Nationalism,Civilization and Transnational Relations: the discourse of Greater China

This essay examines the interplay between nationalism and foreign policy in China—but with a twist. It seeks to loosen up analytical categories to expand from cultural nationalism to see how civilization constructs identity in national and transnational ways. It examines the limits of Chinese trans/nationalism according to the main Chinese expression of inside/outside—‘civilization/barbarism’—as it constructs Chinese nationalism and Greater China. The purpose is to both critically examine Chinese nationalism and to trace what our focus on the nation-state obscures: namely, transnational politics. Rather than recounting one master narrative of Chinese nationalism, the essay argues that civilization and barbarian define Greater China according to four narratives—nativism, conquest, conversion and diaspora. Hence, the essay does not merely deconstruct the notion of Greater China and Chinese nationalism, but shows how these four grids of meaning can help us to understand identity politics and foreign policy debates in China. Nationalism thus turns from being the Answer about the true intent of China, to being a series of questions which define different terrains of political inquiry.     

New Migrants and the Revival of Overseas Chinese Nationalism

Emerging at the turn of the twentieth century, overseas Chinese nationalism played an important part in the evolution of the overseas Chinese community and modern history of China. It is generally held that overseas Chinese nationalism had died out and had become ‘a historical phenomenon’ by the 1950s, when the China-centered allegiance of the overseas Chinese was replaced by a local-oriented identity. The fundamental change of the Chinese diasporic communities over the last two decades, however, has put this conventional wisdom into contestation. This essay is concerned with the emergence of the xin yinmin (new migrants) and corresponding manifestations of a reviving overseas Chinese nationalism since 1980. It is divided into two main parts. The first is empirical, examining the rise and characteristics of the new migrants, who are composed of four main types: students-turned-migrants, emigrating professionals, chain migrants, and illegal immigrants. The second section is conceptual and comparative, looking at the manifestations and limitations of the reviving overseas Chinese nationalism and placing them in a historical perspective. It also considers the embedded tensions between nationalism and transnationalism and the strategies employed by both the Chinese state and new migrants in tackling these tensions. I argue that there are complex reasons behind the re-emergence of overseas Chinese nationalism. From overseas, it is a by-product of the formation of sizeable new migrant communities, particularly in the West. As the first-generation immigrants who have extensive links with the homeland, they remain culturally, and often, politically, attached to China (as a nation-state and/or site of transnational imaginary) and are concerned greatly with Chinese matters. Through such intermediaries as Chinese-language newspapers, websites and TV programs, they form a borderless and imagined greater China that is bound by both the ideas of sovereignty and transnational culture. From the mainland, a series of policies relating to the Chinese overseas facilitate the connections between China and its population overseas, thus providing a potential ground for the revival of overseas Chinese nationalism. I argue that the key agendas of this reviving overseas Chinese nationalism are China's economic prosperity, cultural regeneration, and national unification. This nationalism, furthermore, is characterized by its reactive nature and embedded contradictions with the simultaneous process of transnationalism, which in turn reduces the centrality and intensity of nationalism. As a result, it is unlikely to constitute a unified ideology or a movement with centralized leadership such as that in the 1930s.     

Reclassifying Chinese Nationalism: the geopolitik turn

This article assesses the rise of China by exploring a number of recent popular Chinese political texts to go beyond explanations that take the international system as the level of analysis. It proposes that a merging of nationalism and geopolitical thinking is taking place, resulting in the emergence of a new form of nationalism that can be categorised as ‘geopolitik nationalism’ because it deploys many of the themes evident in the political thought of Germany and Japan before the two world wars. By considering the impact of such ideas, it is possible to gain new insights into recent assertive actions in Chinese foreign policy.     

