Deviant Nationalisms

Introduction

Since the late twentieth century, scholars have been talking about the “rise of nationalism” among the Chinese youth (Johnston, 2017; Tang & Darr, 2012). Mostly seen as a threat to political and international stability, Chinese nationalism has been described as a monolithic and pro-regime ideology that consistently and linearly developed as China has become more powerful than ever. Scholars also noted the crucial role of the central government in fostering, conniving, and controlling, and also occasionally cooling down the Nationalist sentiments on the Chinese internet. The title of one Foreign Policy article (Xu, 2019) summarized the conventional judgment on nationalism among Chinese youth: “China’s Youth Are Trapped in the Cult of Nationalism: Dreams of liberalization have clashed against the reality of successful propaganda.”

However, this taken-for-granted formula combines multiple stances under the one umbrella term of nationalism: patriotism, pro-regime sentiment, congruence between the national/cultural and political unit, xenophobia, Sinocentrism/Han-centrism, conservatism/traditionalism, opposition to liberal world order, government sponsorship, and so on. Such a rigid political line is not without contradictions and exceptions. The nationalistic image of how “China” as a region, nation, or state should look can vastly differ due to the diverging meanings, guidances, justifications, and developmental trajectories for different cohorts. Innovations, if not reformulation, were made to perpetrate newer waves of nationalism.

Benjamin Akzin (1964) called nationalism literature a “terminological jungle,” but the job of this essay is to try to navigate the jungle without getting lost. In addition to pointing out the diversities and exceptions of the conventional narrative of nationalism, in this essay, I want to delve into the specifics and typology of the variants of unofficial ideologies frequently uniformly termed nationalism in the contemporary Chinese internet space: especially considering and contrasting the camps of Imperial Han (皇汉) and Passology (or Ruguanxue, 入关学). Other than simply claiming that they are systematically different from the official nationalism characterized by “Triple Unification” (通三统), I argue that the successful early dissemination of the former two schools of thought is arguably their better logical consistency and fewer political burdens. However, precisely because of their strict, limited, and exclusionary worldview, their consistency became their weakness as well—a lack of flexibility and resilience, which eventually led to the prohibition of them by the state.

The Nationalists: Official Nationalism

The official and state-sponsored version of nationalism embodies the most typical and common image when speaking of modern Chinese nationalism. Having its roots in Liang Qichao (Dirlik, 2019, p. 125), it stresses the concept of the Chinese Nation (中华民族) that blurs or erases the ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and historical boundaries and conflicts among the diverse population in what is now China. It portrays a uniform and singular history of the Han ethnicity, but with a flexible incorporation of non-Han cultures and ethnicities through Confucian or histo-geographical justifications. Therefore, this narrative is particularly fond of the term “civilizational state” originally from Lucian Pye’s quote on China as “a civilization pretending to be a nation-state’” (Tang & Darr, 2012). It is crucial to note that official nationalism undoubtedly embodies a teleological historiography. It begins with the presupposition of a culturally, historically, and politically united China in PRC’s territory, then looks for evidence to establish this conclusion.

Beginning with a conclusion to reach, the primary goal of endorsers of official nationalism is to explain (away) the discontinuities, changes, and exceptions in Chinese history. One influential scholar who sought and developed core historical and cultural continuities for official nationalism is Gan Yang. His 2007 book Tong San Tong (通三统), or what I translated as “triple unifications” in this essay, starts by asserting that China is not only one of the hundreds of countries in the UN, it is first and foremost a giant civilizational matrix (da wenming muti) (p. 1). Since the late Qing, he argues, Chinese people have never conceptualized China’s relation with the world as an inter-state one, but rather as a relation between Chinese civilization and other civilizations (p. 1-2). He then referenced Huntington’s theory of clash of civilizations in claiming that globalization has only emphasized civilizational qualities (p. 2). In comparing China and the US, he quoted from an op-ed in claiming that the US is a country of only some two hundred years of history, while China is a three-thousand-old civilization (p. 9)

Afterwards, he stated that he borrowed the classical triple unifications concept to discuss the subjectivity of Chinese civilization in a globalized era (p. 1). The triple unifications concept comes from the post-confucius tradition of “the great spring autumn unification” (春秋大一统), as explained in Qing scholar Chen Li in his Gongyang Yishu (公羊义疏) (p. 1). Specifically, the triple unifications are respectively (1) shared cultural traditions and custom rituals; (2) China as both a historical civilizational commonwealth (gongtongti) and as a unified political commonwealth that embodies political unitarianism and against political divides; and (3) the high degree of historical continuities represented by a conscious and voluntary inheritance and integration of the cultural traditions of the previous dynasty by any new ones (p. 1-2). Therefore, he exemplified that Confucius praises Zhou even though Zhou replaced Shang, because Zhou inherited the traditions of Xia and Shang (p. 2). He also noted the Yuan and Qing dynasties as examples of triple unifications (p. 2). The continuity of Chinese civilization, he claims, depends on the tradition of triple unifications (p. 3).

