A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism 9781503624498

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A Nation-State by Construction

A Nation-State by Construction Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism

SUISHENG ZHAO

Stanford University Press Stanford, California 2004

Stanford University Press Stanford, California www.sup.org

© 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zhao, Suisheng. A nation-state by construction : dynamics of modern Chinese nationalism/Suisheng Zhao. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8047-4897-7 (alk. paper)-ISBN o-8047-5001-7 (pbk: alk. paper) r. Nationalism-China-History-19th century. 2. NationalismChina-History-2oth century. I. Title: Dynamics of modern Chinese nationalism. II. Title. DS755.2.Z463 2004 320.54'0951-dc22 2004006013 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Original Printing 2004 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 14

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I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

Contents

Tables and Figure

lX

Acknowledgments

Xl

Note on Romanization

Xlll

Introduction r. The Rise of Chinese Nationalism: Causes, Content, and International Ramifications

8

The Origins of Chinese Nationalism: Western Challenge, Chinese Tradition, Ethnicity, and the State

37

3. Building a Chinese Nation-State: Elite Nationalism versus Mass Nationalism

79

2.

4- The Challenge of Chinese Liberal Nationalism: Personal

versus National Rights

120

5· The Challenge of Ethnic Nationalism: Self-determination versus the Unitary Chinese Nation-State 6. The Rise of State-Led Pragmatic Nationalism: An Instrumental Response to the Decline of Communism in China

209

7· The International Orientations of Chinese Nationalism: Inward-Directed Sentiments or Outward-Directed Emotions

248

Notes

291

Bibliography

313

Sources in Chinese

313

Sources in English

333

Index

347

Tables and Figure

Tables 2.1 3.1 3.2 5.1 5.2 7.1

Unequal Treaties Signed by China, I842-1919 Workers' Strikes in Shanghai,January I-April I, 1926 KMT Government Deficit, 1946-1948 Growth of China's Ethnic Minority Population, 1953-1990 Ethnic Composition of the Chinese Population, 1949-1990 Frequency of the Use of Force on the Periphery of the PRC, 1950-1996

47 93 II5 198 199 281

Figure 4· I Back cover of Quanqiuhua yinyingxia de Zhongguo zhi lu (China's path under the shadow of globalization)

154

Acknowledgments

THE RESEARCH for this book project started shortly after my return from a trip to China in 1994. During the trip, I planned to interview some leading figures of the neoconservative movement, but discovered a powerful surge of nationalist sentiment among Chinese intellectuals. Thanks to Colby College Social Sciences Grants, which made it possible for me to spend time in China almost every summer between 1994 and 1999, I endeavored to collect relevant Chinese publications and to study and analyze them in order to begin to uncover the significance of this upsurge of nationalism. A generous Campbell National Fellowship from the Hoover Institution of Stanford University in 1999-2000 relieved me from one year of teaching responsibilities so that I could concentrate on the book project. It was indeed a privilege to work in the intellectually stimulating environment of the beautiful Stanford campus and to gain valuable access to the rich East Asian collection at Hoover, one of the best in the world, at a crucial stage of my research and writing. I am particularly grateful to two of Hoover's senior fellows, Dr. Ramon Myers and Dr. Larry Diamond, for their mentoring and friendship. It was also a valuable opportunity for me to discuss the book project with the late Michel Oksenberg at Stanford's Asian Pacific Center. I was greatly saddened to learn that Michel passed away shortly after my departure. In 2000-2001, I taught at Washington College, on the beautiful eastern shore of Maryland. My gratitude extends to all my colleagues in the Political Science Department as well as President John Toll and Provost and Dean Joachim]. Scholz for their efforts to make my relocation a most pleasant one. I owe them an especially great debt because I had to leave for a position at the University of Denver after only one year of teaching at the college. This book manuscript was finally completed in Denver. I am very grateful to Dean Tom Farer and my colleagues at the University of Denver's Gradu-

xu

Acknowledgments

ate School of International Studies. They provided me with a very supportive environment in which to put the final touches on the book. Generous grants from the University Professors Program at Boston University (1997-98) and the Pacific Cultural Foundation (1999-2000) are gratefully acknowledged. In addition, I would like to thank Professor Kuan Hsin-chi, director of the Universities Service Center at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, for offering me a travel grant, which allowed me to use the rich collections of Chinese-language journals at his center in the fall of 1996. My research assistants, particularly John Humphrey, Lin Ying, and Walter Wang at Colby College, Mary Bramlett, Li Xin, Roger Chiang, and James Nolan at the University of Denver and Aaron Back from John Hopkins University (a summer intern at the University of Denver) provided valuable assistance to this project. Finally, it would be remiss if constructive comments on the book manuscript by two referees and the editorial work of the Stanford University Press staff, particularly Muriel Bell and Carmen Borb6n-Wu, were not acknowledged. Although they are not responsible for the final product, their efforts certainly made the book a better one.

Note on Romanization

PINYIN IS USED as the primary romanization system for Chinese characters throughout this book; most original spelling in quotations stands unchanged, however. The Wade-Giles system of romanization is used for some names and organizations long familiar in the West. Examples include Kuomintang (Guomindang in the pinyin system), Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan), and Chiang Kai-shek OiangJieshi).

A Nation-State by Construction

Introduction

A SCHOOL OF THOUGHT in the late 1980s predicted that the postCold War world would be an end point of mankind's ideological evolution and that liberal democracy would be universalized as the final form of human government. Indeed, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, communist ideology largely completed its historical tour of duty as a force for political change. However, the decline of communism did not lead to the universalization of liberal democracy. Nationalism, instead, was on the rise. Almost at the same time as Francis Fukuyama was expounding the triumphs of liberal democracy, Zbigniew Brzezinski called upon the West to pay particular attention to the "rising tide of nationalism" in the communist world: "The ongoing crisis of communism within the once homogeneous Soviet bloc is likely to define itself through increased national assertiveness and ever rising national turmoil." 1 Peter Alter, a European scholar, also suggested that "after the collapse of communism it is realistic to assume that nationalism will continue to be a universal historical principle decisively structuring international relations and the domestic order of states well into the next century."2 Their warnings unfortunately came to be largely warranted. Indeed, the end of the Cold War has precipitated an epidemic of rising nationalism that has aroused ancient hatreds and territorial conflicts in many parts of the world. The emergence of nationalism in the post-Cold War world, as in earlier eras, was "expressed both in the challenge to established nation-states and in the widespread reconstruction of identity on the basis of nationality." 3 Nationalism, in this way, inspired two broad categories of stateseekers. Old state-seekers sought to reestablish preexisting states, brought down the multinational Soviet empire, and caused turmoil in other countries. New state-seekers directed nationalist sentiment to the construction of entirely new nation-states in central Asia and threatened the very survival of

2

Introduction

established nation-states in the Balkans. Although nationalism has inspired state-seekers, it has also been instrumental for "state-retainers." It has been the case that incumbent political elites use nationalism as an emotional glue to hold the multinational communist state of the People's Republic of China (PRC) together during the turbulent transition to the postcommunist era. This development contrasts with the prediction that nationalism would soon be overwhelmed by the leveling effect of economic and technological globalization, the future world would no longer be contained within the limits of nation-states, and state sovereignty would not likely continue to be the distinguishing principle of political organizations. Recurring nationalist conflicts have shown that there is no immediate prospect of transcending nationalism, either as a principle of legitimization or as the basis of political organization. In spite of growing economic interdependence and consequent changing political values, nationalism has remained a salient phenomenon and has served to legitimate the politics of nations, however repressive or exploitative they may be. Although it is too early to say that nationalism is an enduring anachronism within the world of modernity, it is certainly true that "the national question is still a virulent, poisonous one." 4 As long as the national question continues to structure political struggles and the nation-state remains the primary sovereign political structure, nationalism will be an indispensable subject of historical and social science analysis. Although the literature on nationalism was already enormous, the resurgence of nationalism has aroused new interest in the enduring and complicated subject. The literature on nationalism, like the literature on any other complex topic in the social sciences, has been characterized by many controversies and has been beset with much conceptual confusion. Benjamin Akzin called the literature on nationalism a "terminologicaljungle." 5 Arthur N. Waldron complained, "capturing nationalism in a theory has proved to be a difficult task." 6 Peter Alter described nationalism as "one of the most ambiguous concepts in the present-day vocabulary of political and analytical thought." 7 Thomas Metzger and Ramon Myers claimed that nationalism "has so far eluded the definitional exercises of scholars." 8 Although the upsurge of new interest in nationalism may have clarified or revealed much more than earlier scholarship did about this important phenomenon that dominated human affairs for a good part of the nineteenth and the entire twentieth centuries, it has certainly raised more questions and controversies for study at both the empirical and conceptual levels. This book is not an exercise in the definition of nationalism in general; rather, it grapples with nationalism in a single but enormous countryChina-that has struggled to construct a modern nation-state and to find its rightful place in the modern world. It is an attempt to shed light on the most pernicious, relentless, and tenacious political phenomenon in that country.

Introduction

3

Nationalism as a modern concept was introduced from Europe and Meiji Japan by seasoned Chinese political elites in the late nineteenth century to regenerate China and remained a central theme of twentieth-century Chinese politics. However, there was a conspicuous lack of interest in Chinese nationalism in both the Chinese and Western scholarly communities for many decades. Luo Houli surveyed Chinese-language literature on nationalism and discovered that only a handful of Chinese books and articles on the subject were published before the 1980s and that most of them appeared in the last two decades of the twentieth century. 9 Lucian Pye in his 1993 survey of Western literature on nationalism in China found that, as a whole, Chinese nationalism remained poorly understood and inadequately studied. Although it was commonplace for scholars to treat nationalism as one of the most important forces in the emerging states of the postcolonial world in the 1950s-6os, the study of China was generally not included in this great intellectual endeavor. Because China at the time was vigorously engaged in pursuing its quest for a Maoist utopia, most Western scholars found Maoism to be distinctive, if not peculiar, and characterized Chinese communism by its internationalism rather than nationalism. To them, Marxism appealed to the proletarian revolution throughout the world and such an appeal should have little to do with nationalism. China specialists were also happy to accentuate the uniqueness of China and preferred not to put the study of China into a comparative context. Thus, the study of Chinese nationalism was not developed at a time when it was a popular subject in political science and other disciplines in the social sciences. 10 During the early years of the PRC, only a few scholars systematically studied the Chinese communist revolution from a nationalist perspective. Benjamin Schwartz was one such pioneer. In his landmark book of 1951, he argued that Mao Zedong did not follow Marxist and Leninist dogma, but instead created a unique model of peasant revolution with nationalistic features. Chalmers Johnson was another leading scholar who systematically linked Chinese communism and nationalism. In his classic 1962 study of Chinese communist-led peasant resistance during the Sino-Japanese War, Johnson sought to uncover the origins of communist power in China. Chinese nationalism began to receive a great deal of scholarly scrutiny only after its resurgence in the post-Cold War era. This belated but serious interest produced a scholarly debate over several important issues. Although Chinese nationalism was largely a twentieth-century phenomenon, nationalism in general was hardly quiescent in modern world history. It was, arguably, the most powerful idea and nearly universal sentiment affecting national and international politics for centuries during the modern era. As Joseph S. Nye categorically stated, "nationalism proved to be stronger than socialism when it came to bonding working classes together, and