The Localism of Local Leadership Cadres in Reform Shanxi

The changing face of China's politics is to be found as much in the cadre force as in the categories of ‘new rich’ engendered by economic reform and rapid development. A series of interviews undertaken in 1996 and 1997 with local cadres—at sub-provincial, county and section levels—in Shanxi Province provides evidence as to the extent of change and continuity in their social backgrounds, careers and political attitudes. Analysis focuses in particular on five common hypotheses about the cadre force in reform China: that they are conservative upholders of the status quo; a priviligentsya; imposed ‘from without’; the source of a ‘new class'; and one which has come in the reform era to be dominated by ‘technocrats' (rather than former revolutionaries). Though local political and administrative leadership in the 1990s appears to have become more localist, and even in some senses parochial, such analysis must be kept in perspective. The local cadre force is considerably less local, parochial and ‘privileged’ than their counterpart local business elites; and the agency of the provincial organisation of the Chinese Communist Party is still very much in evidence.     

History,Tradition and the China Dream: socialist modernization in the World of Great Harmony

How will China influence world politics in the twenty-first century? Many people answer this question by looking to Chinese history, and particularly to traditional models of Chinese world order. This essay seeks to complicate this question by asking which history, and which tradition? While it is common to look at China's pre-modern history as ‘tradition’, this essay argues that we also need to appreciate how ‘socialism’ is treated as a tradition alongside Chinese civilization. It does this by examining how China's public intellectuals appeal to two seemingly odd sources: Mao Zedong's 1956 speech ‘Strengthen Party Unity and Carry Forward Party Traditions’, and the ‘Great Harmony’ passage from the two millennia-old Book of Rites. It will argue that these two passages are employed as a way of salvaging socialism; the ideological transition thus is not from communism to nationalism, but to a curious combination of socialism and Chinese civilization. This new socialist/civilization dynamic integrates equality and hierarchy into a new form of statism, which is involved in a global competition of social models. Or to put it another way, what these two passages have in common is not necessarily a positive ideal, but a common enemy: liberalism, the West and the United States.     

Popular Nationalism and China’s Japan Policy: the Diaoyu Islands protests, 2012–2013

2012–2013 witnessed a renewed flare-up of anti-Japanese sentiment in Mainland China, followed by a toughening of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) Diaoyu Islands policy. Did popular nationalism influence the PRC’s military escalation? A lack of transparency in elite Chinese decision-making puts a definitive answer to this question beyond our reach. However, this article utilizes qualitative and quantitative analyses of anti-Japanese discourse and deeds in both cyberspace and on the streets of urban China to argue that the circumstantial evidence is compelling: nationalist opinion is a powerful driver of China’s Japan policy. The demands of nationalist legitimation appear to pressure the elite to respond to popular nationalism. Should one or more Chinese die at the hands of the Japanese navy or air force, therefore, the popular pressure for escalation and war will likely be more than China’s leaders can manage.     

Identity,Sovereignty, and Economic Penetration: Beijing's responses to offshore Chinese democracies

Investigating how the PRC responds to democratization in Taiwan and Hong Kong, this paper argues that the Chinese Communist leadership has mainly developed three strategies in managing the complicated crises, including Beijing's own legitimacy crisis and the integration crisis of the Chinese nation, caused by the rise of offshore Chinese democracies. These strategies are: identity politics, sovereignty politics, and economic penetration. With ‘identity politics’, Beijing identifies ‘identification with the Communist leadership’ as the sole Chinese national identification, and utilizes the nationalistic passions of mainland and even overseas Chinese people against democrats in Taiwan and Hong Kong, by labeling the latter as ‘separatists’ or ‘national traitors’. Further, Beijing defines ‘sovereignty’ in a way in which the ‘central’ government monopolizes all possessions of the nation, and excludes ‘people's sovereignty’ from the politics of national reunification or the ‘one country, two systems’ model actualization. While appealing to both ‘soft power’ based in ‘patriotic nationalism’ and ‘hard power’ embedded in national sovereignty, however, the Chinese regime also mobilizes business resources and opportunities provided by China's growing economic power and China's dominance in Greater Chian economic integration for its political purposes of curbing offshore Chinese democracies.     

