Nationalism and Democratisation in Contemporary China

Feng Chongyi is associate professor in China studies at the University of Technology, Sydney.

The upsurge of nationalism in China since the 1990s has been the subject of considerable academic attention and political concern.¹ The upsurge occurred in the aftermath of the grave setback to political modernisation/democratisation in China signified by the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989. These historical circumstances have prompted further deliberations over the relationship between political democratisation and nationalism in China. The strength of nationalist sentiment in China is widely understood, but the liberal voice against nationalism in that country is hardly known to the outside world. It is worthwhile attempting to see how liberal intellectuals and officials in contemporary China, who are determined to embrace constitutional democracy, have responded to nationalism. Generally speaking, Chinese liberals have put forward three major arguments: nationalism is detrimental to the project of democratisation; nationalism jeopardises state interests; human rights take precedence over state sovereignty.

Nationalism versus Liberalism

There is a complicated and delicate relationship between nationalism and liberalism in China, largely because of the different logic of these two ideologies as well as the country’s extraordinary intellectual and political history. The conventional wisdom has it that the nation and nationalism are modern phenomena originating in Europe. I tend to believe that there were pre-modern nations and nationalisms and that they were also to be found outside Europe. Over their long history, the Chinese first developed the idea of self-identification as early as the Spring–Autumn Period (770–403 bce), when the distinction was clearly made between Huaxia people living in Zhongguo (China) and yidi (barbarians) living elsewhere. In the Shangshu (Book of History), allegedly edited by Confucius, there occurs the definition that “Huaxia means Zhongguo”—an indication that Huaxia might refer both to the Chinese people and to the country they populated. In the Chunqiu, another ancient book allegedly authored by Confucius, and in the three most famous contemporaneous commentaries on it, painful efforts were made to conceptualise the “differences between the Xia [Chinese] and barbarous tribes” (yi xia zhi fen). It was claimed that “the hearts of those who are not of our race must be different” (fei wo zulei, qi xin bi yi), and China was urged to “internalise the Xia and externalise barbarians” (nei zhuxia er wai yidi).² Before encountering Westerners, the Chinese—in typically Sino-centric fashion—regarded China as the only civilisation on earth to be governed by a “heavenly dynasty” (tianchao), and had been fighting, educating, and assimilating a variety of “barbarians” for two thousand years.

 

The distinctiveness of the modern concept of the nation lies in the notion of popular sovereignty and citizens’ rights (known as “civic nationalism” by some) and in the notion of the equal status of nations in the world system. It is in this sense that I discuss the embrace of nationalism by intellectuals in modern China. The rise of modern nationalism in China was a response to Western aggression after the Opium War of 1839–42.³ China’s collective awakening to modern nationalism became a political and intellectual force in 1895, when a petition drafted by the reformist Kang Youwei and signed by thirteen hundred civil-service examination candidates was presented to the emperor, advising him that China thenceforth “should pursue an order where countries are standing side by side, rather than an order of unification in only one country”. The document can be seen as the birth certificate of modern Chinese nationalism, and ever since that historical moment, the emerging Chinese intelligentsia and other “progressive elements” have spared no effort in promoting nationalism among the entire population and backing reforms and revolutions heavily informed by nationalist ideology.

 

In promoting China’s independence and modernisation, nationalism and liberalism once went hand in hand. The liberals in modern China were mostly at the same time nationalists. The Wu Xu Reform Movement of 1898, which sought to make China a constitutional monarchy, also aimed to achieve the nationalist goal of “enriching and strengthening the country”. Sun Yat-sen, who helped to found the Republic of China in 1912, put the “principle of nationalism” before the “principle of democracy” and the “principle of socialism” in his manifesto of the “Three People’s Principles”. Later, during the Sino-Japanese war period in the 1930s–40s, Chinese liberals laid as much stress on resisting the Japanese invasion as on pursuing democracy. At that time, establishing constitutional democracy in China was seen as the only viable means by which the country could survive the invasion.