4

Introduction

stronger than capitalism that bound bankers together." 11 Peter Alter also claimed that "nationalism is a political force which has been more important in shaping the history of Europe and the world over the last two centuries than the ideas of freedom and parliamentary democracy, or, let alone, of communism." 12 The power of nationalism came from the fact that it "locates the source of individual identity within a 'people,' which is seen as the bearer of sovereignty, the central object of loyalty, and the basis of collective solidarity." 13 Where did this powerful force come from? This is a complicated and controversial question. As Michael Robinson has indicated, "most theories focus on nationalism's power to transform societies, but its origins and mechanics remain too complex to encompass in a single formulation." 14 Indeed, there has been very little consensus even on the meaning, let alone the origins, of nationalism. The main differentiation is between primordialism and instrumentalism. Primordialism argues for an essentially unchanging national identity consisting of certain "givens" of social existence into which one is born, and which determine one's group loyalties. People with certain shared physical and cultural characteristics form an intrinsic awareness of their collective identity and come to psychologically identifY with the nation-state. The traditional loyalties vested in this identity give rise to very strong common sentiments, which are the irreducible bedrock on which common interests and claims tend to be based. Accordingly, nationalist loyalties can be viewed as essentially emotional and "inherently irrational or extra-rational in the sense that they supposedly violate or transcend considerations of self-interest." Russell Hardin regarded "primordial, atavistic, inconsistent, and other motivations not intended to serve either the individual or the group interest as irrational. ... Individual motivations to serve the group- or national-level interest more or less independently of immediate individual costs and benefits are extra-rational." 15 As an essentially unchanging sentiment, in the primordialist view, nationalism is not merely a modern phenomenon since rudimentary nations and protonationalism existed in the premodern world. As George L. Mosse asserted, "nationalism existed in most European nations during the Middle Ages." 16 By contrast, instrumentalism argues that primordial attachments are contingent and subject to manipulation. Nationalism, therefore, is explained as a result of essentially self-interested behavior, and nationalist consciousness is seen as a consequence of the historical context in which some interests or political forces successfully imagined a political community or national history and persuaded people of artificially shared origins that they were indeed one people: a nation. This process had the effect of removing differences within the political community and replacing them with a common, hegemonic order of signs, symbols, and values. This approach emphasizes

Introduction

5

the subjective nature of nationalism, as expressed by Benedict Anderson's conception of "imagined national communities" and Eric Hobsbawm's conception of "invented national traditions," and rejects any idea that nationalism is primordial. From this perspective, narratives of nationalism, including interpretations of nationalistic symbols like the Great Wall of China, are invented histories or traditions. Hobsbawm categorically stated that "the nation, with its associated phenomena: nationalism, the nation-state, national symbols, histories and the rest, all rest on exercises in social engineering which are often deliberate and always innovative, if only because historical novelty implies innovation." 17 Although Anderson did not go so far as to state that the primary significance of nationalism lies in its supposedly instrumental, functional role, he did maintain that in an age in which cosmically rooted religion declined, nationalism provided a quasi-religious center of meaning for vast multitudes. Nationalism is thus situational. The construction of a nation and consequent nationalism is a rational choice of political entrepreneurs in response to specific circumstances. Rational means that people act in a manner that accords with their own self-interest. Though it is possible for individuals to be mistaken about what constitutes their interests, rational individuals always act according to their perceived interest. Their identification with such things as ethnic groups is not primordial, or somehow extra-rational in its ascendancy of group-over-individual interests, but is rational because it is in their interest. To a certain extent, instrumentalism was supported by modernization theorists who connected the emergence of nationalism to the "great transformation" of modern time. According to Ernest Gellner, for much of history, villages, city-states, feudal settlements, and dynastic empires were far more pervasive political units than nation-states. Only after the nation-state was constituted in modern Europe did nationalism come into existence, either as an expression of an existing nation-state or as a challenge to it on behalf of a future state. 18 Nationalism has played both constructive and destructive roles in modern history. John L. Comarotf and Paul Stern made a useful distinction between the "inward-directed sentiments" that hold a nation together and the "outward-directed sentiments that heap hostility upon others." 19 As inward-directed sentiments, nationalism once appeared as a doctrine to express a political desire for national independence among people who believed they had a common ancestry or a common political destiny in a territory particularly identified with their history, an idea around which the modern nation-state system was created and remained intact. It also functioned to free many nations from alien rule, served as the ideological underpinning of anticolonial movements, and contributed to modernization. As outward-directed sentiments, however, nationalism, especially its extreme versions that were associated with racist arrogance and ignorance, has been a driving force

6

Introduction

for collective yearning and aggressive posturing in the name of the nation, responsible for many human tragedies in modern history. Hans Kohn claimed that the history of nationalism represented a progressive degeneration from rationality into a kind of madness as it consumed its own legitimacy in violence, war, and messianic authoritarianism. 20 Although some scholars have criticized Kohn's view as "both Eurocentric in the extreme and also heavily focused on the special experience of Germany and Italy," 21 the prevailing image of nationalism in the post-Cold War world has remained negative. Nationalism has often been regarded as an emotional and irrational manifestation of primordial sentiments, fueling the destructive warfare of the first half of the twentieth century and the bloody and tragic ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans after the end of the Cold War. A new nationalism, or "a nationalistic universalism" as Hans]. Morgenthau called it, has been seen as particularly dangerous for a state strong enough to impose its will on others and hence a source of international aggression and confrontation in the late twentieth century. 22 However, a direct link between nationalism and international aggression is by no means automatic. In the discussion of nationalism, aggression and warmongering have often been taken for granted. The extensive attention paid to the rise of Chinese nationalism in the I990s, and the alarm that it generated, illustrate this assumption. Indeed, as communist ideology has gradually lost its grip, the Chinese Communist Party has rediscovered the utility of nationalism. "In place of the revolutionary legitimacy of MarxismLeninism, the regime substituted performance legitimacy provided by surging economic development and nationalist legitimacy provided by invocation of the distinctive characteristics of Chinese culture." 23 As a result, the nationalist conception of China as a nation-state with interests that must be protected and advanced in competition with those of other nation-states has replaced the old conceptions of class division and communist internationalism. Furthermore, the nationalist conception is now shared by the communist state and its liberal critics. The resurgence of Chinese nationalism has alarmed Western observers who believe nationalism can be destructive. They are particularly concerned about what the awakening of the "hidden dragon" may mean for the world and worry that China, with the spectacular growth in its economic and military capacities, may try to regain its ancient glory by taking an aggressive posture toward its neighbors and Western powers. Is this concern well founded? To seek answers to this controversial but crucially important question, this book conducts an empirical study of Chinese nationalism by tracing its origins and the major forces that shaped its content and by investigating its ramifications for China's foreign policy behavior. In particular, this book tries to find answers to the following impor-

Introduction

7

taut questions: What are the sources of Chinese nationalism? Is the content of Chinese nationalism eternal and objective or contextual and situational? Is Chinese nationalism an emotional and irrational sentiment that transcends considerations of self-interest or a rational choice of political forces based on calculations of their self-interest? What have been the different roles of major political forces, namely, the authoritarian state, liberal intellectuals, and ethnic groups, acting out of self-interest, in the construction of Chinese nationalism? Is Chinese nationalism an "inward-directed sentiment" that holds the nation together or an "outward-directed emotion" that will become a destructive force? Taking a historical approach to the study of Chinese nationalism that tempers primordialism with a careful measure of instrumentalism, this book is composed of seven chapters in addition to this introduction. Chapter r presents theoretical debates on the issues of Chinese nationalism and lays out the analytical framework of the book. Chapter 2 places Chinese nationalism in a historical context in order to explore the political and intellectual struggles that brought about nationalist consciousness in China. Chapter 3 traces how the competing nationalist programs of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) shaped the emergence of Chinese nationalism. Chapter 4 focuses on the relationship between personal and national rights in Chinese nationalist discourse, and in so doing seeks to illuminate the evolution of liberal nationalism and its challenges to state nationalism. Chapter 5 examines the challenges ethnic nationalism presents to. the myth of the unitary Chinese nation-state and the instrumental policy responses of the communist state. Chapter 6 elaborates on the content of a state-led nationalism by an indepth case study of the patriotic education campaign of the 1990s. Chapter 7 analyzes the foreign policy ramifications of Chinese nationalism.

CHAPTER

The Rise

1

if Chinese Nationalism

Causes, Content, and International Ramifications

DURING THE U.S.-China standoff over the American spy plane that collided with a Chinese jet fighter in 2001, a headline on the front page of the VVczshington Post read "New Nationalism Drives Beijing." 1 Although the headline is perhaps an exaggeration, nationalism is indeed on the rise as a powerful force in China. Liu Xiaobo, a leading Chinese political dissident, remarked that "since June 4, 1989, China has suddenly been engulfed in a wave of nationalism and patriotism, which reaches every corner of the land and involves every person." 2 WangJisi, director of the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote that "future generations of Chinese leadership, regardless of their policy orientation, will continue to uphold patriotism as the core value and major uniting force to rule the country." 3 Geremie R. Barme, a Western scholar, noted that "since 1989 there have been numerous indications of a growing disenchantment with the West and its allies." 4 Maria Hsia Chang, a Chinese American scholar, observed that "Chinese communism is turning to nationalism to legitimate one-party rule." 5 The remarkable resurgence of Chinese nationalism can be observed at least at three levels: in the state apparatus, in intellectual discourse, and within popular society. At the state level, as faith in communism has declined and citizens have lost confidence in the communist regime, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has rediscovered the utility of nationalism, which remains its most reliable claim to the people's loyalty. The Western sanctions after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown were interpreted in official propaganda as anti-China rather than anti-communist-regime. The communist regime positioned itself as the representative of China's national interest and the defender of Chinese national pride. In one of its most important actions to promote nationalism, shortly af-

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

9

ter the 1989 crackdown the state launched an extensive propaganda campaign of education in patriotism, appealing to nationalism in the name of patriotism to ensure loyalty in a population that was otherwise subject to many domestic discontents. The goals of the campaign were to rejuvenate China's national spirit, to strengthen the unity of the Chinese people of different ethnic groups, to reconstruct a sense of national esteem and dignity, and to build the broadest possible coalition under the leadership of the CCP. In a way, the campaign deliberately blurred the lines between patriotism, nationalism, socialism, and communism. As CCP general secretary Jiang Zemin said, "in China today, patriotism and socialism are unified in essence." 6 The core of the campaign was the so-calledguoqingjiaoyu (education in the national condition), which unambiguously held that China'sguoqing (national condition) was unique, not ready to adopt Western-style democracy, and for that reason, the current one-party rule should continue in order to help maintain political stability, a precondition for rapid economic development. Although the content of the patriotic education campaign was wideranging, three themes dominated the campaign: Chinese tradition and history, territorial integrity, and national unity. Chinese tradition, which had been under fierce attack by the communist state for many years, now held a prominent place in patriotic education. Chinese history was characterized as an unceasing struggle against foreign aggression and oppression. To link communist China with its non-communist past, the CCP restored ancestor worship, celebrated the Great Wall as symbol of official patriotism, and revived Confucianism and other traditional Chinese cultural artifacts. In the midst of Western sanctions, the communist regime made the accusation that "a small number of Western countries feared lest China should grow powerful, and thus imposed sanctions against her, contained her, and placed great pressure on her to pursue Westernization and disintegration (xihua he Jenhua)."7 The regime warned of hostile international forces that perpetuated imperialist insults to Chinese pride. Patriotism thus was used to bolster the CCP's leadership in a country that was portrayed as besieged and embattled. Patriotic education emphasized national unity against ethnic separatist movements, which have been among the myriad of social and political problems confronting the Chinese communist leaders in the post-Cold War era. Although many Chinese, particularly intellectuals, distrusted the official propaganda and tried to read between the lines for many years, they accepted the core themes of the patriotic education campaign. As Liu Xiaobo observed, "No government-sponsored patriotic campaign ... can compare with the latest surge in patriotism in the suddenness with which it occurred and in its intensity and its longevity. It seems that the wound of national humiliation inflicted on China in the past one hundred years has been re-

ro

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

opened." 8 It was in this context that tens of thousands of Chinese students besieged the American embassy in Beijing after the United States accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia in May 1999. A New York Times news report pointed out that "for many people, Chinese friendship toward the United States has always been tinged with a drop of suspicion, and the bombings have allowed dormant nationalism and anti-Western sentiments to surge to the surface." 9 At the intellectual level, as a result of the discovery of China's new position in the post-Cold War world, the mainstream discourse drastically shifted from enthusiastic worship of the West in the 1980s to deep suspicion of the West in the 1990s. China had been a friendly non-ally and strategic partner of the United States in the triangular competition with the Soviet Union during the last years of the Cold War, but after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, China was left as the world's only major communist power and, to an extent, in the eyes of some American politicians it replaced the Soviet Union as the "evil empire." China's relations with major Western countries, particularly the United States, dramatically changed because of disputes over the issues of human rights, intellectual property rights, trade deficits, weapons proliferation, and Taiwan. This change forced Chinese intellectuals to look at the United States and other Western countries from a more realistic perspective. Many Chinese intellectuals were particularly sensitive to the views expressed in major Western intellectual works on post-Cold War international politics. Among them were three works pertinent to China's relations with Western countries: Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book, The End qf History and the Last Man; Samuel P. Huntington's 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, "The Clash of Civilizations," which was later expanded into a book with the same title; and The Coming Conflict with China, coauthored by Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro and published in 1997. Although some Chinese liberal intellectuals welcomed Fukuyama's argument in terms of the victory of liberalism, they were not sure if Western democracies out of geopolitical consideration would not come to confront China's rise. Many Chinese intellectuals were particularly apprehensive about an earlier, sensational article, "Why We Must Contain China" by Charles Krauthammer in the July 31, 1995, issue of Time magazine. This article compared China with Germany at the end of the nineteenth century and argued that as China became stronger it would be eager to expand; therefore, in order to prevent further disaster, the United States must build an alliance to contain China. The persistence of this type of argument confirmed the suspicions of some Chinese intellectuals that the United States wanted to thwart China's rise. In response, some Chinese intellectuals began to write articles and books advocating nationalism, arguing that nationalism is indispensable and a ra-

