most fluctuating foreign policies of our time. The policy of leaning towards the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc in the fifties was succeeded by developing solidarity with national liberation movements all over the world in the sixties. In the context of the Sino-Soviet schism, the latter was accused of being revisionist for advocating peaceful coexistence. When the differences with the Soviet Union developed into a full-scale conflict, China beat a strategic retreat and opened channels for rapproachment with the United States. The Soviet Union then was condemned as social imperialist and the main source of international conflicts. Abandoning its solidarity with oppressed nations, China developed full diplomatic political relations with most authoritarian regimes in the Third World.

It has been primarily the state’s perception of national security that is the core element in the above-mentioned conflicts. They largely influenced popular imagination and found entry to popular culture, forming the subject for film, drama, poetry and song. This is an intricate process in which goals of state nationalism and popular imagination reinforced each other. In China the state’s mobilisation of popular support against foreign threats often appeals to Han history and symblls, thus constructing a nation as defined as Han. This contrasdicts the ideological pretensions of the Chinese state that portrays the PRC as a multinational community.

A close look at the rhetorical discourse of Chinese nationalism since the eighties to the present would suggest that state nationalism of the PRC has bidden farewell to its 1950-51 archetype. The aggressive tone of foreign policy pronouncements, official propaganda and state-promoted demostrations has markedly waned down in the last two decades. Between 1949 and 1969 the state’s nationalism was most intense. Its call for national defence during the Korean War, tension in the Taiwan straits and the conflict with the Soviet Union had struck a responsive chord in the minds of the people. But later the PRC sought to accommodate itself to the realities of the new world order and it has redeemed itself from the politics of mass mobilisation.

STATE NATIONALISM AFTER THE FALL OF THE SOCIALIST PROJECT

In this context, it would be relevant to examine the changes that swept over the ideology of the CPC since the inauguration of economic reforms. The breaking down of the Maoist grand theory, both as the official orthodoxy and as the dominant ideology in society, by the late seventies only deepened the crisis of the people’s faith in the Chinese party-state. Against this backdrop, the post-Mao CPC leadership under Deng Xiaoping initiated a set of new social and economic policies by which China deviated decisively from the original vision of the Chinese revolution. These policies have brought about far-reaching changes in the structural relations of economy, culture and politics. The CPC has redefined its own historical project. The most important element in this programmttical and rhetorical shift was the abandonment of the original vision of the Chinese revolution. What the CPC and official media celebrated was an idea of modernity without making any reference to the position of social classes. As China slowly integrated itself into the global economy, it brought into the open widening social disparities. A new social strata comprised of senior Party bureaucrats and private entrepreneurs emerged as a power elite having enormous political and social capital. But on the other hand the liberalisation process has made the Chinese working class politically powrrless and materially impoverished. The state did not acknowledge these irreconcilable social cleavages. The official rhetoric moved increasingly towards the celebration of what is called ’modernisation’.

As a response to the open door policy the global corporate attention turned swiftly towards China. Factors such as an immensely huge market, cheap labour and political stability have made China an irresistible destination for the transnational corporation. Along with massive foreign capital inflow came the Western ideas of liberal democracy, human rights and citizenship. And, on a wider canvas, the most compllling influence on Chinese society was the fascinating cultural rhetoric of the West. Nike and blue jeans, discos and electric guitars, Coke and McDonalds, all made a tremendous impact on the psyche of the post-cultural-revolution youth in China. For them it was much more than an attempt to be trendy. It offered, above all, prospects for a ’great escape’ from the social suffocation under a repressive system. China’s tryst with late-twentieth-century Western culture and capital turned socialism upside down. Maoist China stood on its head.

This process of Westernisation got under way swiftly, before Party hardliners could wake up to reality. As Orville Schell noted, it represented a powerful symbolic rejection of everything for which China’s communist revolution had strived since the twenties as well as a refutation of everything in traditional Chinese culture.¹⁰ At a time when the CPC was relying increasingly on the ideology of nationalism and was frequently invoking the ’glorious past’ of the nation in an effort to fill in the intellectual vacuum created by the loss of faith in the official orthodoxy, the Westernisation of Chinese popular culture seemed to be an anathema to the party-state.

