Nationalism, Democracy and National Integration in China (Routledge Contemporary China Series, 1)

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Nationalism, Democracy and National Integration in China

This book examines the changing role of nationalism in China in the light of the immense political and economic changes there during the 1990s. It analyses recent debates between the nationalists (and New Left) and liberals in China, examining the roles played by state-sponsored and populist nationalism in China’s foreign relations with the West in general and the US in particular. The issues of Taiwanese nationalism and Tibet and Xinjiang separatism are discussed, with a focus on the questions surrounding the impact of globalization on national integration, and the relationship between democracy and national integration. Should democracy precede national democracy and national integration, could democracy be realized only after national integration, or are democracy and national integration mutually exclusive objectives? This book also examines the roles played by the People’s Liberation Army and ﬁscal system in China in promoting Chinese nationalism and national integration. Leong H. Liew is associate professor at the School of International Business and Asian Studies, Grifﬁth University, Brisbane, Australia. He has published extensively on various aspects of China’s political economy. Shaoguang Wang is professor of political science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the chief editor of the China Review, an interdisciplinary journal on greater China. His research focus has been on China’s political economy and he has authored or co-authored over 10 books in Chinese and English.

RoutledgeCurzon Contemporary China Series

1

Nationalism, Democracy and National Integration in China Leong H. Liew and Shaoguang Wang

2

Hong Kong’s Tortuous Democratization A comparative analysis Ming Sing

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Nationalism, Democracy and National Integration in China

Edited by Leong H. Liew and Shaoguang Wang

First published 2004 by RoutledgeCurzon 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2004 editorial matter and selection, Leong H. Liew and Shaoguang Wang; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-40429-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-33987-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–30750–3 (Print Edition)

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Contents

List of illustrations Notes on contributors Preface

vii viii ix

PART I

Introduction 1 The nexus between nationalism, democracy and national integration

1 3

LEONG H. LIEW AND DOUG SMITH

PART II

Democracy and Chinese nationalism 2 Barking up the wrong tree: the liberal–nationalist debate on democracy and identity

21 23

YINGJIE GUO

3 The rise of neo-nationalism and the New Left: a postcolonial and postmodern perspective

44

MOBO CHANGFAN GAO

PART III

Chinese nationalism and Sino-US relations 4 Chinese nationalism and the Belgrade embassy bombing

63 65

BEN HILLMAN

5 Chinese nationalism and Sino-US relations: the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade JOSEPH CHENG AND KINGLUN NGOK

85

vi

Contents

PART IV

Taiwanese nationalism 6 Taiwan’s evolving nationalism: ideology for independence

105 107

C.L. CHIOU

7 The political formation of Taiwanese nationalism

122

CHIA-LUNG LIN

PART V

Market, democracy and national integration 8 China’s minorities and national integration

145 147

COLIN MACKERRAS

9 China’s national identity: a source of conﬂict between democracy and state nationalism

170

BAOGANG HE

10 Reaching out to Taiwan, keeping in Xinjiang: the impact of marketization and globalization on national integration

196

LEONG H. LIEW

PART VI Institutions promoting national integration

219

11 For national unity: the political logic of ﬁscal transfer in China

221

SHAOGUANG WANG

12 Nationalism, the Chinese defence culture and the People’s Liberation Army

247

JI YOU

Index

261

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Illustrations

Figures 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

True character can never change NATO aiming for peace, but at what price? Is NATO US led? Beg your pardon, we’re just about to accidentally hurt you

75 76 77 78

Tables 7.1 7.2

Typology for distinguishing nationalists and non-nationalists Changes in national identity, statehood preference and attitudes towards nation-state building over time, comparing the general public and the elite 7.3 Changes in attitudes towards nation-state building over time, by ethnicity 7.4 Understandings about being Taiwanese 7.5 Understandings about being Chinese 7.6 Taiwanese pride v. Chinese pride 7.7 Reactions to China’s military intimidation during the 1996 election 8.1 Lengths of roads, railways and postal routes in operation in minority areas 10.1 National and provincial GDP (1978 and 1998) 10.2 National and provincial compositions of GDP 10.3 Current account identity 10.4 Domestic, foreign and border trade, Xinjiang and Guangdong 10.5 Transport, post and telecommunication services in Xinjiang 11.1 Fiscal disparities among China’s 31 provinces, 1998 11.2 Central–provincial transfers, 1998 11.3 Testing variables that explain central–provincial transfers, 1998 11.4 Fiscal transfers to minority-concentrated provinces, 1998 A11.1 Provincial–county transfers, 1998 A11.2 Explaining provincial–county transfers, 1998

124 125 126 128 129 138 140 156 202 203 204 209 211 224 228 233 238 241 243

Contributors

Joseph Cheng is Professor and Director at the Contemporary China Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong. C.L. Chiou is Professor at the Graduate Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Tamkang University (Taiwan) and Presidential Advisor. Mobo Changfan Gao is Associate Professor at the University of Tasmania (Australia). Yingjie Guo is a Lecturer at the Institute for International Studies, University of Technology, Sydney (Australia). Baogang He is Senior Research Fellow at the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore, on leave from the University of Tasmania (Australia). Ben Hillman is a doctoral student at the Contemporary China Centre, Australian National University. Leong H. Liew is Associate Professor at the School of International Business and Asian Studies, Grifﬁth University, Brisbane (Australia). Chia-lung Lin is Senior Advisor for the National Security Council (Taiwan). Colin Mackerras is Professor at the School of International Business and Asian Studies, Grifﬁth University, Brisbane (Australia). Kinglun Ngok is Research Fellow at the Contemporary China Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong. Doug Smith is Lecturer at the School of International Business and Asian Studies, Grifﬁth University, Brisbane (Australia). Shaoguang Wang is Professor at the Department of Government and Public Administration, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Ji You is Senior Lecturer at the School of Politics, University of New South Wales (Australia).

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Preface

The centrifugal forces of economic and social liberalization in the People’s Republic of China have projected democracy, nationalism and national integration as pivotal issues for the Chinese people and their leaders. These issues are also portentous for many outside China who seek to understand how to engage most effectively with this seemingly ever more powerful nation undergoing political and social as well as economic transformation. Recognizing this, a regional workshop on nationalism, democracy and national integration in China was held in Brisbane, Australia, in January 2001, to examine the importance of these issues and the complex relationships between them. The 2001 workshop was the genesis of this book. Scholars from Australia, Hong Kong, Mainland China, Singapore and Taiwan took part in the workshop over two days. Authors have revised their workshop papers in the light of workshop discussion, additional research, and further time (which included the 11 September terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC in 2001). The book has 12 chapters in six parts. Chapter 1 is more than an introduction to the book; it introduces some key concepts and identiﬁes linkages and disjunctures in the literature on Chinese nationalism, democracy and national integration. It also identiﬁes key issues on the topics highlighted directly and indirectly by other authors in the book. The remaining chapters are presented in ﬁve parts. Part II examines views held by PRC intellectuals about democracy and nationalism. In particular, it analyses debates between the liberals and ‘New Left’. Part III considers Chinese nationalism in Sino-US relations and Part IV examines Taiwanese nationalism in the light of PRC efforts at reuniﬁcation. Chapters in Part V explore issues of market and democracy in relation to national identity and national integration, and Part VI examines two key institutions – China’s system of ﬁscal transfers and the People’s Liberation Army – that impact on national integration.

Acknowledgements Many people and organizations have contributed generously to the production of this book and we express our sincere thanks to them. In particular,

x Preface we thank the Grifﬁth Asia Paciﬁc Council (Grifﬁth University, Australia), headed by Professor Robert Elson, which provided generous funding for the Brisbane workshop where authors explored, shared, contested and enriched their preliminary ideas for this book. We thank Grifﬁth University’s School of International Business and Asian Studies, headed by Professor William Shepherd, which also contributed funds for the workshop. Some authors in this book have received research support for the projects taken up in their chapters and their acknowledgements appear within the chapters. In addition to the other 11 authors who have contributed to the chapters in this book, we thank RoutledgeCurzon’s anonymous reader of our manuscript for constructive comments. We acknowledge the invaluable contribution of Jia Qingguo, Associate Dean, School of International Studies at Beijing University, who presented and contributed signiﬁcantly at the workshop. Bruce Jacobs and David Schak also made signiﬁcant contributions to the workshop discussions. Robyn White skilfully formatted the content of this book and Margie Brenan provided editing assistance. Most of all we wish to express our thanks to Maureen Todhunter and Donna Gregory for their invaluable contributions to this book as, respectively, copy-editor and project manager. Leong H. Liew and Shaoguang Wang April 2003

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Part I

Introduction

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1

The nexus between nationalism, democracy and national integration Leong H. Liew and Doug Smith

There is little doubt that nationalism played a central role in China’s struggle for modernity and international respect throughout the twentieth century. Early debates about Chinese nationalism sought to identify its origins in a China that had previously found unity through the strength of its own culture, rather than through politics. For millennia, the power of Chinese culture served, sometimes more and sometimes less, to assimilate external threats. But the strength of Chinese culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries proved insufﬁcient to meet the military technology and destabilizing economic power of the modern state, and the once great regional power was humbled at the hands of a few Western nations and Japan. Much has been made of the absence of nationalism in Asia. It was the American and French revolutions in the eighteenth century that saw the rise of modern nationalism, with ‘the ﬁrst ideological conception of the nation’ (Anderson 2002: 7). Early modern nationalism was Euro-centric, linked intimately to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and it was European intrusion into Asia and the realization by Asian proto-nationalists of the currency of the concept that provoked the development of nationalism in Asia. The universalism implied in the maxim ‘all under the Chinese emperor’ now had no place within the world of nations. For China to secure a place, Chinese leaders clearly had to draw together the population to build what many saw as China’s only defence against imperialism – a modern nation-state. Nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen’s passionate call for that ‘loose sheet of sand’ (founded for millennia on the particularistic ties of family, clan and village) to come together into a modern nation-state is well known. Numerous modern Chinese leaders from both the right and left have echoed the call for cohesion throughout the struggles that followed Sun’s incomplete nationalist revolution. The leaders of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, for example, attacked Confucianism, arguing it should no longer be the national essence (guocui). The people of China were to become patriots, upholding Mr Science and Mr Democracy to build a modern nation capable of resisting imperialism and standing proud among the nations of the world.

4 Leong H. Liew and Doug Smith Many Chinese traditions were now seen as obstacles to China’s advance into this modern world. Importantly, the May Fourth Movement saw the need to shift the rationale of the state towards the Chinese people themselves. While this national project was never completed under the auspices of the Movement, the attempts in the wake of the Movement provided useful groundwork for the efforts that followed. Nationalism found unique – and ironic1 – expression in the unity secured by Mao Zedong through Marxist ideology in establishing the People’s Republic in 1949. Mao saw the organizational power of nationalism and used it judiciously to draw a fractured society into the semblance of a modern nation in response to external threats, especially from Japan and the US. Mao used the time-honoured approach of establishing a national myth upon which to establish the nation of the People’s Republic of China, when he claimed: [t]he Chinese nation is known throughout the world not only for its industriousness and stamina, but also for its ardent love of freedom and its rich revolutionary traditions. The history of the Han people . . . demonstrates that the Chinese never submit to tyrannical rule but invariably use revolutionary means to overthrow or change it. . . . Thus the Chinese nation has a glorious revolutionary tradition and a splendid historical heritage. (Mao 1965: 314) Mao identiﬁed nationalism as one of the most powerful exports from the West, and strongly embraced it in his task of nation-building. Mao’s nationalism stressed patriotism through loyalty to the nation and to the state. It anticipated a world in which a fraternity of socialist nations predominated over the capitalist West. Mao’s nationalism was therefore qualiﬁed by a commitment to the internationalist imperatives of Marxism and Leninism. Both Mao and Stalin used nationalism to serve the cause of national economic development and modernization. But nationalism and the left do not always sit together comfortably. As Mobo Gao points out in Chapter 3 in this volume, in contrast to the situation in contemporary China, in Europe it is often the right that raises the banner of nationalism in politics. Epitomizing the position of the left in Europe, Hardt and Negri (2000), the authors of Empire – a neo-Marxist critique of globalization – are critical of nationalism and the forging of national identities. They write approvingly of Rosa Luxemburg, a revolutionary ﬁgure of the early twentieth century who was much admired by Trotsky and a vehement critic of nationalism. They point out that her most powerful argument against nationalism was not that it divides the working class – an issue of extreme concern to her and presumably to the authors – but that it ‘means dictatorship and is thus profoundly incompatible with any attempt at democratic organization’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 97).

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Views repudiating nationalism gained resonance among many Western scholars of China after 1978. These scholars have argued that in the dramatic shift after 1978 away from utopian ideology to commerce and patriotism, nationalism functioned or was manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to foster the legitimacy of the Party in the eyes of the Chinese masses (Nelson 2000: 262; Unger 1996: xi). Even the strong defence of Chinese nationalism and call for a more balanced understanding of a rising China, as put by scholar Zheng Yongnian, assumes that nationalism ﬁlls the ideological vacuum left by the decline in Marxism. Zheng claimed: A strong sense of national pride comes to average Chinese citizens, a sense probably as strong as they felt when Mao Zedong declared the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. The Chinese leadership certainly welcomes this resurgence of nationalism because a new ideology is necessary as faith in Marxism or Maoism declines, and nationalism, if handled properly, can justify the political legitimacy of the leadership. In other words, nationalism can become the ideological basis of a transitional regime that turns away from totalitarianism but is not yet democratized. The leadership, aware of the danger of an ideological vacuum, often consciously appeals to nationalism to legitimate its political governance. (Zheng 1999: 2)

Chinese nationalism in the new millennium By the 1990s, most urban Chinese had accepted the limitations of MarxismLeninism in the newly emerging global economy, and had accepted the need to develop new identities with which to manage their working lives. Conceptually, economic life should not be thought ‘exogenous’ to national life. As Crane (1999: 217) identiﬁed, economic life works in a number of ways to incorporate the population into the national narrative: ‘economic historical experiences of suffering that are made into powerful signs of collective identity; economic accomplishments that can serve as emblems of shared glory; and assertions of societal unity rooted in a common economic life’. These new identities have been sustained by China’s very strong economic growth since 1978. According to the World Bank (1997: ix), China’s GDP per capita grew an average of 8.2 per cent annually between 1978 and the mid-1990s, and in the process lifted 200 million people out of poverty. Between 1995 and 2000 China received 40 per cent of the foreign direct investment ﬂows into Asia and in the 1990s had outperformed most of its Asian neighbours in export growth (CSRC 2002: Ch. 5). Depending on whether purchasing power calculations are used, China is now the second or third largest economy in the world after the US and perhaps Japan.

6 Leong H. Liew and Doug Smith The collapse of the Soviet Empire was a shock to the leaders of China and heralded the end of any pretence of utopian ideology in China. The CCP’s subsequent inquest into the Soviet collapse led the Party leadership to conclude that the Party’s continued relevance, even survival, depends on how well it can meet the material expectations of the Chinese people. The CCP leadership came to recognize the potential of nationalism as more than an instrument for achieving political and social stability and reinforcing its own legitimacy. Party leaders now also recognize nationalism as a powerful source of motivation that will propel the Chinese people to compete successfully in the global league of economic and other competitions. Greenfeld’s impressive study, The Spirit of Capitalism (Greenfeld 2001), documents how nationalism has served as a strong motivator for national economic achievement in many countries: [N]ationalism implies international competition. This makes competitiveness a measure of success in every sphere [that] a nation deﬁnes as signiﬁcant for its self-image, and commits societies [that] deﬁne themselves as nations to a race with a relative and therefore forever receding ﬁnish line. When the economy is included among the areas of competition, this presupposes a commitment to constant growth. In other words, the sustained growth characteristic of modern economy is not self-sustained; it is stimulated and sustained by nationalism. (Greenfeld 2001: 23) Unlike Greenfeld, who sees the role of nationalism primarily to motivate people towards national economic competitiveness and has nothing to say about its possible role in developing a nation’s capabilities for economic growth, in China we see nationalism contributing to national capability as well as arousing desire for economic growth. Of course, China’s impressive economic performance since 1978 cannot be attributed solely to nationalism; gradual radical reform of institutions or ‘rules of the game’ has obviously played a major role. However, as Liew (1997: 149) has argued, the need ‘to encourage and develop productive [rather than unproductive] entrepreneurial behaviour and the imperative to retain modes of cooperative behaviour during the transition to a market economy . . . is the most difﬁcult task facing [Chinese] reformers’. We believe that the CCP’s adroit use of nationalism has made this task easier. We contend that the gap ﬁlled by nationalism in place of communist ideology, to moderate otherwise unrestrained maximizing behaviour among economic actors, cannot be underestimated. Nationalism is providing the motivation for the modicum of cooperative behaviour among economic actors in China’s economy while it is in transition from central planning to market. It has thus contributed signiﬁcantly to minimizing the free-rider problem, and has facilitated economic reform.

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Here we see the reciprocity between nationalism and marketization. For, while nationalism has contributed to China’s successes in economic reform, these successes in turn have lubricated the emergence of a type of nationalism that has promoted China’s international status. China is recognized today as a ‘rising economic and military power’ with, importantly, a set of historically accumulated grievances against the West. Xiao Gongqin’s widely held view casts these grievances as a ‘profound sense of humiliation’ caused by the setbacks and frustrations that the Chinese people have experienced historically. This has ‘planted in the Chinese people a certain complex that is accumulated and settled in the deepest recesses of the Chinese mentality’. This complex can be called ‘the dream of becoming a strong nation’ (cited in Zheng 1999: 74). This humiliation and the ‘dream’ were other important aspects of twentieth-century Chinese identity. Some Chinese intellectuals perceived China had fallen from greatness to backwardness at least partially because of weaknesses in the national character. The broad popularity of Lu Hsun’s The True Story of Ah Q (1955) and Bo Yang’s The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis of Chinese Culture (1991) resonates clearly with the pessimism and anxiety2 among many learned Chinese about the state of their nation. However, recent triumphs in a number of areas complement China’s growing signiﬁcance in the global economy, and have helped to reverse attitudes to the ‘backwardness of Chinese culture’. Beijing’s success in winning the bid to stage the 2008 Olympic Games highlights China’s propensity as an emerging and conﬁdent international player. Gone now is the earlier anxiety about Chinese ‘ways’ among many Chinese cultural leaders, as evidenced by the wave of Chinese literary and cinematic products capturing both art-house and mainstream audiences around the world. Ben Hillman’s Chapter 4 in this volume describes this phenomenon as ‘a renewed celebration of Chineseness’. For Hillman, cultural forms of nationalism are benign. They create a sense of community and link the past to the future, providing a sense of direction for the nation as a whole. According to Hillman, the goals of Chinese nationalism now depend increasingly on this direction, as the dream of a socialist utopia has been ended by market reforms. Most Chinese liberals, however, are not so welcoming of cultural nationalism, seeing it as a major obstacle to democracy in China. Andrew Nathan suggests that the ‘generally accepted sense’ of a democracy requires the existence of a system for open competitive elections under universal franchise, together with ‘the freedoms of organization and speech needed to enable self-generated political groups to compete effectively in these elections’ (Nathan 2000: 22). Using this deﬁnition, he argues that democracy has never really been tried in China. Pre-1949 attempts at democratization generally lacked universal franchise and effective institutions, and were sabotaged by political instability and corruption. Post-1949 communist governments have also incorporated democratic ideals within

8 Leong H. Liew and Doug Smith their ideology, but failed to deliver democracy in a practical sense. Mao himself clearly highlighted democratic ideals as the raison d’être of the government, which – in theory if not in practice – was to be ‘one that genuinely represents the people’s interests; it is a government that serves the people’ (cited in Hsu 1971: 587). Yet these democratic aspirations devolved into dictatorship over the proletariat under the Leninist leadership of the party. One of Mao’s designated successors, Liu Shoaqi, explained of this political arrangement: [p]ersonal interests must be subordinated to the Party’s interests, the interests of the local Party organization to those of the entire Party, the interests of the part to those of the whole, and temporary to longterm interests. This is a Marxist-Leninist principle which must be followed by every communist . . . When a Party member’s personal interests are subordinated to those of the Party, they are subordinated to the interests of the emancipation of the class and the nation, and those of communism and social progress . . . (cited in Hsu 1971: 581–2, 584) One could argue credibly that tension between democratic ideals and authoritarian party leadership was at the heart of the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). The need to relieve this tension became an important priority for the government of Deng Xiaoping, who liberalized much of the economy and certain aspects of social life. Baogang He has underlined the signiﬁcance of the Cultural Revolution as a prelude to the democratic movements in contemporary China by comparing this revolution to the religious wars of Europe, which gave birth to increased tolerance in those states after the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 (Baogang He 1996: 1). The reforms that Deng introduced from 1978 sought to counter the social aberrations of the Cultural Revolution. However, reforms can be a doubleedged sword. Political and economic liberalization gained for the CCP government the needed legitimacy that drained severely during the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution. Yet this liberalization has also unleashed powerful forces that many argue will in the end pull the Chinese Communist Party from government. The Party leadership has treated democratic movements in 1978, 1987 and 1989 with varying degrees of severity, and all three incidences indicate that the Party is not as ripe for democratic change from below as it is for redevelopment of nationalist sentiments from above. A trend towards democratic development appears to parallel the rise of nationalism. This has led to considerable tension, articulated in the late 1980s through debate between liberal Chinese intellectuals and neoauthoritarian factions within the government. Neo-authoritarians claimed that, rather than democratization, China needed recentralization to promote economic reform and build a strong nation. Liberals, on the other hand,

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argued that statism and recentralization weakens state power – China needed democratization through political reform. The liberal arguments did not discount the need for a strong state, but argued against nationalism and for democracy as the foundation of the state. Wang Deshang and Li Zehou, two leading liberals, argued that they stood for: . . . centralization. The central government must be strong and have great authority. If power is too decentralized and local governments do not follow the mandate from the centre, then a civil war will be inevitable. Without a strong central government to coordinate, regulate, and control diverse local interests, there will be disaster . . . Neo-authoritarianism aims to institutionalize centralized power. But China needs to transit to democracy and the rule of law. (translated and cited in Zheng 1999: 151) After the 1989 Tiananmen incident, where the authorities cracked down heavily on civilian demonstrators, participants in the debates on democracy tended to divide between liberals and nationalists instead of liberals and neo-authoritarians. As Guo Yingjie points out in Chapter 2, what is so striking about their views is that ‘they regard liberalism or nationalism, rather than authoritarianism, as the main obstacle to democratization’. Guo’s chapter and Chapter 3 by Mobo Gao explore the current debate between the liberals/New Right and nationalists/New Left in the print media and Internet over democracy and other socio-political and cultural issues. Guo, focusing on debate in print media, argues that the positions of both camps on democracy and national identity are closer to each other than they seem. The disputes over nationalism versus democracy and national identity versus freedom ‘are probably easier to reconcile than the more emotional disputes over attitudes towards the Chinese Party-State and the US’. Guo holds that these concepts are not mutually exclusive and believes that it is unfortunate that most liberals and nationalists are ‘still guided by the age-old Chinese adage “no deconstruction, no construction”’, which makes reconciliation between them difﬁcult. For Guo, liberals and nationalists should recognize ‘that the construction of a democratic future for China does not require deconstruction of all that is now seen to be undemocratic in China’s past or present’. Gao, on the other hand, sees irreconcilable differences between the two camps in his analysis of debates through the Internet. Gao sees that the future modernization of China is at stake here, with attitudes of the liberals and nationalists towards the US closely aligned with their preferred models of modernization. That China should modernize is not in dispute; the problem is rather which modernization path China should take, given rapid changes from globalization. While Guo is ambivalent about where his sympathies lie, Gao clearly sympathizes with the New Left. Gao notes the liberals’ preference for transforming China with Western Enlightenment

10

Leong H. Liew and Doug Smith

and humanist rationality, but he questions how the liberals can rightly ignore or reject the New Left argument that the very structure of Western rationality has racist and imperialist implications.

Nationalism and international relations Whether and how to engage or contain China has become one of the key foreign policy issues for many nations in the West. Many in the US have embraced the ‘China threat’ thesis, adopting a seemingly anti-China attitude that often ﬁnds expression in reports such as that to the US Congress, produced by the China Security Review Commission (CSRC 2002), and articles in the print media. Charles Krauthammer’s declaration in Time magazine (well circulated in Chinese intellectual circles) of the need for ‘us’ to ‘contain’ China is a prime example. China, he argues, is: an expanding power that will ruthlessly act to preserve its dictatorship. The US needs to apply pressure now that will contain China and promote democracy there. Though diplomats cannot come out and say it, this means undermining the authoritarian regime. (Krauthammer 1995: 72) Similarly, David Shambaugh (1999) highlighted the dangers of Chinese nationalism in his article, ‘Insecure China is stoking xenophobic nationalism’, in the International Herald Tribune. Shambaugh claimed ‘A succession of Chinese Governments has periodically stoked [xenophobia] for their own purposes – from the boxer rebellion at the turn of the century to Chiang Kai-shek’s neofascist manifesto in the 1930s, to Mao’s Cultural Revolution’. ‘Containing China’ and Chinese nationalism are hot topics not only in academic and political print media but also in such popular media as the Internet. We want to be careful here not to reduce these sorts of critical comments simply to anti-China stances; one must always take care not to accept statements in international politics at their face value. Yet we must point out here that many nationalist writers in China have construed these comments as anti-China. Many Chinese elites and intellectuals have interpreted these discussions as ‘the West’ denying ‘China’ fair treatment. Much of the new nationalism may well be a direct result of these seemingly anti-China attitudes and many Chinese themselves have developed strong feelings about American attitudes to China. While the 1980s saw growing Chinese respect for the West and things Western, since 1989 there have been signs of growing disenchantment with the West, particularly the US. Signiﬁcantly, Chinese have noticed that the post-1989 transformation of Russia and its previous satellite states of Eastern Europe to liberal/capitalist states has not lived up to the expectations of many, if

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not most, of their peoples, despite promises of better living standards and democracy. Wang Hui from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences claims that Samuel Huntington’s polemical work on the clash of civilizations has led Chinese intellectuals to believe that they are alien to Western cultures (cited in Zheng 1999: 19). In the light of human-rights demands and calls for liberalization inside China, the clash of civilizations thesis has inspired some Chinese intellectuals to take on defence of Confucian civilization as their mission. There is now, as Gao has argued forcefully in his chapter in this book, a general uneasiness in China about some beliefs and value systems that are dominant in the West, and their suitability for postcommunist states, particularly China. This uneasiness forms an inﬂuential component of contemporary Chinese nationalism. Three issues in particular have sharpened and refocused these aspects of Chinese nationalism, not only for the elites but also the masses. The ﬁrst was the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade on 8 May 1999, which aroused a huge wave of anti-American sentiment nationwide in China. Ironically, Chinese are likely to regale Westerners with this information in a McDonalds, sipping a Coke or over a Budweiser, while wearing jeans designed in the US or Europe. Perhaps more ironically, this antiAmerican sentiment at the heart of the new nationalism is much stronger among the young, who are more likely to frequent McDonalds or Pizza Hut. The US still remains the number one destination for Chinese students studying overseas. Holland (1999) tries to explain this as the individual American remaining popular in China, despite a strong distrust of the invisible American. Holland cites a 30-year-old insurance salesman sitting in McDonalds during the demonstrations following the Belgrade embassy bombing, who claimed, ‘I cannot accept the US attack on China’s sovereignty and we must stand up to that, but this is lunch’ (Holland 1999: 13). There are of course more radical emotions and actions, such as parading placards in the Guangzhou demonstrations in May 1999 stating: ‘I’d rather die of thirst than drink Coca-Cola; I’d rather starve to death than eat McDonalds’ (cited in Hooper 2000: 439). The second key event was the collision between a Chinese ﬁghter plane and a US spy plane on 1 April 2001, forcing the spy plane to land on Hainan Island and killing the Chinese pilot. While it seems the US plane was in international airspace, the incident brought home to the Chinese people that the US views China as a sufﬁcient threat to warrant close surveillance. As with the Belgrade embassy bombing, Internet chat rooms reﬂected considerable indignation over the issue. It is likely that the sardonic letter below, which was circulated widely on the Internet, reﬂects the feelings of many ordinary Chinese who, after the embassy incident, were extremely sensitive about China’s treatment in the international arena.

