CHINESE NATIONALISM (part 3)

THE RACE
Over centuries, China, as conceived by outsiders, has connoted an entire civilization, manifested by, if not necessarily defined by its various artifacts: its forms of government, its 3400 year-old written language, its sublime artistic expression and its precocious technological inventions. But while the marks of a civilization are distinctive, those of a “nation” are not. The convulsions of China’s history – regularly invaded, subjugated, divided or ruled by outsiders – has left the sycophantic sinologues with an unfinished task of defining who is and who is not Chinese. Within a tradition that customarily emphasizes the structure of human relations and the interests of collective stability over individual’s self-realization, this deficiency has presented a serious challenge to its rulers and subjects alike.

Whenever political ethnocentrism seeks to stabilize the boundaries of the group context, the deceivingly attractive ‘solution’ resides in biology. In the case of China, this emphasis, by default, will fall on the so-called Han “race”. But the very fact that the ideologues of the Chinese state have to resort to biologically untenable claims of supposedly common genetic pool is a testimony to the fact that the boundaries of the Chinese civilization are not co-extensive with the oft-failed Chinese statehood. The numerous and successful invasions by Altaic people – the Xiongnu, the Tabgach Turks, the Mongols, the Manchus – have made genetic claims to Chineseness highly dubious. Indeed, due its size and position on Asian mainland, China could never aspire to genetic purity. On the contrary, molecular research based on 110 genes indicates that mainland East Asia was a playground of influences between two genetically distinct groups. These populations – from the Northeast and Southeast – probably interacted as early as 50000 years before the millet-based culture expanded from Huang He river towards the rice-growing south. The northern and southern groups remain quite distinct to this day, both genetically and physically. And not only. An Australian friend of Cantonese origin once recalled the first thing he learned about China from his parents: “never trust a Northerner”.

When some hundred years ago, Chinese nationalists sought to abolish the Manchu dynasty they endeavored to rally support on the racialist grounds of the “Han” as opposed to the “Man”. But by dispossessing the tradition of the Qing state – dominated by the Manchu court and aristocracy – the nationalists risked rejecting 260 years of statehood, precisely the period during which the “Chinese” state achieved its largest ever territorial expanse, including the lands never before dominated by various historical Chinas. This Orwellian reversal of historical dogma is particularly sensitive today. When Lee Teng-hui celebrated his victory as Taiwan’s first popularly elected President, an angry email landed in my mailbox from Beijing. The young student, who had never been to Taiwan, dismissed Taiwan’s President as “unimportant person” and went on to quote Deng Xiaoping’s words, according to whom everyone who ‘splits the nation is Wu San-kuei’, referring to the Ming general who in 1644 opened the Great Wall to the Manchus. The historical confusion over the Qings’ colonial rule in Taiwan finds in this prosopopoeia an unstable parallel to the self-contradictory role of the Manchus in China’s history – the rulers and colonizers in the name of “China”, but also racially distinct caste which was opposed by all but the most odious of traitors.

Similar compartmentalization is necessary to deal mentally with the other legacy of the Manchus’ overlordship over China. The rejection of the Qing Empire as “foreign” would run the risk of undermining the legitimacy of the Chinese rule over Tibet, which became a vassal state during that period. In recent years, historical series produced by Chinese state TV have stressed the re-appropriation of the Qing as essentially “Chinese”. Even if the acculturation of the Qing is well documented, it was never complete. For example, the court’s officialdom was trilingual – a visit to any decent collection of Qing artifacts will reveal documents written in Chinese, in Manchurian and in Tibetan – certainly not something Chinese TV propagandists are planning to underline today.

But this is just as well. Any efforts to picture the Manchus or other “barbarians” as separate people will run aground in a country where “Chinese”, single syllable family names had been adopted for centuries and where it became virtually impossible to distinguish biologically between the true descendants of the proto-Chinese Xia tribe and the overwhelming majority of others. For all the efforts of its ideologues, China’s idiosyncratic cultural diffusionism has been drowned in explosions of fertility.

