Forging National Unity: Ideas of Race in China

Frank Dikötter, Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, is the author of Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (Walker Publishing Company, 2010). His article below is adapted from his chapter, “Race in China”, in A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, ed. David Theo Goldberg and John Solomos (Blackwell, 2002).

While over fifty different “minority nationalities” (shaoshu minzu) are officially recognised to exist in the People’s Republic of China, well over 90 per cent of the population are classified as “Han”, a term translated in English as “ethnic Chinese” or “Chinese of native stock”. Despite the existence in China of cultural, linguistic and regional differences which are as great as those to be found in Europe, the Han are claimed by mainland officials to be a homogeneous ethnic group (minzu) with common origins, a shared history and an ancestral territory. “Han” and “Chinese” have become virtually identical, not only within official rhetoric and scholarly discourse in the People’s Republic, but also in the eyes of many foreign scholars. Eric Hobsbawm, for instance, perpetuates the myth of a Han majority by noting that China is among “the extremely rare examples of historic states composed of a population that is ethnically almost or entirely homogeneous”.¹ Only recently have some researchers started to reject the notion of an ethnic majority and attempted to describe China as a mosaic composed of many culturally diverse groups within the so-called “Han”.² While references did exist in traditional China to the descendants of the various Han dynasties (206 bce–220 ce), the representation of the “Han” as an ethnically integrated majority is a modern phenomenon intrinsically linked to the rise of nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century. In a nutshell, the idea of a Han majority is a modern invention which was first used by nationalist elites to forge a sense of racial identity among China’s various population groups vis-à-vis foreign powers which threatened the country and in opposition to the Manchus who ruled the Qing Empire until its fall in 1911.

 

After the fall of the empire, racial theories continued to underpin Chinese nationalism. Sun Yatsen (1866–1925)—founder of the Kuomintang, China’s Nationalist Party, and widely accepted as the “father” of the nation in China and in Taiwan to this day—considered the Han to constitute the absolute majority in China, a distinct people with shared physical attributes and a line of blood which could be traced back to the most ancient period. If we can define socially constructed “races” as population groups imagined to have boundaries based on real or fictitious biological characteristics, and if these can be contrasted with socially constructed “ethnicities”, which are population groups thought to be based on culturally acquired characteristics, then political elites in modern China saw both as coterminous: ideas of “culture”, “ethnicity” and “race”, in other words, were often conflated by political and intellectual elites in order to represent cultural features as secondary to and derivative of an imagined racial specificity.

 

Politics have been essential in the making of racial discourse in modern China: in order to legitimise control over the territory which was part of the empire until 1911, from Manchuria to Tibet, the political leaders of the Republic until 1949 and the People’s Republic after 1949 reinvented subject peoples in border areas as mere sub-branches of the Han. This vision emphasises both the organic unity of all the peoples living within the political boundaries of China and the inevitable fusion of non-Han groups into a broader Chinese nation dominated by the Han: the political boundaries of the state, in short, could be claimed to reflect a more profound biological unity between the various peoples of China.

 

While this assimilationist vision is closely linked to the politics of national unity, its legitimacy has been based primarily on a system of knowledge called “science”. Racial theories were made possible only by the advent of scientific knowledge in Europe from the late eighteenth century onwards, as “science” offered a whole new language from which a relationship between culture and biology could for the first time be systematically imagined. Racial theories, first in parts of Europe and gradually elsewhere around the world, sought to represent social groups as biological units: racial theorists appropriated science, from craniology to genetics, in order to present the group boundaries they had constructed as being objectively grounded in the natural laws of evolution. In Europe, China and many other parts of the globe, negative attitudes about the physical appearance of individuals or entire population groups can be found before modernity, but these attitudes rarely formed a coherent and credible worldview.