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Leong H. Liew and Doug Smith Dear American: My name is U. Sam. Here was what happened last weekend. I drove a van circling around your house, took pictures of your backyard, recorded your bedroom conversation with your wife with high-tech devices. I admit I did that routinely. But, I drove on a PUBLIC road. When your kid came out biking, I hit and killed him. I swear, it was an accident. Then, my van was landed on your backyard. So, you should send my van, my equipment and my friends on board back to me immediately, otherwise, the relationship between your family and my family could be damaged. By the way, I have no intention to apologize because I did nothing wrong. It happened on a PUBLIC road. Uncle Sam (personal communication)

The third and most important issue is Taiwan. Anxiety over the growing push for independence in Taiwan is building not only among Mainland leaders; a considerable number of Mainland citizens themselves feel passionately that Taiwan is part of the Chinese nation. Yet support for independence inside Taiwan is also strong. Lee Teng-hui was the ﬁrst Taiwanese president to openly canvass the idea of a fully independent and sovereign Taiwan. He found considerable support among the youth of Taiwan who had never known a home on the Mainland. Nothing has inﬂamed the situation in Mainland eyes more than Lee’s 1995 visit to his Alma Mater, Cornell University, in the US. Taiwan’s various attempts to gain a seat in the United Nations, and other attempts to gain recognition as an independent state, have continued to aggravate the Chinese government. Just before the Taiwanese elections in 1996, cross-Strait tension had escalated such that the Chinese government felt the need to hold aggressive naval manoeuvres in the Taiwan Strait to show its intransigence. Clearly the growing movement for independence in Taiwan is a crucial issue for Chinese nationalists on the Mainland. For Mainland nationalists, it is imperative that Taiwan be included in a truly integrated Chinese nation. Internet chat rooms in China have revealed quite hardline attitudes to the Taiwan issue. Wang Jisi, Director of the Institute of American Studies of the Chinese Academy of Science, suggests that generally Internet users believe that the Mainland government has been too soft on Taiwan (Wang 2001: 24). Ben Hillman’s Chapter 4 in this book examines articles in Renmin ribao (RMRB), the Mainland’s ofﬁcial party newspaper, to analyse how nationalism was conveyed in that paper in response to the US bombing of China’s Belgrade embassy. Hillman found that China’s ofﬁcial media displayed a calculated degree of restraint in its coverage of this incident, proving that China’s leaders were in ‘supreme command over the nationalist rhetoric’. Here was a calculated show of anger against the bombing that recognized and used the opportunity to advocate what Hillman considers to be

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the positive aspects of Chinese nationalism – nation-building and cultural pride. Hillman cautions, however, that the negative aspect of Chinese nationalism – the idea of China as a victim of past injustices inﬂicted by the West – is always lurking beside the positive aspects of Chinese nationalism, and China’s leaders have to continually manage prudently its popular expression. Joseph Cheng and Kinglun Ngok argue in Chapter 5 on Chinese nationalism and Sino-US relations that China’s leaders are rational actors. The way in which these leaders responded to the embassy bombing and spyplane incidents shows that they are aware of China’s weaknesses and recognize the limitations of using nationalism to manage foreign affairs. Cheng and Ngok see that China’s leaders use nationalism mainly for domestic purposes – to preserve political stability and achieve national unity. However, Cheng and Ngok recognize that the leaders’ goal of national integration inevitably will involve disagreements with the US over Taiwan, an exception in foreign affairs where nationalism will feature powerfully. Nevertheless, the CCP recognizes that the legitimacy of its rule depends ultimately on its ability to improve the living standards of China’s people and the Party will evaluate China’s relations with the US in this light (Lampton 2001: 299). Cheng and Ngok claim that this will ensure that the CCP exercises extreme caution in exploiting nationalism, even for the very worthy goal of national unity. An important aspect of Chinese nationalism that foreign observers have emphasized is contemporary Chinese governments’ use of nationalism to gain legitimacy in the face of the decline of ideology. Yet this move is only part of a larger story. An understanding of Chinese nationalism that focuses totally on state-led nationalism ignores the new nationalism, which is often expressed spontaneously and is now seen in extra-bureaucratic and private sectors. The narrower perspective reduces nationalism to a mere instrument of government propaganda, which is simply not the case. In a discussion in 2000 on Chinese nationalism, Michael Yahuda compares minzu zhuyi (nationalism) with aiguozhuyi that translates as ‘lovestate-ism’. Yahuda argues that the CCP leadership encourages aiguo zhuyi, which highlights the role of the state – meaning the national leadership and the CCP – not only because the leadership ‘can use it to demand loyalty to the person, but also because the leaders themselves determine [the state’s] whole character’ (Yahuda 2000: 33–4). Yahuda’s claim may have some explanatory power. Yet it is surely the case that many Chinese can differentiate between their love of country and their feeling towards the state. The many spontaneous expressions of indignation at the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and the US spy-plane incidents from ordinary Chinese people are clear examples of non-state-sponsored nationalism. Within hours of the Chinese people learning of the two incidents, fervently nationalist discussions, many patently anti-American, raged through the Internet inside China. People outside China received emails from China

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reﬂecting a strong nationalist and even vitriolic response, and there was simply no way that the government could have mobilized such feeling in such a short time.

Taiwanese nationalism Gellner’s deﬁnition of nationalism as the desire to make the state, the nation and patriotism congruent has serious implications for the issues and relationships examined in this volume (Gellner 1983: 43). In the Taiwan case we need to question which state, which nation and whose patriotism. Mainland Chinese patriots vehemently support the inclusion of Taiwan in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), while Taiwanese patriots want an independent Taiwan. C.L. Chiou and Chia-lung Lin in Chapters 6 and 7 in this book put the case strongly for an independent Taiwan. Chiou points out that before the 28 February 1947 uprising against Nationalist rule on Taiwan, there was no Taiwanese nationalist consciousness. Taiwanese nationalism is based neither on ethnicity nor culture since most Taiwanese are Han. Chiou argues that Taiwanese nationalism arose from the movement of the then Taiwanese political opposition against the Nationalist government for democratic rights, which later developed into a political struggle by the Nationalist’s opponents to gain self-determination and independence from their ancestral home country. Chiou argues that this nationalism is neither anti-Confucian nor anti-Han, but anti-authoritarian, anti-communist and anti-Chinese-irredentist. For Chiou, this nationalism is the result of nation-building and political modernization. As Ernest Gellner claimed, it is ‘not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist’; it ‘engenders nations, and not the other way around’. In Chapter 7 Lin uses surveys carried out by himself and others in Taiwan, to examine Taiwanese identity. Lin believes that national identity is a social and political construct and like Chiou believes that Taiwanese nationalism grew out of the then Taiwanese opposition struggle against the Nationalists for democratic rights. In Lin’s view, the emerging Taiwanese national identity is the result of pull and push factors. Democratization in Taiwan pulled people together, creating a collective loyalty to the political system through their political participation. The push factor is the CCP’s opposition to Taiwan’s transition to a democracy. Chiou’s and Lin’s description of Taiwanese nationalism thus ﬁts with what Ben Anderson categorizes as creole nationalism, a nationalism that ‘was pioneered by settler populations from the Old Country, who shared religion, language and customs with the metropole but increasingly felt oppressed by and alienated from it’ (Anderson 2001: 33). Therefore while Chiou and Lin may accept the view that it is difﬁcult to conceive of nationalism without some reference to a ‘shared culture and ethnic

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community’ (Smith 2000: 17), they believe it is an insufﬁcient condition for nationalism.

Democracy and national integration ‘The Taiwan issue’ is highly complex, with arguments on both sides of the Strait that require serious examination. The questions of which state, which nation, and whose patriotism have serious implications for multi-ethnic nations like China. Consequently, nation building has been an important aspect of Chinese governance throughout the twentieth century. Chinese minority groups are very diverse and the levels to which these groups have been integrated into the Chinese nation have varied considerably. A number of groups are ethnically quite distinct from the Han, while others are quite similar. A number of these groups occupy strategically important regions that are close to the nation’s borders, often with considerable relations with their brethren across that border (Mackerras 1994: 4). The PRC has made considerable concessions to its national minorities through social and economic policy, but there are still acute tensions between the central government and a number of groups. Separatist sentiments are held by a number of ethnic minorities in Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia, where local customs and religions bear a heavy and direct inﬂuence on the political cultures of these regions. This situation has led Allan Liu to argue that the minorities ‘will remain the most alienated political culture(s) in China’ (Liu 2001: 265). The difﬁculty of integrating the various nationalities in China is examined by Colin Mackerras in Chapter 8, ‘China’s minorities and national integration’. Mackerras concludes that ‘China has “integrated” its minority nationalities well enough to function as an effective nation-state’, and he does not believe that any attempt through the use of force by Tibet and Xinjiang to secede from the PRC will be likely to succeed within the next ﬁve to ten years. He gives this assessment cognizant that since 1987, opposition to the state in places like Xinjiang has increased. His assessment is that outside factors may be more decisive than domestic factors in inﬂuencing China’s national integration, and military conﬂict over Taiwan is far more likely than conﬂict over nationality issues on the Mainland. Separatist movements in Xinjiang and Tibet, and the independence movement in Taiwan, highlight the tenuous nature of the Chinese nation. This tenuous nature has led a number of scholars to suggest that China is ‘a state looking for a nation’. Underlining this state action is an anxiety inspired by the rather tragic dismantling of the Soviet Union. The crucial issue here is how best to ‘control diverse local interests’ – with a more authoritarian government, or a more democratic one? It is particularly compelling to answer accurately when we recognize that the centrifugal forces that increased liberalization inside China, particularly in the border regions, may ignite into fully blown separatism.

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This acute tension is a crucial issue for Chinese democracy and Chinese nationalism to face. Ethnic separatism has been a signiﬁcant and tragic force in Eastern Europe, especially in the Balkans and Chechnya. The Chinese government is extremely anxious about the dangers of disintegration of the PRC. Yet there seems to be silence on this in the English language literature on democracy in China. Andrew Nathan’s otherwise excellent and seminal book on Chinese democracy (Nathan 1985) does not mention nationalism in the index and really does not engage democracy with the question of national integration, despite some inextricable linkages. Ding Yijing’s Chinese Democracy after Tiananmen (2001) also fails to engage explicitly with this issue. The relationship between democratization and national integration is complex. In an early but important article, Dankwart Rustow argued that, for democracy to emerge there must already be a strong sense of community that is preferably ‘taken for granted . . . [and] is above mere opinion and mere agreement’ (Rustow 1970: 363). His model of the transition to democracy presents three broad assertions. First, it argues that elements such as national unity, entrenched competition and the acceptance of democratic rules are ‘indispensable to the genesis of democracy’. Second, and particularly important for our argument here, he asserts strongly that these elements must be assembled one by one because they have their own logic and their own protagonists and as such may be incompatible with each other. And ﬁnally, a ‘small circle of political leaders skilled at negotiation and compromise’ is needed to formulate democratic rules. The crucial issue is the prerequisite sense of ‘national unity’, which acts to ensure that competition between groups will not be divisive for the entire nation. Citizens in a ‘democracy-to-be must have no doubt or mental reservations as to which political community they belong’ (Rustow 1970: 363). Primarily, this is because democracy needs conﬂict, especially in the modern liberal sense, where democracy is seen as a system of rule by temporary majorities that have to compete for popular mandate at regular intervals. So that those who are ruled can change their rulers and policies, the nation’s sovereign boundaries must endure and the composition of the citizenry must remain consistent. In Chapter 9, Baogang He’s argument that democratization threatens the existence of the Chinese nation state ﬁnds resonance with Dankwart’s axiom ‘unity before democracy’. China as a multi-ethnic country with a history of empire poses an extraordinary challenge to China’s leaders who attempt to keep the country together. He explains that this is why China’s leaders, post-Deng Xiaoping, have continued to stress national integration and strengthening national identity to maintain national unity while delaying full-scale democratization. In Chapter 10 on ‘reaching out’ to Taiwan and ‘keeping in’ Xinjiang, Leong Liew introduces marketization and globalization into Rustow’s conceptualization of the relationship between national integration and

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democracy. Liew argues that marketization and globalization serve to integrate the economies of the PRC and Taiwan. This integration does not guarantee reuniﬁcation of the two political entities, but at least advances the cause of reuniﬁcation. Here marketization and globalization serve as a means by which the Mainland ‘reaches out’. For Xinjiang, however, marketization is a means by which the state helps to ‘keep in’ this province with separatist leanings, and here the PRC is not as successful. Marketization has improved living standards in Xinjiang, but it has also exacerbated economic differences between this poor northwestern province and the rich coastal and southern provinces. Xinjiang’s poor factor endowments and remote location help to prevent it ﬂourishing in a market economy without state intervention. The central government has made massive investments in this province in response to growing regional income inequality in the wake of marketization and Muslim separatism in Xinjiang. Yet these investments are exacerbating ethnic–Han tensions in the province. Moreover, while marketization is integrating Xinjiang’s economy more closely with other provinces in China, globalization is nudging Xinjiang’s economy and society closer to Central Asia. This latter development advances the cause of ethnic rather than national identiﬁcation. Hence, applying Rustow’s logic of a sense of community as prerequisite for democracy, marketization and globalization have mixed consequences for national integration and national identity, and thus for the prospects of democratization. By more closely integrating Taiwan with China, these forces promote democratization, but by encouraging ethnic identiﬁcation in Xinjiang, these forces weaken democratization.

Institutions promoting national integration In recent years, the Chinese government has made enormous efforts through economic and social policies to integrate minority areas into China. In 2000 the central government unveiled an ambitious plan to develop the poorer western part of the country, where many ethnic minorities reside. In Chapter 11, Shaoguang Wang explores the price of attempts at national integration through the ﬁscal system. In theory, central transfers should be designed primarily to equalize the distribution of ﬁscal resources and/or outcomes among administrative units. But in practice, many other factors, including political interests, also shape the allocation process. Wang concludes that the driving force behind intergovernmental ﬁscal transfers in China is the overriding concern of Chinese political elites at the centre to maintain national unity. Wang found that provinces with predominantly non-Han populations have been given the highest levels of subsidies, even though their income levels often exceed those of poorer provinces. The ﬁscal health of the state has a direct bearing on national unity and therefore on potential prospects for democracy. A ﬁscally strong state that can afford to effectively use ‘the carrot’ to ameliorate poor living standards

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in minority and other areas will see less of a need to use ‘the stick’ punitively to maintain unity and social stability. However, as Liew highlighted in his discussion of the situation in Xinjiang, ﬁscal transfers and investment ﬂows from the centre to minority areas may prove counterproductive in promoting national unity if they are used in ways that do not improve the living standards of national minorities and/or if they encourage national minorities to interact economically more with their ethnic brethren outside China than with their fellow PRC citizens. Finally, an important institution that promotes national integration in China is the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In this book’s ﬁnal chapter, Ji You discusses the inﬂuence of nationalism on China’s defence culture and the role of the PLA in promoting nationalism. He argues that the PLA, following the CCP, has been de-ideologized. The PLA has been made the guardian of national interest rather than a revolutionary tool that serves the interest of the working class. Its current generation of ofﬁcer corps is better educated and ‘more and more professionalized’ compared to the previous generation. PLA ofﬁcers are nationalists who favour China’s modernization, but they reject its wholesale Westernization. They regard themselves as guardians of China’s sovereignty. They protect China’s territorial integrity and are highly committed to reuniﬁcation with Taiwan.

Concluding remarks The essays in this volume reveal in different ways how complex and intertwined are the issues of nationalism, democracy and national integration. These essays will no doubt provoke several major questions in the minds of readers. They serve to suggest ‘a chicken/egg’ type of questioning about the symbiosis between democracy and national unity. A central question for Chinese democrats is: has China really achieved the degree of national unity that Rustrow argues is required before democratization? To Chinese nationalists, the key question is almost the reverse: whether the current lack of democracy in China is stiﬂing efforts at promoting national unity? On the issue of the nexus between globalization and nationalism, the central question for Chinese leaders is: will nationalism help the Chinese to globalize successfully and promote national integration, or will globalization divide China? The role of culture in national integration is similarly an intriguing question. Are Ben Anderson, and in this volume Chiou and Lin, right to assert that sharing a common culture is an insufﬁcient condition for Taiwan to embrace Chinese national identity? And if Anthony Smith is right that a common culture is most likely to be a necessary condition for nationalism, does this mean that the goal of integrating minority areas like Tibet and Xinjiang into the PRC is incompatible with democratization? Finally, and of particular interest to the international community, is the issue of how Chinese nationalism is expressed to the

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outside world. How much is the PRC government willing to compromise its quest for national integration for the sake of the Mainland’s international relations? These questions have profound signiﬁcance for the people of China in the quest of many for democracy and national integration. They also have profound signiﬁcance for the rest of the world in how it engages most effectively with China as an emergent world power in the twenty-ﬁrst century.

Notes 1 2

This coupling can be seen as ironic in the sense that nationalism has always been an anomaly for Marxism and has been ignored in much of Marxist discussions. See Nairn (1975). Some authors have gone so far as to describe the response as self-loathing. See, for example, Barme (1996: 196).

References Anderson, Benedict (2001) ‘Western nationalism and eastern nationalism: is there a difference that matters?’, New Left Review, 9 (May–June): 31–42. Anderson, Perry (2002) ‘Internationalism: a breviary’, New Left Review, 14 (March– April): 5–25. Barme, Geremie R. (1996) ‘To screw foreigners is patriotic: China’s avant-garde nationalists’, in Jonathan Unger (ed.), Chinese Nationalism, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Bo Yang and Guo Yidong (1991) The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis of Chinese Culture, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. China Security Review Commission (CSRC) (2002) Report to the Congress of the US: the National Security Implications of the Economic Relationship Between the US and China, July. Crane, George T. (1999) ‘Imagining the economic nation: globalisation in China’, New Political Economy, 4: 215–32. Ding Yijing (2001) Chinese Democracy After Tiananmen, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Gellner, Ernest (1983) Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Greenfeld, Liah (2001) The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. He, Baogang (1996) The Democratisation of China, London: Routledge. Holland, Lorien (1999) ‘Strictly politics’, Far Eastern Economic Review, May 20: 13. Hooper, Beverly (2000) ‘Globalisation and resistance in post-Mao China: the case of foreign consumer products’, Asian Studies Review, 24 (4): 439–70. Krauthammer, Charles (1995) ‘Why we must contain China’, Time, 146 (5): 72. Lampton, David M. (2001) Same Bed Different Dreams: Managing US–China Relations 1989–2000, Berkeley: University of California Press. Liew, Leong (1997) The Chinese Economy in Transition: From Plan to Market, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

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Liu, Alan P.L. (2001) ‘Provincial identities and political cultures: modernism, traditionalism, parochialism, and separatism’, in Hua Shiping (ed.) Chinese Political Culture, Studies on Contemporary China Series, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Liu Shao-ch’i (1971) ‘How to be a good communist’, in Immanual C.Y. Hsu (ed.) Readings in Modern Chinese History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lu Hsun, The True Story of Ah Q; trans. (1955) Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, second edition. Mackerras, Colin (1994) China’s Minorities: Integration and Modernization in the Twentieth Century, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Mao Zedong (1965) Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. –––– (1971) ‘On the correct handling of contradictions among the people’, in Immanuel C.Y. Hsu (ed.) Readings in Modern Chinese History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nairn, Tom (1975) ‘The modern Janus’, New Left Review, 94 (November– December): 3–29. Nathan, Andrew (1985) Chinese Democracy, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. –––– (2000) ‘Chinese democracy: the lessons of failure’, in Zhao Suisheng (ed.) China and Democracy: Reconsidering the Prospects for a Democratic China, New York: Routledge. Nelson, Harvey (2000) ‘Caution: rough road ahead’, in Edward Friedman and Barrett L. McCormick (eds) What if China Doesn’t Democratize?, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Rustow, Dankwart (1970) ‘Transitions to democracy: towards a dynamic model’, Comparative Politics, 3: 337–63. Shambaugh, David (1999) ‘Insecure China is stoking xenophobic nationalism’, International Herald Tribune. Online. Available http://www.taiwandc.org/ iht-9902.htm (accessed 25 May 2002). Smith, Anthony (2000) ‘Theories of nationalism’, in Michael Leifer (ed.) Asian Nationalism, London: Routledge. Unger, Jonathan (ed.) (1996), Chinese Nationalism, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Wang Jisi (2001) ‘The Internet in China: a new fantasy?’ New Perspectives Quarterly, 18 (1): 22–4. World Bank (1997) Sharing Rising Incomes, Washington, DC: World Bank. Yahuda, Michael (2000), ‘Dimensions of Chinese nationalism’, in Michael Leifer (ed.) Asian Nationalism, London: Routledge. Zheng Yongnian (1999), Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China: Modernisation, Identity, and International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Part II

Democracy and Chinese nationalism

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2

Barking up the wrong tree The liberal–nationalist debate on democracy and identity1 Ying jie Guo

The debate between Chinese liberals and the New Left is often dubbed ‘the mega-debate at the turn of the millennium’. It has involved numerous intellectual heavyweights on the Mainland and in the Chinese diaspora, and highlights a cluster of sociopolitical and cultural issues of fundamental signiﬁcance to China’s economic and political reforms. The dominant competing camps are variously cast as the New Right v. the New Left, conservatives v. radicals, or liberals v. socialists/social democrats. This confrontation is particularly noteworthy in the light of the widely accepted proposition by Fang Keli (1997) that the course of modern China has been determined to varying degrees by Marxism, nationalism and liberalism. With the decline of Marxism, the remaining two may well ﬁgure more prominently in the decades to come. Early in the twenty-ﬁrst century, the liberals and the nationalists – with the New Left at the forefront – appear to be tugging the Chinese Party-State in different directions, and they are poised to inﬂuence China’s future institutional arrangements and political directions (Zhang Hailing 2000). They do this not only by producing and disseminating knowledge or engaging with the ofﬁcial reform agenda, but also through their connections with government advisers and high-ranking ofﬁcials of similar persuasions (Fewsmith 2001; Goldman 1999). This chapter focuses on the liberal–nationalist contest and negotiation over democracy and identity. Despite a clear correlation between democracy and national identity, this relationship has not been given serious attention. Further, the confrontation between the Chinese liberals and nationalists results from competing or conﬂicting visions of national identity, and this division militates against the development of an overlapping consensus on democracy. I argue that nationalism/democracy and national identity/freedom are not mutually exclusive concepts. I explain how differing attitudes towards the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the West or the US have compounded the polemic on these concepts. These differences prevent the emergence of some overlapping consensus on democratization, which serves to stall democratic development in China.

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Liberalism, nationalism and some of the complex terms used in liberalist– nationalist debates, are ambiguous. The use of ‘liberals’ and ‘Westernizers’ as synonyms in China is justiﬁed in that the majority of Chinese liberals believe that some version of Westernization is appropriate for China. But ‘Westernizers’ obscures the liberals’ general ‘commitment to the individual and to the construction of a society in which individuals can satisfy their interests or achieve fulﬁlment’ (Heywood 2000: 60–1). Most Chinese liberals are attracted to classical liberalism rather than modern liberalism; of utmost importance to them now is a minimal state, a self-regulating market and the rule of law (Liu Junning 2000b: 1). ‘Nationalism’, as I use it in this chapter, refers to a project, discourse or evaluation that aims to retain or maintain national autonomy, unity and identity.2 I make a further distinction between ofﬁcial/state nationalists, cultural nationalists (most notably Confucians, ‘the national essence school’, cultural conservatives and many postcolonialists), and popular nationalists (including the ‘Say-no Club’ and the New Left).3 This analytical distinction could be questioned on various grounds. General categories are simply not able to take full account of all individual characteristics and are thus susceptible to challenges based on exceptions to the rule. Individuals who are state nationalists on some issues might be cultural nationalists on others, or vice versa, and even liberals are sometimes nationalists at the same time (Liu Junning 1997). This chapter will therefore focus on some essential commonalities shared by nationalists and their sub-groups and by the liberals. However, I acknowledge that not all individuals share each and every belief or view of their groups.