 

However, in the modern era, liberalism has met with great difficulties in China, whereas nationalism can claim some undeniable achievements. As a component of the “Three People’s Principles”, Sun Yat-sen’s nationalism aimed at establishing China as a modern, democratic nation-state open to the influence of socialism. The synthesis of nationalism, liberalism, and socialism in Sun’s thought was, deliberately or otherwise, torn apart by his successors in the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang, especially by its leader Chiang Kai-shek and his clan. The Kuomintang largely accomplished the goals of nation-building and state-building, but the nation-state it built was nevertheless a party-state that was simultaneously anti-socialist and anti-liberal.

 

For their part, the Chinese communists defeated the Kuomintang and rose to power precisely with a claim to be more patriotic and stronger in the anti-imperialist struggle than any other political group in China. What the communists established after their victory in the Civil War (1945–9) was a party-state that moved further away from liberalism. China’s “confident” nationalism of the reform era since the 1980s, characterised by pragmatic relations with the outside world, has been contrasted with the Maoist nationalism of the 1950s to the 1970s, assessed as xenophobic, isolationist, militant, and assertive.⁴ Nevertheless, liberalism remains the chief target of political and ideological campaigns mobilised by the Communist Party, in which the personal interests and liberties of the population can be sacrificed at any time for any reason in order to serve the state.

 

Liberals in China today have come to realise that liberalism is a guarantee of a healthy nationalism. A bitter lesson has been learnt: nationalism, once it overrides universal liberal values such as human rights, liberty, equity, peace and rationality, becomes xenophobia in international relations and an accomplice of despotism in domestic politics. As demonstrated by the history of both party-states, those of the Kuomintang and of the Communist Party, nationalist goals have been achieved at the expense of liberalism, frustrating the project of genuinely modernising China.

 

Under the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, waves of nationalist sentiment substituted for the pursuit of liberal democracy, deflecting the Chinese from the mainstream of modern Western civilisation into the camp of the “anti-Western West”, i.e., Marxism–Leninism and its product, Soviet Russia. This abrupt turn in China’s modernising process was an unfortunate outcome of the country’s response to imperialist humiliation by the Western powers on the one hand, and to the promise made by Soviet Russia to renounce all colonial legacies in China on the other. Dominated by strong nationalist sentiment, many Chinese were unable to distinguish the ugly crimes of Western colonialism from the attractive values of liberal democracy associated with and nurtured by the West. Resistance to Western aggression led to the furious rejection of liberal democracy. It is in this sense that the historian and noted liberal Zhu Xueqin has claimed that populism and “misshapen” or “zealous” nationalism have formed the two root causes of China’s troubles since the May Fourth New Culture Movement of the 1910s.⁵

 

Worse still was that nationalism continued to dominate Chinese politics and discourse even after it had accomplished its historical tasks of standing up to foreign aggression and establishing national independence. The project of democratisation in China during the post–Civil War peace was quashed because of the continued obsession with nationalism on the premiss of a top-down extinction of liberalism. One of the Communist Party’s main objectives in branding the United States as China’s chief enemy was, indeed, to eradicate “liberalism and individualism” among pro-Western Chinese intellectuals. The communist party-state has long raised the flag of nationalism or patriotism, and continuously stirred up anti-Western nationalist sentiment with the aim of weakening the effect that liberalism might have on the Chinese population. According to the ideology propagated by the party-state before the 1980s, the pursuit of liberal democracy was equivalent to wanting to be a Western “slave” (yangnu). Taking advantage of nationalist sentiment, the party-state has repudiated liberal democracy as an unwelcome “wholesale Westernisation”.