 

The politics of nationalism and the language of science were both intrinsic to modernity and appeared in China only with the reform movement which gained momentum after the country’s defeat against Japan in 1894–5. Imperial reformers after 1895 proposed to strengthen China in its confrontation with foreign powers by reforming the thought and behaviour of all the people. The first to articulate systematically a nationalist agenda of reform in which all citizens would participate in the revival of the country, the reformers rejected the Confucian classics and appealed instead to a foreign system of knowledge called “science” to underpin their message of change, as we shall see next.

Lineage, Race, and Nation

After the Qing’s disastrous defeat against Japan, leading reformers like Liang Qichao (1873–1929) and Kang Youwei (1858–1927) searched for a unifying concept capable of binding all the Manchu emperor’s subjects together as a powerful nation which could resist the foreign encroachments which had started with the first Opium War (1839–42). They used new evolutionary theories to represent the world as a battlefield in which different “races” struggled for survival. But while they appealed to such foreign luminaries as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, their understanding of “race” was also informed by their own background. They did not simply copy what they read from these authors, but instead endowed “race” with indigenous meanings, portraying it primarily as an extension of patrilineage, an all-important social institution in imperial China. The reformers used patrilineal culture to represent all inhabitants of China as the descendants of the Yellow Emperor, a mythical national figure thought to have reigned from 2697 to 2597 bce.

 

Extrapolating from an indigenous vision of lineage feuds, which permeated the social landscape of late imperial China, the reformers projected a racialised worldview in which “yellows” competed with “whites” over degenerate breeds of “browns”, “blacks” and “reds”. Thriving on its affinity with lineage discourse, the notion of “race” gradually emerged as the most common symbol of national cohesion, permanently replacing more conventional emblems of cultural identity. The threat of racial extinction (miezhong), a powerful message of fear based on more popular anxieties about lineage extinction (miezu), was often invoked to bolster the reformers’ message of change in the face of imperialist aggressions: “They will enslave us and hinder the development of our spirit and body ... The brown and black races constantly waver between life and death, why not the 400 million of yellows?”³

 

In the reformers’ symbolic network of racialised others, the dominating “white” and “yellow races” were opposed to the “darker races”, doomed to extinction by hereditary inadequacy. The social hierarchy which existed between different groups of people in the empire was expanded into a vision of racial hierarchy characterised by “noble” (guizhong) and “low” (jianzhong), “superior” (youzhong) and “inferior” (liezhong), “historical” and “ahistorical races” (youlishi de zhongzu). The distinction between “common people” (liangmin) and “mean people” (jianmin), widespread in China until the early eighteenth century, found an echo in Tang Caichang (1867–1900), who opposed “fine races” (liangzhong) to “mean races” (jianzhong). He phrased it in evenly balanced clauses reminiscent of his classical education: “Yellow and white are wise, red and black are stupid; yellow and white are rulers, red and black are slaves; yellow and white are united, red and black are scattered.”⁴

 

The reformers also proposed a form of constitutional monarchy which included the Manchu emperor: their notion of a “yellow race” (huangzhong) was broad enough to include all the people living in the Middle Kingdom. In the wake of the abortive Hundred Days Reform of 1898, which ended when the empress dowager rescinded all the reform decrees and executed several reformer officials, a number of radical intellectuals began advocating the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty. The anti-Manchu revolutionaries represented the ruling elite as an inferior “race” which was responsible for the disastrous policies which had led to the decline of the country, while most inhabitants of China were seen to be part of a homogeneous Han race. In the search for national unity, the notion of a Han race emerged in a context of opposition both to foreign powers and to the ruling Manchus. For the revolutionaries, the idea of a “yellow race” was too vague as it included the much reviled Manchus. Whereas the reformers viewed “race” (zhongzu) as a biological extension of lineage (zu), including all people dwelling on the soil of the Yellow Emperor, the revolutionaries excluded the Mongols, Manchus, Tibetans and other population groups from their definition of race, which was narrowed down to the Han, who were referred to as a minzu.