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

r1

tional choice for advancing China's national interests. Although the emerging intellectual discourse on nationalism overlapped, to a certain extent, with the patriotic education rhetoric of the Chinese government, its emergence was largely independent of official propaganda. Those who contributed to the intellectual discourse on nationalism were from various political backgrounds, including both conservatives and liberals. The important common denominator that brought together intellectuals of different political views was the concern over China's changing position in the post-Cold War world. Nationalism was not the sole province of state propaganda and intellectual discourse. Populist sentiments were also part of the nationalist orchestra. This was expressed vividly by a series of instant bestsellers-known as the "say no" books-published in the mid-1990s. 10 These books tried to show that it was the United States that forced China time and again into a series of confrontations with it and warned Washington that any containment effort was certain to fail. Popular nationalism was also reflected in the "Mao fever" of the 1990s. The communist dictator Mao Zedong was praised in popular books as a "great patriot and national hero" because of his courage in standing firm against Western imperialism. The rise of China was attributed to Mao's thought. Books on Mao's life once again became popular among Chinese youth. Stuart R. Schram's The Political Thought of Mao Tse- Tung, first published in 1969, was translated into Chinese and published by Beijing's Hongqin Press under a new title, Mao Zedong, in 1987. Although it did not sell well at first, it suddenly became popular and sold over 240,000 copies in 1991. 11 Many Western visitors to China were impressed by the adulation of Mao and particularly by the display of his picture in almost all taxicabs. Buttons bearing Mao's portrait also became fashionable. A book on Mao fever described a very funny case of a young Chinese man who wore a Mao button on his Western-style suit to "show his unique taste." In an attempt to explain the Mao fever, the book suggested that, after the 1989 Tiananmen incident, Chinese people began to rethink the question, "What is China's national spirit?" and concluded, "China's problems have to be resolved by the Chinese people. China's national interests should be the first priority for the nation. In this case, the Chinese people were reminded of and came to reappreciate Mao Zedong's struggle and accomplishments in the areas of national strength (minzu ziqiang) and independence." According to the book, the "high tide of Mao fever" came from the Chinese people's rediscovery of "Mao's love of the masses, Mao's lasting charisma, Mao's determination to reverse China's backwardness, and Mao's contribution to national self-strengthening." 12 A Western scholar also argued that the nostalgia for Mao was to a great extent a reflection of the populist sentiment of nationalism.13

12

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

Three Controversial Issues in the Study of Chinese Nationalism The surge of Chinese nationalism in the post-Cold War era is obviously of global importance, but it is neither novel nor surprising from a historical perspective. Shortly after China's defeat by Britain in the Opium War of 1840-42, the seasoned Chinese political elite embraced modern nationalist doctrines and institutions that had come into being with the establishment of the nation-state system in Europe. The first nationalist calls came during the Self-strengthening movement and the Boxer Rebellion of the late nineteenth century to save the old Chinese empire after its fatal weakness was exposed while facing the invasion of the Western powers. China's disastrous failure to ward off foreigners was followed by the collapse of the Chinese empire and the loss of national sovereignty. In spite of the setbacks, nationalist calls continued. Various Chinese political elite groups competed to formulate one nationalist program after another. A recurring theme of modern Chinese history, therefore, has been the nationalist quest for China's regeneration to blot out humiliation at the hands of imperialists. As Deng Yong has observed, "through an exclusive and continuous nationalist discourse, China's collective recollection of 'one hundred years of suffering and humiliations' in a Social Darwinian world has become ingrained in the national psyche." 14 As a result, all those who want to rule China have to propound and implement a program of national salvation. Almost all powerful Chinese leaders in the twentieth century were nationalists in the sense that they shared a deep bitterness over China's humiliation and were determined to rejuvenate China. As Yan Xuetong has noted, "The slogan of 'rejuvenation of China' [zhenxing zhonghua] was started by Sun Yat-sen but it was continued by Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin. These Chinese leaders have all shared a strong sense of entitlement that China deserves a great power status as they believe China's decline is a mistake of history, which they should correct." 15 However, many important issues surrounding Chinese nationalism, particularly its origins, content, and ramifications, are still subject to scholarly debate. The conventional explanation of the origins of Chinese nationalism is set forth in the "from-culturalism-to-nationalism" thesis, which argues that the Confucian image of China was a culturally defined community rather than an ethnically I politically defined nation-state. In a provocative reexamination of the origins of Chinese nationalism,James Townsend challenged this thesis and argued that Chinese nationalism comprised an admixture of political nationalism, ethnic Han identity, and a cultural pride that was observed in allusions to Chinese civilization as a point of self-identity. But Townsend did admit that all of these sentiments were influenced and par-

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

13

tially shaped and reshaped by the history of the twentieth century and by the teachings of successive regimes. 16 Prasenjit Duara has also raised questions about the notion of culturalism that implied that ancient China was maintained only by the disembodied essence of a culture. He has asserted that premodern China was a "self-conscious political community" and, therefore, a nation, which in some aspects "might be called nationalistic." The Chinese defined their differences from others not simply in terms of a superior universal culture, which might conceivably be internalized by others, but in terms of something like a built-in "racial" superiority based on irreducible geographic, climatic, and even biological factorsY Michael NgQuinn, in his analysis of Chinese national identity, goes further. Drawing behavior references from premodern Chinese history, he argues that the core determinants of Chinese national identity were essentially affective, based on unity and a culture in existence since the period of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou, thousands of years ago. 18 These challenges are similar to the ahistorical view of Chinese nationalism held by many Chinese scholars and selfproclaimed Chinese nationalists who insisted that nationalism existed in premodern China and was always an important political force in China's long history. According to them, the ancient Chinese self-image, huaxia, meant "the Chinese nation" upon which Chinese national consciousness was developed at a very early stage of history. In the debate over the content of Chinese nationalism, on one side are scholars who view Chinese nationalism as eternal and objective, reflecting China's domestic and international position in pursuing modernization. On the other side are scholars who take an instrumental approach in defining Chinese nationalism as an expression of the interest of the ruling elite. According to the eternalist view, as the emergence of Chinese nationalism and the development of the Chinese modern state was intrinsically linked with meeting the challenge of the West, one of the most important components of Chinese nationalism is "the fundamental assumption that China must find its own unique path toward modernization." Chinese nationalism should help China reconstruct its own national identity "from a synthetic combination of the best elements from the traditional and the modern, East and West." 19 Yongnian Zheng has summarized three eternal meanings of Chinese nationalism: "First, it is about how the Chinese state should and can be reconstructed in accordance with the changing domestic and international circumstances. Second, it is about state sovereignty and people's perceptions of China's proper position of power in a world of nation-states. Third, it is about people's perceptions of a 'just world order,' an international system that accords with China's national interest." 20 Taking an instrumental approach, Lucian Pye, on the other hand, has linked Chinese nationalism with the interest of the communist state and has

14

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

argued that "the Chinese do not have an inspired version of nationalism based on shared ideals and worthy principles .... They are left with only a keen sense of 'we-ness versus they-ness,' an outlook that can only serve xenophobic passions." 21 Chinese nationalism, therefore, has suffered from a "lack of content." Pye has pointed to a void in the cultural ideals that could provide the substantive content for Chinese nationalism because the historical legacies of Chinese tradition have long been under heavy attack since the May Fourth movement of 1919. In particular, forty years of sustained attacks by the communist regime on traditional Chinese culture left China with a relatively inchoate and incoherent form of nationalism without a substantive core that could be readily articulated. Pye believes that Chinese nationalism in the People's Republic of China (PRC) was reduced to the expression of a political party's current policies and that its intellectual sponsors could not come to grips with concrete problems of cultural change. 22 Seconding Pye's argument, Lowell Dittmer and Samuel Kim have indicated that state sponsorship was critical in the construction and enactment of Chinese nationalism. "The state, with its legitimate monopoly on violence and its controlling interest in terms of manipulating the national symbol system, plays a determining role in the construction and management of a national identity dynamic."23 Attempting to bridge these two arguments, Robert A. Scalapino has drawn a distinction between mass identifications derived from a sense of commonality (and which may lend themselves to either national unity or division) and those identifications promoted by the state to justify policies or to manipulate the populace. The two can be complementary but are by no means identical. Scalapino suggests that the emergence of Chinese nationalism occurred simultaneously from the top down, through the action of the state, and from the bottom up, through the will of the nation. 24 The third controversial issue is whether a virulent nationalism may emerge from China's "century of shame and humiliation" after its rise to the status of a modernized, great power. In his 1983 study, Allen Whiting argued that China had experienced a transition from an affirmative nationalism, which emphasized an exclusive but positive "us," to an assertive nationalism by adding a negative "them." But Whiting did not find any imputation of belligerence or aggression attached to his concept of assertive nationalism. 25 In a 1987 study, Michel Oksenberg developed a four-category topology of Chinese nationalism: xenophobic nationalism, emotional nationalism, assertive nationalism, and confidential nationalism, and reinforced Whiting's argument by pointing out that "the leaders of modern China have not exhibited the ultra or expansionist nationalism that so many rising powers have manifested." 26 Although China arose as a world economic powerhouse in the 1990s, some scholars still hold the view that Chinese nationalism will not