China's New Assertiveness in the South China Sea

China's new assertiveness in the South China Sea has arisen from the growth of its military power, its ‘triumphalism’ in the wake of the Western financial crisis and its heightened nationalism. The other littoral states of the South China Sea have been troubled by the opacity of Chinese politics and of the process of military decision-making amid a proliferation of apparently separately controlled maritime forces. The more active role being played by the United States in the region, in part as a response to Chinese activism, has troubled Beijing. While most of the ASEAN states have welcomed America as a hedge against growing Chinese power, their economies have become increasingly dependent upon China and they don't want to be a party to any potential conflict between these two giants. The problem is that there is no apparent resolution to what the Chinese call, in effect, these ‘indisputable disputes’.     

Temporal,Spatial and Functional Governance of China's Reform Stability

Governance is a hot topic in China, as well as among political scientists. Ways of thinking about it can be improved. This essay offers a ‘neo-functionalist’ method to test for successful or unsuccessful governance of reform stability in China. It takes account of the need for participation in effective governance. Steering a state (or any part of a state) requires attention to multiple sizes of polity—especially several medial sizes in a country as large as China. Governance has varied over time during the ‘reform’ era, when anti-reform conservatives have remained important in many nested political networks. The paper shows variation of governance over time, over sizes of polity and over four sample governance functions: managing the economy, maintaining orderly stability, linking ‘social’ parts of the polity to the government, and choosing cadres. It shows how these categories exhaust a logical field that is at least implicit in any analysis of governance roles, and it suggests the value of a ‘circulation of elites’ paradigm when thinking about governance success or failure.     

Bashing ‘the Chinese’: contextualizing Zambia's Collum Coal Mine shooting

The 2010 shooting of 13 miners at Zambia's small, privately-owned ‘Chinese’ Collum Coal Mine (CCM) has been represented by Western and Zambian politicians and media as exemplifying the ‘neo-colonial’ and ‘amoral’ practices of ‘China’ and ‘the Chinese’ in Africa. CCM has been used to provide a sharp contrast to the supposed ways of the Western firms that own most of Zambia's mines. Embedded in racial hierarchy and notions of strategic competition between the West and China, the discourse of the CCM shootings further shapes conceptions of global China and Chinese overseas. While examining all the oppressive conditions that have given rise to protest at the mine, we contextualize the shooting and subsequent conflicts. In analyzing CCM's marginal and troubled development, we discuss aspects of the 2010 shooting incident known to miners and union leaders, but ignored by politicians and media. We look at the shooting's political fallout, focus also on the epilogue that was the 2012 CCM riot—in which one Chinese person was murdered and several others seriously injured—and trace the sometimes violent discontent manifested at other foreign-owned mines in Zambia since their privatization in the late 1990s. The empirical data for this detailed study derive from hundreds of documentary sources and interviews with union leaders, workers, officials and others in Zambia from 2011 to 2013.     

Nationalism,Internationalism and Chinese Foreign Policy

This article examines the role of nationalism in shaping Chinese foreign policy in the history of contemporary China over the last 100 years. Nationalism is used here as an analytical term, rather than in the usual popular pejorative sense. By tracing the various expressions of contemporary Chinese nationalism, this article argues that nationalism is one of the key enduring driving forces which have shaped Chinese foreign policy over the period; as China increasingly integrates herself into this globalized and interdependent world and Chinese confidence grows, the current expression of Chinese nationalism is taking a more positive form, which incorporates an expanding component of internationalism.     