 

Liberalism re-emerged in China in the reform era of the 1980s, when learning from the West become fashionable among much of the population and democratic reform was even put on the agenda by two general-secretaries of the Communist Party—Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. However, such Western-type reform was again short-lived and was terminated by the suppression of the democracy movement in 1989. The acute legitimacy crisis suffered by the Communist Party after the suppression and the fear induced in it by the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and the East Bloc regimes prompted the party leadership once again to exploit nationalism to maintain its shaky rule. Democratisation was once again demonised as a Western conspiracy of “peaceful evolution” (heping yanbian) intended to weaken China. Deng Xiaoping, China’s then–paramount leader, categorically asserted that “bourgeois liberalism is the same thing as wholesale Westernisation”. So far, the Communist Party has been more or less successful in its strategy of utilising nationalist discourse to distract people’s attention from the erosion of its legitimacy and from China’s social crisis, suspending pressure for democratisation.

 

Some nationalists in China today do express support for democratisation. However, Chinese liberals are quick to point out that there is a fundamental weakness in the discourse of Chinese nationalists on democracy. The major concerns of Chinese nationalists are state power and strong government. To them, democracy is only of secondary value and important only if it can serve as a tool to strengthen the power of the state and government. Moreover, the focus of Chinese nationalists is international relations rather than domestic politics, although they are interested in mobilising the support of the population in the name of political participation. Their idealisation of Chinese authoritarian culture, their worship of the post-totalitarian order in contemporary China, and their demonisation of liberal democracy in the West do not help the cause of democratisation.

‘National Interests’

National interests are hard to define, although in the final analysis they refer to the common concerns of the entire citizenry of a country in security, economic welfare, political rights and cultural life. More often than not, a country’s ruling elite deliberately confuses the national interest with its own political and economic gain. In multiparty democracies this kind of confusion is rarer because it is easier to distinguish the national interest from that of the government, which may be ejected in general elections, and of political parties, whose electoral fortunes also fluctuate periodically. In the case of one-party rule, such as in China, the regime can easily lump together the national interest with the interest of the party-state, naming—however grotesquely—the state as the “people’s state” and the government as the “people’s government”.

 

It is equally grotesque that nationalism in Third World countries since the end of the Second World War has been characterised by hostility to the West and to Westernisation, given that what such countries have achieved economically, politically, technologically, and educationally, etc., is largely indebted to Westernisation. Their anti-Western nationalism has seriously damaged their national interests in at least three ways:

 

First, it has led to a xenophobia that rejects normal ties and relations with advanced societies, not only inflicting great economic losses, but also removing the opportunity to learn from advanced institutions and cultures for purposes of development.

 

Second, nationalist fanaticism in many Third World countries has led to fierce competition among them for regional hegemony and superiority, often in the form of bloody and disastrous wars.

 

Third, nationalism in developing countries has benefited right-wing parties in the West, which gain domestically by arguing for tough policies against a hostile Third World.

 

The effect of Muslim nationalism is the most salient example in this regard. Zealous nationalists and terrorists in the Muslim world maintain that they are acting in the interest of their communities, but in fact their extremist nationalist speeches and deeds have seriously harmed their peoples and countries, helping to sideline the Left in the West and scupper efforts for mutually beneficial relations, and providing the Western Right with excuses to impose economic sanctions or wage war. Those extreme nationalists or terrorists may become “martyrs” for their seemingly heroic deeds, but in reality they have brought about endless disasters for their home countries. As one Chinese liberal, Sun Liping, points out,

 

in some countries, nationalism has become a source of spiritual power for development, but in others it constitutes an obstacle to economic development. A simple glance at the contemporary world shows that the countries most persistent in promoting nationalism are more often than not those which resist modernisation most fiercely, some of them even the least developed countries.⁶

 

For liberals in contemporary China, the totalitarian regime has always been a combination of communism and nationalism, in which the national interest has been greatly distorted by vested interests, privileges and the ideology of the party-state. Consequently, the Chinese in general lack a sound understanding of national or state interests and often inflict harm on themselves with great enthusiasm. In the Maoist period, for instance, the “strong-country dream” was distorted by the party-state ideology and Mao’s personal ambition, and China’s foreign policy was shaped by vanity in severing normal relations with almost every Western democracy and in supporting dictatorships around the world. The reform era has witnessed progress in a playing down of ideology in favour of “national interest”. However, xenophobic nationalism (in fact, West-phobia) has never really disappeared. And vanity among the population as well as the government has been exacerbated by rapid economic growth. Xenophobia and vanity can only do more harm to China’s national interests. A succinct account of the phenomenon was provided by the philosopher and liberal Xu Youyu in his article “Minzu zhuyi, quaqiuhua he gujia liyi” (Nationalism, globalisation, and national interests), published online in November 2005:

 

In the 1970s, ultranationalism accompanied leftist ideologies to close off the country from the opportunity to develop China’s economy by means of learning and importing from the outside world. Today, nationalism again unites with imported Western new-left theories, world-system theories, and anti-globalisation theories to block China’s participation in the globalisation process.

 

Liberals in contemporary China assert that the positive role of nationalism diminishes over the course of human history. In an era of struggles for national independence and liberation, nationalism can be a powerful force for social mobilisation, national integration and state-building. A strong nationalism becomes an obstacle to political and economic development in the process of modernisation after national independence and liberation have been achieved. Following careful observation of the recent phenomena of anti-Japanese nationalism, anti-American nationalism, anti-Taiwan-independence nationalism, and other current forms of nationalist sentiment in China, the pro-democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo acutely labels contemporary Chinese nationalism as a “despotic patriotism” that integrates state despotism and popular nationalism. After providing a convincing account of the damage done by “despotic patriotism” to China’s national interests, Liu soberly warns of future catastrophes if it is allowed to escalate.⁷

 

Chinese liberals protest against the official exploitation of nationalism for ill purposes, especially that of reinforcing the legitimacy of the outmoded party-state regime. In the words of Sun Liping, “nationalism has been pragmatically employed as an important resource for the formulation of state ideology during the era of transition”.⁸ This observation is echoed by the human-rights campaigner and pro-democracy activist Fan Baihua, who accuses China’s communist party-state of cynicism and opportunism in making use of nationalism: on the one hand, nationalist discourse is employed to win the hearts of the people, and on the other, the party-state helps foreigners to exploit the Chinese people for huge profits. In his aforementioned article “Nationalism, Globalisation, and National Interests”, Xu Youyu has also pointed out the distinct differences between Chinese nationalism in the 1990s and nationalism in modern Chinese history: the latter was a response to national crisis caused by foreign invasion, whereas the former resulted from efforts by the party-state to fill the ideological vacuum created by the collapse of Marxism–Leninism. Obviously, neither Chinese citizens nor the Chinese “national interest” need stand in opposition to the West. On the contrary, normal communication with the advanced West benefits the people and “national interest” of China in political, economic and cultural development. It is the party-state that needs to be an enemy of the liberal–democratic West, particularly when nationalism has become an ideological pillar propping up the totalitarian regime at the expense of democratisation.

 

To conclude, in line with their belief that liberal and democratic values are prerequisites for a rational nationalism, Chinese liberals insist that no abstract “national interest” exists apart from the sum of the individual interests of the members of a nation, and that this kind of “national interest” can be legitimated only by democratic procedures. For them, to protect and enhance the national interest is to protect and enhance the concrete interests and rights of citizens, rather than harming citizens in the name of national or state interests. “National interests are extolled to the highest degree in nationalism,” the democracy campaigner Liu Junning argues,

 

but nationalism does nothing to advance national interests except for its very limited achievement in the cultural sphere. In the contemporary era, it is undeniably true that the most effective way to advance the national interest is democracy in politics, the market in economics, and pluralism and tolerance in culture. Whoever cherishes the national interest should treat the truth seriously.⁹

Rights or Sovereignty?