However, such a formula can be confusing. For example, he quoted that “That who achieves the great unification unify the triple unifications into one” (大一统者，通三统为一统), which implies that the triple unifications are all necessary conditions for a great unification. However, there are evident discontinuities across the Chinese societies whether in terms of political divides (feudalism in Zhou, Han, Yuan, and Qing, multiple coexisting dynasties in Northern and Southern dynasties, etc [Carter, 2020]) and cultures (in Yuan and Qing or in regions of ethnic minorities). Therefore, a sympathetic reading will contradictorily make any of the triple unifications a sufficient reason for a great unification—as long as one of them exists, China exists. More crucially, it seems a dynasty can achieve the triple unifications post hoc—even if a ruling power was not originally sinicized or confucianized, it can claim the great unification as long as it committed to the triple unifications later by inventing commonality and ignoring heterogeneity to construct a unified nation.

Interestingly, the later section of the book is precisely doing that for the PRC. Gan Yang, somewhat abruptly, brought up a new issue of triple unifications in contemporary China—a coexistence and a “new-era triple unifications” of the traditions of Deng Xiaoping (market, freedom, rights), Mao Zedong (equality, justice), and Confucius (human and hometown connections/favours [renqing he xiangqing]) (p. 3). Conceptually speaking, the “new-era triple unifications” seem quite irrelevant to the traditional triple unifications, but he emphasized that the goal is identical. To re-recognize the foundation of modern China on traditional China as a historical civilization, one needs to also re-recognize the connection and continuity between China’s successful reform and opening up and Mao’s era (p. 5). For example, he claimed that the decentralization in the GLF led to the decentralization under Deng (p. 38). In addition, even the one-hundred-year process between “the total collapse of the Chinese civilization in the late Qing,” as he contradictorily admitted, and the reforms and revolutions should be seen as a continuing tradition that seeks to lay the foundation of modern China (p. 8).

In a sense, Gan Yang’s purpose is to re-interpret all instances of discontinuities as actually embodiments of essential continuities. Such an endeavour is less history-minded or empirical, but instrumental and teleological. He did not hide his intentions either. He criticized Zhang Taiyang’s claim that China ended in 1644 and Qing was not China for using Western logic (p. 21). According to Gan, Zhang was just confused at the time, because after overthrowing Qing, Zhang Taiyan and Sun Zhongshan retracted their previous judgements in favour of the “Five Races under One Union (五族共和)” (p. 22). Then, Gan said Zhang later had a famous quote that he was not thinking much other than overthrowing Qing at the time he claimed Qing was not China, but he did not consider what to do after the overthrow (p. 22). Gan Yang’s intention cannot be clearer at this point: what he does is precisely to defend the new era/ruler/dynasty by constructing legitimacy from continuity because he did consider what to do after the overthrow.

How do we make sense of the paradigm of official nationalism in a historical context? The mainstream culturalism to nationalism transition thesis in the Western Chinese nationalism scholarship provides a useful angle. James Harrison (1969) noted that the primary identity of ancient China was cultural and confucian, with no possibility of China simply as a non-cultural state. Chinese culturalism maintained an image of China’s cultural superiority in a world without rivals, thus there was no need for nationalism (Townsend, 1992, p. 98). Even if the political China was conquered, the backward conquerors had to rule the political China in a culturally Chinese way, implying an undefeatable cultural China. However, culturalismfell out of favour for either the elites or the populace following the foreign imperial aggression towards the late Qing. Therefore, nationalism rose in providing a new source of legitimacy following the first Sino-Japanese War and the May Fourth Movement. As Levenson (1953) noted, Liang Qichao was one of the first scholars to structure nationalism’s replacement over the now impotent culturalism.