However, all these social processes produced evocative counter-currents from not only the CPC establishment, but China’s cultural producers and academic intellectuals as well. This provided a perfect historical conjecture, which paved the way for a different kind of national imagination within Chinese society. A host of popular cultural products, which appeared in the eighties, echoed this trend. In these works China was represented as a nation ruthlessly humiliated by Western imperialism after the Opium War. It was the military and spiritual weakness of Chinese society that had made it easy prey to aggressive foreign powers. The new generation of intellectuals through their works showed a strong urge for national independence and strength. The mass sentiments longed for powerful national icons. To an extent the early nineties nostalgia for Mao Zedong was a reflection of those sentiments.

THE SPECTRE OF PEACEFUL EVOLUTION

During the early years of the nineties, China was negotiating with a difficult historical phase, one that brought the People’s Republic face to face with an uncertain future. The popular overthrow of the Soviet Communist Party and the consequent crumbling down of the Soviet empire loomed, at least symbolically, over Zhongnanhai. Within the country reforms have not yet facilitated desired economic growth. Dissent was clearly articulating more wider dis-senchantment with the Party establishment. Against this background the CPC leadership took recourse to alternative rhetorical constructs to regain control over popular consciousness.

This crisis in fact emanated from the way in which political power has been organised under the Communist Party in China. What has been questioned from within was the very legitimacy of the monopoly of power by a highly centralised Party apparatus. What has been broken was the promise held out by an official utopia for half a century. It was a crisis for which the Communist Party owns the largest share. However, without seeking answers to these questions, the Party elite took recourse to a dramatic and effective discursive strategy that had an appeal in Chinese society. The principal thematic component of this strategy was an invented theory of ’peaceful evolution’.¹¹ And its objective appears to be that of creating a sense of collective danger faced by the entire Chinese nation.

’Peaceful evolution’ points at a grand conspiracy hatched by the international bourgeoisie to subvert socialist systems through political, economic and cultural infiltration, and influence. This plan, said to have been conceived originally by the United States in the fifties, in a way acknowledges the difficulty in overthrowing socialist systems by force. As the military defeat of socialism proved impossible, the US-led Western imperialism used a different ploy of encouraging political changes in socialist countries. They used aid, tourism, and their cultural products and values to influence populations of other Third World countries. In the face of this perceived danger, the Propaganda Department in the early nineties issued an appropriate warning to the nation that the US had turned its political and military strategy away from Russia to China, the last surviving major socialist system in the world. And after it succeeded in bringing down Soviet socialism, the US would now attempt to subvert the Chinese system. Baogang He and Yingjie Guo observed that this conspiracy theory may well be a propaganda ploy, but it serves the purpose of galvanising the Party and society into believing that it endangers not only the Party but the whole nation.¹²

The popular upheavals and the subsequent collapse of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe has been presented as a case of ’peaceful evolution’ by the official Chinese media. The Tiananmen democracy movement in 1989 was also port-rayed as a similar attempt on the part of capitalist countries and the danger faced by Chinese socialism was made out to be more real than ever. Solidarity and support to students in Beijing from Western countries has been interpreted as a case of incitement by the international bourgeoisie to subvert socialism. Condemnation across the world of the military crackdown of students on 4 June and sanctions that followed against China by many Western countries were perceived as a concerted international offensive against China.

The trouble with the theory of ’peaceful evolution’ is that it neither explains the collapse of the erstwhile Soviet and East European regimes nor describes Chinese popular protests accurately. The main flaw of this notion is not its substance but the time and circumstances of its deployment. During the momen-tous advancement of communist movements across the world, the United States aggressively pursued a policy of containment against it. In many Third World countries budding left-wing movements and popular regimes had been subverted with the active involvement of US undercover agencies. In the sixties and seventies US-dominated international credit agencies sanctioned loans with strings attached to them, which finally pushed those recipient countries in to a serious dept trap. For a half a century of world politics, dominated by the rhetoric of the Cold War, these conflicts have been the defining element.

But today, to call forth the ghost of a former enemy, especially when economic reforms look forward to foreign capital, especially that of the US, this is a problemttical proposition. Further, the popular overthrow of ruling communist parties from power in the East has made Cold War politics irrelevant in the scale and intensity pursued earlier. More significantly, Chinese economic reforms have set in motion a social process that has substantially changed the very nature of Chinese society from within. It is highly unlikely that the US will try to destabilise China, thus putting its huge volume of investment in peril. In fact it is the same international bourgeoisie that is at present playing a significant role in China’s economic achievements.