Another confrontation of caricatures On the nationalist side, the New Left is at the forefront of the recent battle. In 1994, Wang Hui, a leading member of the Left, published in a South Korean journal what became one of the most controversial articles in China in recent years. The Chinese version of that article (Wang Hui 2000b) caused quite a stir among Chinese intellectuals when it appeared in the journals Tianya (The End of the World) and Xianggang shehui kexue xuebao (Hong Kong Social Science Journal) in 1997. The article examined a number of critical issues, ranging from the deﬁnition of modernity to social justice and the direction of China’s economic and political reforms, from an unambiguously left position. The liberals began to escalate their response as they ‘re-emerged from underground’ (fuchu shuimian) between late 1997 and early 1998. The diaries of Gu Zhun – a pre-eminent liberal of the 1960s – Gu Zhun Riji, were published in September 1997. The liberals also had a great coup in a number of eulogies to Isaiah Berlin who died in November 1997. In 1998, liberal Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS) political scientist Liu Junning followed up with his edited book Beida chuantong yu jindao

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Zhongguo (Beijing University and Liberalism in Modern China), in which he described ‘the Beida (Beijing University) tradition’ as ‘the Chinese liberal tradition’. Li Shenzhi asserted in the book’s preface (1998: 4–5), ‘After the largest-scale totalitarian experiment ever undertaken in human history . . . liberalism has convincingly been proven to be the most desirable and universal system of values’. The liberal discourse spread further aﬁeld with publication of Chinese translations of the works of Humboldt, Jefferson, de Tocqueville, Spencer, Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, Popper, Hayek, Friedman, Buchanan, Nozick, North, Novak, Berlin and Rand. Hayek’s work is particularly popular, partly due to his reputation in China as ‘the most anti-socialist economist’. The liberal discourse suffered a temporary setback in April 2000, when the government banned four leading liberals – Fan Gang, Li Shenzhi, Liu Junning and Mao Yushi – from giving lectures in universities. An apparently coordinated counter-offensive was launched in Tianya. Leading the charge against the liberals were some of the Mainland spokesmen of the New Left – Wang Hui, Han Yuhai, Wang Binbin – and their colleagues in Hong Kong and the US. In 1999, a few months after the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, another group of nationalists orchestrated another round of attacks on the liberals in a book called Quanqiuhua yinying xiade Zhongguo zhi lu (China’s Road: Under the Shadow of Globalization). This recent confrontation is part of a much broader, century-old confrontation that has polarized Chinese intellectuals, most notably during the May Fourth Era and since the 1980s. The former era witnessed the debate between liberals on the one hand, and the New Confucians, the Xueheng School, and other cultural conservatives on the other. In the 1980s, cultural nationalists, spearheaded by Confucians, put up a futile resistance to the liberals’ dominant Westernization discourse and project. Since 1989, the liberals have battled various nationalists: postcolonialists, nativists, Confucians, the New National Studies School, advocates of the ‘humanist spirit’, champions of Asian values, the New Left, and others. Given the discursive context currently dominant in China, holding liberalism as good and nationalism as bad, it is not surprising that self-declared liberals outnumber self-declared nationalists. According to Liu Junning (2000b: 53), ‘Liberalism has now become a powerful intellectual movement, and China’s political culture is shifting in a liberal direction. Today, almost all of those who shape public opinion and most of the “celebrities” in virtually all ﬁelds in China are liberals’. By contrast, ‘nationalism’ is often treated as a vicious label. Defenders of ‘Chinese nationalism’ such as Song Qiang et al. (1996), Fang Ning et al. (1999), Tang Yongsheng (1996), Chen Mingming (1996), Jiang Yihua (1993), Cai Xiaoping (1996), Zhang Wenbiao (1996) and Cao Yueming (1992) claim it is indispensable for China’s national autonomy, unity and identity in the global nation-state system and in the

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current international order. The harshest criticism of ‘Chinese nationalism’ comes as expected from critics of the Chinese government and political dissidents. Princeton Professor of Chinese history Yu Ying-shih (1996) and well-known dissident Liu Xiaobo (1997), for example, condemned ‘Chinese nationalism’ as ‘fascist’ and ‘ultra’ (jiduan). Other adjectives used to describe ‘Chinese nationalism’ in a number of Chinese and English-language writings are similarly censorious, including aggressive, anti-democratic, anti-imperialist, arrogant, assertive, bullying, chauvinistic, conservative, dogmatic, expansionist, irrational, irredentist, jingoistic, mus-cular, narrow, potboiler, reactionary, revolutionary, territorially ambitious, traditionalist, visceral and xenophobic. The literature on ‘Chinese nationalism’ reveals writers’ concerns about its negative impact on China’s modernization and Sino-foreign relations, and their desires to make ‘Chinese nationalism’ a less destructive force (Wu Guoguang 1996; Tao 1994; Jiang Niantao 1996; Ge 1998; Liu Junning 1997; Wu Chuke 1996; Chen Shaoming 1996; Pi 1996). Chinese writers are therefore generally disinclined to engage empirically with nationalism, preferring instead to theorize about different types of nationalism or prescribe for ‘Chinese nationalism’ (Li Xing 1995; Song Quan 1996; Tian 1997; Xiong 1996; Zhong 1997; Song Liming 1997; Wang Pengling 1997). This literature leaves one with no doubt that the most preferred nationalisms are constructive, moderate, pragmatic, rational, romantic and wise, but there is little clue on what these nationalisms actually refer to and how they can be put into practice. It is not just ‘Chinese nationalism’ that is perceived negatively; nationalism as a whole has a rather bad reputation. Unquestioning assumptions about ‘bad nationalism’ and ‘good liberalism’ have been detrimental to analyses of nationalism and liberalism, and thus to the understanding of both. A clearer understanding depends on focusing on these phenomena as concepts rather than on the value judgements that observers bring to, and impose while conducting, their analyses. For those who are dedicated to democratization in China, it might be more productive to identify and take advantage of all potential driving forces for democracy than to attempt to weed out every undemocratic element before democratization can start. The most striking aspect of the liberal–nationalist debate is that, although disputants know only too well that large-scale democratization is hardly possible within the current political structure of the PRC, they regard liberalism or nationalism, rather than authoritarianism, as the main obstacle to democratization. Liberals and nationalists are jumping on speciﬁc aspects of each other’s vision for democracy before democratization has started in earnest, thus preventing the emergence of necessary synergy that works to propel China towards democratization. Chinese liberals and nationalists, except those residing overseas, can pursue their goals only within the political constraints imposed by the Chinese government, and authorities will deal harshly with any direct

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criticism of the government. A progressive approach to democratization that poses no immediate challenge to the Party-State is their best option. That is one reason why the polemic about democracy has come to focus on competing models or elements of democracy that are permitted by the government, rather than on the Party-State’s refusal to share power. To that extent, the liberals and nationalists have clearly mislocated the main source of resistance to democratization in China.

Liberal approaches to democracy For the nationalists, the liberals’ ‘marketism’ (shichang zhuyi) is blind to the power relations, social stratiﬁcation and social injustice in China’s current transition towards a market economy (Wang Hui 2000a; Han 2000a: 224–7). To the New Left, this is not a democratic process but one that has encouraged a very small minority of society to ‘get rich ﬁrst’, and has enabled the privileged to pillage the properties of the majority. For Han Yuhai (2000b: 420), ‘On “the road to serfdom”, the liberalization of capital appears to have reinforced the privilege of the privileged and thus has enhanced serfdom rather than democracy’. Nationalists are adamant that the liberals’ focus on representative democracy and negative freedom from overarching political authority betrays a suspicion of the people and an indifference to popular sovereignty. The nationalists conclude that the liberals are simply champions of the freedom of the rich and powerful to exploit the have-nots, and of oligarchy rather than democracy. Unlike their overseas colleagues, the Mainland liberals presently focus on economic freedom, constitutionalism, the rule of law and limited government, individualism, an open society and negative freedom. As the State’s monopoly and abuse of political power is intimately related to the monopoly and abuse of economic power (ownership), State ownership must be reduced to prevent the abuse of political power, and private ownership must be increased and protected so that a free market can function effectively. A free market and limited government together will create conditions favourable for a democratic political system (Xu 2000: 417). Instead of justifying their demand for private ownership rights on the grounds of human dignity and individual worth, however, liberals stress that property rights are essential to the success of China’s political and economic reforms and cannot be further delayed without undermining China’s economic reform (Liu Junning 1998b: 40). On the surface, there is nothing sinister about this argument; after all, this is a real issue that the government has to confront today and it would seem quite logical, in the light of the ofﬁcial reform agenda and the CCP’s objective of establishing a market economy, to allow private ownership of property. Thus, the demand for increased property rights is well within the ofﬁcial parameters of permissible debate, even though its primary objective is to erode the CCP’s ideological foundation and to transform the current political system.

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Some observers endorse this incremental approach to political change, especially those who have identiﬁed an emergent middle class in China and marked it as the harbinger of capitalism and democracy (Glassman 1991). Yet others question whether China’s economic and political reforms can be equated with democratization (Dickson and Chao 2001: 11). Some liberals acknowledge that only the naïve believe that a free market will lead to democratization (Xu 2000). Thus, while private ownership and a free market may well serve the liberals’ purpose of subverting the current system, there is no guarantee that these factors alone will automatically lead to a democratic polity in China. This should not lead one to doubt the liberals’ commitment to democracy. However, more problematic is the liberals’ ambivalence towards popular sovereignty. If they accept democracy, it is almost inevitable for them to accept or even follow the general will to some extent. In fact, Liu Junning (1997), the only liberal thinker who has dealt with this issue in any detail, has argued forcefully that republicanism has even more fundamental signiﬁcance for China than democracy. It suggests that he does not object to such republican concerns as civic virtue, public spiritedness and patriotism. On the other hand, Chinese liberals, like liberals as a whole, fear the demos (common people) as a threat to freedom. They fear the tyranny of the majority. The idea of a people collectively exercising sovereignty holds no appeal to Chinese liberals or to anyone who prefers to leave politics to a capable or qualiﬁed elite. Understandably, then, Liu’s republicanism is not the French version, which is associated with radical democracy and the notion of general will, but the American variety, whose deﬁning feature is divided government achieved through the separation of powers. Liu has packed a number of other elements into his version of republicanism, such as ‘representative republic’, constitutionalism and the rule of law. He makes no mention of civic virtue, public spiritedness and patriotism, the republican concerns that are the object of slashing criticism by Chinese liberals as a whole, particularly in their debate with the New Left. If Liu’s endorsement of republicanism is not based on misunderstandings of this concept, it is at least partial and selective. Given the Chinese liberals’ suspicion of positive freedom, they are not likely to welcome the republican stress on public activity or active citizenship over private activity. Let alone will they welcome the civic republicanism that the Chinese New Left promotes in order to re-establish the public domain and to slow down or stop privatization and the ‘rolling back’ of the state. Thus Chinese liberals now reject not only ‘the French republican tradition’ in favour of ‘the Anglo-American liberal tradition’ but also much of modern China’s own liberal tradition, where liberalism was said to be ‘hijacked’ by liberal-minded democratic socialists (Liu Junning 2000b: 53). Contemporary Chinese liberals view Chinese liberals from the 1920s to the 1970s as ‘pragmatists’ or ‘democratic socialists’, who drew their

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inspiration from Dewey and Laski rather than from Hayek, Berlin or Popper (the new icons) and favoured the French Revolution over the English Glorious Revolution and American Revolution. However, for contemporary Chinese liberals (Liu Junning 2001), this tradition observed by their modern forebears is informed by constructivist rationalism, perfectionism, scientism and socialism, which led China on to ‘the road to serfdom’. In contrast to their predecessors, therefore, the contemporary liberals turn to Hayek and Berlin for inspiration, particularly with respect to negative freedom, economic freedom, private property rights, and the link between liberalism and democracy. Of all that Chinese liberals uphold from classical liberalism, the concept of negative freedom is particularly problematic. Unlike earlier advocate Isaiah Berlin, Chinese liberals today are subject to the political order that they seek to transform. Their emphasis on negative freedom under China’s current authoritarian system does not help to win some of the most fundamental political freedoms, such as freedom of political speech and of association. Worse, those who are not interested or courageous enough to ﬁght for freedom can hide behind this notion of negative freedom. Some liberals are only too aware of this. Zhu (2001), for example, has called for an ‘active, dynamic liberalism’ and a more active struggle for freedom. This call clearly resonates with Walzer’s acknowledgement (1989: 217) that the ‘passive enjoyment of citizenship’ requires ‘the active politics of citizens’. However, few fellow liberals have echoed Zhu. With little idea of how to win freedom and kick-start democratization – other than relying on some accumulative democratic effect of a free market, private entrepreneurship or the rule of law – Chinese liberals cannot engage actively in democracy-building, notwithstanding their democratic aspirations.

Nationalist approaches to democracy The Chinese liberals’ claims about democracy are less speciﬁc and straightforward than those of the New Left. One of the liberals’ central arguments is that democracy relies on a value system that respects the dignity of the individual, and so any collective-oriented value system is a potential threat to democracy (Xiao 1998: 227, 230). In this view, nationalism is not only collectivist but also statist, in so far as loyalty to the nation is not always distinguishable from loyalty to the state and can be easily manipulated for state purposes. Some liberals criticize the New Left’s favoured model of comprehensive democracy as ‘pseudo democracy’ since under direct democracy, demos or ‘people’ often becomes an arbitrary category from which individuals can be excluded on the grounds of age, gender, class or social status (Liu Junning 1998a: 43–4). In this criticism, direct democracy almost inevitably results in the tyranny of the majority or in dictatorship, as it demands loyalty to the powers in control and subsumes the will of the

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minority under that of the majority. An even more common accusation is that nationalism has obstructed liberalization and democratization in China because it rejects democratic values and practices in both its insistence on authentic experience and community and its anti-Western stance, and that it balks at democratization for fear of national disintegration or chaos (Gu 1998: 228; He Baogang 2000). Some nationalists surely pose serious problems for democratization. State nationalists, for example, harp on the likelihood or inevitability of instability and chaos if the CCP is weakened; it is hardly conceivable that the Party will voluntarily embark on large-scale democratization at the expense of Party rule. And postcolonialists have voiced concerns about the potential impact of democracy and its value system on China’s ‘cultural sovereignty’ and cultural identity. Those who are concerned about China’s ‘cultural sovereignty’ often use the concept of ‘soft power’ to explain the hegemonic practice of encouraging people worldwide to want what Americans want. One of Party leader Jiang Zemin’s chief political advisers Wang Huning (1993: 92; 1994: 15) attributed ‘soft power’ to such resources as ‘the attraction of one’s ideas’ like democracy and human rights, or to ‘the ability to set the political agenda in a way that shapes the preferences others express’. Wang (1994: 13) warned that China must not jump on the bandwagon of others, but must respond to this new cultural strategy for political hegemony by ‘maintaining its own position and orientation’. This view is echoed in the writings of He Xin (1996: 69–70, 201), whose advice is sought from time to time by top Chinese leaders. He argues that the current Sino-US conﬂict is not over democracy, human rights or ideology, but because China’s efforts to achieve national strength and prosperity clash with the fundamental interests of the US. From this perspective, democracy and human rights are part of a Western mode of knowledge that spearheads a form of postcolonial hegemony, or a new colonialism, and unquestioning acceptance of such Western concepts inevitably leads to China’s subjugation by the West. Another group of nationalists is more concerned about what they call the ‘otherization’ of China. This concern arises from the conviction that fundamental differences between Chinese and Western traditions are irreconcilable and that Chinese tradition is superior. Framing his arguments in terms of power and knowledge, Yi (1994: 111–13) forcefully reminds Chinese academics of cultural differences and cultural confrontation over issues of human rights and democracy, cultural uniqueness and cultural domination. He reiterates that to translate into Chinese such Western notions as democracy and human rights is to reproduce the conditions of Western hegemony; one-way trafﬁc implies China’s surrender to alien discursive systems, their conventions, norms and values. Yi is not alone in this view. One major nationalist theme in Yi’s observations of China is the belief that the incursions of alien ideas, concepts, terminology and methodology

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have already resulted in a Westernized discursive system. This theme recognizes that as the Western system establishes its dominance in China, Chinese concepts, theories and practices are judged by the standards of this foreign system. Anything that fails to meet the standard becomes ‘sub-standard’, ‘unscientiﬁc’, or ‘inferior’, regardless of its intrinsic values within the Chinese tradition and regardless of its own merits (Wang Zigen 1994: 32–5). Thus, ‘China loses its cultural self’ and becomes ‘a cultural colony of the West in spite of its political independence’ (Jiang Qing 1996: 121). This type of nativist or postcolonial reaction recognizes that what is homogenized into an alien, hegemonic culture includes basic democratic values of Western origin. On human rights, nationalists typically point to differences between Chinese and Western traditions: the Chinese seek harmony through benevolence and rightness while the Western concept of natural rights is the basis of social opposition. As human rights theorist Xia Yong (1998) put it: The more individuals are isolated, the more they are in opposition to society, and the more they run into conﬂict with others. The more rights are made absolute, the more they are guaranteed and the more we talk about human rights. The basis of duty and obligation is derived from rights themselves. Regulating duties and obligations is carried out in order to protect rights. The implementation of rights is not based upon any internally generated love or benevolence. Rather, it emanates from contrary demands that are founded on divine and legal order. (Xia 1998: 24) In the Chinese tradition, equality, freedom, social peace and wealth can be pursued without appealing to the rights principle or to the rule of law. ‘Traditional’ Chinese politics sought to use the rule of propriety rather than the rule of restriction (Hsiung, cited in Xia 1998: 29–30). Xia argued on this basis that ‘Not only is the traditional Chinese view of harmony at one with notions of human rights, but the former can be absorbed by the latter and will even go some way towards improving traditional Western notions of human rights’ (Xia 1998: 25). This argument amounts to an afﬁrmation of the Chinese notion of harmony in preference to the Western concept of rights. Indeed, to discard the former would imply cultural self-colonization and the loss of the Chineseness of China (Yi 1994: 111). In contrast to these nationalists, the Confucians purport to make democratic politics (tuichu minzhu) one of their overriding objectives in an emergent ‘third stage of Confucianism’. This democratic theory has not taken shape, yet clearly it will be grounded in the Confucian notion of minben, which is in some ways analogous to the notion of popular sovereignty. While the Confucians’ appeal to minben is aimed to counter the Party-State’s current practice of guanben (ofﬁcials in command), it is also

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intended to provide a sound theoretical foundation for democracy in China and helps to rally the masses behind the Confucians’ appeal (Tang 1989: 5). Among Chinese nationalists, the New Left and the Say-no Club are clearly the most articulate champions of the principle of popular sovereignty, although the New Left is less clear about its conception of democracy than the Say-no Club. These camps have touted the idea of ‘comprehensive democracy’, which appears to refer to participatory, economic, political and cultural democracy. But they have failed to expound the idea or elaborate how it is to be implemented. Their general preference for the French model of democracy and positive evaluation of the Cultural Revolution in particular has attracted much criticism and suspicion. The celebration by some of their adherents (particularly Cui Zhiyuan) of ‘the four freedoms’ of the Cultural Revolution and the ‘economic democracy’ of the Anshan Iron and Steel Complex has also harmed their reputation. Like the New Left, the Say-no nationalists are often portrayed as an accomplice of the Chinese Party-State, but even more anti-democratic. Certainly, some of the Club’s nationalist expressions are eerily reminiscent of ofﬁcial rhetoric, as we see in their unqualiﬁed rejection of US humanrights diplomacy. And given its preoccupation with collective rights, Say-no nationalism easily lends itself to state manipulation. Still, Say-no nationalism poses a stiff challenge to the Party-State in two important ways. First, it insists that China upholds popular sovereignty – that the will of the people should prevail – and embraces democracy to protect the interests of the members of the nation and bring about a civilized society in China. Democracy has become an essential objective of this current of nationalism. Second, Say-no nationalism makes a clear distinction between ‘national rights’ (zuquan) and ‘state rights’ (guoquan), making the nation rather than the state the subject of ‘national rights’. ‘National rights’ are conceived as the sum of individual rights instead of an abstract national will. In Wang Xiaodong’s original words (1999: 32), ‘What is the nation without individuals? And who is the subject of national rights if not the individuals?’. The Say-no nationalists’ approach to democracy and human rights is surely instrumentalist. They have not made clear how individual rights should be protected when these rights come into conﬂict with ‘national rights’, and they are not really concerned about individuality as an end or about a realm over which the individual would be sovereign. Democracy is desirable in protecting the interests of the members of the nation and bringing about a civilized society in China. Violation of human rights not only damages the government’s legitimacy but also jeopardizes China’s international reputation and, therefore, its national interest. If China does not become a civilized society that guarantees the rights of its people, domestic and international pressure will make it difﬁcult for China to become a strong economic and military power.

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Say-no nationalists suggest that individual rights are important not just because liberty is desirable in itself but also because individuals endowed with rights are necessary for China’s progress, survival and strength (Wang Xiaodong 1999). Individuals without rights are not in a position to monitor the ofﬁcials, to help weed out corruption, or to prevent corrupt ofﬁcials from betraying national interest (Wang Xiaodong 1999: 30–1). Therefore it is in the interest of the nation for the government to improve its human-rights practices and more effectively address political dissent and popular grievances, so that fewer individuals ‘turn against their own country’. Nevertheless, the Confucians’ rediscovery of minben and the New Left’s and Say-no nationalists’ emphasis on popular sovereignty are surely attuned to the democratic principle of rule by the demos or people, to government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. Thus nationalism may be compatible with democracy. As Nodia (1994: 4) notes, ‘The idea of nationalism is impossible – indeed unthinkable – without the idea of democracy’, and ‘democracy never exists without nationalism’.

National identity and democracy National identity has at least two dimensions: political and cultural. While political nationalists understand the nation primarily as a political and territorial unit, cultural nationalists regard the nation as an ‘organic’ community based on its unique history, culture and genealogy, or the product of a unique civilization (Hutchinson 1987: 28, 30). The liberal– nationalist contest in this case has focused on whether cultural tradition and national identity have been obstacles to democracy, and the frontier is drawn not simply between liberals and nationalists but between liberals and political nationalists on the one hand, and cultural nationalists on the other. The link between the confrontation over democracy and the dispute over identity can be attributed to the correlation between identity and democracy on several accounts. Broadly speaking, national identity serves as the basis on which the members of a nation decide how to conduct their collective life by providing the accent or tone in which collective life is conducted (Miller 1995: 24). ‘Our’ image and the power to represent ‘us’ produce what ‘we’ are and what ‘we’ can be, and they inﬂuence how ‘we’ see ‘ourselves’ and the world (Calhoun 1998: 20). Hence, how ‘we’ see and constitute ‘ourselves’ as Chinese bears on ‘our’ collective decisions about sociopolitical arrangements and thus shapes ‘our’ future. The preference for certain collective plans of life may require an alternative conception of ‘ourselves’ through redeﬁning, reinterpreting, re-evaluating or rejecting. This in part accounts for the contest over, and transformation of, the nation; this process produces and reproduces the nation (Poole 1999: 14).

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It has been noted that democracy cannot develop unless the political unit is demarcated and a fair degree of national unity is fostered. In China, national identity is at issue while pan-Chinese nationalists insist on China’s territorial integrity and uniﬁcation with Taiwan, while overseas liberals who regard the state as a voluntary association resting on popular consent argue that Taiwan and Tibet are entitled to independence if that is what the people of these two places want. The fear of national disintegration, as He Baogang observed (2000: 8, 181, 187), is a major deterrent to development of democracy, and democratization may be abandoned in the interest of national unity. Also relevant in this context is that some Chinese liberals outside China are said to side with the US rather than with China on SinoUS disputes over Taiwan, Tibet, human rights, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and so forth. In the eyes of radical nationalists, these liberals have lost their ‘moral raison d’être’ and the Chinese people will reject these liberals even if they are allowed to return to China (Wang Xiaodong 1999: 86–7). A similarly divisive issue is how nationalists and liberals evaluate and treat China’s cultural tradition and cultural identity. Chinese liberals diverge from liberals at large in their general inclination towards ‘totalistic iconoclasm’ (Lin 1979). Here most liberals and political nationalists see eye to eye. This is not surprising given that ‘Chinese liberalism’, especially in the initial stages, was associated intimately with a political nationalism that sought to reconstruct the nation’s political centre. During the May Fourth era, liberals, political nationalists, Marxists and most Chinese intellectuals rallied behind the cause of ‘national salvation’ and embraced ‘Mr Science’ and ‘Mr Democracy’. They wanted to rid China of imperialism and feudalism, including Confucianism, which was made to stand for all that was backward and benighted in China. Later the May Fourth version of nationalism was incorporated into the CCP’s Sinicized Marxism-Leninism to offer a ‘perfect match of cultural iconoclasm and political nationalism’, which was to contribute greatly to the communist revolution (Tu 1994: 28). Between 1949 and 1989, ‘totalistic iconoclasm’ remained potent under the Party-State’s tutelage, with the liberal reformers’ encouragement, permeating Chinese society particularly in the 1980s. Permeation was so extensive that the correct view of the decade, as found best expression in the popular television series Heshang (River Elegy), was that the whole Chinese civilization was so irredeemable that nothing short of wholesale Westernization could save China. To varying degrees, all nationalists and liberals appear to have distanced themselves from the May Fourth ‘political radicalism’ or ‘cultural iconoclasm’ or from both, while state nationalists, the New Left and most liberals attach greater importance to civic identity than to cultural identity or some sort of ‘constitutional patriotism’. Liberal scholar Yu Ying-shih was one of the ﬁrst to renounce the ‘radicalization’ of modern China. Li Zehou, another liberal-minded scholar, called for the rejection of revolution –

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including the French Revolution and the Chinese Communist Revolution – in a book entitled Gaobie geming (Farewell to Revolution). Both Yu and Li consider themselves Confucians. For Xiao Gongqin, a liberal to some and a statist or nationalist to others, a key to China’s success is ‘new authoritarianism’, which relies on the traditional Chinese value system in galvanizing society (1994a: 21–5; 1994b: 28–34; Shuang Yi 1993). Xiao has reiterated since the 1980s that Westernization would result in an identity crisis, as it disrupts the continuity between past and present. Wang Xiaodong (1999) also aims at May Fourth iconoclasm in his ‘reverse racism’ attack on unregenerate critiques of Chinese cultural tradition and national character. His views are echoed by Confucians and cultural nationalists in general, who are even more dedicated to rediscovering the virtue of traditional Chinese values while China is said to be experiencing a ‘moral crisis’. Even the CCP has been warming to Confucianism, as evident in the ofﬁcially sponsored celebration of the 2545th anniversary of Confucius’ birth in October 1994. President Jiang Zemin himself made an unprecedented appearance, spending two hours recalling fondly his own Confucian upbringing. In his keynote speech, former vice-premier Gu Mu, instead of condemning Confucianism as ‘feudalistic’ and ‘reactionary’ as the CCP had done previously, claimed Chinese culture as quintessentially Confucian and presented Confucianism as enlightened and progressive. Whether this is a ‘return to the roots’, as the cultural nationalists’ slogan goes, is far from clear. Yet it is quite obvious that not many Chinese, particularly in the current discursive context, will be persuaded by the old argument of the liberals and political nationalists that the Chinese masses must modernize themselves or prepare themselves for democratic mobilization by ridding themselves of their ‘ugly national character’. In this respect at least, the Say-no nationalists are much more realistic than most other liberal thinkers. They are probably right to say that no nation is content to consider itself inferior or abject, that every nation needs its own selfsustaining mechanisms such as self-esteem, self-conﬁdence and pride in its past. Chinese liberal thinkers who have rejected ‘iconoclasm’ now turn for inspiration to Burke, Berlin, Hayek, Yin Haiguang and others in their attempt to temper ‘Chinese liberalism’ with elements of cultural conservatism. In one of his essays on Hayek, Liu Junning (2000a: 504) argues that traditional culture, even if it might lack ideas of liberty and democracy, does not have to be liquidated before liberty and democracy can emerge, and there is anyway no guarantee that traditional culture can be liquidated. Furthermore, ‘If the Chinese spirit is cut off from its own past, China will no longer be a great country with deep roots’. Earlier, Liu Junning (1993: 9–15) proposed a so-called ‘Confucian liberalism’, a sociopolitical model that combines representative democracy, a market economy and Confucian ethics. He claimed that the experience of the East Asian Dragons has proved the compatibility of Confucianism and

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democracy. Similarly, Xu (2000: 415) sees the possibility of an overlapping consensus between Chinese liberalism and Confucianism and claims that the two concur on issues of modernization, market economy, liberty, democracy and rule of law. However, the majority of Chinese liberals do not share the views of Liu and Xu on Confucianism or traditional Chinese culture. A few are as antitraditional as their May Fourth predecessors, but many remain suspicious of national identity. Their suspicion reaches far beyond the ‘backwardness’ of China’s cultural heritage to the fundamental characteristics of all collective identities. For many liberal thinkers, national identity conjures up the idea of nations as organic wholes, whose constituent parts are subordinate to the whole.4 Hence Fukuyama (1994: 24) suggested that nationalism and liberalism cannot coexist in a democracy unless national identity is ‘pushed off into the realm of private life and culture’. Yet what if there is a positive link between democracy and national identity? And can national identity actually be pushed into the ‘ream of private life and culture’? If we take seriously the notion that all power derives from the people, surely we need to know who ‘the people’ are and what binds them together. And if popular self-rule depends on political solidarity among members of the national community, we need to foster that solidarity. Today it is ‘the nation’ that conveys the idea of a single body of people bound together not only by citizenship but also by common beliefs, memories, and customs. There is sufﬁcient evidence to suggest that in some African nations, for example, the consolidation of democracy has been hampered where no cohesive national identities exist (Linz and Stepan 1996). As Poole (1999: Ch. 3) claims, national identity constitutes a citizen’s relationship with the nation-state, and this forms the basis on which citizens are committed to fellow citizens and to the political institutions that make public life possible. National identity serves as a framework in which ideas of social justice can be pursued and mutual understanding and trust are fostered to facilitate democratic citizenship. Citizenship, while indispensable for a healthy political life, is of necessity complemented by a set of understandings about common destiny, a public culture that includes political principles like belief in democracy or the rule of law, cultural values and ideals, and social norms such as honesty and courtesy. Hence, cultural values and cultural identity provide ‘the language in which choices are articulated, the symbols which give signiﬁcance to various alternatives, and the sense of belonging which sets the boundaries of choices which one might make’ (Poole 1999: 109). Seen positively, this function of culture gives individuals a certain degree of freedom. Seen negatively, this function is a constraint. In any case, as Kymlicka remarks (1989: 165), freedom is never exercised in a void. It is ‘only through having a rich and secure cultural structure that people can become aware, in a vivid way, of the options available to them, and

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intelligently examine their value’. Even for these reasons alone, it is not advisable to push national identity out of the picture in democracy, and neither is it possible to do so.