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

I

5

become a source of international aggression. Yongnian Zheng in his 1999 book suggested that aggressive Chinese nationalism was a misperception of the West.27 However, in a 1995 study, Whiting recommended more caution, saying he was not convinced that Chinese nationalism would not eventually become aggressive. 28 Also taking a cautious position, Tu Wei-ming on the one hand believed that "since the Opium War and the subsequent political upheavals, economic collapses, social disintegration, and intellectual effervescence in China, every Chinese has been engulfed in an ocean of suffering, but this has had only limited effects on the outside world. To the industrialized societies, ... China was ... at most a sleeping lion, or to use an indigenous Chinese expression, a 'hidden dragon.'" On the other hand, Tu observed that "China is now roaring for recognition .... Among dissident intellectuals as well as government officials, the fear of social disintegration, with disastrous consequences for China's neighbors including Russia, India, Vietnam, and the Asia-Pacific region, has greatly intensified ... an upsurge in Han nationalist sentiment [that] might provoke ethnic conflicts among the minorities."Z9 Other scholars have gone a step further and described Chinese nationalism in the 1990s as a dangerous new phenomenon that may drive a rising China into an aggressive stance. Ying-shih Yu has stated that old Chinese nationalism was derived from an instinct of survival and therefore was defensive in nature while new Chinese nationalism is derived from China's wealth and power and is hence aggressive. Chinese "new nationalism" aims at "replacing the dominant position of the West in the world and making the twenty-first century a Chinese century." 30 Edward Friedman characterized new Chinese nationalism as a type of chauvinism: "Far from acting in line with Mao's anti-imperialist nationalism, ... China's 1990s chauvinists who insist on a quick timetable for Taiwan's return to the PRC have self-consciously turned against Mao's nationalism.'' 31 Bernstein and Munro warn, "Driven by nationalist sentiment, a yearning to redeem the humiliations of the past, and the simple urge for international power, China is seeking to replace the United States as the dominant power in Asia.'' 32 Samuel P. Huntington also points out that Chinese in the 1990s increasingly asserted their intention to resume the historic role of "the preeminent power in East Asia.'' They wanted "to bring to an end the overlong century of humiliation and subordination to the West and Japan that began with British imposition of the Treaty of Nanking [Nanjing] in 1842." 33 James Lilly has echoed this assessment: "There is a rallying cry for Chinese everywhere ... that after a century of humiliation and Mao's social and economic experiments China's time has come; ... [China] will rise in the world to the place it deserves.'' 34

16

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

Chinese Nationalism as a Modern Concept Although there is a historical connection between nationalism and premodern sentiments, nationalism is a peculiarly modern phenomenon that appeared with the emergence of the nation-state system (Westphalian system) in Europe and was tied to social and economic modernization in other parts of the world. As a modern concept, nationalism" combines the political notion of territorial self-determination, the cultural notion of the nation as one's primary identity, and a moral idea of justification of action to protect the rights of the nation against the other" in the anarchical world. 35 Nationalism came to China along with many other modern Western ideologies and ideas in the late nineteenth century as an instrument for China's regeneration and defense. The modern nation-state is a unique form of political organization, born out of the struggle between the universal empire and the particularistic nation. Fong-ching Chen's study of the origins of Chinese nationalism indicates that traditional empires were characterized by a mixture of universal principles (such as Christianity in the Roman Empire, Islam in the Ottoman Empire, and Confucianism in China) and particularistic features (such as ethnic composition, language, and ancient customs). The rise of modern nationalism basically meant the ascendancy of sentiments associated with the particularistic features of the nation over universal principles. The ascendancy of particularism led nations to strive to gain political independence and then to acquire and maintain equal status with other nations. In extreme cases, this drive took the form of ultranationalism and catastrophic destruction. It also gave birth to many fervent and even murderous independence and separatist movements in former colonial countries and multinational states. 36 Although the Chinese empire stretched back two millennia, it was not a nation-state before the nineteenth century and, therefore, nationalism did not exist in ancient China. Immanuel C. Y. Hsu, relying on documentary and behavioral references to Qing diplomacy, categorically declares that "imperial China was not a nation-state." 37 Writing in the nineteenth century, Kunikida Doppa also found the Chinese "totally devoid of national consciousness."38 Joseph Levenson's influential writings showed that nationalism did not exist in traditional China. Instead, culturalism permeated traditional Chinese thought as Chinese culture was the focus of people's loyalty. 39 Chinese perceived their country as the only civilization in the universal world (tianxia), one that embodied a universal set of values. All those who accepted its teachings and principles, including the alien Mongol Yuan and Manchu Qing dynasties, could be incorporated within its culturalist bounds. Indeed, tianxia zhuyi (universalism) rather than minzu zhuyi (nationalism) characterized the thinking of ancient Chinese peoples.

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

17

Joseph Whitney described China's shift "from cultural entity to political entity" as the Confucian idea of the state was replaced by an imported nationalism.40 The Chinese nation was no longer defined within a larger cultural framework. In this respect it was "very different from the earlier form of Chinese identification, and also unlike many versions of the Western nationalism that precipitated the new Chinese national orientation." 41 John K. Fairbank held that "modern Chinese nationalism is a new force in history." 42 Nationalism began to penetrate the thinking of the Chinese people only after China was brought into the modern nation-state system in the nineteenth century; it represented a fundamental turn in modern Chinese history. The catalyst for this turn was the national crises that came after China's defeat by the British during the 1840-42 Opium War and by the Japanese during the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War. The historical defeats and the subsequent humiliation at the hands of imperialist powers were the impetus for the rise of Chinese nationalism. To a great extent, the Opium War was a conflict between an expansive modern West and a traditional China. From this perspective, the problem of opium was secondary to the struggle between the Chinese empire and Western nation-states. Although most Chinese scholars disagreed with this "collision of cultures" view as they emphasized that "foreigners wantonly, even consciously, used opium to victimize the Chinese people," 43 the official history textbooks of the PRC did identify the Opium War as the watershed between traditional and modern China. Hu Sheng, one of the most prominent historians of the PRC, suggested that the rro years between the Opium War and the founding of the PRC be called "modern Chinese history" (Zhongguo jindai sht) and the years after 1949 "contemporary Chinese history" (Zhongguo xiandai sht). 44 Indeed, in the words of Zhou Yongming, "the history of the Opium Wars provides the Chinese with a unique frame of reference within which to define their identity. In the anti-drug discourses of modern China, a striking point is that they are inextricably linked to the reinterpretation of national history." 45 The defeat by Japan in 1895 was particularly heart-wrenching for the Chinese elite. In his discussion of the historical significance of the SinoJapanese War of 1894-95, Liang Qichao, one of the most prominent Chinese nationalists of the early twentieth century, stated that this war effectively awoke the Chinese people "from the dream of 4,000 years." 46 It was from this perspective that Michael Yahuda has suggested that "modern Chinese nationalism was sparked off by the defeat of China by Japan in 1895. This was the point at which the fear of the loss or the death of China ... took hold. Theories of Social Darwinism filled many Chinese with foreboding. The universalistic principles on which ultimately the political culture of the Qing state rested were becoming an obstacle to China's integra-

r8

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

tion into international society." 47 It was under these circumstances that Chinese elites discovered the utility of nationalism together with other Western ideas as well as Western technology, science, and commodities. Fei Xiaotong, a renowned Chinese sociologist, although insisting that China as an unconscious nation (zizai de minzu) had existed for thousands of years, admitted that "the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu) as a conscious national entity (zijue de minzu shitt) was born of the confrontation between China and the Western powers in the last one hundred years or so." 48 The search for China's national regeneration created demands for nationalism and called for supplies of nationalist programs. As a result, a market for nationalism emerged and gave "prospective entrepreneurs the opportunity and the incentive to enter the political arena by endorsing a nationalist program and by fashioning their offer in a nationalist shape." 49 Having accepted the norm of a modern nation-state system, Chinese political elites no longer thought of China as the center of the world and Chinese culture as a set of universal values. They began to use the basic principles of nationalism, such as the ideas of territorial sovereignty and national equality, to defend China against imperialist erosion. They were convinced that China as a nation-state with a long history of civilization ought to stand equal with other great powers. Struggling to restore China's national grandeur, seasoned Chinese political elites competed to articulate and disseminate doctrines about China's distinctiveness and sense of mission and manipulated nationalism to promote their personal and/ or party agendas and careers. As a result, Chinese nationalism as an ideology spread across the widening cultural and social divide between traditionalists and those involved one way or another in the modernizing sectors of society. This inclusive nature of Chinese nationalism provided a "vast gray area of intellectual discourse in which different people and interest groups pick and choose from among different shades of ... language to emphasize their own politics." 5° Chinese of varying cultural and social inclinations could thus identify with the increasingly common antiimperialist theme of nationalism. In the intellectual revolution of the early twentieth century, contending groups of thinkers struggled over whether it was liberalism, fascism, or Marxism that could save China. However, none of these isms endured. In contrast, the fl.oodtide of nationalism steadily engulfed all that stood in its path. While other imported Western ideologies and doctrines waxed and waned, nationalism permeated them all and triumphed as a new Chinese political identity in the modern era. Nationalism was a central theme in the Self-strengthening movement of the late nineteenth century; it inspired the antiforeign xenophobia of the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the twentieth century, led to the revolution that gave rise to the first Chinese republic in

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

19

I9II, and blended into the more fully developed May Fourth movement of 1919, with its dedication to anti-imperialism and national salvation. During the Sino-Japanese War of the 1930s and 1940s, nationalism became the most powerful appeal for war mobilization. As Joseph Fewsmith and Stanley Rosen have put it, "Nationalism has been one of the basic leitmotifs of twentieth century China, undergirding the Revolution of I9II, the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the reorganization of the Guomindang in 1924, and the communist revolution." 51 The PRC itself was the product of a movement with strong nationalist credentials. It was hardly distinctively communist in its early years. Its policies and programs aimed at national greatness and prosperity were ones that any strong nationalist government might have undertaken under the circumstances, and indeed, in a large measure, ones that its defeated political rival, the KMT (Kuomintang, or Guomindang; literally the Nationalist Party), had attempted or promised to pursue.

The Situational Content

if Chinese Nationalism

Although national consciousness was a universal potentiality after the creation of the nation-state system and the embarkation on the road to modernization, the content of nationalism was not always attendant in similar situations of modernization because self-interested political entrepreneurs treat it as a political enterprise and manipulate it in response to changing supply and demand conditions in the political marketplace. It is from this perspective that Mario Ferrero has suggested that "the market for nationalism belongs in the same category as the 'market' for social revolution or systemic change in general." 52 New threats and dangers to the identity, interests, or integrity of a nation, whether from internal or external sources, often provide the crucial moment for the construction and reconstruction of nationalism. In modern world history, both world wars were such crucial moments; they remade physical and political boundaries and posed questions for national self-inclusion and self-definition. In such circumstances, the supply of nationalist programs-including extreme, exclusionary racist Nazism and fascism-rose. Modern Chinese history has been punctuated by numerous crises caused by domestic turmoil and foreign aggression. The resolution to all these crises has required nationalist action. Political entrepreneurs have offered a variety of nationalist programs and competed for the leadership of nationalist movements. Modern China had several critical moments that called for new nationalist programs. China's defeat in the Opium War gave rise to the Selfstrengthening movement of 1864-95. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894 preceded the anti-foreign nationalism represented by the Boxers in r898-190I

20

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

and the overthrow of the Qing dynasty by a Republican Revolution in 1911. The humiliating decision of the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 to transfer former German concessions in China's Liaodong Peninsula to Japan triggered the famous anti-imperialist May Fourth movement. The Japanese invasion during the 1930s and 1940s threatened the very survival of the Chinese nation and gave rise to a nationalist mass mobilization movement. The Korean War of the 1950s gave a chance for the newly born PRC government to launch a state-sponsored nationalist struggle to resist the United States and defend the motherland. In response to the collapse of communism in Europe in the late 1980s and the 1990s, the Chinese communist state repositioned itself as the defender of China's national interests in an attempt to block criticism from both internal and external sources. This historical development shows that Chinese nationalism is a product of the mixture of national revolution and social revolution. Its content has not been eternal but situational and in a state of flux, responding to the supply and demand conditions of a political market structured by both national and social revolutions. At the risk of oversimplification, we may distinguish three types of nationalisms that have competed in the political marketplace of modern Chinese history: liberal nationalism, ethnic nationalism, and state nationalism. Each emphasizes different aspects of nationhood. State nationalism stresses political-territorial convergence; ethnic nationalism emphasizes cultural-ethnic identity; and liberal nationalism proclaims the civil right of participation in government. Although the three types of nationalism are related with one another in a significant way, each is grounded on distinctive political values that have often been advanced by different social or political forces. One reason why no single definition of nationalism has won such wide acceptance that it has dominated the others is because different people have used the same term to emphasize very different aspects of nationalism. For ethnic nationalists, nationalism means building a single ethnic state. For liberal nationalists, it is a doctrine of social solidarity based on the symbols of nationhood, defined in terms of citizenship, political participation, and a common territory. For state nationalists, it is the desire to maintain the boundaries of the existing nation-state with its territory and population, to give the government the right to submit any objective to it, to reinforce its identity, and to justifY the use of force to preserve its sovereignty against external as well as internal threats. Depending upon historical and situational contexts, different political forces have chosen different types of nationalisms that are linked to their political values and interests and then attempted to impose them on the rest of the population while trying to obscure and repress other types of nationalism. As a result, the content of nationalism is not simply a "function of specific domestic political economic conditions and cultural-ideological predilections, as well as the country's location in the

