In the analytical context of this study, there are at least two logical time-periods from which to begin an overview of Chinese nationalist rhetoric in history. The first possibility, in keeping with much of the secondary literature, is to set the birth date of Chinese nationalism sometime in the late 19th century, 176 when a weakening Qing empire confronted Japan and “the West”177 from a position of bureaucratic, scientific, and military weakness. According to this narrative, the psychologically violent collision of dynastic China’s “grand imperial
pretension”178 with – for the first time – jarringly obvious foreign political, technological, and military superiority, set a generation of anti-Qing revolutionaries on a quest to “save the nation”
by creating a nation-state. The rhetorical contestation between these revolutionaries and the more conservative reformists is then presented as the “formative stage” of Chinese nationalist discourse.179 As Mohanty writes,
The themes of nationalism, modernization and democracy have dominated Chinese intellectual discourse for a century since the reform debates of the [1890s]. How to unite China, liberate it from colonial domination, build a strong and prosperous country to cope with Western challenged and eradicate poverty have been the common threads connecting Sun Yatsen, Mao Zedong and Den Xiaoping and their respective generations of leaders.180
The second possibility involves making a clear distinction between nationalism before and after the founding of the PRC. Citing Chatterjee’s distinction between nationalism’s
“moment of departure, moment of maneuver, and moment of arrival,” in India’s colonial and
176 Viewing the late 19th century as the beginning of nationalism in China is consistent with the approaches developed in Zhao, Schell and Delury, and Chu and Zarrow – each work is cited below.
177 A conception of “the West” (西方) as a coherent civilization seems foundational to the cognitive frame of Chinese nationalism. The discourse resulting from this cognitive frame typically presents “the West” as China’s foil, implicitly elevating “China” to a position of equivalence or comparability with a rhetorical entity that spans three to four continents, depending on definition. There is a powerful but often overlooked subtext to the Chinese nationalist conception of “East” and “West;” very often, such nationalist discourse privileges China with the right to speak for the “East,” that is, for Asia and Asians. This cultural dichotomy goes hand-in-hand with the reverse-Orientalism described in John Timothy Wixted, “Reverse Orientalism,” Sino-Japanese Studies 2, no. 1 (December 1989), http://chinajapan.org/articles/02.1/02.1.17-27wixted.pdf.
178 Orville Schell and John Delury, Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 2013), 119.
179 Hong-yuan Chu and Peter Zarrow, “Modern Chinese Nationalism: The Formative Stage,” in Exploring Nationalisms of China: Themes and Conflicts, ed. George C. Wei and Xiaoyuan Liu (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 3-26.
180 Manoranjan Mohanty, Ideology Matters: China from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2014), 93.
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post-colonial history181, Wang marks the 1949 founding of the PRC and Mao’s famous declaration that “The Chinese people have stood up!” (中國人民站起來了!) as nationalism’s
“moment of arrival” in China. As George describes, after nationalism’s “moment of arrival,”
“nationalist discourse utters its own life history. It is in this period of time, in the literary productions of the society, that one finds even the most banal event to be overdetermined by the dominant politics of nationalism.”182 In other words, nationalism’s arrival marks the point at which “the nation” has been successfully engendered as the rightful subject of history and the legitimate object of political discourse. Such a transition in the relationship between “nation”
and political consciousness should dramatically alter the form of nationalism occurring in
political discourse. Thus it is reasonable to limit an analysis of Chinese nationalist rhetoric to the post-1949 era on the basis that pre-PRC Chinese nationalism is simply a different topic.
Renowned Chinese historian Hu Sheng (胡绳), in fact, argues for the differentiation of not just nationalism, but all of Chinese history, between the “modern” and “contemporary” eras, with 1949 as the boundary between these two periods.183
This chapter attempts to compromise between these two approaches by first considering the discourse of nationalism prior to the PRC’s founding, but devoting greater attention to more recent periods. Throughout the following analysis, the actual words of Chinese speakers and the actual contexts in which they were acting are prioritized above abstract theoretical questions.
This is especially important because although many aspects of modern Chinese politics can be explained with reference to models introduced form the outside (the CCP’s democratic
centralism, for example, is an adaptation of Leninism), and although nationalism as a doctrine was originally imported from the outside, the putative “Chinese nation,” or Zhonghua Minzu (中 華民族), differs in key respects from seemingly similar models outside of China. Leibold notes that while a Zhonghua Minzu has figured centrally in Chinese nationalist discourse from the time of Sun and Liang, to the Mao era, and now in the present day, it has at no time resembled
181 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 1986), 50-51. Discussed in 汪宏倫, 〈理解當代中國民族主義〉, 192.
