Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China

Yingjie Guo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134352272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia cinese

In the vast majority of literature on 'Chinese nationalism' the distinction between nation and state is rarely made, consequently nationalism usually appears as loyalty to the state rather than identification with the nation. Yet, since 1989, both the official configuration of the nation and the state's monopolized right to name the nation have come under rigorous challenge. Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China relocates the discussion of nationalism to within a more contemporary framework which explores the disjunction between the people and the state and the relationship of each to the nation.
With its challenging exploration of one of the most neglected aspects of identity in China, this book should appeal to Asianists, China watchers and all of those with an interest in cultural and sociological phenomena in East Asia.

1

RETHINKING NATION AND NATIONALISM

Concepts, positions and approaches

Discussions of ‘Chinese nationalism’, like analyses of the nation and nationalism in general, have too often been muddled by terminological confusion and lack of clarity. On the one hand, ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ mean so many things that a sensible discussion is hardly possible when discussants talk about different things in the belief that they are talking about the same thing. On the other hand, value judgements on nationalism, let alone impassioned positions, can dictate people’s response to it, while even methodological choices of a study can influence its outcome. For these reasons alone, it is advisable to clarify the sense in which the key terms are employed.

This chapter considers the writings on China and not the literature on nationalism in general, or the political philosophy at large. And rather than presenting a review of the literature on ‘Chinese nationalism’, it attempts to clear away some of the terminological confusion in the literature, clarify what ‘nation’, ‘national identity’ and ‘nationalism’ mean in this book, and explain the perspective from which these subjects are approached. The chapter is divided into six sections. It starts by highlighting the distinction between ‘nation’ on the one hand, and ‘state’ and ‘nation-state’ on the other. This is followed by a discussion of the objective and subjective aspects of ‘nation’, which draws particular attention to the inadequacy of objective definitions and their proclivity to lend themselves to statist manipulations. Following on from the distinction between ‘nation’ and ‘state’, the chapter proceeds to stress nationalism as loyalty to the nation rather than identification with the state. Finally, it looks at the main content and characteristics of cultural nationalism and state nationalism, and offers an explanation of the causality of these nationalisms, which is indispensable to the understanding of both.

Nation, state and nation-state

‘Nation’ as used in this book refers to ‘a named human population sharing a historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members’.¹ As such, it is set apart from ‘state’: the set of political institutions that such populations possess – ‘that territorial juridical unit’² – and ‘nation-state’: ‘a territorial-political unit (the state) whose borders coincide or nearly coincide with the territorial distribution of a national group’.³

A useful working definition of national identity can be derived from Erikson’s conception of identity,⁴ which combines a persistent sameness within itself (or identity) and a relationship (identification). And ‘national identity’ based on this concept of identity can be understood as the self-sameness of the national community and the identification of individual members with that community. In other words, national identity refers to a persistent but constantly revised set of beliefs, values, practices, characteristics and symbolic representations shared by the members of a nation, and the collective expression of an individual sense of belonging to such a national community.

The distinction between ‘nation’ and ‘state’ is worth reiterating given the fact that conceptions and misconceptions of national identity and nationalism have much to do with the way in which the latter is understood or misunderstood in the first place. A common error is to take ‘nation’ as a synonym for ‘state’. When some talk about the ‘newly emerging nations of Eastern Europe’, for example, they probably mean the newly emerging states there. Other examples include ‘transnational’, ‘multinational’, ‘nationalization’, the League of Nations and the United Nations. Another obvious misnomer is ‘international relations’, which actually mean interstate relations. Even a sophisticated theorist like Michael Billig explains the ‘nation’ as the ‘nation-as-people’ and the ‘nation-as-state’.⁵ A less common error is the confusion of ‘nation’ and ‘nation-state’. One example is Giddens’ definition of the nation, which Paul James uses as a definition of ‘nation-state’.⁶

The failure to clearly differentiate nation and state or nation-state has obviously hampered discussions of national identity. As an example, Whiting argues that ‘national identity emerges in how the policy-making elite perceives and articulates the image of China in its relationship to the world’.⁷ Dittmer, as another example, defines national identity as ‘the relationship between nation and state that obtains when the people of that nation identify with the state’.⁸ In both these cases, what is regarded as national identity looks more like state identity, a state-defined identity, or a state-manipulated image, which serves government purposes in international politics. In Dittmer’s case, this becomes all the more apparent when he further explains that the substantive content of national identity is the state, and that national identity is the record of the zig-zag course of the ship of the state through international waters. It is also obvious that Dittmer treats state and nation as one and the same when he describes China’s national identity as a socialist country and a Third World country, and that of the Soviet Union as a superpower donor in the past and a Third World supplicant later.

All in all, the state predominates in what is presumably national identity, whereas the nation becomes subsumed under the nation-state. It is as though it does not matter in this understanding of ‘national identity’ whether or not the beliefs, memories, values, practices and characteristics shared by the members of the nation find expression in the state’s articulation and whether or not the members of the nation actually identify with it. If a relationship of identification exists, state identity and national identity are more or less congruent; if not, it is all the more problematic to treat state identity as national identity. In either case, one must look at state identity and national identity separately to see if a relationship of identification obtains or not. That relationship simply cannot be taken for granted. Dittmer, however, refuses to take this approach, insisting that national identity is neither the identity of ‘nation’ nor of ‘state’; if it is, it will ‘force the differentiation between state identity and national identity’.⁹ This is a highly problematic proposition for two reasons. First, if ‘nation’ and ‘state’ are separate concepts and entities, it is only logical to assume that each has a sameness within itself, or its own identity. Second, there is absolutely no reason why a differentiation between state identity and national identity should not be made if there is one.