Sometimes, the race-based dogmatism seeks to anchor its objectives in the folk beliefs founded on ancestor worship and patriarchal tradition. Family structures dictated by virilocal residence and patrilateral kin groups are very strong among the Chinese, but absent, for example, among the neighboring Tibetan and Burmese traditions. This pervasive emphasis on patrilineal descent makes even educated Chinese an easy target of the genetic mythology. Drawing on paternalist sources, Sun Yatsen stressed in “Three Principles to the People” that ‘common blood’ was the greatest force. But devoid of tradition of civil law, China could not transform this concept into a legal tradition “ius sanguinis” and thus enshrine the question of nationhood in the way the Germanic tradition did.

Less legitimate, but just as frequently employed are the metaphors of Yellow River and Yellow Emperor – heritage supposedly manifested by the yellow pigment of the “Chinese race”. This proposition is, however, neither exclusivist (similar pigmentation is quite common in Asia and the Americas) nor historically appropriate (the yellow color was the preserve of the emperor, not its subjects). It was Kang Youwei who over a hundred years ago first manipulated the cult of agricultural deity later reinvented as allegedly historical ‘Yellow Emperor’ into a novel identity of huangzhong – yellow race. The invention did not instantly take off. A century ago, the problem for anti-Qing nationalists was that this “Yellow” concept would not exclude the Manchus. But obviously, for the Communist-nationalist propaganda today, the Manchu identity is no longer a threat. Today, a much elaborated belief in Yellow Emperor (Huang Di, believed to be born in 2704 BC) also serves a legitimizing purpose of backdating China’s recorded historical lineage by at least half a millenium. A perfect example of prochronism and presumptive continuity used to mark the “5000 years of history”.

With a similar objective, the political paleo-anthropology reaches out to prehistory and sometimes identifies the homo erectus Peking Man from Zhoukoudian as a polygenist sign not only of Chinese biological ‘otherness’ but also of its cultural antiquity (300,000 years of history?). Refuted by mitochondrial DNA studies, the widespread belief that the “Chinese race” is of a different origin than the rest of mankind, also panders to a particularly unattractive anti-African feature of Chinese racism. As recently as 1918, Chinese anthropologists referred to African as “black slave race” (hei nu) and to Japanese as “dwarf slaves” (wo nu).

These pseudo-scientific efforts to underline a common biological ancestry usefully support Great Han chauvinism (da Hanzu zhuyi), but do little to define the role for millions of PRC citizens who are not Han. The naïve biological distinctiveness that the China’s borderless nationalism exports, is not only the most easily accessible, but also the most divisive of the three putative pillars of nationalism. And even if the discourse of racialism makes heroic efforts to stabilize the sino-cultural sphere within a biological domain, we still do not know what the Chinese “race” is.




THE LANGUAGE
If the ideal of a “Han” race seems somewhat artificial, then the Chinese language would certainly prove to be the unifying force of “all Chinese”. The problem with this assertion is that the Chinese “language” exists only as a medium of communication in its written form. Its application is a matter of convention, not ethnic or linguistic unity. This assertion is appropriate both diachronically and synchronically. First, the current written (baihua) style replaced the traditional wenyan form only in the 1920s. Secondly, the Chinese characters (hanzi) have historically been adopted by the very different, non-tonal and originally agglutinative languages of Korea and Japan. These influences undoubtedly illustrate how pervasively attractive the highbrow culture of sinified literati was, but they distract us from defining the boundaries of the Chinese nationhood. Likewise, numerous communities of overseas Chinese in Indonesia or North America may not be able to decipher the hanzi, and yet their identity may be strongly attached to the elusive concept of Chineseness.