Interpreting Nationalist Texts: a post-structuralist approach

This article critically appraises the narrative of nationalist resurgence in China in the 1990s that structures much of the secondary literature on Chinese politics since Tiananmen. Adopting a post-structuralist method, Chinese texts from the 1990s are treated as discursive rather than as expressions of a common consensus, emergent ideology or political movement. This makes it possible to bring out the disparate points of view concerning the desirability of nationalism for China and to understand the strategies that are being deployed by authors within the context of everyday Chinese politics. It also reveals the significance of the absence from both the primary and the secondary texts of any mention of the advocacy of nationalism by the political leadership. When this hidden discourse is taken into account, it becomes evident that many of the texts that have been taken as expressions of a nationalist revival are either not particularly interested in nationalism or are highly sceptical concerning its possibilities for solving the problems faced by the Chinese state. Particularly significant is the way in which many of the texts locate themselves in relation to the official discourse on nationalism by appropriating its themes in order to promote and legitimate a wide range of other discourses with which it can be bound up, ranging from democracy to authoritarianism.     

Touching stones to cross the river: Evolving telecommunication policy priorities in contemporary China

This article, drawing on fieldwork in China, charts the ascendancy of Lian Tong (China Unicom), the first competitor to the incumbent Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. Commencing with an historical overview of Chinese telecommunications, it suggests that Lian Tong's formation has been contingent upon support from key constituencies within China's political elite. The company's emergence mirrors technological trends and user pressure evident globally. It embodies the drive towards market liberalisation now evident within the Peoples’ Republic. While the Chinese policy community is sensible of the need to make haste slowly toward the goal of telecommunications competition — ‘touching stones to cross the river’ in the contemporary aphorism — the success of this ‘policy experiment’ depends both on the subtleties of Chinese politics and the construction of bold new regulatory frameworks. Lian Tong's genesis is symbolic of developments in the telecommunications sector, and maybe also more generally in the Chinese economy.     

Nationalism,Ideology and China's ‘Fourth Generation’ Leadership

This paper examines the extent to which China's ‘Fourth generation’ leadership might be inclined to place a greater emphasis on nationalist rhetoric both in China's international relations and in domestic policy. It explores two different views of nationalism, namely state-centred and popular. With the decline in the public impact of official ideology, the Party–state has given tacit recognition to nationalism as one potential source of regime legitimisation. However, this article argues that by placing the Party at the centre of the official discourse the state-centred view of nationalism restricts the extent to which the Party–state can mobilise nationalist symbolism in support of its leadership and makes the Party vulnerable to criticism from more popular conceptions of nationalism. The priority given to developing the economy means China's leaders must downplay popular criticism which can focus on the negative consequences of China's growing interaction with the wider world. Under China's ‘Fourth generation’ leadership this tension may deepen. China's new leadership are unlikely to resort to ‘wrapping themselves in the flag’ as some commentators have suggested.     

Introduction: The Basic Law,Governance and Electoral Politics in China's Hong Kong and Macao since 1997

1 July 2007 marks the tenth anniversary of Hong Kong's retrocession to Chinese sovereignty to become a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the PRC. The HKSAR has functioned under the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ framework as enshrined in the Basic Law, its mini-constitution. Upon the resumption of Chinese jurisdiction over Macao on 20 December 1999, a similar ‘One Country, Two Systems’ formula also came into effect for the new MSAR under its Basic Law. The ‘One Country, Two Systems’ formula that guarantees a high degree of autonomy in both Hong Kong and Macao is also a cornerstone of the PRC's strategy toward peaceful reunification with Taiwan. To provide a more balanced and informed understanding of these two Chinese SARs in actualizing the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ model, this special section of four articles adopts a bi-focal approach. On the one hand, it presents in a joint article the views of two leading mainland Chinese legal scholars (Professors Geping Rao and Zhenmin Wang, both National People's Congress Hong Kong Basic Law Committee members) on some vital dimensions of the Basic Law. On the other hand, it offers three articles with a more locally anchored perspective—a comparative analysis (by Professor Sonny Lo) of the contrasting HKSAR and MSAR experiences, and two case studies (by Professors Bruce Kwong and Eilo Yu) that highlight key features of patron–client linkages and informal politics dynamics in HKSAR and MSAR elections and politics.     