Nation-state sovereignty was not originally antagonistic to human rights. When the first few sovereign states were founded in Europe in the seventeenth century, they arose from the will to resist external intervention by the Roman Catholic Church and domestic challenges by feudal separatist rule. With the maturation of concepts such as “democratic right” and “no fatherland under despotism” during the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, protecting the interests and rights of citizens was an intrinsic requirement for commanding their loyalty to the state. According to the political scientist Xu Xun, “the position of liberal nationalism with regard to the state is that protection of personal liberties is the aim of political life, economic life and social life in a country, opposing despotism in any form.”¹⁰

 

In the modern era, state sovereignty and human rights have conflicted mainly under despotic regimes in countries achieving their independence through nationalist movements. During struggles for national independence, the people are generally required to sacrifice their personal rights for the sake of resistance to foreign aggression. Once the national liberation movement results in a despotic government rather than a democratic one, the people are usually forced to make a further sacrifice of their personal liberties, nominally for the state but really to consolidate the regime.

 

Juxtaposing “human rights” against “state sovereignty” is a recent development. During the Cold War, when many democracies competed with the Soviet Union for the allegiance of developing countries, the condition of human rights in the Third World was not a concern of Western states; they took a pragmatic approach, supporting dictatorships in exchange for their “friendship”. In the 1980s, and after the end of Cold War in particular, the West added human rights to the agenda of international relations, giving rise to what became known as “human-rights diplomacy”. Given that the principle of non-interference in domestic affairs is central to the notion of state sovereignty, this “human-rights diplomacy” has met with strong resistance from regimes less than democratic, such as the party-state in China.

 

Two basic claims are made by the Chinese government and nationalists in attacking the West’s “human-rights diplomacy”. First, such diplomacy is just one of the means Western nations use to intervene in the internal affairs of “socialist and developing countries”. Second, giving priority to human rights above state sovereignty is a Western value that runs counter to Chinese principles such as the inviolability of state sovereignty and the cardinal importance of non-interference in a country’s internal affairs.

 

In fact, ever since the Communist Party assumed power in China in 1949, state sovereignty and security have been regarded as sacrosanct. In the 1950s, even liberal Chinese intellectuals subscribed to Communist Party ideology and willingly renounced their freedom of belief, speech, association and independent academic enquiry in deference to “state sovereignty”. However, the liberal intellectuals who thus betrayed themselves did not win the confidence of the party-state but were victimised in its endless political purges. Liberals in contemporary China have learned the lesson that without the legal protection of personal freedoms, the ruler can deprive citizens of their basic political rights at any time in the name of the state. Without reservation, they oppose any brand of nationalism that overrides individual liberties; they also oppose the notion of “state sovereignty” that rejects human rights. As Liu Junning puts it, “Liberalism embraces only political structures that allow and maintain free spaces for individuals … Liberalism resolutely opposes acts that deprive individual citizens of personal liberties in the name of the ‘general will’ or the ‘collective interests of the state’.”¹¹

 

It is the belief of contemporary Chinese liberals that replacing “sovereignty first” by “human rights first”, and “absolute sovereignty” by “limited sovereignty”, is a new achievement of humankind, for which it has paid a high price. They also believe that accepting the principle of “human rights first” is a crucial signifier to distinguish civilisation from barbarism, and that putting human rights above state sovereignty has become a self-evident principle for mainstream civil societies today. In “Human Rights Take Precedence over State Sovereignty”, an online article published in November 2000, Liu Xiaobo argues that human rights are universal and transcend religious belief, ideology, race, nationality, and national boundaries. To him, justice in the new international order of the twenty-first century is centred on liberal values. No state, nor any other organisation, has the right to infringe personal liberties with any such excuse as “sovereignty” or “internal affairs”. The principle of “human rights first” is the line that any nation or sovereign state cannot cross. The international community has the power, in fact the responsibility, to act against infringements of human rights, including by imposing economic sanctions or launching military attacks.

 

The Kosovo War of 1999 was a test for the international community, as well as for the Chinese government and people, on the relationship between human rights and state sovereignty. President Boris Yeltsin of Russia challenged the European intervention in Yugoslavia, claiming that “the appeals for humanitarian interference” in the “internal affairs of another state” cannot be justified, “even when this is done on the pretext of protecting human rights and freedoms”.¹² At the other end of the spectrum, Czech leader Vaclav Havel, addressing the Canadian parliament on 30 April 1999, hailed the NATO intervention “because decent people cannot sit back and watch systematic, state-directed massacres of other people … This war gives human rights precedence over the rights of states”.

