Chapter Abstract
How do people come to identify with nations? This chapter examines how people come to identify with nations, focusing specific attention on how nationalist discourses in China have addressed questions of cultural difference and common origins. Traditional approaches to nationalism emphasise unity, cohesiveness and the commonality of the people within a particular territory brought together under the rubric of the nation. This chapter proposes instead that nationalist discourse operate at the conceptual margins of the nation to include and exclude. It is in these marginal spaces that the problematic, contested, contingent, and ambivalent nature of the nation is most apparent. Focusing on Chinese nation-building policies towards overseas Chinese and ethnic minorities, this chapter shows that nationalism is not delimited by the territorial sovereign boundaries of the state, but works in conjunction with other non-territorial markers of distinction, such as race.
Additional web content and audio-visual materials
1. China’s Century of Humiliation: This documentary film by Mitch Anderson (2011) explores Chinese experiences of nation-building: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boPkMCJSYSs
2. Policing the Contour Lines - China’s Cartographic Obsession: Episode 19 of the Little Red Podcast series reflects upon the politics of map-making in China: http://www.chinoiresie.info/little-red-podcast/
3. Why Being an African in China is Difficult?: This video features a series of short interviews with long-term African residents in Guangzhou about their lives in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4Ew4GliVUY
4. Life Inside China’s Re-Education Camps: A Wall Street Journal video investigation into a growing network of internment camps, where hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uighurs are believed to have been detained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swCf6Z5REwI
5. Overseas Chinese: Stories of Struggle and Success: A three-part documentary film about Chinese diaspora developed by a Chinese production company. It is representative of the official state narratives about Chinese emigration and Chinese communities abroad: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjErQil8g4TvW0jJxwi0fTuuJxWge22TM
Global Politics Film Club
Wolf Totem (2015), dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud
Based on the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Chinese novelist Jiang Rong, this feature film looks into the relationship between China’s majority Han group and the nomadic Mongolianpeople through the eyes of a Han student sent to the Inner Mongolia region during Cultural Revolution (1966-76). The film interrogates the conflicted nature of China’s modernisation project and the cultural and ecological costs of its economic transformations.
Seminar room activities
Activity: Ask students to reflect on the moments, situations, and contexts when they take on a particular national or ethnic identity. What language is used? What factors play a determining role in how they present themselves? What other categories and forms of identification are available to them in those instances? Ask students to study carefully details included in their identification documents and compare them to those contained in documents issued by other countries. For example, Chinese ID cards have information on the ethnic group of the document holder. What is the significance of it? Do other countries include this detail in their documents? Discuss the underlying factors and implications of this for political rule and experiences of ethnic identity.
Assessment Questions
- What political tensions does the question of how we come to identify with nations highlight?
- How can the limitations of the main approaches to the study of national identities be addressed?
- Are alternative ways to national forms of identification needed? How viable are they?
- How can analyses of marginal places and people help in the study of national identities?