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

2I

world system," 53 including the legacy of its historical position. In other words, shared culture or history shapes but does not determine the content of Chinese nationalism. It is necessary to probe into the motivations and functions of nationalist entrepreneurs in order to make sense of the particularities of nationalist expression and how it interacts with and impinges on foreign policy. Nationalism defined from this perspective is neither static nor abstract. It is multifaceted. ETHNIC NATIONALISM IN CHINA

Ethnic nationalism sees the nation as a politicized ethnic group defined by common culture and decent, shared historical experiences, and usually a common language. The nation may emerge from an "imagined political community" that is subject to political manipulation, although it may not necessarily be unreal and fabricated. As Paul R. Brass has suggested, politicized ethnic nationalism is the creation of "elites, who draw upon, distort, and sometimes fabricate materials from the cultures of the groups they wish to represent in order to protect their well-being or existence or to gain political and economic advantage for their groups as well as for themselves." 54 Often linked with separatist movements for the creation of independent ethnic states, this type of nationalism has inspired many state-seeking movements by which the representatives of certain ethnic groups that did not have collective control of their states claimed autonomous political status, or a separate state, on the grounds that the population had a distinctive, coherent ethnic identity. Ethnic nationalism and related separatist movements thus became a serious challenge in many states that included more than one nation or potential nation. This type of nationalism was a hot subject in many headlines after the end of the Cold War thanks to the emergence of new nation-states in the place of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and to the ensuing nationalist conflicts in the Balkans. Ethnic nationalism was the mainstay of Chinese nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century when revolutionaries of the Han ethnic majority led a state-seeking movement to oppose European imperialism as well as the minority Manchu rulers. Although many of the Chinese elite were concerned that China as a state and the Chinese as a race faced extinction (wangguo, miezhong) after China's defeat by Britain in the Opium War and launched a movement of baoguo, baozhong, and baojiao (preserving the state, preserving the race, and preserving native Chinese religion and thought), the rising Chinese nationalist consciousness quickly moved to target the Manchu rulers not only because their inability to resist foreign imperialism supposedly caused the decline of China, but also because they were seen as alien rulers over the Han Chinese. Ironically, the creation of an ethnic Han identity goes back only to the

22

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

late nineteenth century. The term "Han" emerged in the context of a discussion framed by Social Darwinism when scholars like Liang Qichao responded to the European notion of race by claiming that the yellow race was dominated by the Han people who "were the initiators of civilization and had civilized the whole of Asia." 55 In the first decade of the twentieth century, ethnic nationalist leaders such as Zhang Binglin championed a violent and vengeful struggle of the Han people against the Manchu rulers. They believed that the alien Manchu government oppressed the Han people, whose origins could be traced to ancient heroes such as the Yellow Emperor and Minister of Agriculture (Shen Nong). The Han people had to struggle to overthrow both the alien Manchu rulers and white imperialists. 56 To save China, Han nationalists launched a state-seeking revolution. The ethnic content of the movement was clearly reflected in the famous slogans of pai Man (exterminate the Manchus) and huifu Hanzu zhuquan (restore Han sovereignty). During the revolution leading to the end of the Qing dynasty, revolutionaries conducted an extensive mobilization of Han Chinese, including those living overseas, in support of the anti-Manchu cause. It was from this perspective that Edward Friedman has called Chinese nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century a "racist nationalism" and has claimed that Chinese national identity was at first "racist and anti-imperialist." 57 After the fall of the Qing dynasty in I9II, the revolutionaries quickly discovered a contradiction between ethnic Han nationalism and the desire to retain all of the Qing territories, which had extended to include many ethnic minorities in the frontier areas. Thus Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Chinese republic, and other nationalist leaders had to promote a unitary, multiethnic nation-state and reject an ethnic nationalism that would have made the Chinese nation-state coterminous with the Han people. The Provisional Constitution of the Republic of China (Zhonghua minguo linshi yuefa) written in March 1912 specifically identified Mongolia, Tibet, and Qinghai as integral parts of the nation, even though these territories were only recent additions to the Qing empire. Hence, Chinese nationalism advocated by the Han majority was no longer an ethnic state-seeking movement although it was still constructed around an ethnic core of Han culture and history. Since then, successive Chinese constitutions have defined China as a multiethnic political community and the Chinese state, whether the republican, the nationalist, or the communist, have inculcated a sense of Chinese nationalism in political-territorial terms, regardless of ethnic nationality. Ethnic nationalism remained alive only among those ethnic minorities in China's frontiers, such as Tibetans and Mongols, which were denied the right to establish separate states. Ethnic nationalism and ethnic separatist movements therefore posed a serious threat to the unity of the multiethnic Chinese state.

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

23

Before coming to power in I949, the CCP policy toward ethnic nationalism was typically instrumental. To enlist the support of ethnic minorities disgruntled by the KMT's nationality policy, the CCP promised a federal system and recognized the right of self-determination of ethnic minorities and their freedom of choice to join the Chinese federation or to secede from it and form independent states. After the founding of the PRC, the CCP made a sharp U-turn and began to suppress ethnic nationalism and promote the notion of a unitary, multiethnic nation-state as it realized the strategic importance of ethnic minority areas, which amounted to about 64 percent of China's territory. To physically control and extend political jurisdiction over all frontier areas, the CCP moved quickly to integrate ethnic minority communities into the structure of the communist state by adopting a variety of measures, including large-scale migration of Han people to the ethnic minority areas, the recruitment of ethnic minorities into the party and government bureaucracies, and the encouragement of minorities to learn the Han language and other cultural practices. This chauvinist assimilation policy, combined with Mao's disastrous "socialist transformation," however, stimulated resistance from ethnic minorities and exacerbated antiHan sentiments, particularly among the Tibetans, Uighurs and other Muslims, and Mongols. These frontier ethnic minorities were bitter about the personal and collective suffering they experienced under Han Chinese rule, particularly during the Cultural Revolution, and saw themselves as "engaged in a struggle to keep culture and national identity afloat in a world of one billion Han." 58 Ethnic nationalism thus became a serious threat to the PRC government and was interpreted as an internally responsive force that could be exploited by hostile foreign powers to split China. To maintain a multiethnic nation-state, the PRC leaders have not hesitated to deploy forces to suppress ethnic resistance and unrest. LIBERAL NATIONALISM IN CHINA

Liberal nationalism defines nation as a "socially mobilized body of individuals who believe themselves united by some set of characteristics that differentiate them (in their own minds) from outsiders and who strive to create or maintain their own state." 59 It aspires to a strong and assertive selfawareness among citizens who are nationals of a state regardless of ethnicity, religion, lineage, or any other similar factor. Nationalism thus implies popular awareness of, and some degree of civic participation in, politics. A government is not considered legitimate unless it is thought to represent its nationals. Liberal nationalism was developed first in England prior to the Revolution and then in France as a reaction to the frank denial of individualism embodied by Jacobin nationalism. Liberal nationalism is not characterized by

24

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

its universal concern with individual freedom. According to Bear F. Braumoeller, "liberalism is nowhere truly universal, and the nation provides a common delimiter for its scope." 60 The historical context of many former colonial or semicolonial countries created the condition for combining liberalism and nationalism as a single political force to fight for the freedom of their nationals, not only against their own authoritarian state but also against any foreign imperialist state. The freedom of the nation-state has been the imperative objective in countries that are still fighting for national independence. Liberal nationalism was introduced to China early in the twentieth century to regenerate the nation through comprehensive political and social reforms. Liberal nationalists identified with the Chinese nation-state against foreign imperialism and, at the same time, pushed for recognition of individual rights against authoritarian states led by both the KMT and the CCP. As a result, while the incumbent political elites attempted to make use of liberal nationalist forces to confront foreign pressure, they often found themselves in constant tension with liberal nationalists on the domestic front. Criticizing the authoritarian rule of the KMT regime, many liberal nationalists allied with the CCP, which, before the founding of the PRC, promised to build an independent and democratic new China. For example, Li Hongling, who was purged by the CCP in the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957 and then became a prominent political dissident in the 1990s,joined the CCP in 1946, when he was a college student, because he found that it was "a democratic alternative to the 'one party, one leader and one ism' advocated by the KMT." To his satisfaction, in the early years of the PRC, the CCP built a more-or-less inclusive state based upon a broadly defined Chinese nation. He was optimistic about the prospect of some form of popular democracy emerging under the leadership of the CCP. However, the situation began to change in the mid-1950s. Li was frustrated to see that the Chinese people were forced to live and work under the active organizational control of the party-state at every level and were more the objects of education and indoctrination than they were voluntary participants. 61 As a result of the domination of the CCP, the alliance between liberal nationalists and the CCP began to crack. Liberal nationalists assertively expressed their dissatisfaction with the CCP in the Hundred Flowers campaign of 1957. Many liberal intellectuals took the opportunity to criticize the CCP regime for its monopoly over political power and its policies that set national and state interest higher than or even against personal rights, roughly the same reasons that they had previously opposed the KMT. In response to the criticism, Mao Zedong launched an antirightist campaign, which, in a decisive blow to liberal nationalism, forcefully presented the communist state as the sole representative of the Chinese nation. However, demands for liberal

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

25

nationalism never entirely disappeared from the PRC. When the post-Mao leadership began to correct the gross injustices of the PRC and carry out market-oriented economic reform in the 1980s, liberal nationalism reemerged at first in the form of antitraditionalism and then, in the spring of 1989, evolved into a direct challenge to the CCP when many liberal nationalists defied the communist state by taking over Tiananmen Square and demanding democracy. The communist regime had to forcefully quash the Tiananmen protests to keep the country from unraveling. After the Tiananmen crackdown, while liberal nationalists continued their critique of the communist state, some took a defensive position against Western sanctions because most democratic activists at Tiananmen Square were nationalists deep in their hearts. As a Chinese observer stated, "the prodemocracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, while confronting the government, claimed that patriotism drove them to take to the streets in the spring of 1989." 62 Most demonstrators equated promoting democracy with advocating patriotism. The combination of liberalism and nationalism produced two seemingly conflicting attitudes among Chinese liberal nationalists. On the one hand, they maintained a critical stance toward the Chinese authoritarian state. On the other hand, they held a very defensive attitude toward the Western countries that imposed sanctions on China. They were critical of the Chinese communist regime for violating their individual rights and, at the same time, critical of the Western powers, most of which were democratic, for violating China's national rights. In other words, liberal nationalists were liberals in the domestic arena and nationalists in the international arena. Partly because of this, some liberal nationalists were labeled "neoconservatives" in the 1990s. This label ignored the fact that just below the sometimes intemperate attacks on foreign misdeeds was criticism of the present regime. In fact, liberal nationalists often tried to distinguish their criticism of the foreign powers from that of the government. In an interview with Wang Xiaodong, a Western reporter found that "Wang's nationalism begins, surprisingly for some, with an unequivocal commitment to democracy" because Wang wanted to hold Chinese leaders "accountable for safeguarding national interests." Wang criticized the Chinese government for making concessions in the December 1999 agreement to pay Washington $2.87 million for the damage inflicted on U.S. diplomatic properties in China by antiNATO demonstrators. He also criticized the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency for omitting reports on this settlement. 63 Indeed, many liberal nationalists were very critical of the communist state for its seemingly "soft" policies toward hostile foreign powers. They criticized the state as neither confident nor competent enough to make foreign policy. In the wake of the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Bel-