 

Exactly the same division of opinion took place in China. The government and nationalists stood in alliance with Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, while liberals publicly sided with NATO, supporting what they saw as its humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia. The opinion of the government and nationalists is best represented in a speech by Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan at the United Nations General Assembly in September 1999. “Such arguments as ‘human rights taking precedence over sovereignty’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’ seem to be in vogue these days,” he said. But respect for sovereignty and non-interference are “the basic principles governing international relations”.¹³

 

Chinese liberals were outraged by the government’s nationalistic stance. As Xu Xun explained, liberals in China hold dear the moral bottom line of humanitarianism and maintain that in the contemporary world sovereignty can no longer shield a state which violates human rights from “outside interference”. They believe “outside interference” is necessary when despotic regimes use state violence to abuse human rights and contravene basic principles of civilisation.¹⁴ The historian and public intellectual Zhu Xueqin also came out to defend the bedrock principle that accords supremacy to human lives and human rights, quoting a well-known Chinese liberal thinker Hu Shi, who asserted in the 1940s that “above all the states stands humankind”.

 

The pro-democracy writer Wang Yi and the historian Qin Hui have gone a step further, arguing that under the despotism of one-party rule, sovereignty is meaningless for the people, who are mere subjects dictated to and humiliated by the state rather than citizens with non-negotiable rights. Wang and Qin have claimed that by practising the Chinese brand of patriotism, which is devoid of respect for human lives and human rights, “patriots” never treated fellow Chinese as real human beings, especially not as beings equal to Westerners.

 

Liberals claim that Chinese nationalism has been informed by a regressive Sino-centrism that has prevented China from learning from other civilisations and making progress. They call for an end to fanatical populist nationalism (leftist xenophobia), which promotes violence and rejects liberal values in the name of patriotism. Convinced that the state is only instrumental and of secondary value relative to the value of the individual, Chinese liberals urge their compatriots to accept the superiority of universal liberal values over nationalism and to abide by these values in conducting international relations.

Liberalism’s Growing Momentum

The power of nationalism in shaping human history cannot be exaggerated. Nationalism not only destroyed the ideal of internationalism that originally pertained to communism, turning the world communist movement into a nationalist project, but it also modified liberalism to various extents, even in those countries and societies founded on liberal principles. Based on the painful experience of two world wars and other conflicts initiated by nationalists, the mainstream thinking of humankind has at long last reached the point where sharp vigilance is sustained against the scourge of nationalistic fanaticism, and where human rights are considered superior to sovereign rights, as evidenced by the principles which guided the NATO intervention in Kosovo. It would be unrealistic to discount the influence of nationalism for the foreseeable future, but its value has been relegated as secondary to liberal values. China is still a long way off from catching up with this new trend, but the elements emerging in the thought of some Chinese intellectual and political circles are promising.

 

China having suffered from Western invasions and aggression for over a century, the collective Chinese memory of modern history is bleak and sensitive, especially as regards foreign powers. Nationalism, in turn, won credit for assisting in China’s “liberation” and its establishment as an independent state. It is no wonder that nationalism has become a dominant force in China. In addition, the West is seen in two divergent ways in China: as a role model for modernisation, and as a devil invader. This Janus-faced image of the West causes great confusion. Together with a desire to utilise foreign technology to overcome foreign powers, there has been the stigmatisation of those who learn from the West as traitors and flunkeys. Many Chinese also constantly confuse Western civilisation with Western hegemony, ignoring the distinction between hegemonic policies and liberal values, and resenting both the hegemony and liberal democracy associated with the West.