182 Rosemary Marangoly George, “Nostalgic Theorizing: at Home in ‘Third World Fictions’,” in The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 117.
183 Discussed in Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction, 17.
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Stalin’s famous four-part definition of “nation.”184 Chinese-ness, likewise, has embodied ethnic, cultural, civic and territorial characteristics, each of which has a potential to become a
nationalized element of identity. To understand what makes up Chinese nationalism at present, therefore, we must begin by retracing the contents and orientations of Chinese nationalism historically. The following section does so while demonstrating the applicability of the model laid out in chapter three to the study of Chinse nationalism through time.
4.1: Nationalism Before the PRC 4.1.1: Late Qing Nationalism
In the competing discourses of late Qing intellectuals, we can find both polity-based and polity-seeking nationalism and both ethno-cultural and civic-territorial imaginations of the Chinese nation. This section briefly discusses the discourse and stances of Liang Qichao, Chen Duxiu, the Empress Dowager Cixi, Sun Yat-sen and Zhang Binglin to highlight the various ethnic, cultural, civic, and territorial contents and status quo-reinforcing and revisionist orientations of these multi-faceted nationalisms in the late Qing era.
Chu and Zarrow offer a relatively mainstream characterization of late Qing intellectuals as belonging to one of two broad camps: reformers who aimed to modernize China’s government, bureaucracy, and military while preserving the Qing government or gradually transitioning to a more democratic system, and revolutionaries who called for the immediate overthrow of the existing system. These authors describe how differing stances as to the status of ethnic Manchus in relation to the Chinese nation mark a central difference between the nationalism of reformers and revolutionaries in this era:
Reformers like Liang argued, using a more civic definition of ‘national,’ that the Manchu were certainly members of the Chinese political community. Revolutionaries argued, using a more ethnic definition, that the Manchu were certainly not legitimate members of the political community but usurpers and the enemies of the true Chinese (the ‘Han’).185 The ensuing discussion will reveal a degree of truth in this broad characterization of the more civic-territorial nation of the reformers in comparison to the more ethno-cultural nation of the
184 James Leibold, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and its Indigenes Became Chinese (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 51-109.
185 Chu and Zarrow, “Modern Chinese Nationalism,” 7.
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revolutionaries. However, a careful examination of specific nationalist discourse representative of this era reveals a more complex mixture of civic, territorial, ethnic, and cultural dimensions of the nationalism in both camps. In fact, as the following analysis demonstrates, viewed through the lens of nationalism, it is in some cases rather problematic to characterize individual figures of the era as either “reformist” or “revolutionary” at all.
Liang Qichao’s thought seems to straddle between the ethno-cultural and civic-territorial nation. His nationalism, however, is clearly polity-based (nationalizing). Schell and Delury note that while in exile in Japan, Liang realized that the source of China’s weakness was its lack of
“national consciousness” (國家思想): the inability of the Chinese people “to imagine themselves as active participants, as guomin (國民), ‘citizens’ of a modern nation-state.”186 (Chu and
Zarrow argue that Liang’s guomin should rather be translated “national.”187) According to Chu and Zarrow, “Liang argued that China needed to end the subordination of ‘subjects’ to the
emperor and create ‘nationals’ who would feel that they were members of the state. Monarchical states were weak, while states composed of nationals were strong.”188 As he wrote in 1899,
“‘Citizens’ is the term for the people who collectively own the nation. A nation is the accumulation of its people’s achievements, without whom there would be no nation.”189
Turning subjects into citizens and thus co-equal nationals who would be active
participants in their nation-state, Liang’s version of the nation has distinct civic qualities. His nationalism was therefore aimed at the transformation of China as both a people and a state.
“Liang warned that unless China reinvented itself as a modern nation soon, it faced the real prospect of political extinction, of becoming a wangguo (亡國), ‘lost country.’”190 According to Zhao, Liang regarded the Han-dominant China-proper as “but a region” within the multi-ethnic and multi-regional Chinese nation-state that should include Manchuria, Mongolia, Turkestan and Tibet.191 In a sense, his nationalism elevated territoriality above ethnicity.192 On the whole,
186 Schell and Delury, Wealth and Power, 101.
187 Chu and Zarrow, “Modern Chinese Nationalism,” 5, 22.
188 Ibid., 5.
189 This is the translation provided in Michael, Gow, “The Core Socialist Values of the Chinese Dream: Towards a Chinese Integral State,” Critical Asian Studies 49, no. 1 (2017): 92. “Nation” here could also be translated as state or country, as the original suggests: 國民者, 以國為人民公產之稱也. 國者積民而成, 捨民之外, 則無有國.