26

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

grade in 1999, public anger nearly spun out of the government's control. To the government's dismay, many protesters felt that communist leaders had been too weak in their response to the bombing. Similarly, after the Chinese government released the twenty-four crew members of the U.S. spy plane that collided with a Chinese fighter in April 2001, many self-proclaimed Chinese nationalists accused President Jiang Zemin of being too soft. A Western reporter observed, "for the first time since the Communist Party took over in 1949, the rulers in Beijing were accused not of corruption or totalitarianism, but of treason." 64 STATE NATIONALISM IN CHINA

State nationalism defines the nation as a territorial-political unit and an organizational system to gather citizens of a given territory-voluntarily or not-to produce public goods for its members and make sovereign collective decisions. State nationalism is similar to what Jean-Dominique Lafay has called the "holistic view of nationalism," which conceives of the state as a "superbeing, with its own aims and rights. This superbeing is the sovereign judge of the national interest, and it has a natural right to promote this interest, whatever the consequences for the sovereignty and welfare of other nations or for the sovereignty and welfare of domestic individuals." 65 State nationalism is promoted by the incumbent state elite who speak "in a nation's name, successfully [demand] that citizens identifY themselves with that nation and subordinate other interests to those of the state." 66 The difference between state nationalism and liberal nationalism is similar to the difference between what Liah Greenfeld calls "individualistic-libertarian nationalism" and "collectivistic-authoritarian nationalism." In the former, historically "sovereignty of the people was the implication of the actual sovereignty of individuals; it was because these individuals actually exercised sovereignty that they were members of a nation." In the latter, the theoretical sovereignty of the people "was the implication of the people's uniqueness, its very being a distinct people, because this was the meaning of the nation, and the nation was, by definition, sovereign." 67 The distinction between state nationalism and ethnic nationalism is rather like the distinction between the nationalism of peoples who possess a state, and the nationalism of those who do not. In twentieth-century China, incumbent political elites from both the KMT and the CCP were strong advocates of state nationalism. They sought to make the state the pivotal and sovereign center of self-conscious collective action and to build a centralized state to create and maintain the myth of a multiethnic nation-state in response to external threats to its sovereignty and internal challenges to its authority. The Chinese state assumed the essential responsibility of defending the integrity of the Chinese identity, in-

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eluding China's physical survival and cultural distinctiveness and the restoration of China's national grandeur. From this perspective, although Chinese nationalism sprang from crises of foreign invasion, it was perpetuated by the state in the name of saving a Chinese nation under threat. The incumbent elite marshaled all the institutional apparatus at its disposal to propagate a national identity that promoted its own interest. The KMT and the CCP each provided what they believed to be a viable nationalist program. Although they shared the conviction that the struggle to strengthen the state was to save the nation, they disagreed, as Michael Hunt has pointed out, primarily on three questions about how to make China strong and prosperous. First, what ideology would prop up the state and give its rejuvenation legitimacy and direction? Second, who was to lead and what principles and codes would regulate government institutions? And third, who were the "people" and what would be the proper basis for their relationship to the state? Hunt reduces the disagreements that these questions engendered to system-reforming and system-transforming approaches. The KMT adopted a system-reforming approach while the CCP adopted a system-transforming approach. 68 The system reformers were to build a bourgeois state led by the KMT and the system transformers were to build a worker's state led by the CCP. Both movements were to achieve national independence and state sovereignty as well as to maintain one-party rule. The KMT established China's first one-party dictatorship in 1928 and embarked on a mission to eradicate foreign imperialism and unifY China in the next decade. Following Sun Yatsen's policy of a gradual transition from political and economic modernization programs, the KMT would have eventually constructed the substance of the Chinese nation and reorganized Chinese society under a strong state. However, the onset of a full-scale Sino-Japanese war in 1937 placed the KMT in the very difficult position of facing challenges from both the external, Japanese invasion and the internal rivalry of the CCP. The national crisis brought about by the war stimulated a great outburst of popular nationalist demands. However, the relatively narrow social base of the KMT constrained its ability to timely transform elite nationalism into mass nationalism. As a result, the KMT was ineffective in competing with the CCP for leadership of the massive national mobilization for the patriotic war. In contrast, the CCP moved quickly to identifY the party and its revolution with the mass movement that the CCP itself was not primarily responsible for setting into motion. Communism, when fused with Chinese nationalism, became a powerful impetus and gave rise to what Chalmers Johnson called Chinese "national communism." 69 Building upon the momentum of wartime mass nationalism, the CCP founded the People's Republic of China and won strong nationalist credentials. As Edward Friedman

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has pointed out, whatever else analysts of the Chinese revolution may differ on, they agree that Mao's communist revolution was a patriotic embodiment of Chinese nationalism. "Mao's armed struggle unified the nation, threw out the foreigners, and built a strong and powerful centralized state that won dignity and standing for China and Chinese in the world arena." 70 The nationalism championed by the CCP incumbent elite had a strong statist tinge. Mao used the term "people's democratic dictatorship" (renmin minzhu zhuanzheng) to describe the state system, which was "to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right." However, in the early years of the PRC, Mao exercised maximum pragmatism to include a broad range of "the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie" in the new nation-state.7 1 In this way, the notion of the communist-led Chinese state was defined in a united-front style that lined up the broadest possible support. State nationalism in the PRC portrayed the communist state as the embodiment of the nation's will. The communist state sought the loyalty and support of the people that had been granted to the nation itself and tried to create a sense of nationhood among all its citizens by speaking in the nation's name and demanding that citizens subordinate their interests to those of the state. Freedom was sought not for individuals but for the nation-state. This meant all power to the rulers who claimed the monopoly of authority and refused to acknowledge any opposition voice as "patriotic." As a CCP propaganda publication stated, "Socialist patriotism has three levels. At the first level, individuals should subordinate their personal interests to the interests of the state. At the second level, individuals should subordinate their personal destiny (geren mingyun) to the destiny of our socialist system. At the third level, individuals should subordinate their personal future to the future of our communist cause." 72 The state nationalist program successfully restored national unity and state power to a degree unknown since the collapse of the Qing dynasty by dint of the communist state's strong political organization that reached into the grass roots of Chinese society. The resulting rise in China's power and international status satisfied nationalist aspirations. It is from this perspective that James Townsend stated that "the real nationalist revolution in China came after 1949 in the building of an infrastructure that reached all of the state's citizens and regions." 73 Although the salience of nationalism later became shrouded by an overlay of Marxism and Maoism from the late 1950s to the 1970s, the communist regime reinvested in a state-led nationalism after it encountered a profound crisis of faith in Marxism-Maoism during the reform years of the 1980s and 1990s. This crisis forced the communist state to construct a new national identity incorporating the changes brought about by market-oriented econmnic reform. As a result, identification with

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism 29 the communist state was reoriented to be a function of the state's performance in improving the economic well-being of Chinese people rather than its success at "socialist transformation."

Chinese Pragmatic Nationalism and Its International Orientations In championing state nationalism, the CCP has to face challenges from ethnic nationalism and liberal nationalism, which have become stronger after the end of the Cold War. The strategic response of the communist state to these challenges has not only shaped the content but also defined the international orientation of Chinese nationalism. A STRATEGY OF PRAGMATIC NATIONALISM

The crucial strategic issue for the communist state is how to prevent nationalism turning from a tool into a threat. The solution was the adoption of a strategy of pragmatic nationalism, which is largely a situational matter and essentially contextual, whose content is continually reconstructed to fit the needs of its creators and consumers. Narratives of pragmatic nationalism typically become "invented histories or traditions." Most communist leaders in post-Mao China, from Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang, and Hu Yaobang, to Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, have been pragmatic nationalists. They have used nationalism to enhance the political legitimacy of the regime and to maintain political stability and national unity, with an eye on the challenges from liberal nationalism and ethnic nationalism. To meet the challenge of liberal nationalism, pragmatic leaders set economic growth as the top priority and claimed that the success of economic development depended on political stability. They rejected the demands of liberal nationalism on the grounds that Western-style democracy causes social chaos and delays economic development. Yu Xintian, president of the Shanghai Institute of International Studies, presented this view in her 1998 comparative study of modernization: Political stability and order is the prerequisite of modernization .... Many developing countries that have fallen into the status of the least developed countries have done so due to domestic chaos. It is indeed a luxury for these countries to talk about a multiparty system and checks and balances. State authority must be established first before it can be restrained. Political resources must be accumulated first before they can be distributed .... The developing countries that have developed the fastest are usually not democratic countries but neo-authoritarian countries.7 4

This view of making economic development the primary goal and liberal democracy secondary has been at the core of the strategic considera-

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tions of pragmatic nationalism. Shortly after his rise to power in the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping launched a state-led economic modernization program. Although the rigid central planning system was identified as the major barrier to modernization and was to be reformed, Deng had to make a choice among three alternative models: Western liberalism, Eastern European market socialism, and the East Asian model of a developmental state. Deng rejected the Western model on the grounds that liberal democracy would bring turmoil and political instability. It would, Deng held, sap the state's capacity and make economic development impossible. Political stability and unity (anding tuanjie) were thus set as the preconditions for China's economic modernization. Having rejected the liberal model of development, pragmatic leaders found attractive the market socialist model of some Eastern European countries, with which China shared the same socialist legacy. However, the collapse of Eastern European communist regimes in the early 1990s demonstrated the failure of the socialist market economies and made it impossible for China to continue emulating them. Pragmatic leaders interpreted the collapse of communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as a failure to maintain political order and to deliver sufficient economic benefits to their people. At this juncture, they reiterated their pragmatic nationalist call for the Chinese people to concentrate on economic development. An internal article widely circulated among Chinese elites, "Sulian jubian zhihou Zhongguo de xianshi yingdui yu zhanliie xuanze" (Realistic responses and strategic choices for China after the disintegration of the Soviet Union), argued that the CCP should combine systematic economic transformation with tight political control and claim its legitimacy firmly based on the success of economic modernization. 75 As a pragmatic move, Deng Xiaoping gave his support to the East Asian model of a capitalist developmental state in spite of his earlier concerns about, in the words of Ming Xia, "the applicability and compatibility of a capitalist model to China within the context of the existing Communist rule." 76 In his famous southern China tour of early 1992, Deng denounced the debate surrounding whether the reform and opening-up should be "surnamed socialism or capitalism" and proposed a pragmatic approach in which socialism could efficaciously adopt some elements of capitalism and capitalism could have socialist elements. Deng set up a criterion of three youliyu (facilitation or conduciveness) in judging economic development policy: facilitating the forces of production, facilitating the consolidation of the state power, and facilitating the improvement of people's standard of living.7 7 Mter Deng's southern China tour, how to make use of a capitalist market mechanism to serve the authoritarian state in an all-out economic development program became the focal point of communist propaganda. This state-led economic development strategy proved effective in com-

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3r

peting with liberal nationalism as it successfully projected China onto the world scene as an emerging power. China's economic growth rate averaged 9.8 percent in 1985-95· Furthermore, China also avoided the severe effects of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-99 and maintained a growth rate of 78 percent in the last three years of the twentieth century. Pragmatic nationalism thus seemed to have made a strong case against liberal nationalism. To meet the challenges of ethnic nationalism, while continuing to forcefully suppress separatists, pragmatic leaders emphasized the ability of the communist state to maintain the multiethnic Chinese nation. In a way admitting the failure of the forced assimilation policy, pragmatic leaders shifted to a more tolerant policy of inducement in the 1980s, including a dizzying array of preferential treatment in political representation, economic development, and social benefits. This policy of preferential treatment was dubbed "China's affirmative action" by a Western reporter.7 8 To avoid inciting ethnic antagonism, the PRC government has avoided using the term "nationalism," which, in the official vocabulary, carries a derogatory connotation and refers to parochial and reactionary attachments to nationalities. The sentiments of the Chinese people are described as aiguo (patriotic), which in Chinese literally means, "loving the state," and aiguo zhuyi (patriotism), which is to love and support China, always indistinguishable from the Chinese state and the Communist Party. As Michael Hunt has observed, "by professing aiguo, Chinese usually expressed loyalty to and a desire to serve the state, either as it was or as it would be in its renovated form." 79 The official line defines the Chinese nation always as the total population of China, composed of 56 nationalities. Loyalty to the nation must mean loyalty to the communist state. The unity of all nationalities (minzu tuanjie) and the "mutual prosperity" (gongtongfuyu) of all nationalities are thus emphasized as the objectives of Chinese patriotism. In this way, pragmatic leaders effectively endorsed a nationalism that supported the political authority of the communist state in the collective effort of modernization involving all of the country's territories and nationalities. Pragmatic nationalism, therefore, was designed to help elicit the loyalty of the Chinese people in order to promote the interests of the communist state. INTERNATIONAL ORIENTATIONS OF CHINESE NATIONALISM