Conclusion The discussion above suggests that the liberal–nationalist debate in China on nationalism, democracy and national identity boils down to a dispute over the value of individuality and collectivity. This dispute is compounded by two important intervening factors: attitudes towards the CCP and perceptions of the West, particularly the US. These factors have provided a context in which nationalism, democracy and national identity are discussed and construed or misconstrued. Nationalism and democracy are not mutually exclusive concepts, since the principle of popular sovereignty enables coexistence to exist. For one thing, the notion of nationhood is inseparable from the idea of selfdetermination. Also, the principle of democracy requires that the people observe a set of rules, or democratic procedures, to ensure and facilitate its expression. Finally, democracy can take place only in particular types of communities, and it is largely nationalism that has deﬁned the communities within which democracy has emerged in modern times. Yet democratization is often accompanied by attempts to foster a cohesive national identity or create a common identity out of tribal or ethnic material. One may therefore be justiﬁed in claiming that nationalism has a critical – if not indispensable – role to play in democracy and that democratic transitions, like nationalism, also engender nations (Nodia 1994). This recognition is important to Chinese liberals for two reasons. First, they need to ask whether democracy, including representative democracy, is possible without all power deriving from the people. Second, if they do reject the principle of popular sovereignty, they need to ﬁnd a new basis of legitimacy and an alternative driving force for democratization. They have more reason to assume that a democratic system is an effective way of ensuring individual autonomy than to rely on the desire for liberty as a driving force for democratization. As Liu Junning (2001) acknowledges, a nation-state where there is freedom is not necessarily a democratic system, and a democratic system may even hinder freedom. For the nationalists – the New Left in particular – the most obvious challenge is to provide a blueprint for ‘comprehensive democracy’ that reconciles majority rule and the protection of minority rights while maintaining political stability. Like nationalism and democracy, identity and freedom are also not mutually exclusive concepts. Much of the liberals’ suspicion of national identity stems from the assumption that national identity and personal identity contradict each other, or that national identity is necessarily hostile to individual freedom. There is certainly no lack of examples to suggest that

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the emotional ties of nationhood are invoked or manipulated to beguile people into supporting leaders and policies even at the sacriﬁce of their liberty or interests, and that some people regard dictators and dictatorships as the embodiment of collective purpose. But many observers have argued cogently and with clear examples (for example, Poole 1999: 108–10), that multiple identities can and do coexist peacefully and, except in times of war, people rarely treat their national identities as exclusive and overriding. Citizens’ obligations to the national community often compete, and are negotiated, with their obligations to family members, workplaces, friends, organizations and other groups without causing irresolvable conﬂict. A potential risk for nationalists is to demand that the claims of the nation override any other claims. Differences between Chinese liberals and Chinese nationalists over these concepts are probably easier to reconcile than the more emotional disputes over attitudes towards the Chinese Party-State and the US. The nationalists who regard US ‘human rights diplomacy’ and its attempts to push China towards democratization as a ‘peaceful evolution’ conspiracy are not likely to support democratization wholeheartedly. Others argue that ‘peaceful evolution’ might be simply a pretext for rejecting democracy. At any rate, a real or imaginary ‘enemy’ in this scenario has changed much in China’s search for democracy, not least by making less attractive what the ‘enemy’ claims to uphold: democratic values. Cultural nationalists who reject alien ideas and practices for the sake of cultural authenticity are liable to resist Western democratic values unless they make a distinction between universal values and ‘colonial culture’. Liberal and nationalist thinkers who evade the challenge of regime transformation may well be equally guilty of defending government policies when defending or capitalizing on some transitional measures or developments that they believe pave the way for democratization. It is also doubtful whether ‘totalistic iconoclasm’ is conducive to, or necessary for, China’s democratization. From the discussion in this chapter, I conclude that the liberal– nationalist debate on democracy and national identity is barking up the wrong tree. This debate serves a purpose in bringing forward theory, ideas, conjecture, and to some extent public discussion about democracy and national identity. But it is certainly not in the interest of China’s democratization if Chinese liberals and nationalists cling habitually as adversaries to the dichotomy of truth and falsehood and insist that one group ‘loses’ so the other can ‘win’. Consciously or unconsciously, most liberals and nationalists appear to be still guided by the age-old Chinese adage ‘no deconstruction, no construction’. In fact, the way forward begins with recognition that the construction of a democratic future for China does not require deconstruction of all that is now seen to be undemocratic in China’s past or present. History is rich with lessons indicating that, for movement along the democratization path, an overlapping consensus on democracy is more useful than division between antithetical groupings.

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Notes 1 2

3

4

I am particularly grateful to Shaoguang Wang, whose detailed, insightful comments on an earlier version of this chapter helped me to rethink some aspects of my discussion from different angles. This is based on Anthony Smith’s (1991: 73) deﬁnition of nationalism as ‘an ideological movement for retaining and maintaining autonomy, unity and identity’ on behalf of the nation. I have, following Calhoun (1997: 4–5), expanded the unnecessarily restrictive term ‘ideological movement’ to a project, discourse or evaluation. Joseph Fewsmith (2001) provides a schematic of societal actors on the left and right. In his schematic, the New Left includes three sub-groups: New Nationalists, Postmodernists and Neo-statists. I ﬁnd a common nationalist inclination among all these thinkers except the Neo-statists, who are probably better seen as statists than as nationalists, due to their preoccupation with state capacity. Isaiah Berlin (1981: 341–5) believed that nationalism is responsible for four indefensible beliefs: ﬁrst, that the characters of human beings are moulded by the groups to which they belong; second, that the ends pursued by individual members cannot be dissociated from the good of the whole; third, that the ends that individuals pursue are evaluated by the standards of the nation; fourth, that the interests of the nation are regarded as supreme. As a result, he made a distinction between a defensible ‘national consciousness’ – the sense of belonging to a nation – and an indefensible ‘nationalism’.

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Fukuyama, Francis (1994) ‘Comments on nationalism and democracy’, in Larry Diamond and Marc Platner (eds) Nationalism, Ethnic Conﬂict and Democracy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ge Hongbing (1998) ‘Jingti xia’aide minzuzhuyi’ (On guard against narrow nationalism), Zhongguo qingnian yanjiu (Chinese Youth Studies), 1: 32–3. Glassman, R.M. (1991) China in Transition: Communism, Capitalism and Democracy, New York: Praeger. Goldman, Merle (1999) ‘Politically engaged intellectuals in the 1990s’, The China Quarterly, 159: 700–11. Gu Xin (1998) ‘Bolin yu ziyou minzuzhuyi’ (Berlin and liberal nationalism), Gonggong luncong (Res Publica), 5: 227–42. Han Yuhai (2000a) ‘“Xiangyue jiuba”, “gaobie jiuba” ’ (‘Gathering together in 1998’, ‘farewell to 1998’), in Li Shitao (ed.) Zhishifengzi de lichang (The Position of the Intellectuals), Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe. –––– (2000b) ‘Ziyouzhuyi yu dangdai Zhongguo’ (Liberalism and contemporary China), in Li Shitao (ed.) Zhishifengzi de lichang (The Position of the Intellectuals), Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe. He Baogang (2000) ‘The clash between state nationalism and democratisation over the national identity question’, in He Baogang and Guo Yingjie, Nationalism, National Identity and Democratisation in China, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. He Xin (1996) Zonghua fuxing yu shijie weilai (China’s Revival and the World’s Future), Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe. Heywood, Andrew (2000) Key Concepts in Politics, Hampshire, UK and New York: Palgrave. Hsiung, J.C. (1985) Human Rights in East Asia, cited in Xia Yong (1998) ‘Human rights and Chinese traditions’, in Michael Dutton, Streetlife China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutchinson, John (1987) The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, London: Allen and Unwin. Jiang Niantao (1996) ‘Dui minzu ziwo zhongxin de fanbo’ (A retort upon the selfcentrism of nationality), Jianghan luntan (Jianghai Forum), 3: 33–5. Jiang Qing (1996) ‘Chaoyue Xifang minzhu, huigui Rujia benyuan’ (Transcend Western democracy and return to Confucian roots), Zhongguo shehui kexue jikan (Chinese Social Science Quarterly), 17: 110–31. Jiang Yihua (1993) ‘Lun ershishiji Zhongguode minzuzhuyi’ (On Chinese nationalism in the 20th century), Fudan xuebao (shekeban) (Fudan University Journal), 3: 8–13. Kedourie, Elie (1993) Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell. Kymlicka, Will (1989) Liberalism, Community and Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Li Shenzhi (1997) ‘Preface 2’, in Chen Minzhi and Ding Dong (eds) Gu Zhun riji (The Diaries of Gu Zhun), Beijing: Jingji ribao chubanshe. –––– (1998) ‘Preface’, in Liu Junning (ed.) Beida chuantong yu jindao Zhongguo (Beijing University and Liberalism in Modern China), Beijing: Zhongguo renshi chubanshe. Li Xing (1995) ‘Lun guojia minzuzhuyi gainian’ (On the concept of state nationalism), Beijing daxue xuebao (Beijing University Journal), 4: 74–80. Lin Yu-sheng (1979) The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Linz, Juan J. and Stepan, Alfred (1996) Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Liu Junning (1993) ‘Xinjiapo: rujia ziyouzhuyi de tiaozhan’ (Singapore: the challenge of Confucian liberalism), Dushu (Reading), 2: 9–15. –––– (1997) ‘Minzuzhuyi simianguan’ (Four dimensions of nationalism), Nanfang wenhua (Southern Culture), 6: 25–8. Online. Available http://www.sinoliberal. com/jnliu/republic. –––– (1998a) ‘Zhijie minzhu yu jianjie minzhu’ jinyi haishi fanyi?’ (Direct democracy and indirect democracy: synonyms or antonyms?) Gonggong luncong (Res Publica), 5: 36–52. –––– (1998b) ‘Chanquan baohu yu youshan zhengfu’ (The protection of property rights and limited government), in Dong Yuyu and Shi Binghai (eds) Zhengzhi Zhongguo (Political China), Beijing: Jinri Zhongguo chubanshe. –––– (2000a) ‘Baoshou zhuyi yu ziyou zhuyi zhijian – cong Hayeke dao Zhongguo’ (Between conservatism and liberalism: from Hayek to China), in Li Shitao (ed.) Zhishi fenzide lichang (The Position of the Intellectuals), Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe. –––– (2000b) ‘Classical liberalism catches on in China’, The Journal of Democracy, 3 November: 48–57. –––– (2001) ‘Dang minzhu fangai ziyoude shihou’ (When democracy hinders liberty), Sixiang pinglun (Ideological Forum). Online. Available http://www.sino liberal.com/jnliu/republic (accessed 9 April 2001). Liu Xiaobo (1997) ‘Jiushi niandai Zhongguode jiduan minzuzhuyi’ (Chinese ultranationalism in the 1990s), Beijing zhichun (Beijing Spring), 44. Online. Available http://bjzc.org/bjs/bc/44/31 (accessed 26 August 1997). Miller, David (1995) On Nationality, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nodia, Ghia (1994) ‘Nationalism and democracy’, in Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner (eds) Nationalism, Ethnic Conﬂict and Democracy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pi Mingyong (1996) ‘Minzuzhuyi yu rujia wenhua’ (Nationalism and Confucian culture), Zhanlue yu guanli (Strategy and Management), 2: 51–7. Poole, Ross (1999) Nation and Identity, London and New York: Routledge. Rustow, Dankwart (1967) A World of Nations: Problems of Political Modernisation, Washington: Brookings Institutions. Shuang Yi (1993) ‘Xuezhe xiance, quanzhe juece’ (Academics offer policy advice, the powers-that-be make the decisions), Zhongguo shibao zhoukan (Chinese Global Times Weekly), 94, 17–23 October: 16–18. Smith, Anthony (1991) National Identity, Nevada: University of Nevada Press. Song Liming (1997) ‘Minzuzhuyi yu Xizang wenti’ (Nationalism and the Tibet problem), Dangdai Zhongguo yanjiu (Modern China Studies) 2: 159–67. Song Qiang, Zhang Zangzang and Qiao Bian (1996) Zhongguo keyi shuo bu (China Can Say No), Beijing: Zhonghua gongshang lianhe chubanshe. Song Quan (1996) ‘Guanyu minzuzhuyi de jige wenti’ (On several topics about nationalism), Heilongjiang congkan (Heilongjiang Journal), 2: 31–4. Tamir, Yael (1993) Liberal Nationalism, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tang Changli (1989) ‘Shidai tezheng yu rujia gongneng’ (Characteristics of the times and the function of Confucianism), Dongyue luncong (Dongyue Forum), 1: 14–16. Tang Yongsheng (1996) ‘Minzuzhuyi yu guoji zhixu’ (Nationalism and the international order), Zhanlue yu guanli (Strategy and Management) 3: 76–9.

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Tao Dongfeng (1994) ‘Xiandai Zhongguo de minzu zhuyi’ (Nationalism in modern China), Xueshu yuekan (Academic Monthly) 6: 6–9. Tian Tong (1997) ‘Guanyu minzuzhuyi lilun de ruogan jiexi’ (Various analyses of nationalism), Shixue yuekan (Journal of History) 5: 9–13. Tu Wei-ming (1994) The Living Tree, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Walzer, Michael (1989) ‘Citizenship’, in Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson (eds) Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wang Hui (2000a) ‘Fenqi jiujing zai nar? Sihuo chongwen xue’ (What is the most fundamental difference? Preface to Sihuo Chongwen [Embers]), supplement to China News Digest 202 (10 January). Online. Available http://www.cnd.org. HXWZ/ (accessed 12 July 2000). –––– (2000b) ‘Dangdai Zhongguode sixiang zhuangkuang he xiandaixin wenti’ (The intellectual state of affairs in contemporary China and the question of modernity), in Li Shitao (ed.) Zhishifengzi de lichang (The Position of the Intellectuals), Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe. Wang Huning (1993) ‘Zuowei guojia shili de wenhua: ruan quanli’ (Culture as a component of national strength: soft power), Fudan xuebao (shekeban) (Fudan University Journal) 3: 91–6. –––– (1994) ‘Wenhua kuozhang yu wenhua zhuquan: dui zhuquan guannian de tiaozhan’ (Cultural expansion and cultural sovereignty: challenges to the concept of sovereignty), Fudan xuebao (shekeban) (Fudan University Journal) 3: 9–15. Wang Pengling (1997) ‘Zhongguo minzuzhuyi de yuanliu – jianlun cong geming de minzuzhuyi zhuanxiang jianshe de minzuzhuyi’ (Source of Chinese nationalism: on the transformation from revolutionary nationalism to constructive nationalism) Dangdai Zhongguo yanjiu (Modern China Studies), 2: 101–27. Wang Xiaodong (1999) ‘Zhongguode minzhuzhuyi he Zhongguode weilai’ (China’s nationalism and China’s future), in Fang Ning, Wang Xiaodong and Song Qiang, Quanqiuhua yinying xiade Zhongguo zhi lu (China’s Road under the Shadow of Globalisation), Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe. Wang Zigen (1994) ‘“Shijimo” de wenhua jingyu yu women de chulu – Beijing daxue bijiao wenxue yanjiusuo Zhong Xi wenhua “pingxing yanjiu” yu “huayu jiangou” taolunhui jiyao’ (The cultural milieu at the ‘end of the century’ and our way out: a report on the symposium on ‘parallel studies’ and ‘discourse construction’), Wenyi zhengming (Literary Debates), 2: 32–5. Wu Chuke (1996) ‘Dui dangdai minzuzhuyi sichao fanlan de pingxi’ (Comments on and analyses of the spreading of nationalism in the present age), Neimenggu shehui kexue (wenxueshi ban) (Inner Mongolia Social Science), 3: 6–12. Wu Guoguang (1996) ‘Yi lixing minzuzhuyi kangheng “weidu Zhongguo”’ (Responding to ‘containing China’ with rational nationalism), Ershiyi shiji (Twenty-ﬁrst Century), 34: 25–33. Xia Yong (1998) ‘Human rights and Chinese traditions’, in Michael Dutton (ed.) Streetlife China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Xiao Gongqin (1994a) ‘Minzuzhuyi yu zhongguo zhuanxing shiqi de yishi xingtai’ (Nationalism and ideology in China during the period of transformation), Zhanlue yu guanli (Strategy and Management), 4: 21–5. –––– (1994b) ‘Dongya quanwei zhengzhi yu xiandaihua’ (East Asian authoritarianism and modernisation), Zhanlue yu guanli (Strategy and Management), 2: 28–34.

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Xiao Xuehui (1998) ‘Buke huibi quanli zhiheng’ (Checks on power cannot be avoided), in Dong Yuyu and Shi Binghai (eds) Zhengzhi Zhongguo (Political China), Beijing: Jinri Zhongguo chubanshe. Xiong Kunxin (1996) ‘Guanyu minzuzhuyi zhenglun zhong de jige redian wenti’ (On several hot topics concerning nationalism), Guizhou minzu yanjiu (Guizhou Ethnic Studies), 4: 1–6. Xu Youyu (2000) ‘Ziyouzhuyi yu dangdai Zhongguo’ (Liberalism and contemporary China), in Li Shitao (ed.) Zhishi feizide lichang, (The Position of the Intellectuals), Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe. Yi Dan (1994) ‘Chaoyue zhimin wenxue de wenhua kunjing’ (Beyond the cultural dilemma of colonial literature), Waiguo wenxue pinglun (Foreign Literature Review), 2: 111–13. Yu Ying-shih (1996) ‘Democracy and nationalism’, Fen hua yuan (The Maple Garden). Online. Available http://uwalpha.uwinnipeg.ca/fhy/ (accessed 21 June 1997). Zhang Hailing (2000) ‘Shijimode da luzhan’ (A massive debate at the end of the century), Supplement to China News Digest, no. 202 (10 January). Online. Available http://www.cnd.org./HXWZ/ (accessed 12 July 2000). Zhang Wenbiao (1996) ‘Zhonghua minzu yishi yu shehui fazhan’ (Chinese national consciousness and society development), Fujian luntan (wenshizhe ban) (Fujian Forum), 1: 15–21. Zhong Weiguang (1997) ‘Minzu, minzuzhuyi he Zhongguo wenti’ (Nation, nationalism and the China problem), Dangdai Zhongguo yanjiu (Modern China Studies), 2: 128–42. Zhu Xueqin (2001) ‘Ziyouzhuyide yanshuo’ (A defence of liberalism), Supplement to China News Digest, no. 202 (10 January). Online. Available http://www.cnd.org/ HXWZ/ (accessed 12 July 2000).

3

The rise of neo-nationalism and the New Left A postcolonial and postmodern perspective Mobo Changfan Gao

Nationalism has, of course, ﬁgured prominently in modern Chinese history. In this chapter I demonstrate that the rise of neo-nationalism in China since 1990 is closely related to the rise of the so-called New Left. I argue that, from the point of view of the New Left, neo-nationalism in China is not anti-Western, xenophobic and aggressive, but is more assertive and open to the outside world than China’s earlier forms of nationalism. China’s new nationalism is based on two Western conceptual understandings. One is postcolonialism, which enables the New Left to be more conﬁdent of China’s traditional past and recent past under Mao Zedong. This interpretation recognizes that the May Fourth Movement in 1919 made many mistakes about China’s tradition and that the complete denial of the Mao era, including the Cultural Revolution, is invalid. The New Left argues that the success of the West should at least partly be attributed to the West’s aggressive and exploitative colonial and imperialist history, and that ‘Mr Democracy’ and ‘Mr Science’ are not the only source of Western power and wealth, as the May Fourth Movement argued or assumed. The other conceptual understanding is postmodernism, with which the New Left argues that the Western model of modernization is not the only model and that China should seek an alternative model.

Background The death of Mao in 1976 and the subsequent arrest of the Gang of Four brought great relief and joy to the Chinese elite.1 This dramatic event was termed the ‘second liberation’, with the ﬁrst liberation being the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) takeover of power in 1949. By the early 1980s, a great surge of re-introducing the West had started, bringing some liberalization of Western philosophy, political thought and literature. It was virtually a re-start of the May Fourth Movement.2 In the well-known thesis of qimeng yu jiuwang (Enlightenment versus saving the nation), the Communist revolution was seen to have interrupted the Enlightenment, since the urgency and necessity of saving the nation at that time took precedence (Bao 1990; Gan 1989; Wang Yuanhua 1990).

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In spite of four decades of anti-traditional theory, practice and rhetoric under CCP rule, the Chinese literati considered the existing so-called socialism3 in China to be inﬂuenced too heavily by the Chinese feudalistic tradition, so that a large dose of Westernization was still necessary. Hence, the remnants of the May Fourth Movement had to be picked up again and Enlightenment given precedence if China was to have any hope. Xu Jilin (2000) noted that while postmodernism was one of the Western ideas that ﬂooded the Chinese intellectual scene in the 1980s, its presence was not really noticed until the late 1990s, and that the neo-Enlightenment (xin qimeng) went hand in hand with the CCP’s ofﬁcial ‘second liberation’ that denounced the Cultural Revolution and restored the former ‘capitalist roaders’ to power. Through the 1980s the ofﬁcial claim was that this was the new era – an era of opening up and reform. There was very little disagreement, let alone resistance, among the literati, although there was some resentment and resistance from what is called the old-guard section of the CCP elite. The new era reached its height in 1989 when Beijing students protested in the streets. However, the authorities’ bloody crackdown on the protests shattered not only the West’s illusion about China becoming more like ‘us’, but also the dream of the Chinese literati. China is, after all, China, and the ﬁre of Enlightenment was extinguished once again. Many of the literati joined the Chinese diaspora in the West to become dissident democrats. Some who remained in China became more interested in xiahai (take the plunge into the uncertain ocean of money-making) than in Enlightenment. Economic reform surged after Deng Xiaoping’s push during his Southern tour in 1992, and China has continued on its track of opening up to the West economically. However, direct political reform was largely shelved.4 With the above discussion as context, I turn to consider neo-nationalism and its relationship with the so-called New Left in China.

A methodological note For two important reasons, the source of much of the primary information in this chapter is the Internet. First, the bulk of discussion here concerns the most recent developments and debates, meaning that the most apposite material had not reached the slower publications media at the time of preparing this chapter. Second, and more importantly, many of the debates and ideas cited in this discussion may never appear in ofﬁcial publications in China. The Internet is the quickest, safest and most convenient channel for authors to share ideas and to present their debates. For instance, Qiangguo luntan (Strong Nation Forum)5 has become a lively forum for political debates inside China.6 According to Tao (2000), on average about 35,000 messages are pasted on Qiangguo luntan every month. Most of the

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more than 30,000 of its registered writers are highly educated and pour forth on many issues that cannot be debated through other media channels. It is still too early to contemplate the potential and far-reaching signiﬁcance of the Internet for intellectual discourse and recording of it. One serious potential problem in using Internet sources is the possible lack of reliability and credibility of the information accessed on the Web. Since anyone with Internet access can paste anything on the Web, accountability is lacking. When an author publishes in a hard-copy journal, the editorship and peer review provide some accountability for what is published. Authors who have published even in a non-refereed journal or magazine may expect feedback, perhaps protest, from readers. However, there is not yet a regulatory standard for many website publications. It is important to acknowledge these limitations on the reliability of Internet information since this chapter draws extensively from the Internet as the site of discussions by Chinese observers/participants. I also need to clarify some key concepts. I use ‘left’ and ‘right’ as working concepts to classify groups of people who advocate certain ideas. I do not attempt to provide precise, historical or academic deﬁnition of these terms, since I believe that this is self-explanatory within the framework of this chapter. I use ‘New Left’ to mean the left side of contemporary opinions, and ‘liberalists’ to mean the right side of contemporary opinions. Here ‘left’ refers to political persuasion, whereas ‘New Left’ refers to a speciﬁc group of people. The same distinction applies to ‘right’ and ‘liberalists’. I have used the term ‘liberalists’ here because this group of people does not seem to me to be ‘the liberals’ as understood in the West.7 ‘Literati’ translates to the Chinese term zhishi fenzi, which means anyone, with or without formal education, who can use written words effectively. I ﬁnd the term ‘intellectuals’ inappropriate for zhishi fenzi because the latter denotes a much larger group of people. Finally, I use ‘neo-nationalism’ to mean nationalism with new content. In China, neo-nationalism includes appeals for anti-imperialism, the reuniﬁcation of Taiwan, and postmodern and postcolonial approaches to the interpretation of China’s modern history. It takes a realist approach to international affairs.

Neo-nationalism and the division between the left and right As the twentieth century drew to end, a new kind of nationalism was developing in China. I call this neo-nationalism, and I argue that it is developing in the twenty-ﬁrst century with greater force than before.8 This is conﬁrmed by academic observers such as Miles (2000), who ﬁnds such a degree of Chinese nationalism and anti-Americanism in China worrying. Clear evidence of Chinese nationalism are the demonstrations against the US and UK in China after the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade

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in May 1999 (Gao 2000) and the popularity of the ‘China Can Say No’ books by Qiao Bian et al. (1996), Song Qiang et al. (1996), and Peng Qian et al. (1996). Even awarding the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature to Gao Xingjian9 has become an issue of nationalism. Gao in 1987 became a naturalized French citizen after seeking political asylum. The most widely read newspaper in China, Renmin ribao (People’s Daily) denounced the prize as a political act, and individuals inside and outside China, including some prominent Chinese writers, condemned the action.10 The electronic journal Zhongguo zhuyi (China-ism) reveals this stance clearly. Contributors to the journal argued that Gao is only a third-class writer by Chinese standards, and that he won the prize because he wrote for a Western audience and because of his anti-China position (Zhongguo zhuyi 2000). In European and other industrial developed countries, nationalist rhetoric seems to have some connection with the right wing, including Le Pen in France, Jorg Haider in Austria, Tories like Norman Tebbit in Britain, Vlaams Blok in Belgium, Carl Hagen of the Progress Party in Norway, and the nationalist Filip DeWinter in Finland. Australia saw the rise of Pauline Hansen and the US has right-wing nationalists, such as the notorious author of the Cox Report on Chinese spying. Then there is the right-wing nationalism of Taiwan (Chen 2000).11 George Orwell’s observation in the 1950s still seem to be relevant in the West today: within the left-wing circle there was something slightly disgraceful in being nationalistic (Traves 2000). In China today, however, the opposite is true: people of the left are perceived to carry on the rhetoric of nationalism. Hence the theme of this chapter: neo-nationalism and the Chinese New Left. The issue of Gao Xingjian’s Nobel award again provides a lucid example. Chinese dissidents overseas, such as Liu Zaifu, Liu Bingyan, Wang Ping and Wang Dan, all welcomed the news of the award to Gao (Huaxia wenzhai 2000).12 Some of them actually stated that the honour of the prize does not go to China, claiming that it is precisely Gao’s anti-Chinese regime attitude that has made his work valuable. On the other hand, those who denounced the awarding of the prize to Gao and who stated that this had insulted the Chinese, tend to have quite radical political views. Ji An (2000), the creator of the electronic Zhongguo zhuyi, for instance, is a strong defender of Mao, Maoism and even the Cultural Revolution.13 The same line can be drawn between the so-called left and liberal right, both inside and outside China, regarding the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and subsequent Chinese protest demonstrations. Those of the so-called left tend to believe that the bombing was not a mistake, whereas those of the liberal right insisted otherwise (Gao 2000). While the left side supported the protests, the liberal right warned of the dangers of Chinese nationalism and condemned what they thought to be the Chinese government inciting the demonstrations. The liberalists, with no pretence about concealing their intentions to promote China’s economic

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and political liberalization, argue that nationalism in China is a threat to the world. In China as elsewhere, nationalism is expressed intensively in international sports competition. News of Chinese achievements in the 2000 Olympics, and news of Beijing’s intention to bid for the 2008 Olympics, drew very different responses. In a critique of Cao Changqing, one of the leading Chinese-diaspora dissidents, Xiang Zhen (2000), accused Cao of ‘wagging his tail’ to the West. Cao argued that Beijing does not deserve to hold the Olympics because the Beijing regime holds values different to those in the US (Cao 2000). In these exchanges of views we see how the right assumes the superiority of American values and therefore accepts that Americans have the right to intervene in China and to shape what China can and cannot do internationally. The left, on the other hand, refers to China’s past of international humiliation, rejects the right and validity of any external intervention in China and takes pride in the present achievements of Chinese internationally. Another case that divides the left and right is the translation and publication inside China of Andre Gunder Frank’s, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. The translated book, Baiying ziben (Silver Capital), created a stir in China with book reviews and seminars. The book claims that until 1750 the global economy was Sinocentric, while China had a balance of trade surplus, based on unrivalled manufacturing production and export, and that Europe or the West developed economically by climbing on Asia’s shoulders, i.e. using wealth and money (chieﬂy silver and gold) from its colonies in Africa and America to trade with Asia. Therefore, the rise of the West is related to Asia and is a result of a global economy (Frank 1998). The book has stimulated good feelings for Chinese nationalism, since it re-orients China to the centre of the world stage. However, for this very reason, the prominent Chinese liberalist Xu Youyu (2000a) is very critical, not only of the book but also of the Chinese who praise it. Xu asserts that if Frank is right, several generations of Chinese since the May Fourth Movement, including the egregious observers of Chinese society Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Lu Xun and Hu Shi, were all wrong. Further, all the efforts of learning from the West and of self-criticism of Chinese tradition, and all the promotion of ‘Mr Sai’ (science) and ‘Mr De’ (democracy), were a waste of time. For Xu, the crucial question is whether to denigrate the direction of the May Fourth Movement or to uphold its ﬂag. Xu has accused the left of using Frank’s book to attack the May Fourth spirit and to support the left’s thesis of postcolonial discourse (Xu 2000b). The ideological divide can also be seen in the Changjiang dushu jiang (Changjian Dushu Prizes) incident in 2000. The Changjiang dushu jiang are annual prizes set up through a donation by Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing for the best academic books and articles published in Chinese, with total prize money of nearly RMB 1,000,000 each year to be shared among winners.

