The evolution of the concept of a modern Chinese nation
Nation-building (or as it is sometimes called, state-building) is defined as a process of the construction of a national identity and a functioning state in which the citizens share the feeling of a commonality of interests, goals and preferences. The purpose of nation-building is to achieve the unification of the people within the state in order to remain politically stable and viable in the long run.1 Questions of nation, nationalism or national identity are ubiquitous and pervasive in the modern world. The studies of nation, nationalism and national identity are multiple and varied across and within the academic world from different disciplines and perspectives.
Modern Chinese nation and Chinese nationalist consciousness was sparked by China’s defeats in a series of wars against Western imperialists and Japan in the 19th century. The Chinese nation was a constructed notion that came about because ‘the other’ – the West – came into China, which pushed Chinese intellectuals to reconstruct ‘the self’ – the Chinese nation. According to Wang Zhongfu, the ‘Chinese term for nation (民族) was introduced from Europe by Liang Qichao early in the 20th century. Since then, “nation” has been used widely in China’.2 Chen Liankai describes how the notion of ‘Chinese nation’ was adopted from the writings of Meiji Japan and began to appear in Chinese revolutionary journals in 1895 in reference to the Han Chinese.3 Zhang Taiyan was a Chinese writer who used the term ‘Chinese people’ for the first time in China and introduced the concept of ‘Chinese people’. This marked the beginning of a modern concept of Chinese national identity.4 However, in the early 20th century, ‘Chinese nation’ or ‘Chinese people’ was used as an ethnic term by Zhang Taiyan and other Chinese intellectuals to refer to Han Chinese, as Han people were ruled by the Manchu minority at the time.
After victory of the nationalist revolution in 1911 ended the Manchu rule, Chinese intellectuals and political leaders sought to build a unified nation-state that had equal status with other great powers in the world. The Chinese nation, as a political and cultural notion, was officially used by Sun Yat-sen in 1912 in Nanjing when he declared establishment of the Republic of China as a nation-state. In order to maintain most of the territory that was held under Manchu imperial rule, Sun Yat-sen and other nationalists in the Republic of China had to seek ways to live with and assimilate Manchu as well as other ethnic minorities into the Han-dominated modern nation-state.5 For example, the notion of the Chinese nation officially included five identified ethnic groups: Han and other four major ethnic minorities – Manchu, Mongolian, Hui and Zang. It was called Wuzu Gonghe (五族共和, a republic of five ethnic groups). However, the Nationalist Party’s policy of national assimilation failed to absorb all of the ethnic minorities within the territory of China into Han, the dominated Chinese nation.
Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949 and proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing. The PRC officially describes itself as a ‘unitary multinational state’ under the slogan of ‘the unity of nationalities’. The PRC claims that Chinese people are composed politically and culturally of 56 identified ethnic groups: Han majority and 55 other officially recognized ethnic minorities.6 Although the other 55 ethnic minorities in China only make up a relatively small proportion of overall Chinese population, according to the national census, the Chinese government has established a series of policies to maintain equality and unity of ethnic groups and to ensure that Han and the other 55 minorities live in harmony.7 For instance, the Chinese government allocates regional autonomy to ethnic minorities and respects and protects the languages, social customs and culture of ethnic minorities; the PRC has released a constitution and laws to protect the rights to economic and cultural development of all the ethnic minorities in China. These minorities enjoy preferential rights of exemption from population growth control of the ‘One Child Policy’, and ethnic minorities are represented in the National People’s Congress as well as in governments at different levels. Thus, it can be seen that, after the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, both the Nationalist Party and the CCP define the Chinese nation-state as a multiethnic political community and make an effort to construct the Chinese nation as a political and cultural community in order to maintain national unity.
Chinese nationalism and national identity
Chinese nationalism and national identity are also modern phenomenon, and the concept and origins of them are tangled with modern Chinese history of nation-building from the late Qing Dynasty at the beginning of the 20th century on. Joseph Levenson stated that culturalism permeated traditional Chinese thought and the ideology and identification of the mandarin were all forms of cultural consciousness.8 Culturalism held China to be the only true civilization and embodied a universal value: people who accepted Chinese teachings and principles, including alien dynasties such as Mongo-Yuan and Manchu-Qing courts, could all be incorporated within its cultural bounds. China’s defeat in the Opium War from 1840 to 1842 and subsequent humiliation at the hands of imperialist powers paved the way for disintegration of imperial China and led the Chinese elite to reject traditional culturalism and to borrow the Western concept of nationalism to defend China against foreign invasions in the late 19th century.9 Thus, Chinese nationalism was born in the wreckage of culturalism and triggered by Western imperialists and imperial Japan’s threat to China’s territorial, cultural and even racial survival.