The adoption of a pragmatic strategy has important foreign-policy implications, as pragmatic nationalism is a firmly goal-fulfilling and national-interest-driven doctrine, ideologically agnostic, having nothing, or very little, to do with either Marxism or liberalism. While firmly defending China's national interest, China's pragmatic nationalist leaders have tried to avoid confrontational relations with the United States and other Western powers in the post-Cold War world. They have gained power both from reacting to

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and absorbing from the outside world. Pragmatists seek to defend China's national interests by striving to develop cooperative relations with the international community, including the Western countries. Although some prag-

matists have tried to limit interactions with the outside world to those clearly beneficial to China's economic development and to watch carefully for unwanted consequences, most pragmatists are confident that China's distinctive culture is sufficiently resilient to survive extensive contact with the outside world. Pragmatic nationalists are flexible in tactics, subtle in strategy, and nonconfrontational; but they are uncompromising with foreign demands that involve China's vital interest or trigger historical sensitivities. In the sense that pragmatic leaders have appealed to nationalism in response to perceived foreign pressures that are said to erode, corrode, or endanger the national interest of China, pragmatic nationalism is more reactive than proactive in international affairs. It is not hard for pragmatic leaders to realize that nationalism is a double-edged sword. Although nationalism can enhance the legitimacy of the communist regime, the cost of overplaying nationalism can be disproportionately high. On the positive side, nationalism has reinforced Chinese national confidence, turning past humiliation and current weakness into a force that propels modernization. When liberal nationalists complained that China was bullied and humiliated by the United States, they also indicated that China's backwardness in economic development should share some blame for China's past humiliation and current weakness. Pragmatic communist leaders have used nationalism to rally support when they have called upon the Chinese people to work hard and to build a prosperous and strong China. Attacks on U.S. hegemonism and discussion of the social-political problems in Western countries also have helped the pragmatic leadership divert attention from many problems stemming from market-oriented reform, such as crime, corruption, and inequalities, to the old devil of foreign intervention. Pragmatic leaders have played the nationalist card whenever they have perceived external or internal forces challenging the legitimacy of their authoritarian power. Indeed, nationalism as an instrument for the communist regime has been particularly effective when China has faced challenges from hostile foreign countries. As Liu Ji has claimed, if the Chinese people feel threatened by external forces, their solidarity will be strengthened and nationalism will be a useful means for the regime to justify its leadership role. "Chinese nationalism has a unique characteristic: in peaceful times, there are often 'internal struggles' (wolidou) within the nation .... When confronted with foreign invasions, this nation is prone to respond with a narrow kind of nationalism." 80 The Korean War is a typical example. With the perceived imminent invasion of American forces via Korea, the communist government launched

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a kang Mei yuan Chao, baojia weiguo (Resist America and assist Korea, protect the homeland and safeguard the country) campaign in 1950. The nationalistic rhetoric of defending the nation mobilized popular support for the newly born People's Republic. ChenJian has called this campaign a successful "political mobilization" that channeled "outside pressures into the dynamics of internal mobilization." 81 It is from this perspective that Xiao Gongqin labeled Chinese nationalism yingji-ziwei xing (a reactive-defensive type) of nationalism in response to "negative stimuli" (buliang cijt) from certain foreign forces. "It is reactive to specific issues and has little to do with abstract ideas, religious doctrines, or ideologies. The intensity of the reaction is in proportion to the intensity of the negative stimulus from abroad." 82 After the Cold War, with the collapse of the former Soviet Union, China suddenly found itself a lonely communist power facing heavy pressures from the Western world. Although China managed to achieve impressive economic growth, the advocacy of the containment of China reached its peak in the Western media in the mid-1990s. With a volatile mix of rising pride and lingering insecurity, the communist regime launched a patriotic education campaign. The perceived hostile international environment buttressed the success of the official campaign. A large portion of the Chinese people, including liberal and dissident intellectuals, accepted the state version of nationalism, ironically, because they were concerned with obstructions to China's course of reform and opening up by Western sanctions and fearful of national disintegration. However, once unleashed, nationalism could cause a serious backlash, provoking serious challenges to the communist state and damaging China's foreign relations. Liberal nationalists' criticism of Chinese foreign policy on Japan and the United States in the 1990s was certainly an embarrassment for the CCP. Widely criticized as too chummy with Japan and the United States, the party was in danger of losing some of its dwindling legitimacy. It was particularly vulnerable to the criticism of its policy on Japan, a country that allegedly failed to provide adequate compensation for wartime injuries, laid claim to the Diaoyu (Senkaku) Islands, and waged economic imperialism by flooding China with Japanese products. Corning at a time when China urgently needed Japanese and American trade and investment, the government certainly did not want to see a surge of popular nationalistic antipathy to these two countries. Even the popular nostalgia for Mao did not necessarily generate support for the communist state. As a Western reporter found, "while many revere his image, few respect the state he left behind, which struggles to deal with the pressing social, economic, and diplomatic challenges of a growing nation."83 Indeed, the Mao fever often brought criticism of the government for its softness toward the Western powers. Mao fever was related to the

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popular demands for the Chinese government to stand tough in handling the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia in 1999 and the mid-air collision between a U.S. EP-3 spy plane and Chinese fighter jet in the South China Sea in 2001. It was striking that in the wake of the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy, many Chinese netizens in the popular internet chatrooms protested that the Chinese government was not tough enough in confronting the American devils and recalled the good old days when China had real leaders like Chairman Mao. After the U.S. EP-3 plane collided with the Chinese jet and landed on Chinese soil, chatroom messages called for a strong leader like Mao, revered for standing up to foreign domination. Using the name Xiagang Gongren Xinliliang (New Force of Laid-off Workers), a poster on the Strong Nation Forum (Qiangguo luntan) website declared "we miss Chairman Mao." Under the name Qiangguo Zhi Lu (Road to a Strong Nation), another wrote, "China needs politicians like Chairman Mao who have strategic vision." 84 Hence the communist state has to be very cautious in promoting national pride. It has even tried to constrain populist nationalist expressions by quickly banning popular antiforeign books such as The China That Can Say No shortly after their publication. Pragmatic Chinese leaders have to constantly temper the emotional voice of university students and liberal nationalist intellectuals in order to implement their nonconfrontational policies toward major foreign powers. In addition to concerns over a possible backlash in China's foreign relations, pragmatic leaders have to consider the ethnic implications of promoting nationalism. The Chinese state "stretching from Buddhist Tibet to Korean enclaves in Manchuria, from Muslim Xinjiang near Pakistan to Cantonese-speaking Guangdong next to Hong Kong-is arguably the last great multi-ethnic trans-continental empire left in the world. And while its grasp is enormous, its reach is even greater: Chinese claims stretch across seas to encompass Taiwan and the Spratly islands near the Philippines and Malaysia." 85 In this case, an overplaying of nationalism that glorifies largely Han history and culture could easily cause resentment among minority nationalities, including Zhuang in Guangxi and the Miao and the Yi in the southwest, who have long been highly integrated into the Han population. Furthermore, ethnic separatists in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia could attach an ethnic interpretation to the official nationalist appeals and challenge the very basis of the multinational state. As Xiao Gongqin has warned, "Because of the ethnic implications of Chinese nationalism, if the Chinese government advocates nationalism to defend China's national interests and position in the world of nation-states, the ethnic separatist tendency may gain a legitimate status under the banner of nationalism." 86 Hence, Chinese pragmatic nationalism is not only reactive to perceived threats but also constrained by the same threats, which dictate what viable

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nationalist policy options are open to pragmatic leaders. As a result, pragmatic nationalism is more defensive than offensive. The notion of defense in the Chinese case, however, needs a qualification. It is not only a matter of external defense or territorial defense, as the term is usually defined in Western security studies literature, but also, perhaps more importantly, a matter of internal defense because the threat to China's national security comes from both sides of its national borders. What worries Chinese leaders most are the liberal, antigovernment, and ethnic separatist movements within the country. Internal defense thus was a core element of the National Defense Act passed by the National People's Congress in March 1997, which stressed that one of the major functions of national defense is to prevent any split of the nation. For defensive purposes, Chinese leaders have embraced with a vengeance, and depended on, the Western notion of sovereignty. They have not only accepted the norms of the nation-state system and acknowledged the formal equality of other states, but also vigorously asserted China's own territorial sovereignty and have become very sensitive to foreign interference in "domestic affairs." A Western journalist has claimed that "even though it is reestablished as an important power, China still acts like a country with something to prove, and it collects what it sees as new slights to its pride." 87 From this perspective it is not hard to understand why President Jiang Zemin refused to go to Washington to meet with President Clinton for a "working visit" in September 1995 and would only accept an official "state visit," complete with a red-carpet welcome and 21-gun salute, in October 1997. This defensive posture may be misinterpreted as aggressive because China has sometimes been overly sensitive about its national sovereignty. Bernstein and Munro are right that "China is quick to take offense and to view disagreements that other countries might take more easily in stride as assaults on national dignity, requiring uncompromising response." 88 Reacting strongly against so-called interference in China's domestic affairs by Western powers, what pragmatic leaders really intend is to defend the authority of the Communist Party. They have played up a history of painful Chinese weakness in the face of Western imperialism, territorial division, unequal treaties, invasion, anti-Chinese racism, and social chaos, because the regime has to claim legitimization based on its ability to defend China's territorial integrity and to build a modern Chinese nation-state. Thus, while defending its position against sanctions imposed by Western countries, pragmatic leaders have managed to avoid a confrontational policy against the United States and other Western countries because China's vital national interest in modernization requires them to keep at least workable relations with these countries. The principle of pragmatic leaders is Deng's famous 24-character principle for handling world affairs after the Tiananmen incident of 1989: "Observe developments soberly, maintain our posi-

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tion, meet challenges calmly, hide our capacities and bide our time, remain free of ambition, never claim leadership." 89 Following this principle, pragmatic leaders have tried to avoid confrontation while fighting for China's rightful place. As a Reuters report in the wake of China's winning the bid for the 2008 Olympic games suggested, "Chinese leaders are now basking in what they see as long-overdue international acceptance of China's status as a great power.... A China that imagines it has gained the acceptance and respect of the world may be less inclined to believe that plots are being hatched in the West, particularly the United States, aimed at subverting its political system and blocking its economic rise." 90

CHAPTER

2

The Origins of Chinese Nationalism Western Challenge, Chinese Tradition, Ethnicity, and the State

LIKE THE ANCIENT Roman and Ottoman empires, imperial China was built upon a long tradition of civilization. China also had "the world's longest tradition of continuous statehood ... [and was] centrally administered in accordance with an enduring civic ethos, laws, administrative hierarchy and so forth." 1 Imperial China, however, was not a modern nationstate with sovereignty and territorial integrity and clearly defined borders in accordance with what Ernest Gellner called "the national principle" of seeking to make "the cultural and the political unit congruent." 2 Viewing Chinese culture as a set of universal principles, the Chinese empire transcended the specific cultural traditions of the people residing in the empire. Its territorial domain was also loosely defined by cultural principles, which were in fact not always universally accepted and often had to be enforced through the imperial political system. Writing in 1914, Max Weber argued that nations and nationalism had a specific beginning. This argument, significantly enough, was based on observations of China: "Only fifteen years ago, men knowing the Far East, still denied that the Chinese qualified as a 'nation'; ... yet today, not only the Chinese political leaders but also the very same observers would judge differently. Thus it seems that a group of people under certain conditions may attain the quality of a nation through specific behavior, or that they may claim this quality as an 'attainment."' 3 Modern Chinese history started with the transformation from a universal but loosely connected empire into a particularistic but centrally governed nation-state. Chinese nationalism was developed to provide people with the means to identifY their own position in the world in relation to others. Chinese nationalism began to take shape in the late nineteenth century when a growing number of Chinese elites began to think of their country no longer in a cultural sense but rather in political and territorial terms as a