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The prizes are jointly administered by Sanlian Publishing Company and Dushu magazine. In 2000, three of the prize winners were Wang Hui, chief editor of Dushu; Fei Xiaotong, Honorary Chairman of the Prize selection committee; and Qian Liqun, a member of this selection committee. The announcement of these winners caused widespread uproar (Zhong 2000). The so-called liberalists (such as Zhu Xueqin 2000 and Zhu Jianguo 2000) either joined the chorus of those denouncing the prizes or tried to distance themselves from Dushu. But many opinions posted on the Internet supported Wang Hui and Dushu, including those of Shaoguang Wang (2000), Yang Wenshao (2000), Xiao Jun (2000) and Zhou Xiangsen (2000). One contributor pen-named Wen/Xiaomin14 directly attacked the inﬂuential Nanfang zhoumo (The Southern Weekend), which published many pieces attacking Dushu. Wen points out that Nanfang zhoumo was very keen to attack a scholar like Wang Hui, but did nothing itself to expose ofﬁcial corruption. Wen asks why Nanfang zhoumo does not publish news or comments on the dreadful working conditions and abuse of migrant workers in Guangdong where this newspaper is based, and why this paper supports the existing system of anonymous bank accounts. He suggests that the paper criticized the awards to Dushu and Wang Hui because they have been critical of what the paper supports: economic liberalism that allows corruption and exploitation of workers (Wen/Xiaomin 2000).

The dispute between the new left and liberalists: the issue of modernity The real dispute between the left and the right in this instance is the political stand that Dushu had taken, as Wen’s posting indicated. The award recipients in 2000 became a convenient focal point for the right, who for some time had wanted to attack Dushu (Qiu 2000). Dushu is a popular magazine that used to cater to the Chinese literati, who subscribed to and read Dushu because it had a reputation of supporting the opening-up and reform of China.15 However, since 1996 when Wang Hui took over the editorship, some accuse Dushu of having changed direction. Instead of being a highbrow popular monthly for the literati, Dushu also introduces ideas that both challenge liberal assumptions and raise serious theoretical social and political issues, especially in its book reviews. Book reviews that praised Frank’s ReOrient book are examples in point. The ﬁrst to openly criticize Dushu was outspoken freelance writer Dai Qing. In a short piece published in a Hong Kong newspaper, Dai (2000) declared that she used to be a subscriber to Dushu, but no longer wants to because Dushu is now ‘kan ting zhaohu’ (willing to listen to orders), meaning that Dushu serves the authorities willingly. Gan Yang, however, immediately responded to Dai in a short piece published in another Hong Kong newspaper. Gan (2000a) argued that Dai’s accusation was

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groundless and accused Dai of being manipulative and spreading rumours for her own gain. He Qinglian, another winner of the prize, declared herself outside the dispute between the new left and the liberalists, recognizing both sides as serving their masters while she herself remained independent. He (2000) claimed that the New Left serves the master of the dictatorial regime while the liberalists serve the master of capital. For the neo-nationalists, many of the Chinese diaspora serve the masters of foreign imperialists because they ‘have gone to Oxford to settle account with the Cultural Revolution and to Yale to denounce Mao Zedong’.16 She argued that not only is there nothing wrong in that, but that Chinese have to go overseas to be critical because they do not have the freedom to do it in China.17 For the neonationalists, Chinese dissidents ‘washing dirty linen’ in front of the West serves the Western powers’ purpose of demonizing China. Those who are considered to be of the New Left, such as Cui Zhiyuan and Wang Hui, reject this label. China’s radical history under the leadership of Mao has rendered the term ‘left’ a distasteful catch phrase. Wang Hui has argued that ‘New Left’ is used in the West in a very different political and social context (Wang Hui 2000b: 77). Gan Yang argued that the so-called New Left in China is really ‘liberal left’, whereas the so-called ‘liberals’ are really ‘liberal right’ (Gan 2000b). However, the ‘New Left’ label has stuck. Cui Zhiyuan (2000) explained that the term ‘New Left’ was ﬁrst used in June 1994 when Beijing qingnian bao (The Beijing Youth) published a commentary on Cui’s idea of shareholding in rural China, and the term then became widely circulated among academics after the publication of Wang Hui’s ground-breaking article in 1997.18 By the 1990s, the issue was no longer whether, but how, China should be reformed. The answer hinges on the very issue of modernity. At this juncture a split formed among the Chinese intellectual elite. The liberalists want China to go further along the road of modernization towards liberal market economy and representative democracy. To them, China is not yet modernized, and the task of Enlightenment has not been completed. Hayek and Berlin are the master thinkers of the liberalists. Five New Left scholars are egregious on the issue of modernity. Shaoguang Wang and Hu Angang argued that during the transitional period China needs strong state intervention to build institutional infrastructure for democracy and equality. Cui Zhiyuan argued for a post-Fordist style of management to strengthen grassroots political and economic democracy, which cannot be provided by liberal market forces (Cui 1999). Gan Yang (2000b) was one of the ﬁrst to argue for picking up the Enlightenment ﬂag during the 1980s, and in the 1990s argued that since China has changed its policies of equality, justice should take priority over liberal marketism. Wang Hui (2000a) argued that it is wrong for the liberal discourse of Enlightenment to assume that Western values of individualism are universally applicable. Wang Hui calls the present liberalism in China xin qimeng

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zhuyi (neo-Enlightenmentism) that in seeking to realize capitalist modernization in China, criticizes China’s socialist practice of the past ﬁve decades as feudalism, and takes its task in present China as that of the European Enlightenment in the Middle Ages. Wang Hui (1998) argues that this view misses the global context in which the Chinese practice of socialism is also a practice of modernization. The New Left argues that Western-style modernization was realized in the West at the expense of the underclass, the indigenous people and the environment. Its supporters cite the economic collapse of the former Soviet Union and environmental degradation in China to demonstrate the cost and damage of the liberal market economy. They cite evidence of horrible working conditions, the abuse of migrant workers, and increasing inequality, to demonstrate the true cost of liberalism. They argue that the West achieved its material afﬂuence as a result of imperialist plunder and colonial exploitation. The master thinkers for the New Left are Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Samir Amin and Immannuel Wallerstein. Liberalists accuse the New Left of supporting mass violence. They therefore appreciate Edmund Burke’s conservatism and England’s Glorious Revolution, and are critical of the value of the French Revolution. Liu et al. (2001) declare that freedom is noble, transcendental and something with which we are born (gaogui, xiantian chao shisu), that only the elite can make freedom a priority, and that only freedom can protect the elite. The New Left accuses the liberalists of being elitist and of supporting the market liberalism that victimizes the underdog (Han Yuhai 2000). The New Left is left because it is critical of capitalism and tends to have a positive interpretation of China under Mao, as evident in Han Deqiang (1999)19 and Zhang Guangtian (2000).20 The New Left is new because it employs postmodern and postcolonial theories for criticizing liberalism. The dispute between the New Left and the liberalists is keenly relevant to Chinese nationalism. The New Left sees global capitalism as a Western march into non-Western countries at the End of History. According to the New Left, global capitalism is like colonialism re-enacted, with missionaries of economic rationalism and human rights to clear the moral ground. Understandably, criticism of aggressive globalization in countries like China has taken a nationalist stand. Nationalism emerges in non-Western countries during their process of modernization because the model of modernity has always been brought from the West, which has a colonial and imperialist history. For the liberalists, although the West had an unfortunate history of imperialism and colonialism, there is a need to make a distinction between Western civilization and Western hegemony (Li Shitao 2000b). For the New Left, however, there is an inherent connection between Western civilization and Western expansion. For the liberalists, there is also a need to distinguish between modernization and Westernization (Li Shitao 2000a).

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The model of modernity originated in the West, but since the 1950s there have been other models of modernization such as in Eastern Europe, Japan and elsewhere in East Asia. In other words, being critical of the choice of model of modernity does not have to mean being anti-Western (Zhu Xueqin 2000). The New Left argues that there is no essentialist anti-Westernism in their critique of the Western model of modernization because the theoretical tools it uses to criticize Western liberalism are postmodernism and postcolonialism that are also Western.

The conditions of contemporary China and its future direction Liberalists and the New Left also differ in their evaluation of the present conditions of China. Liberalists argue that China is not a capitalist country and that the majority of China’s economy is still in the hands of the state. China is not a colony and Chinese feudalism is still dominant. Market forces do not play a major role in China and all the problems cited by the New Left are not a result of capitalist market economy, but of too much state control (Chen and Yang 2000). Liberalists argue that postcolonial and postmodernist theories do not apply in China. They argue that those of the New Left such as Cui Zhiyuan are out of touch with China’s reality because they write from the US (Wu 2000). Yu Shicun (2000) argues that Wang Hui of the New Left is a Chinese Don Quixote who ﬁghts for nothing. The liberalists argue that these New Left scholars overseas have the freedom to read and write whatever they want, whereas those in China do not have that privilege. Liberalists argue that China is still authoritarian and even dictatorial, which is why they ﬁght for liberalism. In their view, only liberalism can lead to individual freedom, and that privatization and the right of private ownership can fundamentally protect individual freedom and human rights. The New Left denounces this as false. Dai Qing seems to claim that Dushu and, by implication, the New Left answer the call of the Chinese government. In fact, the New Left is very critical of the government – for instance, for its corruption, abuse of the human rights of workers, and concession to the US for entry into the WTO. Three main ﬁgures of the New Left, Cui Zhiyuan, Shaoguang Wang and Gan Yang write from outside Chinese government control and they do not have to serve the Chinese government. The New Left claims that in terms of practical policies it is the liberalists who serve the cause of the government by arguing that corruption is unavoidable in the process of transition (Zhang Weiying 1997) and that pain has to be endured for China to join the WTO. It is no longer true to identify all that is left with the Chinese government. The dispute also demonstrates that the split within the Chinese intellectual elite is a sign of intellectual maturity. Both the New Left and the liberalists are thinking seriously about what direction China should take at

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this critical juncture of modernization: further along the road to become another Western-styled modern China, or something different in terms of both economic management and governance. The mainstream economists, who are either trained or ﬁnancially supported by US institutions (Yang Fan 2000), are generally liberalists and strongly advocate the former road, whereas the New Left argues for caution. Because China comprises more than one-ﬁfth of the world’s population, whatever course China takes is likely to have major consequences internationally. If China takes the economic road that Western nations have followed, the environmental consequences alone will be disastrous for the world (Wen Tiejun 2000). The issue of corruption also demonstrates the dividing line in interpreting modernity in China. According to mainstream economists and other liberalists, corruption is rampant in China because of public ownership and a lack of competitive market forces (Fan 1996). Reform needs to use corruption to buy off those who are in power (Zhang Shuguang 1995). This theory is reﬂected in the model of Yi zichan huan tequan (give them money and property in exchange for privilege) that prescribes buying off the politically powerful in return for their giving up power (Zhang Wuchang 1997). However, the New Left argues that corruption is no less rampant in some countries where the market economy holds sway. According to an International Transparency estimate in 1999, all 10 countries with the highest levels of corruption have a market economy. For the New Left, the way to check corruption effectively is to strengthen grassroots democracy politically and in economic management, like Mao’s mass democracy (Cui 1999). China’s entry into the WTO also reveals the importance of the New Left/liberalist dispute. Mainstream economists in China tended to support the Chinese government’s efforts to join the WTO by making concessions. They argue that only by international exposure through WTO membership can China’s economy achieve efﬁciency and international competitiveness. However, the New Left argues that there is no way that Chinese industry can compete with large multinational companies. The consequences of China’s concessions to gain WTO membership will mean the collapse of local industries and will lead to a huge increase in unemployment. Zuo Dapei (2000) states frankly that the free trade doctrine preached by Western mainstream economists has ulterior motives and that the naïve Chinese economists cannot see that the whole discourse is aimed at making China reliant upon Western economic structure. The ‘free trade’ doctrine has no theoretical foundation, or any empirical evidence to support it, Zuo argues. Britain, then the US, Germany, France and Japan set in place domestic protection measures before their own industries became strong enough to compete internationally. No country was freer than China in terms of tariff protections after the Opium War because China at that time was too weak to protect itself. The outcome was disastrous for China.

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Why is it that in the West the right holds the banner of nationalism while in China it is the left that presents the nationalistic rhetoric? The answer seems to lie in the colonial history of the West and its postcolonial critique. From Mao Zedong to Ho Chi-minh, from Africa to Latin America, nationalism was carried out in anti-colonial discourse. The left and revolutionaries have criticized Western colonialism. Yet nationalism in developed countries has an undercurrent of justifying the status quo. In defending the established interests of Western order and their own privileges, those of the right are anxious that their comfortable material afﬂuence and Western core values are being invaded by migrants from former colonies, or by those from undeveloped countries who seek to reside in Western countries to enjoy the beneﬁts of modernity. Nationalism in Taiwan can be seen in this light. Those of the nationalist right in Taiwan, long protected by and beneﬁting from US imperialism but now threatened by their poor Mainland cousins, tend to identify themselves with the colonial status quo.

The 11 September attack on the US In almost every sense, the 11 September 2001 suicide attacks on the US have changed the scenario of the international arena. The profound impact of the attacks and their aftermath on international and national politics is far-reaching and continues to unfold. While acknowledging this, my concern here is how the Chinese have responded to 11 September, and particularly how their response reﬂects division between the New Left and the liberalists in relation to Chinese nationalism. The ofﬁcial Chinese response was a cool and digniﬁed condemnation of the attacks and expression of sympathy to the victims. However, informally on the streets and on the Internet, there was some expression of ‘they got what they deserve’ (huo gai). In an estimate by website Da cankao (Big News) (2001), which is supported by the US but run by Chinese dissidents, in the ﬁrst few days after the attacks more than 70 per cent of discussions on websites such as Qiang guo luntan (To Strengthen the Nation Forum) and Xinlang (New Wave) supported the attacks on the US. So large was this response that the Chinese government took measures to stop the ﬂood of expressions of anti-US feeling and Chinese nationalism. The liberalists immediately identiﬁed themselves with the US by declaring their alliance. Liu et al. (2001) published a letter on the Internet stating that the attacks were crimes against humanity, challenges to life, freedom and peace, and that US had paid an extraordinary price for maintaining the world order of freedom. They warned that nationalism is the last refuge for scoundrels and evil forces, ending their letter with a declaration that we were all Americans tonight and God bless America. Cao Changqing, who often publishes on the Da cankao website, wrote a long

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piece responding to Chinese criticism of US imperialist hegemony. Cao (2001) defended all international actions by the US and ended by saying that the US ﬂag of stars and stripes symbolizes the values of freedom, dignity and civilization, so we should bless US hegemony over the world.21 The liberalists also condemned Chinese generally for their xing zai le huo (taking pleasure in others’ misfortune) after the 11 September attacks. Yu Jie (2001) recycled May Fourth language by declaring that the majority of Chinese are used to the ‘man eating’ system denounced by Lu Xun, and the cultural background for Chinese xing zai le huo is that the Chinese are still maggots (qu chong) living in a cesspit (mao kang). The New Left has largely kept silent on the 11 September attacks, presumably because they found it either insensitive to say anything contrary to the prevailing condemnation of the attacks, or because the issues involved were too complex. The New Left nevertheless condemned the American government’s responses to the attacks. One response posted on the Internet and also circulated personally to this author by an obviously pen-named Xi Shou (2001) condemned the Chinese New Left for standing side by side with terrorism.

Conclusion: are postmodernism and postcolonialism relevant to China? In my concluding remarks I raise this question without attempting to provide a deﬁnitive answer. It is clear that neo-nationalism in China is neither xenophobic, expansionist nor exclusionist. It is about China’s directions for modernization in the rapidly changing world of globalization. As the model of modernization seen widely as successful is Western liberal democracy, it is not surprising that many Chinese want to follow this model. I call those who follow this model liberalists, and mainstream economists are among them. Some Chinese are critical of the Western model and have been inﬂuenced by Orientalism, postcolonialism and postmodernism (Wang Xiaodong 2000a, 2000b). Although the liberalists cry wolf by saying that the New Left has government support, I argue that it is the liberalists – who have much government support – whose discourse is dominant in China. The success of the Western model is too obvious and the idea of challenging the model for many, including the liberalists, is too overwhelming to contemplate. Do postcolonialism and postmodernism have any relevance in China?22 Some observers have argued that the historical experiences that China has suffered have not been as bad as those suffered by Africans (Ashcroft et al. 1989; Chinweizu 1975; Rodney 1972) and by native Americans (Sale 1990, Stannard 1992). Yet as Todorov (1982) argued, Columbus’ voyage was the harbinger of the modern era, which has since imposed the Western universalist notion of humanity in its own image across the entire globe. The Chinese liberalists are very keen on transforming Chinese with Western

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Enlightenment and humanist rationality, but can they rightly ignore or reject the postmodernist and postcolonial argument that the very structure of Western rationality has racist and imperialist implications? Knowledge cannot be ‘pure’ and ‘disinterested’. Said (1993) explained cogently how Western material and political power inﬂuenced the production of knowledge of the Orient. For Marx, England had to fulﬁl a double role, one destructive and one regenerative: to destroy Asiatic society and to lay the material foundation of Western society in Asia. This is the colonial civilizing mission of Europe. As Gramsci (1971: 416) said, [e]ven if one admits that other cultures have had an importance and a signiﬁcance . . . they have had a universal value only in so far as they have become constituent elements of European culture, which is the only historically and concretely universal culture – in so far, that is, as they have contributed to the process of European thought and been assimilated by it. While Enlightenment has an aude sapere (dare to know) attitude, postcolonialists and postmodernists deliver the possibility of knowing differently, of care to know, thus their task of deconstructing humanism in the West. By ignoring postcolonial and postmodernist critique of the Enlightenment project, Chinese liberalism may well ﬁt Arif Dirlik’s description of it as ‘self-Orientalism’ or ‘Orientalism in reverse’ (Dirlik 1997). Postcolonialism is then a new humanism that attempts to provincialize Europe, to foreground the exclusions and elisions that conﬁrm the privileges and authorities of canonical knowledge systems, and to recover marginalized knowledge that has been occluded and silenced. The so-called Chinese New Left certainly takes postmodernism and postcolonialism very seriously. Those of the New Left in China are highly critical of globalization, because they advocate ‘comprehensive social values’ that are based on equality and social justice (Wang Hui 2000b: 79). They are critical of the liberalists who argue that market economy and privatization of ownership will lead China to a Western-style modernity, since this will have neither equality nor social justice. It will be very interesting to see how far the New Left will take their critique and their will to prevent the onslaught of China by the liberalists’ pursuit of market economy, privatization of ownership, and in the longer term a Westernstyle modernity for China.

Notes 1 By ‘elite’ I mean not only those who are usually described as zhishi fenzi (the literati), but also a section of the bureaucrats in the CCP and government. In recent times the term jingying (literally ‘cream’, ‘essence’, quintessence’) is used to refer not only to these two strata of people but also to the business elite.

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2 Yet as Wang Hui (2000b) noted, in the early 1980s the new enlightenment project was pushed by those who considered themselves Marxists, such as Su Shaozhi, Wang Yuanhua and Li Zehou. 3 In the West, the Chinese regime under Mao is referred to, even by some serious academics (for example Andrew Walder), as communist. The Chinese themselves, however, never thought or stated that their regime was communist. 4 I say ‘direct’ here because I believe that some form of political reform has been under way in China since 1992, but it is carried out in many ways that are less conspicuous and less dramatic than what could be expected in direct political reform. 5 The web address for Qiangguo luntan is http://202.99.23.237/cgi-bbs/Change Brd?to=14. 6 Qiangguo luntan was ﬁrst created by the Renmin ribao for Chinese to protest the US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, and it was then named Kangyi luntan (Protest Forum). 7 For background and brief introduction to the ‘liberalists’, see Guo Yingjie (2000: 1). 8 On Chinese nationalism since the 1980s in general, see Zhao (1997), Whiting (1995) and Unger (1996). 9 The Swedish Academy says of Gao ‘an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insight and linguistic ingenuity’. An article in The Observer (Jeffries 2000) singled out Gao’s novel Soul Mountain as ‘one of these single literary creations that seem impossible to compare with anything but themselves’. 10 One electronic journal, Xin nahan (New Voice of the Populace), ran a special issue on Gao Xingjian’s winning of the prize. See http://leftvoice.8u8.com/ index.html. 11 Yu Ying-shi, for instance, is a strong supporter of Li Denghui (Lee Teng-hui) who pushed Taiwan’s claim of national independence. See Zuo Si (2000). 12 Huaxia wenzhai is a widely read electronic journal run by Chinese of PRC origin. In October 2000 it ran a special issue on Gao’s winning of the Nobel Prize. 13 On Ji An’s nationalistic stand, see the Zhongguo zhuyi website http://zhongguosim.home.chinaren.com/. 14 Xiaomin (the little person) following a slash indicates to readers that the author has used a pen-name and is seeking to speak on behalf of the ordinary people. 15 As Xu Jilin (2000) explains, Dushu was one of the main forces of the neoEnlightenment during the 1980s. For more on Dushu see Wang Hui (2000b). 16 The Chinese version is ‘qian wang niujin qingsuan wenge, zhu zai yelu pipan Mao Zedong’. The English translation does not have the rhythm and irony of its Chinese original. 17 He Qinglian seems to forget that her highly acclaimed book Zhongguo xiandaihua de xianjing (Trap for China’s Modernization), which is very critical of the Chinese authorities, was published in Chinese in China, and she was one of the Changjiang Dushu prize winners precisely because of that book. 18 Before that time, according to Wang Hui, those who were critical of commercialism and consumerism in China were referred to as ‘conservatives’ (Wang Hui 2000b: 76). Those who want to understand what the New Left stands for to read Cui (1999) and Shaoguang Wang and Hu Angang (1999). 19 In this article Han claims that between 1965 and 1985, China’s GNP growth rate was higher than that of Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea. 20 Zhang Guangtian is one of the writers of the play Che Guevara and declared openly that he is proud to be a Red Guard of Chairman Mao. 21 In part two of his response published on the same website, Cao advocated a war against Chinese terrorists (meaning the Chinese who expressed their support for

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the attacks on the US). Cao named three professors in this category: Zhang Zhaozhong, Yan Xuetong and Li Xiguang. In part three of his response, Cao advocated a Third World War against totalitarian regimes. 22 For a defence of Enlightenment in China and arguments that postmodernism and postcolonialism do not apply to China see Ben (2001).

References Ashcroft, Bill, Grifﬁths, Gareth and Tifﬁn, Helen (1989) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures, London: Routledge. Bao Zunxin (1990) Pipan yu qimeng (Criticism and Enlightenment), Taipei: Lianji chubanshiye gongsi. Ben Xu (2001) ‘Postmodern–postcolonial criticism and pro-democracy enlightenment’, Modern China, 27 (1): 117–47. Cao Changqing (2000) ‘Beijing bupei ban aoyun: xini aoyun zhanshi zhong mei jiazhi bu tong’ (Beijing does not deserve to hold the Olympics: the Sydney Olympics have shown that China and US have different values), Minzhu Zhongguo (Democratic China). Online. Available http://www.chinamz.org/84issue/84gbgcl. html (accessed 25 August 2000). –––– (2001) ‘Rang minzhu ziyou de jiazhi chengba shijie: ping Meiguo bei xiji shijina zhi yi’ (Let the value of democracy and freedom hegemonize the world: on the attacks on the US, part 1), Da cankao (The Big News). Online posting. Available http://www.bignews.org (accessed 18 September 2001). Chen Kuide and Yang Jianli (2000) ‘Ziyoupai vs xinzuopai: dandai Zhongguo sichao duitan’ (Liberals vs the New Left: a dialogue on contemporary Chinese trends), Ziyou Yazhou diantai Zhongguo toushi jiemu (Free Asia on China). Online posting. Available http://www.ncn.org/oo06/48–10.htm (accessed 1 August 2000). Chen Kuan-Hsing (2000) ‘The imperialist eye: the cultural imaginary of a sub-empire and a nation-state’, Positions, 8 (1): 9–76. Chinweizu (1975) The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slaves and the African Elite, New York: Random House. Cui Zhiyuan (1999) Kanbujian de shou fanshi de bolun (The Paradox of the Model of the Invisible Hand), Beijing: Jingji kexue chubanshe. –––– (2000) ‘Guanyu Dushu yu xin zuopai guanxi de shuming’ (About the relationship between Dushu and the New Left), Email (5 July 2000). Da cankao (Big News) (2001). Online. Available http://www.bignews.org (accessed 13 September 2001). Dai Qing (2000) ‘Jue bu hua qian mai xuanquan’ (I deﬁnitely will not spend money on buying propaganda), Xinbao (Correspondence), 20 May. Dirlik, Arif (1997) The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Fan Gang (1996) ‘Fubai de jingjixue yuanli’ (The economic principle of corruption), Jingjixue xiaoxi bao (Economics News), 22 March 1996. Frank, Andre Gunder (1998) ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Gan Yang (1989) ‘Ziyou de linian: wusi chuantong zhi queshimian’ (The ideal of freedom: some faults of the May 4 tradition) in Li Yusheng (ed.) Wusi de duoyuan fansi (Multiple Reﬂections on the May 4 Movement), Hong Kong: Sanlian chubanshe.