190 Schell and Delury, Wealth and Power, 101.
191 Zhao, A Nation by Construction, 66.
192 Ibid.
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Liang called for “a fundament change in China’s identity, a change in the core of what it meant to be Chinese, in order to save its existence as a people and a state:”193 A “nationalizing”
nationalism, in so many words.
Chu and Zarrow argue that the aftermath of the failed 1898 reform movement witnessed the rise of “a version of nationalism firmly rooted in the Romantic tradition,” combining “a notion of ethnic purity around the Han people (hanzu) with two more notions imported from the West: revolution and democracy.”194 As part of this transition, Liang’s post-1898 nationalism edged closer to J. G. Herder’s romantic nationalism, including the concept of a unique national spirit and an immutable community.195 His advocacy of a nationalization of Chinese
historiography embodied the ethno-cultural dimensions of the nation in addition to his well-documented civic-territorial stances. Liang declared that China needed a new historiography,
“one that would take the minzu (民族 race/nation) and its guomin (國民 citizens) as the subjects of historical development rather than the genealogies of individual families contained in the biographies (liezhuan 列傳) and chronicles (nianbiao 年表) of the twenty-four standard
histories.”196 In doing so, Liang and his contemporaries chose to begin this “new type of history with the Yellow Emperor (huangdi 黃帝), the ‘first ancestor’ (chuzu 初祖) of the Chinese people.”197 In this respect, Liang’s polity-based (nationalizing) nationalism represented an attempt to create an ethno-cultural as well as civic nation out of the Qing empire. But the civic-territorial and ethno-cultural dimensions of Liang’s nationalism were compatible under his advocation of “state nationalism” (國家主義), articulated through the logic that the Chinese nation, under threat from imperialist outsiders, needed a strong state.198 Seeking to reform the state rather than abolish the Qing dynasty, Liang proposed “equality of the Manchu and Han people under a constitutional monarchy.”199
193 Schell and Delury, Wealth and Power, 101.
194 Chu and Zarrow, “Modern Chinese Nationalism,” 5.
195 Ibid., 8.
196 James Leibold, “Filling in the Nation: The Spatial Trajectory of Prehistoric Archaeology in Twentieth-Century China,” in Transforming History: The Making of a Modern Academic Discipline in Twentieth Century China, ed.
Brian Moloughney and Peter Zarrow (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press), 335.
197 Ibid.
198 Zhao, A Nation by Construction, 66.
199 Ibid.
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Liang’s late-Qing based nationalism, of course, differed sharply from the polity-seeking nationalism of Sun Yat-sen and Zhang Binglin. These anti-Qing revolutionaries utilized the doctrine of nationalism in defense of the Han ethno-nation. Sun, in fact, viewed “foreign imperialist powers as lesser evils compared to the Manchu government,” who, as the “‘running dog’ of the white imperialists,” were the more immediate and detestable enemy of the Han ethno-nation.200 Regenerating China (振興中華) required first and foremost a return of China’s sovereignty to the Han majority. Zhang espoused a “national essence” (國粹) view of the
national question, rhetorically asking, “is the Chinese nation (民族) really an empty frame which we can fill with foreigners?”201 His Han-centric historiography subsumed China’s complex ethno-political history into a story of two homogenous groups: the Hanzu (漢族), those that descend from the Yellow Emperor, and the non-Han barbarians.202
Territorial themes are clear in statements from Chen Duxiu, whose admiration of Woodrow Wilson’s anti-colonialist stance in “Fourteen Points” led him to call the American president “the number one good man in the world.”203 The constitution of the Anhui Patriotic Society, written in part by Chen, declared an intent to “unite the masses into an organization that will develop patriotic thought and stir up a martial spirit, so people will grab their weapons to protect their country and restore our basic national sovereignty.”204 At the society’s founding in 1903, Chen delivered a speech decrying impending concessions of Manchurian land to Russia.
Chen said, “If our government allows this treaty, every nation will moisten its lips and help itself to a part of China,” to the end that the country would lack even “one foot or inch of clean land.”205 Chen desperately urged his fellow Chinese to “take the responsibility of struggling to the death to protect our land.”206 Yet he notably rejected narrow ethnic markers of
200 Zhao, A Nation by Construction, 64.
201 Quoted in Timothy Cheek, “Reform: making China fit the world (1895-1915),” in The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2015), 50.