Nationalism was crucial to protecting and enhancing a strong sense of national identity and to maintaining national unity and nationhood, of national interests as well as territorial sovereignty during the process of nation-building. However, the content of nationalism was always changing in response to different situations in the political marketplace. Mario Ferrero declared that, ‘the market for nationalism belongs in the same category as the market for social revolution or systemic change in general’.10 Thehistory of modern China was shaped by numerous national crises caused by both domestic turmoil and foreign aggression. Zhao Suisheng suggested that modern Chinese nationalism was shaped by national and social revolutions and its content was not eternal, yet ‘situational’ and ‘in a state of flux, responding to the supply and demand conditions of a political market’.11 In the realm of politics in modern Chinese history, Zhao classified Chinese nationalism into three categories: ethnic nationalism, liberal nationalism and state nationalism.12 Zhao argues that:
For ethnic nationalists, nationalism means building a single ethnic state. For liberal nationalists, it is a doctrine of social solidarity based on the symbols of nationhood, defined in terms of citizenship, political participation, and a common territory. For state nationalists, it is the desire to maintain the boundaries of the existing nation-state with its territory and population, to give the government the right to submit any objective to it, to reinforce its identity, and to justify the use of force to preserve its sovereignty against external as well as internal threats.13
In line with China’s changing historical contexts, different political forces have turned to diversified types of nationalism as they connected with their own political values and interests. The chosen type of nationalism was imposed upon the rest of the population. For instance, ethnic nationalism was a mainstay of Chinese nationalism when the Han ethnic group led a state-seeking movement, or revolution, at the turn of 20th century, to oppose European imperialism as well as the minority Manchu rulers in the late Qing Dynasty. This was due both to defeat of China by the British imperialists in the Opium War and to the fact that the majority Han population struggled under the minority Manchu rulers. After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and the founding of the Republic of China, the state elites soon encountered a contradiction between ethnic Han nationalism and the desire to keep all of the territories of the Qing Dynasty, including frontier areas where many ethnic minorities resided. To maintain a unitary multiethnic nation-state, Sun Yat-sen and other nationalist leaders in the Republic era rejected ethnic nationalism and constructed the Chinese nation-state as a multiethnic nation-state. This definition was accepted and developed in the PRC to maintain national unity among different ethnic groups within the Chinese territory.14
Liberal nationalism was introduced to China in the early 20th century. Liberal nationalists held a critical attitude towards authoritarian rule, so liberal nationalism sometimes offered up a challenge to the ruling party in both the nationalist and CCP regimes. A typical example was the Tiananmen Square Protests in 1989 in Beijing.15 These liberal nationalists were liberals in the domestic arena and nationalists in the international arena, as they had a defensive attitude toward Western countries that imposed sanctions on China and, at the same time, they were critical of the CCP regime for violating their individual rights, which evolved into a challenge to the CCP’s leadership. Thus, the Chinese government had to carefully suppress liberal nationalism in order to maintain its authority.
State nationalism, or state-led nationalism, was strongly advocated by incumbent political elites in both the regimes of the Nationalist Party and the CCP in China. State nationalism was similar to Jean-Dominique Lafay’s notion of ‘holistic view of nationalism’, which regarded the state as
a super-being, with its own aims and rights. This super-being is the sovereign judge of the national interest, and it has a natural right to promote this interest, whatever the consequence for the sovereignty and welfare of other nations or for the sovereignty and welfare of domestic individuals.16
Both the Nationalist Party and the CCP had the objective of building a centralized multiethnic nation-state in response to ‘external threats to its sovereignty and internal challenges to its authority’ to achieve national independence and state sovereignty as well as maintain the legitimacy of one-party rule.17 However, the difference was, as Hunt stated, that the Nationalist Party adopted a system-reforming approach in order to build a bourgeois state whereas the CCP adopted a system-transforming approach in order to build a worker’s state.18 Thus, the CCP developed a broader social base among the C...