 

Minzu, a key term used interchangeably for both “ethnic group” and “nationality” after 1949, referred to a common descent group with a distinct culture and territory. During the incipient period of 1902 to 1911, moreover, minzu as a term was used to promote symbolic boundaries of blood and descent: “nationalities” as political units were equated with “races” as biological units. In the nationalist ideology of the first decade of the twentieth century, minzu was thought to be based on a quantifiable number of people called “Han”, a group with clear boundaries by virtue of imagined blood and descent. Sun Yatsen became one of the principal proponents of a Chinese minzu, which he claimed was linked primarily by “common blood”. Minzuzhuyi, or “the doctrine of the minzu”, became the term used to translate into Chinese the ideology of nationalism, thus clearly indicating the overlap which was envisaged between nation and race. Nationalism was the first principle of Sun Yatsen’s “Three Principles of the People”, and it has been adopted ever since by both the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party.

 

The myth of blood was sealed by elevating the legendary figure of the Yellow Emperor into a national symbol. The Yellow Emperor (Huangdi) was hailed as the first ancestor (shizu) of the Han race, and his portrait served as the frontispiece in many nationalist publications. From mid-1903, the revolutionaries started using dates based on the supposed birthday of the Yellow Emperor. Liu Shipei (1884–1919), for instance, published an article advocating the introduction of a calendar in which the foundation year of the republic corresponded to the birth of the Yellow Emperor. “They [the reformers] see the preservation of religion [baojiao] as a handle, so they use the birth of Confucius as the starting date of the calendar; the purpose of our generation is the preservation of the race [baozhong], so we use the birth of the Yellow Emperor as a founding date.”⁵

 

The revolutionaries constructed a new sense of identity that narrowly focused on the Han, pictured as a perennial biological unit descended from a mythological ancestor. By 1911, culture, nation and race had become coterminous for many revolutionaries fighting the Manchu dynasty.

Republican China

The Qing Empire collapsed in 1911, a momentous political event which was marked by a number of important developments, for instance, the rapid transformation of the traditional gentry into powerful new elites such as factory managers, bankers, lawyers, doctors, scientists, educators and journalists. Modern science, in the eyes of these elites, came to replace imperial cosmology as a body of legitimate knowledge about the world. Many came to view “race” as a credible concept capable of promoting national unity after the collapse of the empire. Not only was “race” deemed to be an objective, universal and scientifically observable given, but it also fulfilled a unifying role in the politics of the nation: it promoted unity against foreign aggressors and suppressed internal divisions. Even the “peasants with weather-beaten faces and mudcaked hands and feet” could be represented as the descendants of the Yellow Emperor, as “race” was a notion which could overarch gender, lineage, class and region to integrate the country’s people into a powerful community organically linked by blood.

 

Racial theories did not remain confined to the new elites concerned with the unity of the nation. With the rise of a modern print culture, driven by many private publishing houses and by the general growth in literacy after the fall of the empire, a vernacular press appeared which facilitated the circulation of new forms of group identity. Racial categories of analysis, disseminated by the new print culture, were consolidated by endless references to science. For example Chen Yucang (1889–1947), director of the Medical College of Tongji University and a secretary to the Legislative Yuan, boldly postulated that the degree of civilisation was the only indicator of cranial weight: “If we compare the cranial weights of different people, the civilised are somewhat heavier than the savages, and the Chinese brain is a bit heavier than the European brain.” Liang Boqiang, in an oft-quoted study on the “Chinese race” published in 1926, took the blood’s “index of agglutination” as an indicator of purity, while the absence of body hair came to symbolise a biological boundary of the “Chinese race” for a popular writer like Lin Yutang (1895–1976), who even proclaimed that “on good authority from medical doctors, and from references in writing, one knows that a perfectly bare mons veneris is not uncommon in Chinese women”. Local archaeologists, on the other hand, sought evidence of human beginnings in China. Like many of his contemporaries, Lin Yan cited the discovery of Beijing Man at Zhoukoudian in the 1920s as evidence that the “Chinese race” had existed on the soil of the Middle Kingdom since the earliest stage of civilisation. Excavations supported his hypothesis by demonstrating that migrations had taken place only within the empire. It was concluded that China was inhabited by “the earth’s most ancient original inhabitants”.⁶