Why China has been successful in attracting foreign direct investment: A transaction cost approach

An important factor that has contributed significantly to China's economic growth over the past two decades has been the dramatic increase of foreign direct investment in China. Based on the observation that overseas Chinese have been the dominant supplier of foreign direct investment in China, this paper employs the transaction cost approach to provide an explanation as to why China has been successful in attracting foreign direct investment. It first describes and analyzes the economic ‘institution’ in China. Then it shows that overseas Chinese have a competitive advantage in investing in China because they have the experience and knowledge of operating their business in an ‘institution’ that is similar to the ‘institution’ in China. Finally, the paper argues that some policies in China, such as the flexible contractual forms (particularly joint ventures) and the establishment of special economic zones, further reduce the transaction cost of doing business in China and contributed to attracting foreign direct investment.     

Classes without Class Consciousness and Class Consciousness without Classes: the meaning of class in the People's Republic of China

The meaning of class, like many other things, is conferred by historically specific chains of signification or discourses that constitute the identity and significance of class as a social reality. Therefore, much of the conceptual purchase and explanatory power of class will be lost when the concept is taken out of the theories in which it is embedded. This is exactly the case with the use of class in the People's Republic of China in the last two or three decades, when the Marxist approach to class has been rejected and ‘forgotten’ by the social analysts and the Chinese Communist Party—even though the latter continues to pay lip service to Marxism—in favour of alternative concepts, methodologies and theories that sidestep class relations. The point of departure here is not so much sociological as political-ideological.     

Disrespect and Distrust: the external origins of contemporary Chinese nationalism

With the rise of China, the importance of understanding Chinese nationalism increases. Assessing Chinese nationalism, many people claim that it has grown stronger and more intense in recent years. Some believe that this is the case because the Chinese Government deliberately promotes nationalism to serve its own purposes. This paper argues that the reality with Chinese nationalism is much more complicated than many assume. It has grown stronger in some respects but weaker in others. The role of the Chinese Government is at best mixed. In explaining the development of Chinese nationalism, one needs to look at external as well as internal and historical causes. Only by doing so can one gain a fuller and more balanced understanding of this intriguing phenomenon.     

Village Elementary School Affecting the United Nations

"Left-behind children" are children who have one parent or both parents working in another city while the children stay in the village. These children usually live with either one of their parents, relatives or family friends. Research shows that there are over 58 million left-behind children in China; 57.2 percent of them have one parent working in another city, 42.8 percent of the children have both parents working in another city, 79.7 percent are raised by their grandparents, 13 percent of the left-behind children are raised by relatives or friends, 7.3 percent of these children are raised without a guardian or information about them is uncertain. As the Chinese economy prospers, working-age adults from villages increasingly choose to work in cities with left-behind children a special population that requires special attention in Chinese village education. Social researchers warn that left-behind children are not only a problem for families but a social problem. The education program in Linzi Elementary School, Rugao City, Jiangsu Province has raised awareness of left-behind children’s education. The school’s "Left-behind Children ’33433’ Linzi Model" is now popular in the country and followed by many elementary schools. This school is now a major experimental elementary school under the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) caring for left-behind children.     

Informed Nationalism: military websites in Chinese cyberspace

This article focuses on the so-called ‘military websites’ in Chinese cyberspace to examine the complexity of contemporary Chinese nationalism. By pointing out the fact that the majority of members of military websites are well educated and well informed, yet nationalistic and anti-Western, the author argues that the key factor in shaping their nationalist thinking is the formation of a new interest-driven game-playing paradigm in the past two decades which the Chinese use to interpret national policies and international relations today. Ironically, much of the new interpretative framework has been borrowed from Western concepts and ideas, including Comprehensive National Power, National Interests, and Rules of the Game. Equipped with this new paradigm to interpret the received information and look at the world, the more informed Chinese are the more nationalist they may be, as demonstrated by the responses to the plane bugging incident by Chinese net surfers.