REDISCOVERING THE ’NATION’ IN THE TIME OF GLOBALISATION

The fall of official utopia and the loss of popular faith in Marxian-inspired visions for the future moved the CPC towards an intricate historical stage. This process that uncoupled Party ideology and contemporary Chinese social realities was in fact set in motion much earlier. With the passage of time, the change of circumstances and mortal departures of leaders, official rhetoric and popular imagination traversed in different directions. The language and categories of state socialism no longer represent or explain social realities of the period. However, successive Party congresses attempted, often in vain, to make sense of an array of socialist terminologies to get across to an indifferent populace. Then to tide over this period, where economic progress and protest movements emerged simultaneously, the CPC moved away from its hitherto identifiable discursive realm. This shift facilitated the official rehabilitation of traditional culture, and the Party tried to redifine the national self in terms of an unbroken lineage of Chinese culture from the imperial past to the republican present. After seven decades of iconoclastic criticism, the old culture was reclaimed by the heirs of a communist revolution as their cherished legacy. To quote Li Rui-huan: ’China’s national culture is long standing, well established, rich, profound and influential…. Our ancestors have bequeathed us extremely rich and precious cultural legacy which we should cherish, protect and expoore.’¹³

The 1991 school curriculum revision also points at this change. In March General Secretary Jiang Zemin instructed the State Education Commission to initiate a nationwide programme of improved education. It offered a comprehensive view of how the CPC elite defined national identity at that juncture.¹⁴ In a way it was yet another instance of central guidelines on educating students on Chinese history and culture. It was not intended to be a separate subject to be introduced in schools. Instead, this programme attempted to inculcate a new sense of belonging to the nation among Chinese students. An idea of socialist patriotism was intricately weaved into the existing curriculum. The programme is divided into six main chapters. An unusually romanticised title introduced pre-modern history, ’Five Thousand Years of Splendid Chinese History’. This is a radical departure from the Chinese communist historiography till then. The period from the Opium War to Liberation (1840-1949), which forms the content of the second chapter, is typical of this nationalistic undertone. Titled ’The Humlliation of More than a Century of Invasions, and the Struggle to Save the Country from Destruction’, it is full of the new nationalist discourse being presented. Here it is significant to note that the emphasis is more on the evils of Imperialism rather than feudalism. Chapter three is on the post-Liberation era, ’The Peoples Republic Opens up for Progress: Gigantic Changes in the Holy Fatherland for More than Four Decades’. According to Clausen, the revised programme of education defined Chinese national identity in terms of three constructs, ancient civilisation, anti-impeiialist resistance and great power status.¹⁵

Within China, nationalism as an idea and a sentiment have been expressed in different ways. Social and political groups drawing inspiration from diverse sources have been articulating a national self of their choice. Yongnian Zheng identifies Chinese nationalism at two levels, official and popular. For him, this separation is important and is critical of Western scholarship, which tends to consider both as identical expressions.¹⁶ But the powerful leitmotif in the CPC’s nationalistic rhetoric is patriotism. This new vision of patriotism as elaborated by the regime has three elements: economic development, political stability and national unification.¹⁷ Shuisheng Zhao argues that the CPC’s assertion as the paramount patriotic force and the guardian of national pride is a means to establish legitimacy to sustain its role.¹⁸ Apart from the CPC and its propagandists, the most eloquent voice of Chinese nationalism has been its intellectuals. In the nineties a whole spectrum of educated Chinese, from social scientists to technocrats, became conscious articulators of nationalism. An important question that haunted the minds of many was locating the West vis-a-vis China. Moden China’s encounter with the West has always been a problematic affair. The Liberation was followed by a tempestous anti-imperialist clamour that died down only in the late seventies. In the post-reform period two competing perspectives tried to appropriate the imagery of the West, especially that of the United States. Official propaganda portrayed the West in a pejorative way and made it out to be the hostile ’other’ of the Chinese nation. In so doing the CPC reformulated and made use of many themes from ’peaceful evolution’. The other popular perception of the West was markedly different from that of the state. According to Shuisheng Zhao, this is largely because of general disillusionment with official propaganda.¹⁹ The popular mood for the most part tended to believe just opposite to what the CPC propagandist was trying to convince them. So much so, for many Chinese the US became an object of desire rather than hate. But this Chinese Ociidentalist romance was shortlived.