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–––– (2000a) ‘Wei Dushu tao ge gongdao’ (Demand justice for Dushu), Ming Bao (Ming Pao), 23 May 2000. –––– (2000b) ‘Zhongguo ziyou zuopai de youlai’ (The origin of the Liberal Left in China), Ming Bao (Ming Pao), 1 and 2 October. Gandhi, Leela (1998) Postcolonial Theory: a Critical Introduction, New York: Columbia University Press. Gao, Mobo, C.F. (2000) ‘Sino-US love and hate relations’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 30 (4): 547–61. Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks; trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Guo Yingjie (2000) ‘Barking up the wrong tree: the quarrel between Chinese liberals and the nationalists’, paper presented at the China Workshop, Grifﬁth University, Queensland, 2000. Han Deqiang (1999) ‘Wushi nian sanshi nian he ershi nian’ (Fifty years, thirty years and twenty years), Tianya zhisheng (Voice of the Remotest Corner of the Earth). Online posting. Available http://www.tianya.com.cn (accessed 3 October 1999). Han Yuhai (2000) ‘Xiangyu 98, gaobie 98’ (Meet in 1998 and farewell in 1998), in Li Shitao (ed.) Zhishifenzi lichang – ziyouzhuyi zhi zheng yu Zhongguo sixiangjie de fenhua (Intellectual position: the dispute over liberalism and the splitting up of the thinking circle in China), Beijing: Shidai wenyi chubanshe. He Qinglian, 2000, ‘Wo kan Qie Gewala yi ju’ (How I see the play Che Guevara), Minzhu Zhongguo (Democratic China). Online. Available http://www.chinamz. org/83issue/83gbgc2.html (accessed 29 September 2000). Huaxia wenzhai (Chinese News Digest) (2000) 234. Online. Available http://www. sunrisesite.org/library/gb/magazine/hxwz/zk0010b.hz (accessed 14 October 2000). Jeffries, Stuart (2000) ‘Gao’s miracle journey out of obscurity’, The Observer, 15 October, p. 21. Ji An (2000) ‘Wubai nian meiyou ren neng chaoguo Mao zhuxi’ (No one can overtake Chairman Mao in 500 years), Zhongguo zhuyi (Chinaism). Online posting. Available http://zhongguosim.home.chinaren.com/ (accessed 1 June 2000). Li Shitao (ed.) (2000a) Zhishifenzi lichang – ziyouzhuyi zhi zheng yu Zhongguo sixiangjie de fenhua (Intellectual position: the dispute over liberalism and the splitting up of the thinking circle in China), Beijing: Shidai wenyi chubanshe. –––– (2000b) Zhishifenzi lichang – minzuzhuyi yu zhuanxing Zhongguo de mingyun (Intellectual position: nationalism and fate of China in transition), Beijing: Shidai wenyi chubanshe. Li Yusheng (ed.) (1989) Wusi de duoyuan fansi (Multiple Reﬂections on the May 4 Movement), Hong Kong: Sanlian chubanshe. Liu Xiaobo, Bao Zunxin, Li Xiguang, Liu Kang, Wu Zhaoping, Shi Anbing and Fei Bao (2001) ‘Liu Xiaobo, Bao Zunxin deng Zhongguo zhishi fenzi gei Meiguo de gongkai xin (A public letter to the US by Liu Xiaobo, Bao Zunxin and other Chinese intellectuals), Da cankao (Big News). Online posting. Available http:// www.bignews.org/20010912.txt (accessed 15 September 2001). Miles, James (2000) ‘Chinese nationalism, US policy and Asian security’, Survival, 22 (4): 51–72. Peng Qian, Yang Mingjie and Xu Deren (1996) Zhongguo weishenme shuo bu (Why Does China Say No?), Beijing: Xingshijie chubanshe. Qiao Bian, Zhang Zangzang and Song Qiang (1996) Zhongguo keyi shuo bu (China Can Say No), 6th print, Hong Kong: Mingbao chubanshe.

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Qiu Feng (2000) ‘Zhiyi Dushu’ (Question Dushu), Sixiang pinglun (Commentary on Ideas). Online posting. Available http://intellectual.members.easyspace.com/ academic/dushujiang3.htm (accessed 17 June 2000). Rodney, Walter (1972) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, London: BorgleL’Ouverture Publications. Said, Edward (1993) Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage. Sale, Kirkpatrick (1990) The Conquest of Paradise: Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, London: Knopf, distributed by Random House. Song Qiang, Zhang Zangzang, Qiao Bian, Tang Zhengyu and Gu Qingsheng (1996) Zhongguo haishi neng shuo bu (China Can Still Say No), Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chubanshe. Stannard, David (1992) American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World, New York: Oxford University Press. Tao Wenshao (2000), ‘Zhongguo yanlun techu: qiangguo luntan’ (China’s special speech zone: ‘Qiangguo luntan’), Online posting. Available email: [email protected] (27 November 2000). Todorov, Tzvetan (1982) Theories du Symbole; trans. Catherine Porter (1982) Theories of the Symbol, Oxford: Blackwell. Traves, Allan (2000) ‘“British”, a term of coded racism, says report’, The Guardian Weekly, 19–25 October, p. 11. Unger, Jonathan (ed.) (1996) Chinese Nationalism, London and New York: M.E. Sharpe. Wang Hui (2000a) ‘Dangdai Zhongguo sixiang zhuangkuang he xiandaixing wenti’ (The current trend of ideas in China and the question of modernity), in Li Shitao (ed.) Zhishifenzi lichang – ziyouzhuyi zhi zheng yu Zhongguo sixiangjie de fenhua (Intellectual position: the dispute over liberalism and the splitting up of the thinking circle in China), Beijing: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 2000: 83–123; and also in Social Text, 55 (1998): 9–44. Wang Hui (2000b) ‘Fire at the castle gate: an interview’, The New Left Review, 6 (November–December): 69–99. Wang, Shaoguang (2000) ‘Nachu zhengju lai’ (Produce evidence). Email (3 September 2000). Wang, Shaoguang and Hu Angang (1999) Zhongguo: bupinghanng fazhan de zhengzhi jingjixue (China: Political Economics for Uneven Development), Beijing: Zhongguo jihua chubanshe. Wang Xiaodong (2000a) ‘Wo weishenme jianchi fandui yixiang zhongzuzhuyi de lichang?’ (Why do I insist on my stand against reverse racism?), Zhongguo baodao zhoukan (China Report Weekly), 165. Online. Available email: [email protected] (13 February 2000). Wang Xiaodong (2000b) ‘A reply to Xie Xuanjun’s open letter to Wang Xiaodong’, Tianya zhisheng (Voice of the remotest corner of the earth). Online posting. Available http://www.tianya.com.cn (accessed 27 December 2000). Wang Yuanhua (1990) Chuantong yu fan chuantong (Tradition and Anti-tradition), Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe. Wen Tiejun (2002) ‘Hainan yehua’ (Evening chat in Hainan). Email (16 March 2002). Wen/Xiaomin (2000) ‘Haoyang de Nanfang zhoumo!’ (Well done, Nanfang zhoumo!). Email (15 August 2000). Whiting, Allen (1995) ‘Chinese nationalism and foreign policy after Deng’, China Quarterly, 142: 295–316.

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Wu Jiaxiang (2000) ‘Xin Zuopai: jiangshi huan hun’ (The New Left: The ghost of the cold body returns), Minzhu Zhongguo (Democratic China). Online posting. Available http://www.chinamz.org/84issue/84gbgcl.html (accessed 1 August 2000). Xi Shou (2001) ‘Zhongguo bufen xin zuopai renshi xuanze yu gongbu zhuyi zhan zai yiqi’ (Some Chinese New Leftists choose to be on the side of terrorism). Email from Shaoguang Wang (17 October 2001). Xiang Zhen (2000) ‘Aoyun gongyuan huaren yu gou budei runei’, Fenghua wenzhai (Maple Digest). Online. Available http://www.sunrisesite.org/library/gb/magazine/fhy/fhy0010a.hz (accessed 6 October 2000). Xiao Jun (2000) ‘Kan du dong the zhenglun’ (Incomprehensible disputes). Email (20 October). Xu Jilin (2000) ‘The fate of an enlightenment: twenty years in the Chinese intellectual sphere (1978–98)’, trans. Geremie Barme and Gloria Davis, East Asian History, 20: 169–86. Xu Youyu (2000a), ‘Wo du Baiyin ziben’ (Reading Silver Capital), Jingqi (Flag). Online posting. Available http://www.jingqi.com/jingqi/zixun/ (accessed 19 June 2000). –––– (2000b) ‘Zhiyi Baiyin ziben’ (Question Silver Capital), Nanfang zhoumo (Southern Weekend), 16 June. Yang Fan (2000) ‘Sixiang taolun hui er’ (Seminar on thinking 2). Email (15 August). Yang Wenshao (2000) ‘Lu jian buping zhe de hua’ (Words from one who cannot let injustice prevail without challenge). Email (15 October). Yu Jie (2001) ‘Xing zai le huo de wenhua baijing’ (The cultural background of those who take pleasure in others’ misfortune), in Xin shiji (New Century Net). Online. Available http://www.ncn.org (accessed 10 November 2001). Yu Shicun (2000) ‘Dushu zhubian Wang Hui shi xueshujie de Tang Jikede’ (The chief editor of Dushu, Wang Hui, is an academic Don Quixote), Jingqi (Flag). Online posting. Available http://www.jingqi.com/jingqi/zixun/ (accessed 19 June 2000). Zhang Guangtian (2000) ‘Qiushou shijie moyu chou’ (Anxiety of the sunset cloud during the harvest season in autumn), Sixiang de jingjie (Boundaries of Thought). Online posting. Available (accessed 1 October 2000). Zhang Shuguang (1995) Fubai yu huiluo de jingjixue fenxi (Economic Analysis of Corruption and Bribery), Shanghai: Shanghai remin chubanshe. Zhang Weiying (1997) ‘Youxi fubai de cuzai, bushi zuihao yeshi ciyo’ (Some corruption exists; even if it is not the best outcome it is the second best), in Zhang Wenmin, Song Guangmou, Zheng Hongliang, Zhan Xiaohong and Wang Limin (eds) Zhongguo jingji da lunzhan (The Great Debate on China’s Economy), Beijing: Jingji guanli chubanshe. Zhang Wuchang (1997) ‘Yi zichan huan tequan, cujin siyouhua’ (Give them money and property in exchange for privilege to promote privatization), in Zhang Wenmin, Song Guangmou, Zheng Hongliang, Zhan Xiaohong and Wang Limin (eds) Zhongguo jingji da lunzhan (The Great Debate on China’s Economy), Beijing: Jingji guanli chubanshe. Zhao Suisheng (1997) In Search of a Right Place? Chinese Nationalism in the postCold War World, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Institute of Asia Paciﬁc Studies, USC Seminar Series, 12.

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Zhong Xiaoyong (2000) ‘99 wan yuan dajiang bangei Dushu ren’ (The grand prizes of 99 hundred thousand were given to people in Dushu), Nanfang zhoumo (Southern Weekend), 9 June, culture column. Zhongguo zhuyi (Chinaism) (2000) Available http://zhongguosim.home.chinaren. com/ (accessed 14 October 2000). Zhou Xiangsen (2000) ‘Xueshu zhuzuo pinglun de jiazhi biaojun’ (Value criteria for judging academic works), Zhonghua dushu wang (The Chinese Reader Network). Online posting. Available http://cReader.com (accessed 30 July 2000). Zhu Jianguo (2000) ‘Changjiang jiang buchu chouwen’ (The scandal of the Changjiang Prizes), Sixiang pinglun (Commentary on Ideas). Online posting. Available http://intellectual.members.easyspace.com/academic/dushujiang3.htm (accessed 26 October 2000). Zhu Xueqin (2000) ‘Wusi yilai de liang ge jingshen bingzao’ (The two spiritual foci of infection since May 4), in Li Shitao (ed.) (2000) Zhishifenzi lichang – minzuzhuyi yu zhuanxing Zhongguo de mingyun (Intellectual position: nationalism and the fate of China), Beijing: Shidai wenyi chubanshe. Zuo Dapai (2000) ‘Maoyi: guanyu baohu zhuyi he jinru WTO’ (Trade: on protectionism and the WTO), Sixiang taolun hui si (Seminar on thinking 4). Email (25 August 2000). Zuo Si (2000) ‘Pingkun yu zuoyi’ (Poverty and the Left). Email from Cui Zhiyuan (13 December).

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Part III

Chinese nationalism and Sino-US relations

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4

Chinese nationalism and the Belgrade embassy bombing Ben Hillman

Over the last century or more, Chinese nationalism has been fuelled by (if not entirely born from) various international ‘events’ that have brought a perceived physical or psychological harm to the Chinese people. The Opium Wars were arguably the ﬁrst triggers of nationalism in China. These imperialist aggressions and the unequal treaties that followed inspired China’s ﬁrst nationalists to challenge the Dragon Throne in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Versailles decision of 1919 that granted Japan Germany’s former concessionary rights in Shandong sparked the May Fourth demonstrations that today’s Chinese claim as the birth of the modern Chinese nation. In the 1930s and 1940s, Japanese aggressions, beginning with the Manchurian Incident of 1931, excited the nationalism of both communists and nationalists. Chinese responses to events such as these can serve as valuable indicators to China’s political climate and the content of Chinese nationalism. Since China’s ‘opening-up’ in the post-Mao period and, more particularly, since 1989, China’s modern nationalism has also been inﬂuenced by another series of international events. Chinese reactions to those events have served to highlight the direction of China’s nationalism. Chinese reactions to the loss of the 2000 Olympic bid in 1992, to the Yinhe incident of 1993 and to US intervention in the Strait Crisis of 1995–6 are some of the more poignant examples. This chapter considers China’s reaction to arguably the most sensitive international incident to stoke the ﬁres of Chinese nationalism in the reform period: the May 1999 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Here I investigate ‘ofﬁcial’ responses to the embassy bombing, as represented by coverage of the event in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) mouthpiece, Renmin ribao (People’s Daily) newspaper. This is essentially an investigation into the messages of nationalist rhetoric and into the themes that connect China’s ‘modern’ nationalism with its past. I aim to shed light on the kind of nationalism (and ideas of the nation) that the Chinese leadership tried to promote at the cusp of the twenty-ﬁrst century. Newspapers play an instrumental role in disseminating nationalist ideologies and in constructing national identities. The central argument of

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Benedict Anderson (1981) is that print journalism joined readers in time and place and made the ‘nation’ imaginable. Anderson argued that the regularity and ubiquity of newspapers turned readers into a ‘league of anonymous equals’. In the People’s Republic of China, no newspaper has been as regular and as ubiquitous as the Renmin ribao (RMRB). It is published by the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and has long served the CCP as a conveyor of its ideological position and nationalist rhetoric. Times have changed since China’s communist leaders combed through each article and editorial, but the RMRB still practises strict self-censorship over sensitive political issues, especially those connected with CCP ideology and legitimacy. The RMRB has the widest distribution of any newspaper across China and is also the authoritative source on international and foreign policy issues. Very few news sources in China produce their own commentary on these topics, preferring instead to quote directly from the RMRB or the Xinhua Press Agency. Even Xinhua regularly cites the RMRB as the source of its news. Many Xinhua news releases in the weeks that followed the Belgrade embassy bombing were nothing more than a recap of stories that the RMRB had either printed that day or was about to print in the following day’s edition. Television news reports also included extensive coverage of articles and editorials from the RMRB. The more than 100 RMRB articles that I selected for analysis in this study will hopefully offer some insight into the ofﬁcial1 position regarding the bombing and its signiﬁcance for China, and also into the boundaries of modern nationalist discourse. It is difﬁcult to determine the precise level and nature of control that China’s political leaders exert over media content. It is also difﬁcult to determine whether we are reading the opinions of individual authors, the product of self-censorship, or Party directives, but the sensitivity of the issue and the highly formulaic consistency of the response presents a very ‘readable’ ofﬁcial line. Much of the Chinese media’s response was not merely a reaction to the embassy bombing, but an explosion of nationalism and anti-Americanism that had been building throughout the 1990s. This process began with the PRC’s isolation in the wake of 4 June 1989 and the harsh criticisms heaped on the PRC by the Western media. In the lead-up to the bombing, China’s state-controlled press was already embroiled in a campaign to deride and discredit the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention in Yugoslavia (RMRB 4 April 1999: 1; RMRB 23 April 1999: 7). For the Chinese leadership, NATO’s actions were setting an alarming precedent. Inviolable international boundaries were being trounced in the name of humanitarian intervention. Angry, and possibly afraid that such a precedent might one day be followed by intervention into ethnic conﬂicts on Chinese soil, the Chinese government unleashed a torrent of vitriol in a carefully orchestrated media campaign designed to smear NATO and the Western ‘farce’ of humanitarian intervention.

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Also in the lead-up to the embassy bombing, the Chinese press was busy with tributes to the May Fourth Movement in preparation for the movement’s eightieth anniversary. The May Fourth Movement began as a protest against the treatment of China by the US and Europe at the end of the World War I. The movement was intensely nationalistic and anti-imperialist and its celebration served as a politically suitable complement to the anti-NATO rhetoric. The Communist Party of China eulogizes the May Fourth Movement today as an embodiment of pure patriotism and of the ‘spirit’ of the modern Chinese nation. In the weeks leading to the anniversary, the RMRB ran a weekly column and a number of commentaries to celebrate the role of the movement in China’s patriotic national salvation. In all of the articles the messages were intensely nationalistic. On 20 April the RMRB (1999: 9) reminded people that in the past, ‘The Chinese nation suffered great humiliation. . . . The shadow of having the nation conquered, the race wiped out, hung over every Chinese who loved the motherland.’ Four days after the eightieth anniversary of the May Fourth demonstrations, the Chinese Embassy in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was bombed.2 Three NATO missiles hit the building from different angles, killing three people and injuring 20 others. A decade of bitterness and antiAmericanism exploded in the newspapers and on the streets. Already buoyed up by anger at NATO and the patriotic highs of May Fourth, the ofﬁcial media’s response was fast and furious. This was hard evidence that the US-led West was determined to crush the Chinese state and the Chinese people: . . . NATO’s subsequent excuse that it did not intentionally target the Chinese Embassy cannot cover up the bloody fact. The fact that three missiles slammed into the embassy from different angles completely exposes the evil intentions of the aggressor. This is a debt of blood that NATO owes the Chinese people. (RMRB 9 May 1999: 1) The media gave the incident blanket coverage and decried the suffering of the Chinese people at the hands of the Western aggressors. It hailed the Chinese victims of the bombing as ‘revolutionary martyrs’, compared US President Clinton to Adolf Hitler and insisted that the nation must build its defences to fend off the Western conspiracy to keep China backward and weak. As the state media opened its ﬂoodgates, the torrent of rhetoric touched on a variety of themes that are key indicators of the content of Chinese nationalism. I have identiﬁed several themes that are interwoven in the texts as I believe they are in modern Chinese nationalism: 1 2

nation building (rich nation–strong army) and national unity appeals to the past

68 3 4

Ben Hillman appeals to Greater China, and the East–West conﬂict (clash of civilizations).

Some of these themes are explicit, while others reveal themselves more subtly. The rest of this chapter explores these themes as they appear in the newspaper articles and how they relate to other issues in contemporary China. The chapter concludes with a few remarks about the positive and negative aspects of nationalism in China today.

Rich nation–strong army: the most effective counterattack The initial reaction of the Chinese press to the Friday 7 May (8 May in China) bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was to give it blanket coverage. The ﬁrst edition of the RMRB to cover the story was published on Sunday 9 May. Apart from the regular economics section that appears on page 2 each Sunday, the entire edition was devoted to coverage of the embassy bombing. In the centre of the front page was a photograph of angry demonstrators carrying two signs. The signs read: ‘We strongly condemn American hegemony’ and ‘This is the voice of our government’. A second photograph at the bottom of the front page shows before and after images of the embassy in Belgrade. The language used in the titles and texts of the articles is bitter, accusatory and emotionally charged. The lead story on page 1 is headed ‘Our country’s government has issued a solemn and just declaration: US-led NATO must accept full accountability while the Chinese government reserves the right to take further steps’ (RMRB 9 May 1999: 1). The article denounces the bombing as a criminal violation of China’s national sovereignty. The editorial on page 1 calls the bombing a barbaric and bloody atrocity and claims that the Chinese people are ‘owed a debt of blood’ (RMRB 9 May 1999: 1). Over the following week, the RMRB consistently referred to the Chinese people’s pain and grief at the death of three Chinese nationals as well as the national humiliation felt by all Chinese at the ﬂagrant abuse of China’s sovereign rights. There were also calls for revenge: ‘Blood debts must be repaid in blood’ (RMRB 9 May 1999: 3). The 10 May issue also ran a bitter editorial on its front page entitled ‘The Chinese people cannot be bullied’.3 The title of this article became a popular slogan of street demonstrations and the title of a book published by the RMRB. Amazingly, this book appeared on shelves less than one week after the bombing incident in a telling example of the extent of resources summoned to conduct the propaganda campaign. Another photograph of angry protesters appeared on the same front page, but two articles suggested that unqualiﬁed emotionalism had run its course. A front-page article on 10 May claimed that the best way to express one’s indignation at the bombing is to ‘move ahead in the reform and development of the economy and the nation’s strength’ and to ‘turn protest into

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a motivation for our present work’ (RMRB 10 May 1999: 1). The article advocated hard work and assiduous study as the key. Another article on the same page emphasized the need for China to strengthen its national security by modernizing the army. This, it argued, is essential for protection against violations of China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, so that Chinese of every nationality may enjoy the peace and fruits of China’s opening-up. Yet another article exhorted people to turn grief into strength and to go all out to make the country stronger. China, it says, is now more prosperous and powerful, but more efforts must be made to achieve comprehensive national strength (zonghe guoli) of the motherland (RMRB 10 May 1999: 1). During the ﬁrst week following the embassy bombing, the articles carefully combined anti-NATO and anti-US hatred with calls for greater efforts at building national strength. Many articles looked for inspiration to the three Chinese nationals who died in the bombing: ‘These martyrs will inspire hundreds of millions of Chinese to work hard in expediting the cause of reform, opening up and modernization’ (RMRB 14 May 1999: 1). In an article titled ‘Take the rich-nation, strong-army road’, a retired General called for economic development and national defence as the only means for national security. The formulation, ‘rich nation, strong army’ ( fuguo qiangjun), has been a recurring one in Chinese nationalism, stressed by the early reformers at the end of empire and by the May Fourth protestors. A great number of articles that I surveyed echoed the need for China to follow this road (RMRB 12 May 1999: 5; 13 May 1999: 3; 14 May 1999: 4; 16 May 1999: 3; 17 May 1999: 2). By the second week there was less talk of blood and anger and more talk of hard work. As a politically expedient complement to the calls for a rich nation and strong army, the media also offered the ‘correct’ formulas for achieving those ends: ‘Pooling our strength to increase productivity and our combined national strength is the last word’ (RMRB 19 May 1999: 1). A 14 May article argued the same points under the title of ‘Most effective counterattack’. The organized student protesters carried banners with similar formulations. This duality of messages suggests that the leadership was taking (or wanted to be seen to take) a ﬁrm stand on the issue without inciting the masses to destructive protest. It is likely that the leadership saw an opportunity to harness the people’s nationalistic fervour to supporting government policies. The authorities appeared to be taking the initiative from the protesters by saying that we are all equally angry and humiliated, but the only way to defend ourselves against this foreign aggression in the future is to cooperate in making ourselves economically and militarily stronger.

National unity Nationalism is sometimes referred to as a doubled-edged sword because it has the power to divide as well as to unite. In one sense, nationalism implies

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the right of a people to build a political community to protect and represent their interests. If we take a nation to be a culturally and linguistically homogeneous group living within a deﬁnable territory, it might be argued that China has several nations within its borders. At least two of those nations have made demands for a state of their own to represent and protect their respective communities’ interests. The Tibetan and Uygur peoples, for example, are two distinct national groups with traditions of independence that are not entirely well disposed to either Han majority rule or PRC authority (Nathan 1997: 196–7). Separatist ambitions among both groups have been a major cause for concern for the PRC leadership since 1949. In stoking nationalism, the PRC leadership realizes that it risks stoking a Han-centric nationalism that might alienate non-Han groups. That is why the nationalist discourse refers to ethnic nationalism as ‘narrow’ nationalism. Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping were all aware of the need to co-opt non-Han ethnic groups for the strength and security of the nation. The unity question, however, strikes much deeper into Chinese hearts than a simple realist reading of strategic interests might elucidate. For the Chinese, unity has meant not only strength but also survival. Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen all expressed their fears that disunity would spell the end of the Chinese nation and even of the Chinese race. In imperial China, disunity was associated with moral decline and is cited as the primary cause of the fall of each successive dynasty, a tragedy that was nothing less than the loss of the mandate of heaven, or what today might be regarded as a loss of political legitimacy. From imperial times through the civil war and to the present, national unity has been projected as a moral force in Chinese politics, a guiding principle and the ultimate source of legitimacy that is never open to negotiation (Wachman 1994). The national-unity message in the ofﬁcial rhetoric carries powerful suggestions that citizens’ livelihoods are doomed without this unity. National unity is portrayed as the wellspring of strength and survival, and to challenge it is the most unpatriotic deed of all. The nationalist rhetoric of the RMRB reveals very clearly the leadership’s desire to see all Chinese people not just united, but united behind their government (see RMRB 10 May 1999: 1 and 4): Indignant university students along with the masses north and south of the Long River (Chang Jiang), inside and out of the Great Wall are staging demonstrations to denounce the atrocity committed by US-led NATO and to resolutely support the just stand of the Chinese government in defending state sovereignty and national dignity. (RMRB 10 May 1999: 1) The passage evokes the very powerful national symbols of the Great Wall and the Long River in what was one of the more emotive pieces surveyed. A 14 May (1999: 3) article calls for building another ‘Great Wall’ to fortify

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the unity of the people. It is ironic, however, that these national symbols belong ﬁrst and foremost to the Han nation and not to the minority nationalities with whom a greater national unity is most dearly sought. The Great Wall was originally intended to keep many of modern China’s minorities at a safe distance. If this point was lost in the 10 May editorial, other editions over-compensated for the lapse. The only photograph on page 2 of the 13 May edition was of students from the Central Minorities University marching in protest at the embassy bombing. Their signs read ‘We strongly condemn US-led NATO’ and ‘Work hard at studies to revitalize the Chinese nation’. China’s national minorities are presented as visibly united against the attack on China’s national sovereignty. This image of national minorities sends a message that the political centre is deeply connected to and united with the frontiers of the nation. It is especially noteworthy that all the marchers in the photograph are wearing their full national costumes, something that students would be unlikely to do of their own volition (unless participating in a minority cultural performance such as those that regularly appear on television). Wearing national costumes was probably encouraged by political ofﬁcers in the schools and might have been a precondition for their being granted permission to march. Gladney (1999) argues that this exotic portrayal of ethnic minorities is essential in the formation of modern Han identity and nationalism, reminding all Chinese of the stages through which they must pass before achieving modernity and prosperity, as exempliﬁed by the Han. Another photograph on page 8 of the 15 May issue shows minority nationality students from Yunnan Minorities Institute discussing the bombing atrocity. The caption reads ‘Share a feeling of hatred for the enemy and work hard for the prosperity of the nation’. This slogan of working hard for the prosperity of the nation was repeated in the titles of several articles (see, for example, RMRB 10 May 1999: 3, and 16 May 1999: 4). ‘Sharing hatred for the enemy’ are potent words and it is relevant that these words are used only within the context of identifying a shared enemy of all China’s ethnic groups. The editorial on 10 May insisted that ‘a strong motherland, the unity of the people and the unity of all nationalities across the country are the foundation and operational basis of the Chinese nation’. On the ﬁrst day of the coverage of the embassy bombing an article appeared on page 4, showing how the nation’s ﬁve main religious organizations were united in their support for the protests and condemnation of the NATO attack (RMRB 9 May 1999: 4). Followers of all religions across China, the article claims, were united in their grief and indignation at the barbaric bombing of a country’s sovereign territory. Religious groups, particularly Islamic ones, are closely associated with ethnic differences in China and are often considered a potential source of instability. The Muslim Uygurs of Xinjiang, for example, inhabit a resource-rich but remote part of China that borders the Central Asian

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republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Most Uygurs have more in common with these peoples than with the Han majority of the PRC. Especially since, but even before the 11 September attacks in the US, Uygur association with Muslim fundamentalist organizations has been regarded as a security threat (Nathan 1997: 196–7). One article swears that the state will not waver from its policy of maintaining the unity of the national minorities (RMRB 10 May 1999: 4). Articles such as this suggest that ethnic unity is not something to be taken for granted in China. The embassy bombing was a great opportunity to reinforce the image of pan-ethnic nationalism that the PRC’s leaders continue to view as vital to their legitimacy and to China’s stability.