 

Racial theories were also disseminated by means of school textbooks, anthropology exhibitions and travel literature. Print culture even reached the lower levels of education, spreading racial theories via the national curriculum. The opening sentence of a chapter on “human races” in a 1920 textbook for middle schools declared that “among the world’s races, there are strong and weak constitutions, there are black and white skins, there is hard and soft hair, there are superior and inferior cultures. A rapid overview shows that they are not of the same level”. Even in primary schools, readings on racial politics became part of basic education:

 

Mankind is divided into five races. The yellow and white races are relatively strong and intelligent. Because the other races are feeble and stupid, they are being exterminated by the white race. Only the yellow race competes with the white race. This is so-called evolution ... Among the contemporary races that could be called superior, there are only the yellow and the white races. China is the yellow race.

 

Only a few isolated voices in Republican China openly contested the existence of a racial taxonomy in mankind. Zhang Junmai, for instance, wisely excluded “common blood” from his definition of the nation. Qi Sihe also criticised the use of racial categories of analysis in China, and pointed out how “race” was a declining notion in the West. Generally, however, racial discourse cut across most political positions, from the fascist core of the Kuomintang to the communist theories of Li Dazhao. Its fundamental role in promoting nationalism, its powerful appeal to a sense of belonging based on presumed links of blood, its authoritative worldview in which cultural differences could be explained in terms of stable biological laws—all these aspects provided racial discourse with a singular resilience. It shaped the identity of millions of people in Republican China, as it had done for people in Europe and the United States.

Contemporary China

Racial theories were attacked as tools of imperialism following the communist conquest of China in 1949, and university departments in such fields as genetics and anthropology were subsequently closed, for political reasons, in the early 1950s. Anthropologists, for instance, were accused of having used disrespectful anthropometric methods that insulted the minority nationalities. But while the Communist Party appealed to the notion of “class” as a unifying concept, it did not abandon the politically vital distinction between a Han majority on the one hand and a range of minorities on the other. Not only did the party perpetuate the generic representation of linguistically and culturally diverse people in China as a homogeneous group called Han minzu, but it also swiftly proceeded to recognise officially forty-one so-called “minority nationalities” (shaoshu minzu) who applied for nationality recognition after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, a number which increased to fifty-six by the time of the 1982 census.

 

As the political boundaries of the country recognised by the Communist Party corresponded largely to those of the Qing Empire, minority peoples in the strategically and economically vital border regions of Xinjiang and Tibet continued to be portrayed as both organically linked yet politically subordinate to the Han. Although the idea of equality between different minzu was promoted by the Communist Party in order to combat “Han chauvinism” (Da Han minzuzhuyi), official discourse during the Maoist period viewed the Han as an absolute majority endowed with superior political and cultural attributes and hence destined to be the vanguard of the revolution and in the forefront of economic development. In a manner recalling the racial taxonomies used by the revolutionaries at the beginning of the twentieth century, “minority nationalities” were represented as less evolved branches of people who needed the moral and political guidance of the Han in order to ascend on the scales of civilisation. The idea of the Han as a politically more advanced and better endowed minzu pervaded the early decades of the communist regime, while assimilationist policies were also eagerly pursued. In other words, not only were “Han” and “Chinese” seen to overlap, but “minorities” continued to be portrayed as mere sub-branches of a broader organic web destined to fuse into a single nation.