In the nineties, owing to a host of factors, Chinese popular perception of the West underwent a sweeping change. It began to share and even converge with the official portrayal. Young Chinese writers of various persuasions came around to the view that generally coincided with the CPC’s anti-American grandiloquence. A number of books published by these authors become bestsellers. These writers criticised Western countries in no uncertain terms. Among them the most aggressive one in terms of tone and content was China That Can Say No, jointly written by young intellectuals, Song Qiang, Zhang Zhangzang and Qiao Bian in 1996. Modelled after the famous 1991 tract by the Japanese nationalist Shintaro Ishihara, A Japan That Can Say No, the authors of the book declare the moment right for China to stand upright in world politics. Their banal approach to and naive prescriptions for foreign policy choices in the post-Cold War era is evident from the two passages quoted below:

Since the Opium War, this ’No’ has been spoken out, but it is only up to now that this word possesses a force that cannot be ignored. China can say No. To say it now is right on time. If we don’t say it now, we will be mis- judged as speechless after [being] beaten up. If we don’t say it now, it’ll mean that we are waiting for the next beating. If we don t say it now, it means betrayal to righteousness and just [ice]. In summary, if we don’t say it now, it’ll be meaningless to say it later on. What can happen to China if we say NO?²⁰

What forces can shake and destroy a great nation which dared to build the Great Wall on top of mouttains? There is none and there could be none. After all, history has advanced to this moment, the moment that [the] Chinese cannot be humiliated or taken advantage of.²¹

For them, Beijing’s defeat in its bid for the 2000 Olympics (though it succeeded later for 2008) and the sending of US aircraft carriers to defend Taiwan were instances of the West against China. At the same time they were also pugnacious about the popular reverence to the US and lack of nationalist spirit in China. The book generated different kinds of responses from within China and abroad. New York Times’s (4 September 1996) comment, ’Anti-Western Nationalism Sweeping China’ was the characteristic response of the Western media. In China the book provoked widespread discussion on the future direction of the nation. Despite being a bestseller, it was subjected to serious criticism. A commentator, Luo Ning, dismissed China That Can Say No as a modern reprint of plain old moralism of a century ago. To quote:

What we are witnessing in this book is a resurgence of a dark side of modern Chinese psyche. If I can’t beat you with my hands, I’ll beat you with my mouth. It has nothing.to do with nationalism. It is a modern reprint of the plain old moralism a century ago. …if it was a tragic sign of the mental weakness of a dying dynasty a century ago, this time the resurgence looks just comical.²²

Since the early nineties there have been clear suggestions of a growing disenchantment of the Chinese popular mind with Western nations. Suisheng Zhao attributes this phenomenon to nationalist sentiments in the Chinese intellectual In fact this new sensibility set on fire a much wider and collective outpouring of nationalist feeling. Nevertheless, what had emerged out of these reactions was a conservative ideological construction of nation that uncritically supported state nationalism.²³

CONCLUSION

As it has been noted above, diverging perspectives have explored the interpretative possibilities of Chinese nationalism. In fact, Western scholarship has shown a special interest in the subject recently. These writings have of course enriched the China field with incisive comments and useful data. But what is most intriguing is a growing tendency to represent China as an aggressively nationllistic regime. As a result, an invented China threat theory is in great demand as well as in circulation. It appears that this view, of nationalism fuelling conflicts, originates more from the European experience of nationalist wars than from the political and economical realities of contemporary China.

In this context 3. few observations in way of an attempt to locate Chinese nationalism seems appropiiate. The process of economic reforms and globalisation have made an enormous impact on popular culture, which in turn has eroded the efficacy of official ideology. The early phase of the reforms had brought about changes in social relations and cultural practices that set off to ransack the ethos of both socialism as well as traditional culture. What animated Chinese society at that juncture was questions of wider political rights and avenues for expressing accumulated discontent than any considerations on the ’nation’ as a shared historical experience. There had also been a strong tendency to re-examine China’s destiny in terms of Western capitalist modernity.