Nonetheless, the legacy of culturalism can still be influential, as Townsend concluded:

Culturalism had always served as an ideology of empire, justifying Chinese rule over non-Chinese peoples as well as non-Chinese rule over the Chinese. In a sense it postulated a super-nation, a community defined by universally- valid principles (though not universally accepted ones) and ruled through an imperial political system centred on China, one that transcended the specific cultural traditions of the peoples included …. It was a point of view readily transferred to state nationalism, which asserts that the state represents the true interests of its people as a whole, who constitute a nation in being or becoming, whatever their past cultural and political differences (p. 113).

Meanwhile, however,

the culture of culturalism’s empire was Chinese …. In effect, culturalism emphasized and extolled Chinese ethnicity, permitting an easy shift to cultural or ethnic nationalism – that is, political defence of Chinese culture and insistence that the Han Chinese must have their own unified state. In short, culturalism could lend its ideas to either state nationalism or ethnic nationalism, to support for a new China-centred state ruling the old empire and for a new political community among ethnic Chinese; one could retain its defacto specification of the Chinese content of the community’s culture, or its more formalistic insistence that the political community rested on ideas transcending the particular ethnic identity of its members (p. 113-114).

Townsend’s remark is worth quoting at length because it reveals the dedicated but also subordinating relation between culturalism and official nationalism. Parts of culturalism are still useful in uniting the Han majority while assimilating the rest, but it is not mistaken that culturalism in contemporary China is only a tool that official nationalism selectively uses for nation-building/state-building, as Gan Yang demonstrated.

The Ethnicists: The Imperial Han

The instrumentalization and subordination of culture by the state undoubtedly raised some eyebrows. Why, some ask, should the state be utilizing the culture, rather than the culture be using the state? This is precisely the position of many imperial Hans (皇汉), as they call themselves. As Anthony Smith (1971, p. 176) said, the biggest definitional controversy about nationalism is that between the “statists” (or official nationalism in this essay) and “ethnicists.” The former starts nation-building with a “territorial-political unit,” while the latter defines the state as a “large, politicized ethnic group defined by common culture and alleged descent.” Ernest Gellner (1983, p. 43) also defined the goal of nationalism as “to make culture and polity congruent.” There naturally comes two ways of doing this: state nationalism (official nationalism), where the “existing state strives to become a unified nation”; and ethnic nationalism, where “an existing ethnic group strives to attain, enhance, or protect its nationhood, perhaps by becoming an independent state” (Townsend, 1992, p. 104).

The Imperial Hans, who take the culture and ethnicity more seriously and authentically, naturally aim for the latter. Some are for independence/self-determination of the 18 inner provinces of Han regions (China Proper), while others prefer to retain the current territory but push for ethnic distinguishment and hierarchy rather than the inclusive Chinese Nation. Some are Han chauvinists and supremacists, while others are simply for self-determination with an equal relation with other ethnicities. Therefore, many fractions of Imperial Han coexist on the Chinese internet space and it is difficult to distinguish them with a neat typology or criterion. But for this essay, it suffices to stress its popular ethnic orientation. But this ethnic angle also makes them more rudimentary and exclusionary than culturalism. In addition to being contrasted with modern nationalism, Confucian culturalism was conceptualized to be also distinguished from an ethnic/racist imagination (p. 100), which is not separable from the claims of Imperial Hans. It seems that the Vietnamese or Japanese, not to mention, let’s say, European Canadians, cannot be their compatriots even if they adopt a Confucian political culture. Therefore, although they often eulogize the Chinese cultures or rituals, the culturalism of Imperial Hans is essentially ethnic and Han, which makes it more apt to call them Han ethnicists.

The development and rationalization of the Imperial Han is quite well-documented and straightforward and has plenty of comparable movements across the modern world. They tend to define China as “the Han country”, meaning that Yuan and Qing were evidently not China while some dynasties were also purer than others based on the ethnic compositions of their governments and population. The biggest cleavage between official nationalism and Han ethnicism is in the continuity of Chinese civilization/nation. Imperial Hans insisted China had been conquered and ended by outsiders and revived by themselves. Such a real possibility is precisely why the Han ethnicity and country are at stake and the Han people need to be permanently fighting for their independence. Therefore, many of them are sympathizers of the Ming while despising the foreign Qing. They also traced their modern theoretical fathers to Sun Zhongshan, Zhang Taiyan, and other figures in the early stage of the Republican Revolution who sometimes identified with the Han ethnicity and contemplated a Han-based country.