 

Enlisting Science
The emphasis on class struggle at the expense of economic development was reversed after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. After the ascent to power of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the language of science gradually started to replace communist ideology in a number of politically sensitive domains. Palaeoanthropological investigation illustrates how the assimilationist vision was reinvigorated by scientific research in the 1980s and 1990s. Prominent researchers represented Beijing Man at Zhoukoudian as the “ancestor” of the “mongoloid race” (Menggu renzhong). A great number of hominid teeth, skull fragments and fossil apes, discovered at different sites scattered over China since 1949, were used to support the view that the “yellow race” (huangzhong) was in a direct line of descent from its hominid ancestor in China. Although palaeoanthropologists in China acknowledged that the fossil evidence pointed to Africa as the birthplace of mankind, highly regarded researchers like Jia Lanpo repeatedly emphasised that man’s real place of origin should be located in East Asia. Wu Rukang, also one of the most respected palaeoanthropologists in China, came very close to upholding a polygenesist thesis (the idea that mankind has different origins) in mapping different geographical spaces for the “yellow race” (China), the “black race” (Africa) and the “white race” (Europe).

 

Early hominids present in China since the early Middle Pleistocene (one million years ago) were believed to be the originals back to which all the population groups in the People’s Republic can be traced. Physical anthropologists also invoked detailed craniological examinations to provide “irrefutable evidence” about a continuity in development between early hominids and the “modern mongoloid race”. Detailed studies of prehistoric fossil bones were carried out to represent the nation’s racial past as characterised by the gradual emergence of a Han “majority” into which different “minorities” would have merged. As one close observer has noted,

 

In the West, scientists treat the Chinese fossil evidence as part of the broad picture of human evolution world-wide; in China, it is part of national history—an ancient and fragmentary part, it is true, but none the less one that is called upon to promote a unifying concept of unique origin and continuity within the Chinese nation.⁷

 

Such theories have not changed substantially with more recent advances in palaeoanthropology. Every new discovery in China, it seems, is jumped upon to question the “Out of Africa” thesis. When an ancient skull was dug up in Henan in 2008, it was widely interpreted as evidence that most of the people living in China were descendents of a native lineage whose uninterrupted evolution could be traced back millions of years.⁸

 

Serological studies were also carried out in the 1980s to highlight the biological proximity of all minorities to the Han. Mainly initiated by Professor Zhao Tongmao, estimations of genetic distance based on gene frequency claimed that the racial differences between population groups living within China—including Tibetans, Mongols and Uighurs—were comparatively small. Serologists also observed that the “Negroid race” and the “Caucasian race” were more closely related to each other than to the “Mongoloid race”. Zhao Tongmao put the Han at the very centre of his chart, which branched out gradually to include other minority groups from China in a tree highlighting the genetic distance between “yellows” on the one hand and “whites” and “blacks” on the other. The author hypothesised that the genetic differences within the “yellow race” can be divided into a “northern” and a “southern” variation, which might even have different “origins”. His conclusion underlined that the Han were the main branch of the “yellow race” in China, to which all the minority groups could be traced: the political boundaries of the People’s Republic, in other words, appeared to be founded on clear biological markers of genetic distance.

 

In similar vein, skulls, hair, eyes, noses, ears, entire bodies and even the penises of thousands of subjects are, to this day, routinely measured, weighed and assessed by anthropometrists who attempt to identify the “special characteristics” (tezheng) of minority populations. As a theory of common descent is advanced by scientific knowledge, the dominant Han are represented as the core of a “yellow race” which encompasses in its margins all the minority populations. Within both scientific institutions and government circles, different population groups in China are increasingly represented as one relatively homogeneous descent group with a unique origin and uninterrupted line of descent which can be traced back to the Yellow Emperor. Contemporary China, in short, is not so much a “civilisation pretending to be a state”, in the words of Lucien Pye,⁹ but rather an empire claiming to be a race.