But owing to a set of factors, all these had to change in the early nineties. The CPC sailed through the crisis that originated from the popular removal of East European regimes, mainly with extensive use of coersive agencies against dissenting voices. But the way in which public institutions crumbled and the utter anarchical helplessness that convulsed the erstwhile Soviet bloc poised a tragic question mark over the premature demise of a ruling communist party. It is in this context that popular mood in China moved closer towards an idea of stability, which underpinned the vanguard role of the CPC. This turn of course was further influenced by the promise of economic development that looked more real than ever before.

The PRC emerged as an important state in the post-Cold War international politics and economic transactions. From the periphery of Third World underdevelopment China’s march towards high-rate capitalist growth was unprecedented. It seems that an idea of the nation as a collective sense of belonging is being rediscovered at this period as a defining element of the new Chinese identity in the post-socialist era. It can be understood in terms of an emotional link with the homeland, territory, language and culture. And this nationalism, contrary to what many Western authors are trying to characterise, does not belong to the nationalism of the aggressive kind. For the party-state the language of nationalism is a rhetorical construct fine-tuned to the popular mood that will help re-establish it as the vanguard force in the country.

Notes:

1. The emergence of Chinese nationalism as a key area of China research is a recent trend spearheaded mostly by the Western scholarship. This growing body of literature provides insightful observations on the subject but at the same time advances formulations that have serious implications. Although written from diverging perspectives, these works share a larger concern about the strengthening position of China in international relations as well as the way in which the regime derives its legitimacy from within. For example, see Micheal Oksenberg, ’China’s Confident Nationalism’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 65, N.. 3, 1987, pp. 501-3; Allen Wiiting, ’Chinese Nationalism and Foreign Policy after Deng’, The China Quatterly, No. 142, 1995, pp. 295-316; and Lucien W. Pye, ’How China’s Nationalism was Shanghiied’, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 29, 1993, pp. 107-33.
2. David Beetham, ’The Future of the Nations States’, in Gregor Mc Lennan, David Held and Stuart Hall (Eds.), The Idea of Modern State (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1993), p. 219.
3. Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and its Modern Fate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).
4. Torbjorn Loden, ’Nationalism Transcending the State: Changing Conceptions of Chinese Identity’, in Stein Tonnesion and Hans Antlov (Eds.), Asian Forms of the Nation (Curzon: Richard Surry, 1996), p. 279.
5. Ibid., p. 285.
6. Sun Yat-Sen, San Min Chu I: The Three Principles of the People (translated by Frank W. Price, edited by L.T. Chen) (Chunking: Ministry of Information, 1943), p. 6.
7. John Fitzgerald, ’The Nationless State: The Search for a Nation in Modern Chinese Nationalism’, in Jonathan Unger (Ed.), Chinese Nationalism (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), p. 57.
8. Ibid., p. 71.
9. James Townsend, ’Chinese Nationalism’, in Unger, op. cit.
10. Orville Schell, Discos and Demccracy: China in the Throes of Reform (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), p. 276.
11. See, for example, Deng Xiaoping, ’We Must Adhere to Socialism and Prevent Peaceful Evolution Towards Capitalism’, in Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, Vol. 111 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994), pp. 333-34.
12. Baogang He and Yingjie Guo, Nationalism, National Identity and Democratisation in China (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 31.
13. Li Ruihuan, ’National Culture Important for Literature to Flourish’, Beijing Review, Vol. 33, No. 9, 1990, p. 13.
14. Soren Clausen, ’Party Policy and National Culture: Towards a State-Directed Cultural Nationalism in China’, in Kjeld Erik Broadsgarad and David Strand (Eds.), Reconstructing Twentieth-Century China (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1998), p. 268.
15. Ibid., p. 270.
16. Yongnian Zheng, Dsco ering Chinese Nationalism in China: Modernisation, Identity, and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 87.
17. Ibid., p. 91.
18. Shuisheng Zhao, ’Chinese Intellectuals Quest for National Greatness Nationllistic Writings in the 1990s’, China Quatterly, No. 152, 9 December 1997, p. 725.
19. Ibid., p. 730.
20. Quoted in Luo Ning, ’Nationalism or Moralism: On “China Can Say No’’, CCF9646 (Wednesday, 25 September 1996), pp. 1-2.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Shuisheng Zhao, op. cit., p. 731.

By TG Suresh

(Source: CHINA REPORT 38: 1 (2002))

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