The analysis above sees the Imperial Han from a nationalism lens (by framing them as ethnic nationalists), but to do the Imperial Han justice, some of them are fundamentally against the nationalism paradigm. Especially for those who are well acquainted with the modern construction of nations, “the congruence between the national and political unit” is inevitably a dead end that leads to failure because the national identity is overwhelmingly superficially constructed and deceiving that the people sooner or later need a “more real identity”—ethnicity. Therefore, the Han ethnicists are also essentialists who believe in the superiority of an essential and historically stable unit over an inclusive construction. These people will say the Chinese Nation is nonsense because it groups multiple ethnicities under one politically charged category. For example, it includes Chinese ethnic Koreans but not North/South Korean ethnic Koreans. By denying “nation” as an epistemologically and typologically valid object, they claim that the Chinese Nation is not a race, ethnicity, or citizen, and thus not a real thing.

Such a seemingly radical rejection of the nation is fundamentally conservative. However, their conservative epistemology and aversion to social construction in effect lend them more theoretical coherence. No matter whether a Han-exclusive country is beneficial to its people, this ethnostate is at least clearly imaginable. It can also dispense the controversies and troubles of rights, accommodation, and affirmative actions of ethnic minority rights and autonomy while making state work, festivals, and communication relatively unitary and simple. These privileges stem from a rejection of the current PRC territory as a precondition of political China. If China as a Han ethnostate does not include Tibet, then it does not need to cherrypick evidence and find ways to claim Tibet as part of China’s ancient and inalienable territory, the methodology and practice of which open their arguments to more critiques and questioning. For another instance,  the ROC (Taiwan)’s definition of the mainland government having 55 ethnicities (excluding Taiwan’s high mountain ethnic minority) is fundamentally unacceptable for the official nationalists because it challenges the congruence between the Chinese Nations (national unit) and the Chinese territory (political unit). But the Imperial Han has no such problem because it always only has one ethnicity for which they need to consider their territorial implication.

The Statists: The Pass Breakers

Compared to the old Imperial Han, a new but phenomenal strain of thought emerged in  2019: the Passology (or Breakthroughism, the breakthrough school, entryism, ruguanxue, 入关学). The term was first coined by the netizen Shangaoxian in a Zhihu response to the question “What lessons have the Chinese learned from the history of the Ming Dynasty?” where he compared contemporary China to the Barbarian Jurchens and the US as the late Ming. Such a unique analogy departs from the conventional Han-centric, Confucian, and heavenly-order-based perspective by describing the late Ming as a corrupt, hypocritical, chaotic, and weakening tyrant, while the Jurchens as the new, energetic, powerful, and rightful challenger to Ming’s imperial order and rule. The ending will be familiar: the Jurchens broke the pass (both militarily and later culturally) and conquered Ming. Of course, this position diverges greatly from the culturalists and Imperial Han.

But can we say the Passology trend is reflective of the successful spread and acceptance of official nationalism because it wholeheartedly embraced Qing as a legitimate cultural and political China? I argue for the negative. Because in the original Zhihu response, Shangaoxian also stressed that “Before entering the pass, don’t carry the book of sages and think nonsense, after entering the pass, there will be Confucian masters for you to use” (BBC, 2020). To disregard the foreign hegemonic and universalist rules and “to not debate” are characteristic of the Passology. Behind this rebelling or even anti-intellectual attitude is a fanatical belief in China’s formidable force that destined it to achieve “might make right.” Therefore, the Pass Breakers look down upon the utility in adopting or maintaining any institutions, cultures, and structures that seem irrelevant or at most derivative to a country’s economic and military power. Naturally, they have low investment on either the Chinese Nation or the Han ethnicity. They are frequently Social Darwinists, aggressive realists, hawks, and constructionists, but most importantly, statists. The passology is hardly an ideology due to its vagueness and competing fractions, it is more about an attitude, standpoint, belief, and sentiment surrounding the image of a powerful China that no longer needs to keep a low profile and adhere to the US-set world order. Interestingly, they stand by the state even more than the state stands by itself. Unlike the official nationalists who seek to unite Chinese people with history, the Pass Breakers see the hanging fruits (or big houses, as they analogize) readily available ahead and self-interest and smart realism alone are sufficient for the Chinese people to support the regime.