 

Eugenics

On 25 November 1988, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of Gansu Province passed the country’s first law prohibiting “mentally retarded people” from having children. Further laws for the improvement of the “gene pool” were enforced after June 1995: people with hereditary, venereal or reproductive disorders as well as severe mental illness or infectious diseases (often arbitrarily defined) were mandated to undergo sterilisation, abortion or celibacy in order to prevent “inferior births”. Although these eugenic laws aimed to curb the reproduction of certain categories of people in the name of public health, some publications went further by claiming that eugenics was vital in enhancing the “biological fitness” of the nation. A few even heralded the twenty-first century as an era to be dominated by “biological competition” between the “white race” and the “yellow race”. The mastery of reproductive technologies and genetic engineering was seen to be crucial in this future battle of the genes, and the government gave much support to medical research in human genetics. A research team was even set up in November 1993 to isolate the quintessentially “Chinese genes” of the genetic code of human DNA. Although coercive premarital medical check-ups were abolished in 2003, to this day the quest for “superior children” is such that, in the words of Susan Greenhalgh, state power now reaches not only into the bedroom, but “stretches into the womb ... to the making of life itself”.¹⁰

 

Racial Nationalism

Racial theories are less visible in China today than before the Second World War. As elsewhere in the world, they have undergone a decline in respectability, although occasionally racial nationalism is still expressed in a fairly unambivalent way, for instance, during the 1988–9 riots against African students on university campuses.¹¹ In a series of incidents, thousands of Chinese students, fuelled by a variety of racist rumours, set about assaulting and destroying the dormitories of African students in Nanjing, Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin, shouting “Kill the black devils!”. Six months after their mass demonstrations against Africans, alleged to have molested Chinese women, the same students were occupying Tiananmen Square in the name of the nation.

 

Negative images of foreign sexuality, to a lesser extent, have contributed to the racialisation of encounters between African and Chinese students, and have played a role in the spread of collective anxieties about sexually transmitted diseases. The popular myth of “international syphilis” (guoji meidu) has contrasted the pure blood of Chinese people with the polluted blood of outsiders, said to have become immune to syphilis after centuries of sexual promiscuity. Until recently, official discourse and popular culture also explained AIDS as an evil from abroad, and prostitutes who offered their services to foreigners were singled out for severe punishment in the late twentieth century. This official line of thought elicited a law on the mandatory testing of all foreign residents; African students in particular were singled out for the AIDS test. In their racialisation of AIDS, many of the publications on sexually transmitted diseases produced by government circles carried images of white and black sufferers; they interpreted gay demonstrations in the United States as a sign of the imminent collapse of “Western capitalist society”. “Primitive societies” in Africa were also criticised for their lack of moral fibre, in contrast to the virtues of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

 

Besides student demonstrators, even opponents of the regime have occasionally been eager to deploy the notion of race as a unifying concept against the threat of “Western culture”. To take but one example, Yuan Hongbing, a lawyer at Beijing University who was briefly detained in February 1994 and became a well-known figure in the public dissident movement, called for a “new heroicism” in order to save “the fate of the race” and for a “totalitarian” regime which would “fuse the weak, ignorant and selfish individuals of the race into a powerful whole”. According to Yuan, only purification through blood and fire would provide a solution to China’s problems: “On the battlefield of racial competition the most moving clarion call is the concept of racial superiority ... Only the fresh blood of others can prove the strength of one race.”¹² Such voices, however, remain marginal, and it would be wrong to misinterpret the intense nationalism which has characterised the reform era as being exclusively “racial”.

 

On the other hand, the rise of the Internet has given a far more prominent voice to popular expressions of racism. Liu Xiaobo—one of the student leaders during the Tiananmen pro-democracy movement, a prominent dissident and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010—discovered just how deeply racism runs when he surveyed the Web after a visit to China by Condoleezza Rice in 2005. In hundreds of rants reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, popular websites attacked the US secretary of state as a “black pig”, a “black devil” or a “black female dog”. Liu noted that the racism he discovered on the Web was so widespread that few readers in China were bothered by it.¹³ More recently, a similar outpouring of racial hatred marked the appearance in a talent show of Lou Jing, who has a Chinese mother and an African‑American father who left China before her birth. Some of the blogs, which demeaned her with racist slurs and demands that she leave the country, attracted tens of thousands of hits.