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nation-state. Although the construction of Chinese nationalism drew upon common language, customs, values, religion, history, and the drive for biologic and social perpetuation, these aspects of Chinese self-identification

were not forced into a differentiated national consciousness until the changing external environment, particularly globalization of the European-dominated nation-state system, compelled it. The years between the Opium War (1840-42) and the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) were a critical transition when explicit nationalist doctrines were imported from abroad. The construction of Chinese nationalism in the twentieth century, however, proved to be a difficult endeavor. Although Chinese nationalists shared a dedication to national salvation, they were divided in finding the best approach to regenerate China. In particular, they struggled repeatedly to balance Chinese traditional values and modern Western ideas, to resolve the tension between Han nationalism and minority ethnic consciousnesses, and to reconcile a statecentric view and a decentralized view of the Chinese nation-state. A bona fide modern Chinese nationalism could not be born until it integrated Western ideas with China's past, fostered coalescence among China's multiethnic nationals, and held the vast and diverse country together to produce the intense feelings of common identity and mutual belonging among the Chinese people in response to internal as well as external threats. Unfortunately, during the formative period of Chinese nationalism, intellectuals and political elites repeatedly failed to establish a synergism between their traditions and Western ideas. As Lucian Pye has stated, "Between the two extremes of either nihilistically denouncing Chinese civilization or romanticizing it, most Chinese intellectuals and political leaders have consistently failed to do what their counterparts in the rest of the developing world have tried to do, which was to create a new sense of nationalism that would combine elements of tradition with appropriate features of the modern world culture." 4 Chinese nationalists also failed to find proper places for the various ethnic, individual, and local identities within the Chinese nation. Instead, both ethnic nationalism and decentralized national identity were denounced as antithetical to Chinese nationalist ideals and had to be superseded by a new form of national political power that could be embodied only in an authoritarian state and its centralized administration.

From a Universal Empire to a Particularistic Nation-State Modern Chinese nationalist consciousness was a product of recent history, sparked by China's defeats in a series of wars against the Western powers and imperial Japan in the nineteenth century. Fearing the extinction of China in the newly encountered nation-state system, seasoned Chinese political elites searched for the nationalist thread among the tangled fabric left

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by the breakup of the universal empire and followed that thread through the chaos of disunity to the creation and maintenance of a new, unified nation-state. AN AHISTORICAL VIEW OF CHINESE NATIONALISM

Many Chinese scholars hold an ahistorical view, however, and argue that China was an ancient nation nurtured by a nationalist tradition and that the national identity emerged millennia ago in the Yellow River Valley, where the Chinese defended themselves against steppe barbarians and spread out to ultimately unify all of China by absorbing all people within the domain into the Chinese civilization. Thus, all dynasties were in effect Chinese states and all the people who inhabited these vast territories were members of the Chinese nation regardless of their ethnicity or cultural differences. Gu Bao, for example, asserted that "China has been a unitary multinational state since the Qin and Han dynasties [221 B.C.-A.D. 220] .... Sima Qian already used the term 'Chinese people' (Zhongguo renmin) in roo B.C. The new term 'Chinese nation' (Zhonghua minzu) was based on Sima Qian's term proposed two thousand years ago." 5 In a systematic exploration of the origins of Chinese nationalism, several Chinese scholars have even found evidence of the existence of a Chinese nation prior to the Qin dynasty: "The basic pattern for the development of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu) was largely established over ten thousand years ago. The regional distribution of nationalities within the Chinese nation-the Han nationality in central and eastern China and minorities in the northeast, west, and southwest-was formulated two thousand years ago." 6 Wang Ermin has argued that "the concept of a Chinese race (Zhonghua zulet) based upon a unified nation and culture (minzu yu wenhua tongyt)" appeared before the first unified Qin and Han empires, a reflection of the long history of Chinese nationalism.? And Lu Simian has suggested that "Chinese nationalism always emerged in response to the repression of alien nations (yizu). Since China was increasingly under the repression of alien nations after the Song dynasty, nationalism rose and became strong." 8 Joining this view are some self-proclaimed Chinese nationalists. In the 1970s, Wang Pengling, an exiled political activist, stated, "Nationalism has an ancient historical origin (shenyuan de lishi yuanyuan) in China, tracing back hundreds of generations and thousands of years (baidai qiannian). It is wrong to deny the unique existence of nationalism in ancient China, because it not only denies the variety of modern nationalisms but also denies the fact that the Chinese nation (huaxia minzu) was formed and developed early in human history." Wang also asserted that the ancient Chinese self-image as huaxia meant "the Chinese nation" upon which Chinese national consciousness developed at a very early stage of human history has two forms

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of classical nationalism: cultural nationalism (wenhua minzu zhuyt) and political nationalism (zhengzhi minzu zhuyt). 9 Some Chinese archaeologists supporting this ahistorical view have contended that "Chinese civilization developed from a single system with many branches." 10 In their view, hominids whose fossils have been found on what is today Chinese territory were the ancestors of the Chinese nation, which had an uninterrupted history of many thousands of years. Citing studies of fossils of Peking Man in north China, Lan Tian Ape-man in the central plain, and Yuanmou Ape-man in the south, Lu Jiansong has described these hominids as "the primitive ancestors of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu)" and the progenitors of "the illustrious ancient culture of the Chinese nation." 11 Archaeology has thus been called upon to support "concepts of the long history, splendid cultural traditions, continuity, and integration of the country." 12 The ahistorical approach is in line with the state nationalist view that a continuous Chinese nationalism guaranteed the durability and advancement of the Chinese nation. As it was expressed in an official Chinese publication for patriotic education, "Patriotism is a fine tradition of our Chinese nation. For thousands of years, as an enormous spiritual force, it continuously stimulated the progress of our history.... Our country is a civilized ancient nation (wenming guguo). Patriotic thoughts have been continually renewed and exhibited in the political, economic, and cultural arenas at different historical periods." 13 These ahistorical statements and assertions may satisfY the needs of many Chinese scholars and nationalists but are not well supported by historical facts. They represent a misusage of the historical concepts of nation and nationalism. CULTURALISM VERSUS NATIONALISM

Nationalism is an ideological artifact of relatively recent historical provenance, consisting of doctrines or a set of ideas that dictate political action or movement in the modern world. In Hans Kahn's words, nationalism is a "political creed" that" centers the supreme loyalty of the overwhelming majority of the people upon the nation-state, either existing or desired." 14 The modern nation-state is a previously unprecedented form of political organization based on particularistic features of ethnic composition, language, or territorial boundaries within which sovereignty is exercised by a government. What is novel about modern nationalism is not the self-consciousness of any polity, but the world system of modern nation-states. This system, known as the Westphalian system in international relations literature, was created by Europeans in the fifteenth century and sanctioned as the only legitimate form of polity. The modern nation-state system has given rise to

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nationalism as a new sentiment that "dissolved the old empire in Europe with its kings, clerics, and local rather than national loyalties and provided a common allegiance that gave the reconstructed nations an unprecedented cohesiveness." 15 Before the nineteenth century, China was a universal empire and not a particularistic nation-state. The self-image of Chinese people was "culturecentric" rather than nationalistic. A sense of Chinese identity was based on a Confucian cultural system of ancestor worship. Dynasties came and went, but this culturally based identity supported systemic continuity, political stability, and social harmony for thousands of years. That is why James Harrison could use the term" culturalism" to describe the dominant worldview of China before the collapse of the traditional Chinese order in the nineteenth century. 16 Culturalism pursued the ideal of datong shijie (universal world) or tianxia zhuyi (universalism) based on Chinese culture. Some Chinese historians in the mid-twentieth century were aware of the features of Chinese culturalism. Liang Shuming wrote in the 1930s, "Traditional Chinese thinking was lacking in the concept of the nation (guojia guannian). People loved to talk about the land under heaven (tianxia), showing ... the development of China in history was as a universe not as a nation." 17 Another famous Chinese historian, Qian Mu, stated in the 1950s, "The Chinese often fused the concept of nation (minzu guannian) with the concept of humankind (renlei guannian),just like they often fused the concept of state (guojia guannian) with the concept of universe (tianxia guannian) or the world. They considered the nation and state to be merely a cultural entity (wenhuajitt). The narrow conception of nation or state did not exist. The nation and state existed only to serve culture." 18 One of the crucial deficiencies in the ahistorical view of Chinese nationalism is the confusion of the long history of Chinese civilization with the recent development of Chinese nationalism. Although the mandarin bureaucracy, a common written language, and a unified class of Confucian gentry gave Chinese civilization a unique path of expansion through cultural homogenization, the culturally based traditional Chinese identity was not the same as national identity in the modern sense, although the contemporary sentiments and imagery of nationalism could have their taproots in past identities. Indeed, universal culturalism rather than particularistic nationalism defined China's self-image before the nineteenth century. The well-elaborated from-culturalism-to-nationalism thesis makes a clear distinction between a mainstream Confucian image of China as a culturally defined community and the competing image of an ethnically or politically defined community. Chinese culturalism distinguishes itself from nationalism by its conviction of cultural superiority that seeks legitimacy or defense based on the culture it-

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The Origins of Chinese Nationalism

self, its refusal to acknowledge a world of formally equal nation-states, and its insistence that legitimate rule rests on adherence to Confucian norms, which dominated the development of Chinese culture for more than one thousand years. Confucianism did not admit cultural equality with "barbarians," as expressed by China's self-image as Zhongguo (the Central Kingdom). It was reinforced by the long-standing civil-service examination system in which ethnic minorities could participate only by accepting a cultural straitjacket imposed by the political center. When "barbarian" conquerors such as Mongols and Manchus adopted Confucian culture, the Chinese people could accept them because their primary loyalty was to the culture rather than to a particular nation. They believed that all conquerors of China eventually had to turn to Chinese culture in order to rule the country. Thus, culture was seen as a great, lasting power that could bridge periods of disunity and infuse new governments, whether Chinese or alien, with values supportive of traditional Chinese civilization. Although the distinction between culturalism and nationalism may oversimplifY the complexity of historical change, the reality and importance of this distinction has been accepted by more and more Chinese scholars in an intellectual debate in the past decade about the origins and functions of Chinese nationalism. Li Shenzhi, former vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has distinguished guo (state) from tianxia (universe) and argued that "guo refers to polity (zhengquan) and tianxia to culture (wenhua) . ... The Chinese traditional ideal was universalism rather than nationalism." Li points out that "ancient Chinese people did not pay any attention to the color of alien people's skin nor to their appearance but instead emphasized only their culture." Li therefore asserts that "Chinese nationalism arose only in the late nineteenth century when China was humiliated by foreign powers." 19 Similarly, Xiao Gongqin has argued that, The ancient Chinese had the concepts of xia [the Chinese] and yidi [barbarians], but did not have the concept of nation in the modern sense. [They] had the concept of tianxia (universe), with the Han civilization as the center, but did not have the concept of the nation-state among many nation-states. The distinction between huaxia (the Chinese universe) and yidi (barbarians) was not based on race and ethnicity but on whether or not [one] accepted the Confucian system and was assimilated. We may call this way of distinguishing xia from yi based on cultural attainment rather than race I ethnicity, culturalism. 20

Many articles on the intellectual debate were collected in a 2000 book, The Positions