 

As elsewhere, in China nationalism and liberalism co-exist and indeed partially reinforce each other. Initially, it was strong patriotism that drove generations of intellectuals in modern China to embrace liberal ideas and institutions as a means of achieving national wealth and power; and it was precisely those elements of liberalism, such as the concept of popular sovereignty, of citizen rights, and of international recognition of the equal status of nations, that differentiated modern nationalism from its earlier forms. However, in the final analysis, liberalism and nationalism are different in nature and follow opposite logics. Liberalism takes individuals as an end, and takes government and nation, or any other political organisation or form of community, as a means to achieve the end of individual independence, dignity, liberty, and happiness. Nationalism, by contrast, takes the nation or nation-state as the end and individuals as a means. Liberalism by its very nature is a doctrine of universalism granting equal status to any human individual, whereas nationalism, no matter how liberal or civic, is a doctrine of particularism setting boundaries between human communities.

 

Liberals in contemporary China have achieved a better understanding of the tension between liberalism and nationalism. There is a clear indication that Chinese liberals are currently endeavouring to replace the nationalist project of “wealth and power” with the project of individual freedom, universalism and globalisation. In a politically charged environment where nationalism has become the most important tool of legitimation, and where nationalist sentiment is strong among a population fed highly selective information by the state propaganda apparatus, Chinese liberals warn of nationalism’s potential to cause social disorder, arouse xenophobia and chauvinism, suppress individual freedom and personal rights, and sabotage the project of democratisation and modernisation. Given that the statist tradition has dominated educated minds in China since the birth of state Confucianism, and that several generations of Chinese liberals have fallen into the trap of nationalism and brought tragedy upon themselves by abandoning their belief in liberalism for the sake of national salvation or national construction, the gathering momentum of Chinese liberalism today may constitute the most profound change in Chinese intellectual development since the mid-nineteenth century, if not since the Spring–Autumn Period. 

 

Endnotes

1. “Nationalism” is a term with many usages. In this paper, it is defined both as a doctrine which places a nation at the centre of its concerns, and as sentiments of belonging and devotion to the nation, understood as a cultural and political community, real or imagined.

 

2. All translations from the Chinese are my own.

 

3. “Western” in this (Chinese) context is a political rather than geographical term, and it sometimes includes Russia and Japan.

 

4. See Michel Oksenberg, “China’s Confident Nationalism”, Foreign Affairs 65, no. 3 (1987), pp. 501–23.

 

5. Zhu Xueqin, “Wusi yilai liangge jingshen bingzao” (Two root causes of troubles since the May Fourth Movement), in Zhishi fenzi lichang: Minzu zhuyi yu zhuanxingqi Zhongguo de mingyun (The stance of intellectuals: Nationalism and the fate of China in transition), ed. Li Shitao (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 2000), pp. 500–13.

 

6. Sun Liping, “Huiru shijie zhuliu wenming: Minzu zhuyi san ti” (Blending into major civilisations: Three debates about nationalism), in Minzu zhuyi yu zhuanxingqi Zhongguo, ed. Li Shitao, pp. 378–9.

 

7. Liu Xiaobo, Danren dujian: Zhongguo minzhu zhuyi pipan [Single-edged poisoned sword: A critique of Chinese nationalism] (Taipei: Boda chubanshe, 2006).

 

8. Sun Liping, “Huiru shijie zhuliu wenming”, in Minzu zhuyi yu zhuanxingqi Zhongguo, ed. Li Shitao, p. 375.

 

9. Liu Junning, “Minzu zhuyi si mian guan” (Four ways to see nationalism), in Minzu zhuyi yu zhuanxingqi Zhongguo, ed. Li Shitao, p. 17.

 

10. Xu Xun, Minzu zhuyi [Nationalism] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1998), p. 55.

 

11. Liu Junning, “Ziyou zhuyi rushi shuo” (This is what the liberals suggest), 16 March 2025 [http://www.boxun.com].

 

12. “In Words of Yeltsin and Clinton: Examining Terrorism and Human Rights”, New York Times, 19 November 1999.

 

13. Barbara Crossette, “China and Others Reject Pleas That UN Intervene in Civil Wars”, New York Times, 23 September 1999.

 

14. Xu Xun, Minzu zhuyi, p. 60.