Sinification, Nationalism and Identity in Chinese Intellectual Discourse

Timothy Cheek, University of British Columbia
February 2004

Popular nationalism has been a social fact in China (PRC) over the past decade. It is also a staple of the pulp book and magazine industry, from The China That Can Say No to China Viewed from the Third Eye. Significantly, this strongly-felt sense of national pride and, especially, national dignity (and often fears of humiliation) finds a strong voice among China’s middle class and intellectual circles. These phenomena have been the subject of numerous scholarly studies. This paper seeks to contribute to that literature by assessing the role of nationalism (minzhuzhuyi) and patriotism (aiguozhuyi) in contemporary Chinese intellectual discourse. It seeks to document and analyze how such concepts of nationalism (the terms themselves or related ideas) are deployed in major intellectual debates and in popular (as distinct from professionally academic) intellectual journals and websites published in China.

Intellectual discourse, the writings of China’s public intellectuals, uses nationalism in contradictory ways, sometimes for goals of liberation (empowerment of the poor, providing a check on government and commercial powers, etc.) and sometimes in defense of the authoritarian state. Equally, these concepts are sometimes explicitly invoked and at other times implicitly shape discussions. These contradictory usages turn up in the issue of “Chinese characteristics” in political programs and the question of “sinification” of foreign theory. In all these intellectual discussions the core issue appears to be the question of identity: what is it to be Chinese in the 21st century—must one be socialist, Confucian, or live in the PRC to be Chinese? Nationalism, then, emerges in contemporary Chinese intellectual debate as quite a different thing from the Cold War concept of identity tied to one of two social systems and a single nation state. Finally the paper seeks to put this Chinese experience into a form to facilitate comparison with other Asian experiences.