In its spoken form, “Chinese” refers to a group of tonal languages many of which are mutually unintelligible. For political reasons, they are referred to as “dialects”, but the differences between, say Cantonese and Mandarin are at least as large as between French and Spanish. Indeed, if we refer to the various Chinese languages with one term, we would also have to label Italian, French, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Catalan and all the other romance languages together as “Latin”. The use of the term “language” is therefore a political, rather than linguistic decision. As one scholar once noted, “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. And true enough, neither the Fukenese nor the Hakka command their own troops. But you can argue that Mandarin does.

Although Mandarin is being told at schools in China, the history of its remarkable success has been actually quite short and goes back to the decision in 1920s to promote nationhood and literacy on the basis of one, unifying dialect. It is on that occasion that the supporters of (an admittedly easier) northern dialect based the spoken form used in Beijing area overruled the proponents of Nanjing dialect.

Most Chinese do not even know about the history of linguistic engineering and are surprised to learn about Nanjinghua’s “near victory”. The propaganda of linguistic unity is so pervasive that an adult friend from Shanghai area once tried to prove to me that she actually had not spoken “any language” until she went to school and learned Mandarin. The Shanghainese pride seems to appear later in life and is more related to local identities (“north of the river”, “south of the river”) than to any of the definitions of Chineseness.

The broader north/south divide among the so-called Han runs deeper. According to historical linguistics, it is the Cantonese language that has been the least affected by non-Chinese influences. It is, however, commonly referred to as Yuè, which is the name of the long-independent ‘barbarian’ kingdom. Consequently, if the linguistic heritage were to be coterminous with “race”, then this research would leave out the taller northerners as cultural imposters, less purely “Chinese” than the southerners. But linguistic differences offer only a poor proxy for genetics. The peoples of Southern China inhabit a much more diverse geographic setting. No wonder that the ethnic and linguistic differences among them have remained more entrenched. The long history of interaction among those groups – be it Han or non-Han has led to a higher level of tolerance for differences in customs and traditions. Many southerners are less paranoid about the “unity” of China, as their families have often known prosperity without “national” unity. This is why the aggressive nationalism may find less following in the traditional areas of Yunnan, then in the more recently settled parts of Sichuan, Gansu or in the north.

But the problem with the linguistic “Chineseness” remains unresolved. It leaves out the groups that the Chinese propaganda condescendingly refers to as “minorities”. These various groups, numbering in millions and thus representing much larger communities than those of many of the world’s independent states do not share the linguistic code of the Chinese languages. Others, overwhelmed by Chinese colonialism during the imperial Qing era, are no longer here to testify. Their descendants may be among the angry fenqing.




THE INSTITUTIONS
The history of Chinese state institutions is often used as a particularly alluring shortcut to understand the country’s “national character”. The study of the Han, Tang and Ming bureaucracies, their un-reformable conservatism, rigidity and eventual collapse tell us much about the formative role that Confucianism, legalism and neo-confucianism played in the development of the organization of Chinese public life. In light of the frequent identification between the Chinese state and Chinese bureaucracy, as well as virtual absence of religious revelation originating from outside the state structures, it is in the institutional tradition that scholars search for clues to comprehend the archetype of the Chinese collective psyche.

The authoritarian rule is often characterized as “traditional” in this part of the world, with arguments ad antiquitam serving to overemphasize its legitimacy. The justification of the present by the past has deep psychological roots and has found reflection among primitive societies, not least in the form of ancestor worship, which is common among Chinese communities. The justification of the present and the future by the events, values and achievements of the past leads to a logical error that deserves some attention.

As the CCP has fossilized the body and heritage of Mao Zedong, maintained the Leninist centralism and drew parallels with legalist and, more recently, even Confucian traditions, it often points to the time-honored tradition of the authoritarian rule, as not only “more appropriate” to the mores of the Chinese people, but also more ancient than modern democracy. This “traditionalist” fallacy reigns supreme. It is easy to demonstrate that while more modern forms are not, by definition, superior, they have been created by people who have lived in the societies that are older than those of Han Feizi or Kong Zi. If “old” equates with “wise”, then the world in 21st century is way older than the world of 5th c BC and somewhat older than the China of 1920s. In terms of our knowledge of the world, most of us are much wiser than Lenin or Mao, or indeed anyone who lived 100 years ago. This would not be the case if any of these men were still alive, but, alas, they are dead (albeit still stuffed and on display in their terrariums). The common experience of mankind is now more extended than during the period when CCP came to power. Appeals to antiquity and fixation on earlier times justify nothing, not even temporal regression. And they surely legitimize no particular form of government.