202 Chow et al., Constructing Nationhood, 2.
203 Schell and Delury, Wealth and Power, 162.
204 Ibid., 148.
205 Ibid.
206 Ibid.
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ness. Chen’s refusal to join Sun’s Tongmenghui (同盟會) apparently resulted from his distaste for “the narrowly racist base of Sun Yat-sen’s views.”207
Japan’s shocking victory over Russia in 1905 convinced Qing reformists of the urgency of learning from Japan’s successful political model. Weatherley notes that the Empress Dowager referred especially to Japan when she wrote in 1906, “the wealth and strength of other countries are due to their practice of constitutional government, in which public questions are determined by consultation with the people. The ruler and his people are as one body animated by one spirit.”208 In essence, Cixi had joined Yan Fu (嚴復), Kang Youwei (康有為), and Liang Qichao in noting that China’s weakness stemmed in part from the lack of participatory politics.
Weatherley explains the logic of these reformers who advocated a transition to constitutional monarchy. They believed that if Qing subjects were able to vote, stand for election, and exercise
“basic civil freedoms of speech and association,” then they would have greater support for the government which not only granted them such rights and freedoms, but also encouraged their active participation in the affairs of the state.
This loyalty could then be channeled by the Qing regime into its broader nation saving objectives so that China would not perish in the international struggle amongst nations.
Crucially, although it was now recognized that individuals as well as nations had rights, the long-term goal remained exactly the same – to make China strong.209
In the final years before the Qing’s collapse in late 1911, the deficiency of a civic “spirit,”
the lack of consultation between the rulers and the ruled, and the nonexistence of democratic rights and freedoms was thus recognized as a principle source of China’s weakness. The Qing government took action with the drafting of the 1908 Principles of the Constitution, then China’s first ever constitutional document, which stipulated a nine year transition into constitutional monarchy.210 The document included aspects of local self-government recommended by Kang Youwei, specified both “negative” and “positive” rights of citizens, “implied the existence of a
207 David Scott, “China’s Further Humiliations,” in China and the International System, 1840-1949: Power, Presence, and Perceptions in a Century of Humiliation (Albany: State University of New York Press: 2008), 170.
208 Maribeth Elliot Cameron, The Reform Movement in China (New York: Octagon Books, 1963), 103. Quoted in Robert Weatherley, Making China Strong: The Role of Nationalism in Chinese Thinking on Democracy and Human Rights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 53.
209 Weatherley, Making China Strong, 3.
210 Ibid., 53.
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right to vote and stand for election,” and laid out particular civic duties expected of citizens.211 Weatherly notes, “Although the Principles was the first document in China to specify that
individuals had rights,” it did so with an explicitly “nation-first approach,” demonstrating a clear link to China’s nation-building project. “With the nation’s interests at the very fore, the
objective of bequeathing rights to the people was to facilitate the rise of a strong and unified
‘China.’” The Principles thus aimed to create a civic/political loyalty to the nation, binding
“ruler and ruled closer together in a unified pact,” rather than to create free citizens as an end in themselves.212
Thus nationalist discourses of late Qing reformists embody territorial, civic, ethnic, and cultural elements of the nation and a clear push for polity-based (nationalizing) nationalism.
Descriptions of late-Qing nationalism as merely a pursuit of wealth and power (富強), or,
“prosperity and strength,”213 while not incorrect, miss the complexity of ideas invoked to substantiate the nation, as well as the central divide between polity-based and polity-seeking nationalism of the period. By carefully differentiating between these strands within the period’s very heterogeneous nationalisms, we understand that the period’s relationship to Chinese
nationalism cannot be reduced to a single movement or group. Sun Yat-sen’s famous declaration,
“If we do not earnestly promote nationalism and weld together our four hundred million into a strong nation, we face a tragedy – the loss of our country and the destruction of our race,” is thus but one of many conceptualizations of Qing China’s “deficient condition” and the related
“remedial political action” which it required. 214 Indeed, Wei and Liu describe a complexity and diversity not only of nationalist rhetoric, but even of new terminology characterizing the period:
“In the early twentieth century, Chinese nationalism took a variety of forms and reflected different concerns… The concept of the new national, introduced through Japan, could be understood in terms of citizenship, that is, as participating in (future) civic and
democratic institutions as a member of the national community. The new national was also thought to have emotional ties, often based on anti-imperialist resentment, to the national community. This national community, in turn, was variously conceived in ethnic
democratic institutions as a member of the national community. The new national was also thought to have emotional ties, often based on anti-imperialist resentment, to the national community. This national community, in turn, was variously conceived in ethnic