To be sure, there is generally a relationship or overlap between ‘nation’ and ‘state’, but there have been ‘nationless states’ like China¹⁰ and ‘stateless nations’ like the Palestinians. In addition, the relationship between nations and states is certainly not always one of identification either in an objective or subjective sense. Objectively, the nation does not always fall into the territorial boundaries or the decision-making scope of the state; subjectively, the members of a nation do not always identify with the state as their own. If national identity is indeed the relationship that obtains when the people of the nation identify with the state, are there national identities to talk about in the case of ‘stateless nations’ and nations with illegitimately imposed state formations with which those nations refuse to identify? In other words, do these peoples have national identities? And are there non-state-directed nationalisms? There may or may not be, but the point here is that Dittmer’s definition does not seem to allow for affirmative answers to these questions.

The reason for Dittmer’s refusal to ‘force the differentiation’ can probably be found in his particular use of ‘national identity’. Like Whiting, he defines national identity as a concept to be applied to international relations, where the primary actor is the state rather the nation. Therefore, their definitions can be of little help to the inquiry into the domestic politics of national identity in China (or anywhere else for that matter), as what is in dispute there is precisely the state-defined identity, or the official image of China and the Chinese.

Objective and subjective aspects of the nation

The objective/subjective polemic has already been touched upon. It deserves more attention not merely because it has all too often driven discussions of the nation into an impasse, but also because, more significantly, it is particularly pertinent to the Chinese conception of national identity and the Chinese cultural nationalists’ challenge to state nationalism. What remains a challenge to theorists of the nation is how to reconcile subjective elements such as will, memory, beliefs and claims, and more objective ones like territory, language and religion.

At the subjective extreme stands Seton-Watson’s tautology that ‘All that I can find to say is that a nation exists when a significant number of people in the community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one’.¹¹ At the objective extreme is the view that one can objectively identify nations without taking account of self-awareness. A case in point is Anthony Giddens’ objective definition of ‘nation’ as a ‘collectivity existing within a clearly demarcated territory, which is subject to a unitary [and uniform] administration, reflexively monitored both by the internal state apparatus and those of other states’.¹²

A more balanced picture takes sufficient account of national ideas while recognizing that their diffusion can only occur in specific social settings. As Hroch observes, ‘Nation-building was never a mere project of ambitious or narcissistic intellectuals … Intellectuals can invent national community only if certain objective preconditions for the formation of a nation already exist’.¹³ This is precisely the point that Anderson makes in his observation that the nation can only be theorized ‘by aligning it not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which – as well as against which – it came into being’.¹⁴

Objective theorists are right to stress that nations cannot just be ‘invented’ or ‘imagined’, that nations are but aggregates of people distinguished by a common homeland, language, religion and a set of common characteristics. The question, however, is whether or not such aggregates of people can automatically become nations without mutual recognition, the common will to belong together, and the belief that they share the relevant characteristics. Besides, each of the objective variables is highly problematic. For one thing, they cannot always be defined objectively; for another, what often matters to national identity is not so much the independent existence of such objective variables as the significance with which they are endowed by large numbers of the community.¹⁵

Theorists do not even see eye to eye, for example, as to whether a common language is an essential criterion for defining a national community. According to Fichte, ‘Wherever a separate language is found, there a separate nation exists, which has the right to take independent charge of its own affairs and to govern itself’.¹⁶ As Weber saw it, ‘a common language does not seem absolutely necessary to a “nation”’.¹⁷ For Kedourie, languages cannot be defined objectively.¹⁸ This suggests that the ‘objectivity’ of such markers or differentiae as language is not unquestionable or indisputable. As Smith has pointed out, it is only when they are ‘endowed with diacritical significance’, that they come to be seen to be objective, and that is when they really matter.¹⁹ To restate the point, even objective criteria are usually subjectified before they are considered relevant.

Objective definitions often fail to recognize that ‘nations are not things that exist in the world independently of the belief people have about them’, as Miller notes,²⁰ or that nations are aggregates of people who will to belong to them.²¹ According to Anderson, nations are ‘imagined communities’, as ‘all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined’.²² From this more subjective point of view, it is misleading to argue that the population existing within the territorial boundaries of a state automatically becomes a nation; it is also misleading to assume that a national consciousness naturally emerges once a unit of population is territorially demarcated. Since the nation is ‘a self-defined rather than an other-defined grouping’,²³ one must look at it from the inside and see whether members identify with each other and with the national community by participating in the relevant practices and sharing the relevant beliefs, values, and so on.

This is particularly the case with the Chinese conception of national identity, which gives precedence to subjectivity over objectivity. Objective markers such as common territory, language, economic life and customs, while not insignificant in this conception, are less important than subjectivity. A person who meets all the objective criteria, for example, might still not be regarded as really Chinese if he/she fails to meet the subjective criteria. In the past, as will be discussed in Chapter 4, the ultimate touchstone for a Chinese was xin, a combination of consciousness, a way of thinking, an attitude of mind, a sense of morality, an aesthetic sense and many other things. E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Rethinking nation and nationalism: concepts, positions and approaches
• 2 Renationalizing the state: class, nation and the Party-state
• 3 Rewriting national history: the ‘Zeng Guofan phenomenon’
• 4 Reconstructing a Confucian nation: the Confucian revival
• 5 Repossessing the mother tongue: Chinese characters, traditional forms and cultural linguistics
• 6 Reclaiming the ‘Othered’ China: nationalist appropriations of postcolonialism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index