Still, the PRC perceives itself today as the only legitimate carrier of Chinese statehood and has deployed many efforts to implant its own version of the institutional tradition as the rallying symbol of Chinese nationhood worldwide. To be sure, the competition is weak. The relevance of overseas Chinese communities to the traditions of a “Chinese state” may be low, but the problem arises in the case of Taiwan. If Taiwan constitutes, as Beijing claims, “a part of China”, then its own, distinct institutional tradition offers a counterproposal for a future development. Its distinct history has been given a diverging momentum by the democratic transition of the 1990s. It is the everyday freedoms of a fully fledged democracy that define the separate Taiwanese collective identity, rather than its unique history fused from the Hakka and Fukenese settlements, Dutch, Portuguese and Qing colonization, Japanese occupation and modernization and finally Chinese KMT dictatorship. Only when Beijing eventually relinquishes the claim of sovereignty over Taiwan, will the competing and highly attractive model chosen by the Taiwanese people cease to threaten the institutions of PRC as a model of Chinese statehood. It will then remain of relevance only to the future of the island, rather than its more populous neighbor.

But as the crowds of excitable fenqing seem to show in their wholesale support for the regime in Beijing, one institution that appears victorious in the struggle to define the “Chineseness” of the public life is the surviving Leninist/Brezhnevist structure of the so-called “democratic centralism”. It underpins the system of appointments within the party and defines the terms of the selection of officials. Certain parallels between the Chinese bureaucratic tradition and the former Soviet system are quite astonishing. Scholars have identified striking similarities between the structure and functions of the Censorate, internal and external surveillance organ of the Tang Dynasty in 7th c. and the Procurator’s Office of the USSR. Do such parallels rule out the implantation of democratic institutions in China?

The term ‘democracy’ (minzhu) is one of many Western concepts that entered Chinese language via Japanese Meiji scholarship in the late 19th c. It is used coyly in the otherwise tedious proceedings of CCP’s conclaves, but the signifier has been long divorced from the commonly accepted signified. Rules and principles that govern internal competition within CCP rarely surface in a system which relies on decision-making by a small group of people.

The concept of human rights presents a different set of challenges. Chinese legal tradition is essentially vertical and focuses on the concept of retribution. Normativity was present only in punishment; criminal law was the only law, and civil affairs were governed by conciliation, not legal statutes. In the anti-egalitarian conservatism of Confucian “harmony”, there was no room for rights to counterbalance the notions of duty and obligation. Here, communism found a ready ally in Confucianism and its opposition to the concept of “rights” (in its bourgeois or legalist meaning, respectively).

Chinese intellectual tradition has not been a fertile ground for constructive institutional criticism or scientific skepticism. But as the bequest of critical thinkers such as Hu Shi (d.1962) and Bo Yang (d.2008) testifies, there has always been a margin of free debate that empowered such eminently Chinese thinkers. It is fallacious to observe the lack of evidence that the Chinese people have thrived under a democratic regime and then conclude that they would not, if given a chance. Lack of evidence that something is the case is not equivalent to the observation that something is not the case.

Nevertheless, in the so-called “People’s” Republic, to argue in favor of a broad-based, “Western” form of democracy or human rights is considered unpatriotic and therefore treacherous. Any arguments directed against “traditional”, and “Chinese” authoritarianism are not only dangerous, but unnatural, untraditional and therefore anti-Chinese. Allergic to westernization, Chinese Communist Party identifies its authoritarian tradition with “Chineseness”. Paradoxically, it is here that the Taiwanese experience represents a threat to Beijing. If it is to be considered “Chinese”, that is.