Greater China Appeals to the greater Chinese community and claims of its support form part of another theme of Chinese nationalism evident in the ofﬁcial reaction to the embassy bombing. Since Sun Yat-sen established the Xingzhonghui (Revive China Society) in Hawaii in the 1890s, overseas Chinese have played a large role in Chinese nationalist movements. The sympathy of the overseas Chinese has also been an important symbol of legitimacy since the civil war, when the Kuomintang (KMT) and CCP solicited this community’s support for their rival visions of the Chinese nation. As members of the greater Chinese nation, overseas Chinese have continued to play important roles in nationalist movements. Chinese in the US, for example, have played leading roles in protesting Japanese occupation of the Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. It is not surprising, then, that the overseas Chinese feature prominently in the articles as another legitimating device. A 9 May (p. 1) article mentions how ethnic Chinese arrived at the embassy soon after the bombing, carrying clothes and food for the survivors. Chinese residents of Belgrade were also reported to have joined the street protests in an emotive passage which claimed that ‘blood debts must be repaid in blood’.4 There is a sense that the blood spilled is not just that of the unfortunate Chinese citizens who lost their lives in the disaster, but that of the (greater) Chinese nation.5 An article on 10 May (p. 6) is devoted to the ‘cries’ of overseas Chinese from around the world. Taiwan gets surprisingly little mention in the articles, considering that the date of the bombing coincided with the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki that ceded the island territory to Japan in 1895, and there appeared to be no acknowledgement of this in the press. Taiwan received less mention than Chinese Americans and ethnic Chinese in other countries. Taiwanese responses were covered in a small piece on 11 May (p. 4) and two weeks after the bombing a 25 May article (p. 6) acknowledged that people in Taiwan were angry, but there was little else. The primary reason is that, much to the PRC’s chagrin, the Taiwanese

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government was generally supportive of the NATO intervention in Kosovo. A likely reason for Taiwan’s support of NATO is hope for a Kosovo-style intervention if Taiwan is involved in any future conﬂict with the PRC.

Historical legacy According to an article on 14 May (p. 4), the embassy bombing was not an accident. It was a deliberate attempt by US and other Western forces to divide and weaken China and crush its development through political, economic and military means. The Chinese leadership appeared to be playing the dangerous game (repeated through history) of blaming external forces for China’s ills. I say ‘dangerous’ because I believe that by encouraging a sense of victimization, China’s leaders are, intentionally or otherwise, promoting a ‘negative’ nationalism that is based on humiliation rather than pride. The message is that the West is as responsible for China’s sufferings today as it was 150 years ago. The historical suffering of the Chinese people was mentioned repeatedly throughout the articles: This is not 1899: this is not the age when Western powers plundered the Imperial Palace at will, destroyed the Garden of Perfect Brightness and seized Hong Kong and Macao.6 . . . The hot blood of those who have opposed imperialism for over 150 years runs in Chinese people’s veins. (RMRB 12 May 1999: 4) A front-page commentary on 10 May mentions three times the 100-year struggle against foreign aggression. Another article on 14 May (p. 7) suggests that NATO’s humanitarian campaign is merely the ‘banner of a new gunboat diplomacy’ that is reminiscent of the Opium Wars. Another article argues that despite the tragedy, the Chinese nation has matured and grown strong. ‘Today there are no longer any Boxers . . . The strength of the people today is inherited from the ﬁne tradition of ﬁghting and struggling against Western powers’ (RMRB 19 May 1999: 1). In an absurd stretch of the imagination, one 19 May (p. 4) editorial considers the embassy bombing a crime greater than those committed by the Japanese in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century: ‘During World War Two the Japanese killed, burned and plundered, but they did not touch our embassies or Confucian temples.’ This reference to Confucian temples might seem incongruous in a Communist Party publication, but it appears to be a sign of the times, an indication that the authorities are increasingly reliant on more traditional symbols as the focus of national loyalties. The appeal to China’s ‘100 years of suffering’ is a common feature of nationalist propaganda in the PRC. Modern history begins with it in Chinese schools and the public is reminded of it every time the authorities perceive that China has been treated unfairly by the international community. The

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anger expressed at this is often seen as the emotional or irrational side of nationalism, but it may be better understood as a very rational attempt by political authorities to mobilize popular support by appealing to such emotions. The danger is, once again, that if people become too emotionally charged they might place too much pressure on the government to take an extreme nationalist position. This is why almost all the articles extolled the virtues of turning indignation into strength, hard work and stability. Stability, several of the articles argued, is the way to combat the foreign aggressors because it is really by destabilizing China that these aggressors wish to conquer China (RMRB 13 May 1999: 9). The appeals to China’s past sufferings are tied closely to the nationbuilding rhetoric. ‘The [embassy bombing] incident has led people to think deeply about the cross-century development of the Chinese nation . . . from the Opium Wars to 1949, history will not be forgotten . . . We must develop and defend China through science and technology’ (RMRB 27 May 1999: 9). These same arguments were put forward by China’s early nationalists in their calls for ‘Mr Science’, which was then coupled with ‘Mr Democracy’. These were the cries of the May Fourth Movement, the eightieth anniversary of which was being celebrated in the same week as the embassy-bombing incident. In 1919 the two Messieurs were considered to be mutually inclusive, but the current Chinese leadership has used nationalist rhetoric to propagate their disassociation. The ofﬁcial press cast the bombing incident as a reason why China should put its modernization drive into high gear. At the same time, however, the nationalist rhetoric has used the bombing to lambaste and discredit what it calls ‘Westernstyle’ democracy and human rights.

Clash of civilizations The Chinese media both before and after the embassy bombing attacked the NATO mission as an attempt to force-feed the world with Western social models and values. This has been perhaps the most signiﬁcant propaganda role of the embassy bombing coverage. The RMRB’s pages were covered with articles such as ‘Explosive revelation of hegemony’ (RMRB 11 May 1999: 7), ‘Serious threat to world peace’ (RMRB 12 May 1999: 1) and ‘Human rights transcend sovereignty’ (RMRB 13 May 1999: 2). The message is loud and clear in all these articles: without national sovereignty there can be no human rights. It is likely that NATO’s mission in Kosovo sent fears through the Chinese leadership that a similar force might one day interfere in China’s own domestic problems, especially an ethnic dispute in a sensitive region like Xinjiang or Tibet. The RMRB lashed out against any such possibility: International antagonist blocs are implementing their strategy of peaceful evolution (from socialism back to capitalism) and never miss

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Figure 4.1 True character can never change. Source: RMRB 11 May 1999, p. 6.

an opportunity to cause a commotion over ‘human rights’, nationalism, religion and so forth. They take advantage of contradictions among the people and unexpected events to foment chaos aimed at the collapse of our socialist system. (RMRB 13 May 1999: 9) The RMRB warned repeatedly of the threat of NATO-style intervention. In all the articles NATO is never referred to independently, but always as ‘US-led’ (yi meiguo weishoude). The consistent use of ‘US-led NATO’ adds a sense of US conspiracy against China, which is the intended propaganda message. Unlike NATO, the US had already proved itself throughout the 1990s as a ‘reliable’ trigger of nationalistic sentiment (Xu 1998). The RMRB rhetoric stopped at nothing to mock the ‘artiﬁce’ of human rights when a nation’s borders can be so easily compromised by an external force. An article on 12 May (p. 4) sums up the intended political message by asserting that ‘this [the embassy bombing] should be a vivid lesson to those

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Figure 4.2 NATO aiming for peace, but at what price? Source: RMRB 12 May 1999, p. 7.

who harbour illusions about [Western] human rights and democracy’. Cartoons reprinted from the RMRB dramatically highlight these messages: The smear campaign against human rights and democracy was empowered by the public’s great anger at the embassy bombing. The Chinese authorities were able to take the moral high ground on behalf of the mourning nation, while silencing their critics. On the one hand articles decry the bombing as a criminal act of violence against a peace-loving people (the Chinese), while ﬁrmly transposing the image of the enemy over all ‘pro-Western/pro-democracy elements’ (anti-CCP activists). The smear campaign speciﬁcally targeted Chinese dissidents (especially those at the forefront of the 1989 protests) in the West and accused them of being nothing but slaves to a foreign master, hiding behind ‘their mask of democracy’: As self-branded leaders and ‘elites’ of the so-called ‘patriotic prodemocracy movement’, which country do you love? . . . You take the side of the hegemonists, openly defend them, deﬁle your motherland and its people . . . Do you still have any conscience or affection for the land where you were raised and fed? (RMRB 17 May 1999: 4)

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The message delivered here is that to be pro-democracy or to be critical of the PRC’s human-rights record is to be unpatriotic. The intended propaganda message was that any anti-government activity should be seen as slavish to Western imperialists and traitorous to the Chinese nation. The article quoted above noted that the bombing campaign exposed clearly the intentions of the pro-democracy activists. It claims that they are seeking not democracy but slavery for the Chinese people, slavery, that is, to the West: If there is a lesson that the Chinese people should learn, it is that had the attempts of those people materialized ten years ago, China would have become ‘Westernized’ and ‘disintegrated’, sold out by the socalled ‘elite’ and turned into a dependency of the hegemonies. (RMRB 17 May 1999: 4) What is signiﬁcant here is the direct reference to the student demonstrations of April to June 1989. It might have been a warning to student protesters, but it also suggests that the embassy bombing has been turned into another stage of the battle against Western-style democracy and its supporters. Since the demonstrations of 1989, the CCP has pursued an extensive and powerful propaganda campaign aimed at those who thought Western-style liberal democracy was the logical end of China’s modernization. Student intakes into social science programmes were slashed to restrict the corrupting cultural inﬂuences from the West (Hayhoe 1993).

Figure 4.3 Is NATO US led? Source: RMRB 13 May 1999, p. 6.

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A Patriotic Education Campaign was launched in 1990 and involved thousands of seminars, lectures and exhibitions across the country designed to arouse patriotism. Television networks were instructed to run more ﬁlms with patriotic themes. The speech by propaganda chief Li Ruihuan advocating the Patriotic Education Campaign appeared in the RMRB on 10 January 1990. The Campaign’s main goal was to instil in Chinese students a sense of pride in their heritage and loyalty to the current leadership as guardians of that heritage (Guo Yingjie 1998: 166–7). The media, under the watchful eye of the Propaganda Bureau, was instrumental in this campaign, by painting dissidents as slaves to foreign masters and by spreading the belief that they were involved in a Western conspiracy to keep China backward and weak. The Western guise of civilized ideals with evil intentions is a theme running through many of the articles. It is illustrated powerfully in Figure 4.4, a cartoon that appeared in RMRB on 13 May (p. 9). The caption in this cartoon read: ‘Beg your pardon, we’re just about to accidentally hurt you’. Dressed in a black dinner suit, the mission of the man (NATO) has the external appearance of civility, but he is actually bearing US bombs. The evil Western ‘Other’ has been central to the authorities’ nationalist campaign. The search for national identity has often looked to what China

Figure 4.4 Beg your pardon, we’re just about to accidentally hurt you. Source: RMRB 13 May 1999, p. 9.

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is not in order to ﬁnd what it is. The Party’s propaganda campaign since 1989 has been accompanied by extensive academic and journalistic inquiries into Chinese (Eastern) v. American (Western) values (Zhao 1997; Xu 1998). The content of these public ‘debates’ has revolved around Western v. Eastern concepts of human rights, family values, and individualism v. communalism. The West (usually represented in the Chinese media by the US) is regularly viliﬁed for its false democracy, moneygrabbing, crime and loose sexual morals. When I asked a group of university students in Shanghai about some possible causes for the increase in prostitution in the city, I was expecting someone to comment on income differentials between city and countryside. The answer that came instead was that the growth was due to women’s increased exposure to Western cultural inﬂuences.7 This discussion serves to demonstrate what I believe to be the success of the CCP’s propaganda and education campaign to smear the West and its values while extolling Chinese virtues. Students did not ﬂock to the streets in rage only because NATO bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, but because this was a crescendo for anti-American/Western nationalism that had been brewing since China’s isolation in the early 1990s. The embassy bombing was a tragedy for its victims, but for the CCP Propaganda Bureau it was a godsend. The CCP leaders could paint themselves as the patriotic rulers of a peaceful and moral nation struggling against the criminal excesses of the US-led West (see especially RMRB 19 May 1999: 1; RMRB 28 May 1999: 12). The widespread belief that the bombing was no accident also suggests another propaganda victory for the CCP leadership. For a long time government propaganda has been telling the Chinese people that international antagonist blocs are working to overthrow China’s unique socialist system. For many people the embassy bombing seems to have conﬁrmed what the government has been saying all along. The embassy bombing caused a great many Chinese previously sceptical of the government’s anti-Western/US propaganda to become more sympathetic to the ofﬁcial line.8 The belief gaining ground among Chinese people that there is a Western conspiracy determined to crush China is part of a xenophobic extreme that the ofﬁcial nationalist rhetoric does little to dispel, and at opportune times, such as in the wake of the embassy bombing, helps surreptitiously to promote. The RMRB reaction to the bombing is couched in adversarial and confrontational terms. There is an overriding sense of victimization in the articles surveyed. This victimization is grounded in the historical suffering of the Chinese people, and is exploited by the government at every possible opportunity. Marshalling this shared suffering as a rallying point for nationalist sentiment perpetuates the sense of victimization, but it carries with it the danger of quite easily turning xenophobic. The three Chinese nationals who died in the embassy bombing were described ofﬁcially as

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martyrs, as if they had sacriﬁced their lives in a holy war. I noted above the xenophobic heading of a page in RMRB (11 May 1999) and a slogan used by student protesters: ‘Share a feeling of hatred for the enemy’. The idea that a sharpening conﬂict exists between China and the West is supported by a belief now widespread in China that Westerners are racist towards the Chinese. This belief is partly inspired by a growing awareness of Western (especially American) attempts to ‘contain’ China since the beginning of the 1990s. Many Chinese academics have come to similar conclusions. Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations received a great deal of attention in China. Many readers saw it as ‘proof ’ that the West perceived of a ‘China threat’ in the form of Confucian civilization (Zheng 1999: 76–86). The West is seen to be not only working to keep China weak, but also to be plotting to crush China once and for all. Writing about the war in Kosovo, ironically, before the embassy bombing, Wang Xiaodong (1999) wrote of the need for Chinese people to prepare for genocide. Wang’s article appeared in the high-proﬁle journal, Zhanlue yu guanli (Strategy and Management), and was reprinted in Hong Kong’s Ta kung pao four days after the embassy bombing (12 May 1999: C12). Wang argued that the NATO mission in Yugoslavia was motivated by racism: The word ‘Slav’ has the same linguistic origins as the word ‘slave’ in Latin . . . Americans and Western Europeans are utterly contemptuous towards the Slavs . . . What got the Serbs into trouble is the fact they happen to be Slavs. (Wang Xiaodong 1999: 14) The Chinese, Wang argued, have even more to fear: Nevertheless, when all is said and done, the Serbs are Europeans. While they may be lowly Slavs, an ‘Oriental’ people, in the eyes of Americans and Western Europeans, they are way ahead of the Chinese in the racial pecking order. That much is clear from books written by Americans like Huntington. The race issue will become even more sensitive as biological sciences develop . . . genetic weapons targeting the Chinese would most likely be the ﬁrst to be made. (Wang Xiaodong 1999: 14) That these views were published in a highly respected academic journal and in a popular newspaper indicates that these are not merely opinions from the fringe, but are part of more mainstream trends in ofﬁcial and scholarly thinking and in public opinion. The nationalist propaganda of the RMRB did not go to such extremes, but it provided little to discourage such runaway xenophobia.

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Propaganda coup The embassy bombing was a coup for CCP propaganda chieftains in that, not only did the bombing seem to conﬁrm the idea of a Western conspiracy against China, but it also attracted sympathy for the state-controlled media in general. Many educated Chinese citizens have long been sceptical about the lines between ‘news’ and ‘propaganda’ in the state-controlled press and have always believed that the Western media is much fairer and more objective in its coverage of political events. Western (especially US) coverage of the bombing, however, caused a great amount of indignation itself. First, the Western press immediately began referring to the incident as the ‘accidental bombing’ of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade before any investigation had taken place. The Chinese media immediately seized upon this assumption and viliﬁed it as pure propaganda designed to cover up the ‘bloody fact’ of the bombing (RMRB 14 May 1999: 1; RMRB 18 May 1999: 7). In another instance, the RMRB reported on the US media’s negative coverage of China’s protests against the embassy bombing. An 18 May (p. 7) article reported that the American media reported ‘President Clinton has apologized, Congress has apologized, the US Embassy in China has apologized. Aren’t you Chinese going a bit overboard?’ The RMRB article attacked these apologies as false and reminded the public of America’s fury in 1998 when its embassies in Africa were the target of terrorists’ bombs. Numerous Chinese friends and colleagues subsequently mentioned to me the ‘irony’ of this point, and many more appear convinced that the Western media is no more objective than its Chinese counterparts. China’s state-controlled media seized upon the propaganda coup and wasted no opportunity to assert the nationalist position of the Chinese leadership. The nationalist tirade that followed, however, stuck to very formal guidelines, suggesting strict censorship. There is little doubt that the Chinese authorities strictly controlled and highly formalized the RMRB’s nationalist rhetoric. Most of the articles began with set phrases such as Mao’s maxim, ‘The Chinese people have stood up’, or ‘The Chinese people cannot be bullied’ and ended with phrases exhorting the people to go back to work as the ‘most effective counterattack’. Academics were mobilized to produce commentaries that repeated the language of the editorials: the need to stand united, study hard, and work assiduously to build a strong China (such as in the page of articles in RMRB 18 May 1999: 9). On the streets, student groups waved banners and shouted slogans that echoed the RMRB headlines and ofﬁcial rhetoric. For this reason, initial reports in the Western media accused the government of inciting the protestors. The protesters did not need encouragement, but authorities determined early on that they needed ‘guidance’. Police might have stood back while angry protesters hurled rocks and ﬁre at US missions, but these areas were quickly cordoned off to the general public and only organized student

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groups were permitted to enter. The government could show itself to be ﬁrmly in control. Unlike in 1989, neither social nor political stability was to appear threatened. The RMRB referred to the student protests only as ‘organized’ (you zuzhide) demonstrations. It showed protesting students to be supported by, and cooperating with, the authorities to an extent unprecedented in China’s modern history. In a telling example of the strategic deliberation behind the propaganda campaign, the Chinese leadership appears to have made the unprecedented move of shifting references to the CCP to the back seat. Usually, the Communist Party is mentioned before country, nation, people and all else. But in this instance, not only did many of the articles refer to the CCP and the Chinese leadership in insigniﬁcant paragraphs within the bodies of their text, many other articles failed to mention them at all. By taking the Communist Party out of the equation except for certain key pieces, the impact of the nationalist rhetoric increases. Readers are less likely to think that they are reading government propaganda and more likely to take the issues at face value. This is not to say that the CCP was absent from the articles. Rather, in the immediate aftermath of the embassy bombing, the CCP located itself outside the emotional terrain of nationalism but well inside the ‘most effective counterattack’. RMRB’s references to the CCP increased gradually after the bombing, especially as the content of articles turned to policies for making the nation strong.

Concluding remarks Through all the nationalist themes that emerge in the RMRB articles, one thing is clear: both positive and negative forces are pulling modern Chinese nationalism. On the one hand there is a movement towards renewed pride in the Chinese cultural heritage. Other observers might note that this process began in the early 1990s, but the reactions to the embassy bombing suggest that a more cultural form of nationalism has actually become entrenched in top-level policy-making. This cultural side of nationalism was lacking under the ‘politics in command’ approaches of earlier regimes and it comes as no surprise that the Chinese public would embrace a renewed celebration of Chineseness. Cultural forms of nationalism are important to the development of every nation. They provide a shared sense of community, belonging and pride in the achievements of forebears. This link to the past also offers a link to the future, a sense of direction for the national community as a whole (Hutchinson 1994: 129). Chinese nationalism is increasingly dependent on this direction as dreams of a socialist utopia fade into history. The negative side to Chinese nationalism is the promotion of the idea of Chinese as ‘victims’ and political elites have played this card throughout China’s modern history. The sense of victimization is played out in the media’s appeals to the past and China’s ‘100 years of suffering’. The effect

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is to breed fear, distrust and xenophobia. It also allows for excuse making and aversion of political responsibility. It asks for Chinese to join together because they have a common enemy, not because they might desire to build a common community. Although it might offer short-term buttresses to political legitimacy, in the long term the nation-building project can only be hindered. The Chinese leadership has demonstrated through the ofﬁcial media that it retains supreme command over the nationalist rhetoric. To a large extent, the RMRB articles show a determination to focus on the positive aspects of nationalism by advocating nation-building and cultural pride. In fact, in light of the great public anger that the embassy bombing provoked, China’s ofﬁcial media could be seen as displaying a calculated degree of restraint. Nationalism’s darker side, however, will continue to challenge the leadership in times of crisis. Much more vigilance and restraint will be required to ensure that it is kept at bay.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6

7

8

By ‘ofﬁcial’, I am referring to policy-makers at the highest level in the Chinese Communist Party and central government. The bombing occurred on 7 May 1999, just before midnight of 8 May. Reports of the bombing became widely known to the Chinese public during the following afternoon. This title (Zhongguo renmin bu ke wu) is rather difﬁcult to translate into English. The character ‘wu’ is associated with bullying, insult, humiliation and subjection to indignity. It is used in the compound ‘waiwu’ which means foreign aggression. The sense of the title could be seen as the refusal of the Chinese people to bow down to foreign aggression. A photograph of ethnic Chinese demonstrators in Belgrade appears in RMRB 20 May 1999: 8. See also RMRB 10 May 1999: 6 and RMRB 12 May 1999: 6 for stories on overseas Chinese responses to the bombing. Ironically, not all these events occurred in 1899 as the writer of this piece claims. Hong Kong, for example, was seized in 1842, and the Garden of Perfect Brightness was destroyed by foreign troops in 1860. Historical accuracy is conveniently sacriﬁced in the name of ‘patriotism’. This comment was made to me by a 23-year-old male graduate student of computer science during an informal English conversation class that I was teaching in January 2000. Not one of 12 other students present accepted an invitation to disagree with him, even though this group had regularly demonstrated a strong capacity and willingness for discussion. This ‘change of opinion’ in the wake of the embassy bombing came across very strongly to me in my conversations with friends, students and members of the Shanghai public between September 1999 and May 2000.

References Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso.

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Gladney, Dru (1999) ‘Representing nationality in China: reﬁguring majority/minority identities’, in Kosaku Yoshino (ed.) (1999) Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press. Guo Yingjie (1998) ‘Patriotic villains and patriotic heroes: Chinese literary nationalism in the 1990s’, in William Safran (1998) Nationalism and Ethno-regional Identities in China, London and Portland: Frank Cass. Hayhoe, Ruth (1993) ‘China’s universities since Tiananmen’, The China Quarterly, 134: 291–307. Hutchinson, John (1994), ‘Cultural nationalism and moral regeneration’, in John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (eds) Nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nathan, Andrew J. (1997) China’s Transition, New York: Columbia University Press. Renmin ribao (RMRB) (People’s Daily) (1999) April–June, various issues. Wachman, Alan (1994) Taiwan: National Identity and Democratization, New York: M.E. Sharpe. Wang Xiaodong (1999) ‘Minzu zhuyi yu minzhu zhuyi’(Nationalism and democracy), Zhanlue yu guanli (Strategy and Management), 3: 11–18; reprinted in Ta kung pao 12 May 1999, p. C12. Xu, Guangqiu (1998) ‘The Chinese anti-American nationalism in the 1990s’, Asian Perspective, 22 (2): 193–218. Zhao Suisheng (1997), ‘Chinese intellectuals’ quest for national greatness and nationalistic writing in the 1990s’, The China Quarterly (December): 725–45. Zheng Yongnian (1999) Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China: Modernization International Relations, New York: Cambridge University Press.

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5

Chinese nationalism and Sino-US relations The NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade Joseph Cheng and Kinglun Ngok

Introduction The rise of modern Chinese nationalism was largely a response to the invasion of, and pressures exerted on, China by Western imperialism and colonialism. The humiliation suffered by the Chinese nation over 150 years made nationalism a signiﬁcant force affecting China’s political development and foreign relations. Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), nationalism has always been an important factor in Sino-US relations. During the 1990s, a dominant perception emerged in China that the US position on China’s human rights record, bilateral trade and position on Taiwan is both arrogant and hegemonic. Strong antiUS nationalist feelings with emotional connotations surfaced in China concomitantly. The bombing of the PRC embassy in Belgrade by NATO forces led by the US on 8 May 1999 (hereafter the May 8 Incident) seems certain to have pushed anti-US feelings to a new high. In many ways, the May 8 Incident was a direct confrontation between US military posturing and Chinese nationalism. Hence this incident offers a classic case study for analysing the impact of nationalism on Sino-US relations in a contemporary context. This chapter attempts to analyse the commentaries on the incident by the major Chinese print media. It then considers the responses of Chinese nationalism to the incident, and the consequent impact on Sino-US relations. The newspapers we examine in this chapter include Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), Guangming ribao (Guangming Daily), Zhongguo qingnianbao (China Youth Daily), Beijing qingnianbao (Beijing Youth Daily) and Huanqiu shibao (Global Times), all inﬂuential newspapers published in Beijing. We consider their editorials, commentaries, news reports, signed articles, and so forth, as well as their electronic versions and website forums. The period under study is 9 May 2000 to the end of June 2000. We see that Chinese nationalism may be divided into ofﬁcial nationalism that is involuntary and unofﬁcial nationalism that is voluntary. Since the

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Communist Party of China controls all mass organizations in China, many elements of unofﬁcial, voluntary nationalism are often hidden in acts of ofﬁcial nationalism. Conscious effort is therefore required to distinguish between the two. The media coverage makes it clear that the May 8 Incident inspired an upsurge in nationalism among Chinese people. We argue that ofﬁcial nationalism successfully guided and absorbed the highly emotional unofﬁcial nationalism at this time. As a result, Sino-US relations did not deteriorate signiﬁcantly. In the post-Deng era, ofﬁcial nationalism in China still follows the teaching of Deng Xiaoping that ‘economic development takes priority; political confrontation is secondary’, and the strategy of avoiding confrontation in Sino-US relations prevails.