Conclusion

The term “Chinese”, whether referring restrictively only to the Han or more inclusively to the people of China, is a generic category comparable to the Victorian notion of “Anglo-Saxon”: it is assumed to be a race, a language and a culture, even when its members are dispersed across the globe. Symptomatic of this phenomenon is the inclusion of Taiwan in most discussions of China, despite the radically different history, politics, cultures and languages of the island-nation. This is roughly comparable to there being a contemporary textbook on England that expatiated on Australia, or a German textbook demanding a merger with Austria on the basis of “race”. Not only is it assumed that “Chinese” is a language shared by most inhabitants of “Greater China”, despite ample evidence to the contrary, but also that all the “Chinese” are linked by virtue of descent.

 

Racial theories have underpinned nationalism in China since 1895. Precisely because of the extreme diversity of religious practices, family structures, spoken languages and regional cultures of population groups that have been defined as “Chinese”, the notion of race has emerged as very powerful and cohesive form of identity. Racial theories have been used by the late Qing reformers, the anti-Manchu revolutionaries, the Kuomintang nationalists, and, more recently, by a number of educated circles in the People’s Republic. The notion of race, while heavily dependent on the language of science, has undergone many changes since the end of the nineteenth century. Its flexibility is part of its enduring appeal, as it constantly adapts to different political and social contexts, from the reformist movement in the 1890s to the eugenic policies of the Chinese Communist Party. It is not suggested here that race was the only significant form of identity available in China, but that notions of culture, ethnicity and race have often been conflated in the politics of nationalism.

 

Since the erosion of communist authority after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, nationalist sentiments have found a wider audience both within state circles and relatively independent intellectual spheres. Intense nationalism arising in a potentially unstable country with an embattled Communist Party could have important consequences for regional security in that vital part of the world. Racial nationalism portrays frontier countries, from Taiwan to Tibet, as “organic” parts of the sacred territory of the descendants of the Yellow Emperor that should be defended by military force if necessary. In contrast, multiple identities, free choice of citizenship and ambiguity in group membership are unlikely to appeal to a one-party state in charge of an empire.

Endnotes

1. E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 66.

 

2. See, for example, Leo J. Moser, The Chinese Mosaic: The Peoples and Provinces of China (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1985), and Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).

 

3. Yan Fu, Yan Fu shiwen xuan (Selected poems and writings of Yan Fu) [Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1959], p. 22. (My translation; unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Chinese are my own.)

 

4. Tang Caichang, Juedianmingzhai neiyan (Essays on political and historical matters) [Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1968], p. 468.

 

5. Liu Shipei, “Huangdi jinian shuo” (About a calendar based on the Yellow Emperor), in Huangdi hun (The soul of the Yellow Emperor), 1904; reprinted, (Taipei: Zhonghua minguo shiliao congbian, 1968), p. 1.

 

6. For the quotations in this and succeeding paragraphs attesting to the invocation of science to legitimise racial claims, see Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (London: Hurst; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).

 

7. John Reader, Missing Links: The Hunt for Earliest Man (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 111.

 

8. Stephen Chen, “Ancient Skull Dug up in Henan May Bury ‘Out of Africa’ Theory”, South China Morning Post, 24 January 2008.

 

9. Lucien W. Pye, “China: Erratic State, Frustrated Society”, Foreign Affairs 69, no. 4 (Fall 1990), p. 58.

 

10. Susan Greenhalgh, Cultivating Global Citizens: Population in the Rise of China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 89.

 

11. See Michael J. Sullivan, “The 1988–89 Nanjing Anti-African Protests: Racial Nationalism or National Racism?”, China Quarterly, no. 138 (June 1994), pp. 404–47.

 

12. Yuan Hongbing, quoted in Geremie R. Barmé, “To Screw Foreigners Is Patriotic: China’s Avant-Garde Nationalists”, China Journal, no. 34 (July 1995), pp. 229, 230.

 

13. Didi Kirstin Tatlow, “True Colours”, South China Morning Post, 1 April 2005.