Moreover, even during the early stages of Passology popularity, some experts raised concerns over Passology’s rebelian, realist, or even nihilist position against both US’ liberalism and China’s official nationalism. Kong Yuan (2020), a researcher from the Chinese Social Science Academy, praised the courage of Passology but criticized its self-deprecation as barbarian, rejection of moral legitimacy, and its winner-take-all mentality (p. 26). In this sense, Passology’s rebellion comes after an identification of the US as the master while orientalizing and subjectifying China as an uncivilized brute force, which is not helpful for China’s grand strategy of global influence and building a united front based on moral legitimacy. Kong suggested instead that the netizens should opt for another analogy: the Crusade against King Zhou (武王伐纣), in accordance with the Confucian ideal of heavenly order embodied by the kind and moral challenger. However, such a reformation is entirely impossible and heretical for the Pass Breakers. The essence of Passology, as its endorsers often quoted: “I am barbaric” (我蛮夷也), is a rebellious rejection of historical, moral, and institutional legitimacy. The coexisting inferiority complex and the unrealistic confidence derive not only from a reading of geopolitics, but also from the social psychology of many Chinese youths. If the Crusade against King Zhou analogy was used, it then does not differ much from the official nationalism and could not have gathered so much popularity among the grassroot youth who are allergic to all “political correctness.”

Expectedly, however, by binding its validity to one singular propositional judgment of a strong China, Passology and its thin theoretical roots made possible both its initial viral dissemination and quick demise. The explosive popularity of Passology in 2019 and 2020 could be attributed to the comparison between China and the US’ covid responses. It was believed that although China used much more “barbaric” measures such as lockdowns, it quickly got the pandemic under control and resumed normalcy, compared to the supposedly civilized and rights-based US that continuingly struggled to control the damage. The Covid containment was also analogized by the official media as “a war” and as a revelation of a strong China and declining US. In this period, the pro-establishment media outlets in China had a cozy relationship with the Pass Breakers. For example, the Guan Media (观视频工作室) uploaded a video narrated by Shangaoxian in the August of 2020, attracting 2.5 million views.

However, as China’s economy and livelihood eventually crumbled during the Omicron variant, the bubble of almighty China was popped. Out of disillusions, many Pass Breakers turned into critics of the regime for its failure to cope with national crisis. Shangaoxian and discussion of Passology were increasingly censored and Passology fell out of favour.

Conclusion: Coherence or Resilience

As a Financial Times article claimed, “The difference between Chinese nationalist factions is probably bigger than the difference between all of them and an American patriot” (Yang, 2021). Jean-Pierre Cabestan also (2005) proposed three nationalisms in contemporary China: (1) authoritarian official nationalism; (2) primitive, revanchist, and racist nationalism; (3) and performance-based pragmatic nationalism. In this essay, I delved into the vastly different nationalistic imaginations by three online camps that were sometimes unreflectively and uniformly termed nationalism by outside observers. I started by introducing the official nationalism and the culturalism-nationalism transition thesis. However, by questioning the presumed nationalism framework, I went beyond Cabestan (2005) and pointed out the fundamentally different images and justifications of states, nationhood, and legitimacy by the deviant variants of online political communities. Most notably, the Imperial Han and Passology standout as they both reject the implied necessity of congruence between the national and political unit under official nationalism. The Imperial Hans are essentialist ethnicities who call for a Han ethnostate in replacement of a multi-ethnic China based on the Chinese Nation. In contrast, the Pass Breakers are constructionist statists who pay little emphasis on the role of ethnic and national constructions, which are irrelevant to China’s invincible power. Therefore, it is more appropriate to not group them under the nationalist camp, but as parallels and competitors to nationalism.

Nonetheless, the Imperial Han and the Pass Breakers seem to embody more logical and epistemological coherence and falsifiability than the official nationalism because they are less teleological in the necessity to reach a nation-based territorial boundary identical with the PRC’s current realm. This advantage of theirs attracts many netizens, but in the end they doom to be marginalized, censored, and condemned by the state apparatus because their theoretical consistency is also their weakness and instability. They are too “hard” and not “flexible” enough. Their hardness becomes brittleness given the contemporary political aims of unity and stability by the Chinese government. They are also too exclusionary (Imperial Han) or conditional (Passology).

Nationalism is most needed not in times of prosperity (as Passology thrived under), but in times of crisis, divisions, and turmoil. Afterall, as Benedict Anderson (2016) noted in explaining the contradiction between nationalism’s theoretical incoherence and extraordinary practical motivational values, nationalism should not be regarded as an ideology per se, but rather as an emotion or spirituality like the religion. The infalsifiability of official nationalism gives it strength. In contrast, the two camps are proven to be hardly resilient: in face of crisis, they cannot bounce back with a more united Chinese population than the official nationalism can. Therefore, in the foreseeable future, I project that official nationalism will still be the dominant ideology on the internet space despite possible emergences and temporary popularities of other national, political, or ethnic imaginations of China.

—-Atlas, 2024.4.12

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