Sino-US relations on the eve of the May 8 Incident For more than four decades from 1949 when the PRC was established until the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, Sino-US relations moved through strategic confrontation, pseudo-alliance and steps towards building a strategic partnership. With the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Sino-Soviet-US strategic triangle from that period has crumbled and Sino-US relations have entered a complex era of conﬂict and cooperation. In the 1990s, Sino-US relations experienced a series of dramatic ups and downs (Cheng 1996: 51–91; Koehn and Cheng 1999). China remained the only major communist power after the fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union. Concomitantly, the impressive victory of Western countries in the Gulf War seemed to indicate that the US had become the world’s sole superpower. Some in China felt that, as the remaining major socialist country, China would become the next main target for the ‘peaceful evolution’ strategy of the West. In the 1990s, especially when China’s relations with Western countries deteriorated, Chinese media accused Western countries of seeking to launch a new Cold War in the Asia-Paciﬁc region through propagating the theory of the ‘China threat’. Western countries were criticized for their ‘attempts to put pressure on China . . . and distort China’s image overseas to sow regional dissension’ (Renmin ribao 22 December 1995; South China Morning Post 23 December 1995). Articles in popular tabloids and academic journals in China reporting the West’s ‘containment’ strategy towards China in the mid-1990s often also argued against further experiments with political and economic liberalization, and against closer cooperation with countries involved in the ‘containment’ strategy (Kaye 1995: 36). Jiefangjun bao (Liberation Army Daily), for example, accused proponents of the ‘China threat’ theory of aiming to sow discord between China and its Asian neighbours in view of Washington’s waning inﬂuence in the region. It was said that countries

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opposing China wanted a larger share of the Asian arms trade, which was part of their motivation in calling for the containment of China (Jiefangjun bao 3 November 1995; South China Morning Post 4 November 1995). While the US and China did not see each other as an immediate military threat during this period, and China did not have the resources to engage in any signiﬁcant arms expansion programme, their perceptions of each other deteriorated substantially in the 1990s. The extent of deterioration was enough to damage the basis for close bilateral cooperation, especially when common strategic interests had largely evaporated in the post-Cold War era. Also at this time, Western media and especially those in the US reported widely on the rise of nationalism in China (Chanda and Huus 1995: 20–8; Unger 1996). The China Can Say No series of books and similar publications, whose anti-US overtones were obvious, attracted considerable attention in the West (Song et al. 1996). Many of the authors of such publications were young intellectuals and some of these publications were highly popular inside China. Chinese leaders were acutely aware that communism had lost its appeal, and they therefore felt the need to exploit nationalism to shore up and maintain support for the Chinese communist regime. But this pressure did not induce them to change the policy of opening up China to the outside world. The informal visit to the US by then Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui in June 1995 led to a sharp deterioration in Sino-US relations and heightened bilateral tensions in the Taiwan Strait area. But the Chinese authorities still had considerable expectations about further developing the bilateral relationship. Both the Chinese and US leaders learned a lesson from their confrontation in 1995–6, and this understanding paved the way for the two successful Sino-US summits in 1997–8. Some Chinese observers even noted that the low-proﬁle reporting of President Bill Clinton’s sex scandals was a gesture of goodwill to the Clinton administration. Chinese leaders were aware that while both governments were keen to prevent a deterioration of the bilateral relationship and valued its signiﬁcance, anti-China sentiment in the US Congress and among the US media and various types of pressure groups remained an obstacle to improving Sino-US relations. Premier Zhu Rongji’s visit to America in April 1999 was intended to soothe the feelings of the US people and win their goodwill (xiaoqi zhi lu) to facilitate China’s entry into the WTO. Premier Zhu made important concessions on China’s conditions of entry to the WTO, although he realized that such concessions would arouse serious opposition from domestic vested interests, which would criticize him in the name of nationalism. Zhu was not successful in eroding anti-China sentiment in the US. China’s involvement in dubious political campaign contributions and an espionage case involving alleged theft of US nuclear secrets by a Chinese expatriate continued to have an adverse impact on Sino-US relations.

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But worse was to come. While Chinese authorities went out of their way to improve Sino-US relations, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by NATO forces headed by the US on 8 May 1999 killed three Chinese journalists and wounded a number of Chinese diplomats. The bombing triggered a crisis in the bilateral relationship. It aroused the anger of the Chinese people who, with few exceptions, refused to accept that the bombing was an accident.

Anti-US protests and nationalist feelings triggered by the May 8 Incident In the wake of the Belgrade embassy bombing, Chinese people expressed their anger at rallies and meetings and in declarations and statements, forums, protest letters and the like. In Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Shenyang and a number of other cities, students and other citizens organized demonstrations and protest activities outside the US embassy and consulates. On 8 May 1999, thousands of students from eight prestigious tertiary institutions in Beijing, including Beijing University, Tsinghua University and the Chinese People’s University, secured the approval of the Beijing public security authorities and marched to the US embassy to express their anger. The students protested strongly against what they claimed to be the gross violation of Chinese sovereignty by the US and NATO, and demanded that both assume full responsibility for the bombing incident. Groups of demonstrating students took turns in presenting letters of protest to the US embassy. The letter of protest of the Beijing University Students’ Union and Postgraduate Students’ Union stated: ‘China cannot be bullied! The Chinese nation cannot be insulted! Chinese people who have already stood up will absolutely not tolerate any act in transgression of Chinese sovereignty’ (Guangming ribao 9 May 1999). Students carrying banners and placards surrounded the US embassy compound and shouted slogans: ‘China cannot be defeated!’, ‘Blood debts are to be repaid by blood!’, ‘Protest against NATO’s hegemonic acts!’, ‘Give me justice!’ (Renmin ribao online 8 May 1999). On the night of 8 May, over 10,000 angry students gathered in front of the US consulate in Chengdu, protesting and chanting slogans and, in Shenyang, tens of thousands of university students marched to the US consulate for a large-scale demonstration. That afternoon in Guangzhou about 100,000 students protested in the rain in front of the US consulate general and consular ofﬁces of other NATO countries. The Chinese ofﬁcial media gave broad coverage of these protest activities. It was also noted that many of the protesting students in Beijing were transported to their destinations by big tourist buses provided by the government (Ming pao 11 May 1999). At the same time, China’s mass organizations were also fully mobilized by the Chinese authorities. Nevertheless, their actions revealed strong

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elements of spontaneity. In Beijing, various provincial capitals, and major cities, people’s congresses, local committees of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, youth federations, student federations, women’s federations, trade unions, religious groups, journalists’ associations, local branches of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, and other organizations took part in and initiated protest actions. In the Beijing municipality, many factories, rural townships and villages, street organizations, schools and mass organizations organized numerous forums to strongly condemn what they recognized as the hegemonic acts of the US, to demonstrate resolute support for the just stand of the Chinese government, and to send protest messages in various forms to the US embassy (Renmin ribao online 9 May 1999). Chinese people also used the Internet to articulate their protests and anger. In the week following 8 May, Internet usage in China increased dramatically. For the ﬁrst time, Chinese people with access to the Internet enjoyed unrestricted access, and turned the Internet into a base to voice their patriotic feelings. On 8 May, the home page of the US embassy in Beijing was hacked into, and plastered with angry statements. Some hackers also planned to attack the home page of NATO. About three hours after the bombing, NetEase, a Chinese website, initiated a ‘Survey on the Net Regarding the Strong Condemnation of NATO’s Crimes’. Within 24 hours, more than 36,000 people had taken part in the discussions. According to the survey, 88 per cent of the Net respondents indicated support for protest activities against NATO. Renmin ribao also organized an online news forum through its Bulletin Board System to allow ordinary people to articulate their views on the incident. To facilitate Internet users to express their strong feelings directly, the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Communist Youth League, the Beijing Municipal Youth Federation, and a commercial media ﬁrm (Yinghaiwei xinxi tongxun youxian gongsi) jointly organized a protest website titled ‘Sacred Sovereignty’. The highly emotional, nationalistic, anti-US outbursts by Chinese students and other ordinary people caused unease among pro-US Chinese and the US media, who suspected that the Chinese leadership had deliberately inﬂamed the nationalist emotions of the university students and Chinese people to divert their attention from China’s domestic problems. Renmin ribao condemned an editorial from The Washington Post that described China’s response to the bombing of its embassy in Belgrade as similar to the response of a totalitarian state. This editorial had criticized reporting by Chinese state-controlled media as untrue and not comprehensive, and that it had inﬂamed the anger of Chinese people. It also criticized the Chinese authorities for providing protesters with transport, public notices and well-prepared slogans (Renmin ribao 18 May 1999). Some Chinese dissidents in exile in the US considered that the anti-US demonstrations and protest activities were ‘based on nationalist feelings’, ‘emotional and explosive outbursts’, and that they ‘might probably develop

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along dangerous directions’ (Zhongguo qingnian bao 16 May 1999). Some intellectuals who remained sober about these developments were worried that the Chinese leadership might adjust its foreign-policy line and engage in confrontation with the US and other Western countries. The bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was naturally perceived in China as a direct challenge to the Chinese nation, and the anger of the Chinese people was inevitable. The Chinese authorities found it extremely difﬁcult to suppress such nationalist passion. However, while the Chinese authorities granted formal approval for the protest activities and offered transport to the US embassy for university students in Beijing, there is no concrete evidence to suggest that the authorities directly instigated and inﬂamed the nationalist emotions of the masses. The Chinese leaders know that nationalism is a double-edged sword, and that Chinese people engaged in anti-US demonstrations could easily turn their anger against the Chinese authorities. Hence, the Chinese leaders believed it best to control the masses’ nationalist emotions within limits. In fact, during the anti-US protests, the Chinese ofﬁcial media, while praising the students’ patriotism, also stressed that these students were ‘highly rational’ and their protest activities were ‘legal’. The Chinese ofﬁcial media also played up protest slogans that were considered beneﬁcial to social stability, such as ‘China cannot be soft, China cannot be in chaos’, and ‘They create chaos, we will not be in chaos’. On 13 May, the New China News Agency reported the university students’ protest activities in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Shenyang and elsewhere, emphasizing the students’ cool analysis and rational thinking. The reports stressed that the university students had not neglected their studies during their protest activities, and that they had turned their anger into motivation and determination to study hard to serve their country (Renmin ribao 14 May 1999). Chen Wenbo from the Education Ministry praised the protest activities of the students as highly sober and law-abiding, and commended their support for the righteous position of the Party and state in preserving state sovereignty and opposing foreign aggression (Renmin ribao Online 17 May 1999).

The Chinese authorities’ responses: between passion and reason The NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy occurred in a period that was domestically politically sensitive. The commemorative activities of the eightieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement had not yet ended, and the Chinese authorities were on full alert before the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Incident. The push for reforms and inadequate domestic demand had produced a great deal of tension in Chinese society, and foreign media were closely monitoring how the Chinese authorities would handle

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the potential political crises. The May 8 Incident gave the Chinese leadership a new international crisis to address. On the day of the bombing, the Chinese government issued a strong statement of protest. It also presented four demands to the US government: 1 2 3 4

an open, formal apology to the Chinese government, the Chinese people and the families of the victims; a comprehensive and thorough investigation into the incident; a speedy announcement of the detailed results of the investigation; and severe punishment for those responsible (Renmin ribao 9 May 1999).

The Chinese Foreign Ministry summoned US ambassador James Sasser, presented him with a formal protest, and demanded that the United Nations Security Council hold an emergency meeting to discuss and condemn the barbaric acts of NATO led by the US. In our interviews with Chinese foreign-policy scholars in Beijing, we were advised that the Chinese leadership exercised considerable self-restraint. Chinese leaders did not demand an investigation by the United Nations, or China’s participation in an investigation if it were conducted, and they were careful not to state what their actions would be if their four demands were rejected. In response to rising anti-US and anti-NATO emotions of the university students and masses, then Chinese Vice-President Hu Jintao made an unscheduled television appearance on 9 May to calm the Chinese people. Hu explained the Chinese authorities’ responses to win the nation’s understanding of, and support for, their position. While he praised the people’s patriotism, he also alerted them to conspiracies about using the incident to disturb the nation’s normal social order, and appealed to the nation’s people to resolutely maintain social stability. Hu indicated that China would continue to move ahead with economic reforms and opening further to the outside world. Hu’s televised speech indicated that the Chinese government wanted to maintain a rational and responsible attitude in handling the incident, despite the strong emotions of the nation’s people. With no immediate apology from the US government, China announced that it would suspend high-level bilateral military contacts and negotiations on nuclear proliferation, arms control and international security, and would terminate the dialogue on human rights. Sino-US relations deteriorated sharply. On 13 May, staff members of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade returned to Beijing. In the grand welcoming ceremony, President Jiang Zemin made an important speech demanding that NATO and the US accept full responsibility for the incident, and comply fully with the Chinese government’s demands. Jiang declared that the Chinese people would not accept anything less, and that the Chinese government would closely monitor the situation and reserve the right to adopt further measures. Jiang’s position was stronger than that of the Chinese government’s

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statement of 8 May, but he remained vague concerning ‘further measures’. The Chinese government, for example, did not recall its US ambassador from Washington, DC. Jiang praised the protesters for ‘fully demonstrating the Chinese nation’s great patriotic spirit and solidarity, fully reﬂecting the Chinese people’s strong will in protecting world peace and opposing hegemony’. Yet he also reafﬁrmed that the incident would not lead to a reorientation of China’s domestic and foreign policies (Renmin ribao 14 May 1999). Jiang’s speech and the subsequent Renmin ribao editorials summarized well the government’s position on ofﬁcial nationalism and fundamental domestic and foreign policy lines after the May 8 Incident. Ofﬁcial nationalism had to give credit to unofﬁcial, spontaneous nationalism and to accept it as patriotism, but also had to avoid allowing the May 8 Incident to alter the Chinese leadership’s basic policy line. The Renmin ribao editorial of 3 June argued clearly for the maintenance of good relations with the US, stating that: The direction of Sino-US relations is most important to the world, although the improvement and development of Sino-US relations are full of twists and turns, and in the US there are anti-China forces that perceive China as an enemy and interfere in China. Yet the US people advocate friendship with China. Because they are two major powers with an important bearing on the world, the establishment and development of a healthy and stable relationship between China and the US are not only in accord with the fundamental interests of the two countries, they will also be beneﬁcial for the maintenance of world peace and stability. . . . We have to oppose hegemony and we also have to develop our relations with the US.

The development of anti-US and anti-Western values Since the end of the Cold War, the export of Western democracy and values that uphold human rights has become an important part of US foreign policy. This development has become a bone of contention between China and America. As part of the increasing economic, technological and cultural exchanges between the two countries, US culture and values are beginning to have an impact on China, exerting a strong inﬂuence on the attitudes and behavioural patterns of the younger generation. US views on democracy and human rights have won the support and admiration of many young people. Chinese leaders and ofﬁcials, especially those responsible for ideological matters, are obviously worried, but they can offer no effective solution. Although the May 8 Incident did not lead to major change in Chinese foreign policy, the incident triggered a wave of nationalist sentiment that could be exploited to erode the impact of US values on China.

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Under the banner of nationalism, after the May 8 Incident everything related to the US and Western values would be re-examined, especially values concerning human rights, democracy and globalization. Human rights On the eve of the May 8 Incident, the US movie ‘Saving Private Ryan’ was shown in many Chinese cities, and the humanitarian values depicted in the movie moved many Chinese audiences. However, many Chinese intellectuals critically questioned the Hollywood promotion of US humanrights values and humanitarianism. They pointed to apparent contradictions in asking ‘Why was the life of a US soldier so precious, yet Chinese people were attacked by US missiles in a barbaric manner? Where were Chinese people’s human rights?’. The Chinese authorities certainly saw the incident as a good opportunity to counterattack the US position on human rights, especially the argument that human rights are above state sovereignty. The ofﬁcial media, while emphasizing the slogans ‘Protect sovereignty’ and ‘Oppose hegemony’ in protest activities, also quoted criticisms of the US human rights made by intellectuals and students. Beijing qingnian bao (15 May 1999), for example, quoted a student of the Chinese People’s University as saying: In the past I had considerable goodwill toward US teachings on human rights, [and] had a lot of admiration for the democratic ways they advocated. . . . As a matter of fact, the US had been quietly indoctrinating the [Chinese] people with its culture and ideology through human rights and other channels, so that some people have become prisoners of US ideology. Through the violent acts of the US in this incident, it is high time for us young people to engage in reﬂection, to think about what exactly are human rights and democracy as advocated by the US. The same issue of this newspaper quoted Vice-chairman of the China Human Rights Study Association Yu Quanyu, that ‘This incident of the bombing of the Chinese embassy by the US clearly reveals that if you want to talk about human rights, you have to talk about sovereignty ﬁrst, you have to oppose hegemony ﬁrst’ (Beijing qingnian bao 15 May 1999). Many meetings were held in tertiary institutions in Beijing and Shanghai to expose the hypocrisy of the US position on democracy and human rights and to engage in ideological indoctrination. In a 17 May meeting for university students in Beijing, organized by the Ministry of Education and the Beijing Municipal Party Committee, Beijing Normal University Professor Zhang Hongyi (who is a standing committee member of the

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council of the China Human Rights Study Association), severely criticized the US position on human rights, equating it with hegemony (Renmin ribao online 17 May 1999). After attending a similar meeting, a student of Tongji University in Shanghai observed: In recent years, as cooperation and exchanges between China and the US expanded, I began to have a good impression of the US. This bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia by NATO, led by the US, was like a bomb in my head. It made me perceive clearly the hypocritical face of the US government. The bloody facts prove that human rights as advocated by the US are actually human rights with the US as the masters. (Renmin ribao Online 19 May 1999) Western civilization What was the impact of the May 8 Incident on the assessment of Western civilization by the Chinese people, especially by the Chinese intelligentsia? A Ph.D. candidate from the Chinese People’s University observed: There was originally an understanding of Western civilization as a civilization representing humanitarianism and democracy. Now the US has fully exposed that the civilization it has been advocating all along is actually a hypocritical civilization, one of false humanitarianism and total hegemony. Every country or nation has its own right of survival and development. Any country using its own way, its own standards to interfere in another country is wrong. (Beijing qingnian bao 20 May 1999) Another Ph.D. candidate specializing in Marxist-Leninist ideology at the Chinese People’s University criticized the US actions for betraying the positive aspects of Western civilization and for exploiting its banner to serve US national interests. This student stressed that one should not ‘completely denigrate Western civilization’ because of the dirty acts of the US, or ‘lose one’s reason’ because of anger over the incident, and instead ‘should continue to treat Western civilization with a scientiﬁc, dialectic, realistic, objective and cautious attitude’ (Beijing qingnian bao 20 May 1999). Yang Ping, assistant to the editor-in-chief of the Beijing qingnian bao, claimed that ‘Removing the various glamorous decorations of Western civilization, a core of Western values is social Darwinism, the logic of the strong exploiting the weak. This logic runs through its political, military, economic and social life’ (Beijing qingnian bao 20 May 1999). Fang Ning, a professor at the Capital Normal University who had been promoting rational nationalism, was even more blunt. He attacked US culture as

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hedonistic, a culture that would be neither long-lasting nor universal, and could not be imitated (Beijing qingnian bao 20 May 1999). In general, the authors’ impression of these views presented in print and electronic media is that in reﬂecting on Western civilization and US civilization, more and more young Chinese people reveal an open, rational attitude. They neither adore nor reject things Western. A student who at the time of the bombing was about to leave for the US to pursue a degree programme admitted that the US intervention in Yugoslavia and the bombing of the Chinese embassy had exposed the true imperialist colours of the US. But he still believed that ‘the US is a country of idealism. The problem lies in its eagerness to impose what it thinks is good on others, so much so that it will attempt to conquer or even eliminate others’. He considered that China had to learn seriously and selectively from the US, especially in management and institutionalization. In his view, Culture ultimately is a process of integration; there is no permanent leadership. In China, US culture, products and lifestyles have been amalgamated into the lives of the Chinese people. These links cannot be cut off. Can you reject the Internet, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and the software of Microsoft?’. (Huanqiu shibao 4 June 1999) Globalization In the 1990s, economic globalization became a popular topic of discussion among China’s educated elite. Opening to the outside world has been an important factor in China’s spectacular achievements in economic development. China has certainly also beneﬁted from the process of economic globalization. To some extent, China’s opening-up policy has been controversial; some worry that in the process the Chinese economy will lose its autonomy and come under the control of Western powers. Thus the May 8 Incident also offered an opportunity for critically examining globalization. A company manager expressed his view that: I too previously thought that, from the commercial development viewpoint, the world should pursue integration. This would be beneﬁcial for the economic development of various countries. Now it seems that this idealistic understanding cannot work. Because of ethnic diversity, different cultural backgrounds, different levels of economic development and different religious beliefs, communities in the present social structure have major differences in their views on many questions and in their ways of handling things. When these divergences cannot be coordinated, power politics emerges. (Beijing qingnian bao 18 May 1999)

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An investment company manager was more straightforward in his comments: ‘The incident of bombing [our] embassy prompted our new understanding of the so-called “global integration”. “Global integration” as advocated by the US is in actual substance “global integration US style”’ (Beijing qingnian bao 18 May 1999). A postgraduate from the School of International Studies, Beijing University, opined: From the US point of view, the progress of global integration is about the US establishing its leadership in a unipolar world. . . . The strategy of the US can be understood as economic security at its core, military strength as its base of support, consolidating its alliance relationships, pushing for ‘democratization’, and guiding coordination among major powers, to establish a new international order most in accord with US interests. (Beijing qingnian bao 18 May 1999) China has been eager to join the WTO since the mid-1980s. As noted above, just before the May 8 Incident, Premier Zhu Rongji visited America and made a number of important concessions to the US regarding China’s admission to the WTO. However, in the aftermath of the incident, discussion proceeded about the risks of global economic integration for China. A researcher at the Contemporary China Research Institute, Du Pu, pointed out that, so far, China had been a beneﬁciary of the economic globalization process. But, as he saw it, China had to have a sober understanding of its unique position in the globalization process, as China remained the only major power in the globalization process insisting on practising socialism. Hence, ‘relative to other countries, besides normal economic risks, China has to be more alert against risks arising from different political interests. . . . After all, economic globalization is not something that China is perfectly willing to go along with’. Du noted that, ‘In economic decisionmaking, as to areas with an important bearing on national economic life, and as to the extent and scale of opening up to the outside world, [China] has to balance the pros and cons and proceed carefully’ (Beijing qingnian bao 18 May 1999). Wang Yizhou, deputy director of the World Economy and Politics Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, offered his commentary through the Bulletin Board System at Renmin ribao’s online news forum. In his view, China had to join the WTO as this would be in China’s interests, but China still needed to think strategically about the timing of entry and learn to engage in psychological warfare. For Wang: China’s strong position on Kosovo not only will not impede progress in joining the WTO, but will raise China’s bargaining power. . . . The US, Japan and Europe now all want to absorb China into the WTO,

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but they will not simply abandon their bargaining chips. And China too should not make concession after concession. China has already waited 13 years, so waiting even longer is no big deal. (Renmin ribao, online, 14 May 1995)

Re-assessing Sino-US relations Since the normalization of Sino-US relations in 1972, the Chinese authorities and ordinary Chinese people have attached much signiﬁcance to this bilateral relationship, which is seen as the most important in Chinese foreign policy. A considerable segment of the Chinese intelligentsia held strong pro-US feelings and ‘adore everything US’ attitudes. However, the May 8 Incident forced many Chinese to re-assess Sino-US relations. Some intellectuals who had much admiration for the US were deeply disappointed by US arrogance in the aftermath of the bombing incident. Well-known novelist Liang Xiaosheng stated in an open letter to President Clinton, issued on 9 May 1999: Since China began to undertake reforms and opening up to the outside world, I have very much admired the achievements of the US in the economy, in science and technology, and in culture. . . . If this [bombing of the Chinese embassy] was not pre-meditated, but was in fact a military accident, then a prompt diplomatic apology by NATO, led by the US – or even a statement indicating ‘an expression of regret’ – is perhaps the very minimum that could have been done. (Beijing qingnian bao 12 May 1999) Other intellectuals with strong nationalist views considered that the incident, whether a mistake or a deliberate act, showed at least that the US did not attach too much importance to its relations with China. If the US authorities accorded priority to this relationship (even though they might treat China as a serious adversary), they should have clearly identiﬁed the location of the Chinese embassy to avoid accidents, before their bombing raids against Yugoslavia. Some argued on the Internet that an accidental bombing actually reﬂected even more badly on the US than a deliberate act. The former reﬂected that the US had not taken human life seriously, while the latter at least indicated that the US had treated China as an enemy of substantial weight (Fang et al. 1999: 4). Guo Longlong, vice-chairman of the Shanghai International Relations Studies Association, noted how the embassy bombing seriously affected Sino-US relations, claiming that: To a great extent [it] hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. It indicated that some people and some forces in the US still retain a psychology

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On management of Sino-US relations after the May 8 Incident, Jia Qingguo, Associate Dean of the School of International Studies at Beijing University, also claimed that China had to engage the US, as determined by the reality of international relations. But in engaging with the US, China had to uphold its own principles, to struggle and cooperate. Neither pure confrontation nor pure cooperation would be effective for managing this relationship. China should not allow people in the US wanting to see a breakup of Sino-US relations and a confrontational relationship to realize their conspiracies. Thus China had to distinguish between anti-China forces in the US government and those in the US government who advocate the development of a cooperative relationship with the PRC. In the long term, national interests should determine the direction of Sino-US relations and, since both China and America share important interests in maintaining normal state-to-state bilateral relations, both nations need to develop good bilateral relations (Beijing qingnian bao 18 May 1999). Some Chinese academics were concerned that the anti-US nationalist sentiments triggered by the May 8 Incident might lead to overly pessimistic assessments of Sino-US relations, and believed that the Chinese people’s understanding of the US should not be altered signiﬁcantly by an isolated incident. Shi Yinhong, president of the China US Historical Studies Association and head of the International Strategic Studies Centre, Nanjing International Relations Institute, believed that it would be inappropriate to over-estimate the US threat, and be inﬂuenced by a worst-case scenario. He objected to China’s current perception of the West as ‘absolutely black’. Shi indicated that because of long-term isolation, the Chinese people and media lacked maturity in international experiences (Fang et al. 1999: 7–8).

A new understanding of comprehensive national power Over the past two decades, China’s comprehensive national power and international status have increased considerably in line with the nation’s rapid economic growth. Many Chinese people expected that China would function as a major power in the post-Cold War international power transﬁguration. China’s experts in international strategy spoke of China as one of the poles in the global multipolar balance. These were the circumstances under which NATO, led by the US, bombed the Chinese embassy with guided missiles. This incident suddenly awoke many Chinese people who had been dreaming of China as a major power. It forced them to question not simply why the US bombed the Chinese embassy, but also whether this meant that China was still a weak country that could be bullied by a major power. In their anger and sorrow, these Chinese people were forced to

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re-examine China’s national strength, and the lament that ‘a backward country will be bullied’ again emerged in their minds. A postgraduate student of history at Beijing Normal University assessed: Why was NATO, as led by the US, so reckless? It is precisely because NATO believes that it has superior scientiﬁc and technological power, economic power and military power. NATO’s barbaric bombing reafﬁrms our belief that only when our country is strong and united can we protect our national pride. (Beijing qingnian bao 17 May 1999) An earlier Renmin ribao article (14 May 1999) expressed this sentiment with ‘A backward country will be bullied; only strength will bring you dignity. Sovereignty and dignity can be won only by strength’. A later Renmin ribao article observed: If you examine many events in today’s world, you can see US intervention or the US in the background. The US perceives those who don’t accept its command as an ‘obstacle’ and will attack them and impose sanctions on them. In the ﬁnal analysis, the US depends on its economic power. . . . To avoid a repetition of the historical tragedy [i.e. China being bullied by Western imperialist powers], China must accelerate its economic development and improve its comprehensive national power. (Renmin ribao 27 May 1999) A commentary by Renmin ribao just after the May 8 Incident deﬁned the functioning of what we construe as ofﬁcial nationalism, which the article cast as ‘patriotism’. It announced that patriotism was: . . . transforming sorrow and anger into initiative, learning through strenuous efforts and hard work; seeking strength through strong motivation, developing production, science and technology; and through concrete efforts modernizing industry, agriculture, science and technology, and national defence and strengthening the Motherland’s comprehensive national power. (Renmin ribao 10 May 1999) Since the Opium Wars of 1839–42, the Chinese people have suffered from the exploitation of imperialism. Whenever China’s sovereignty and national pride were violated, Chinese people would lament the plight of a backward country being bullied. When confronted with power politics, the Chinese people acutely felt their nation’s weakness and yearned for national strength. Chinese people hoped that when China was strong, it would not be bullied. In this sense, Chinese nationalism was passive and responsive.

100 Joseph Cheng and Kinglun Ngok In the protest activities following the May 8 Incident, the strongest feeling among the Chinese people, especially young students, was not to take revenge against the US, but to ﬁnd a way to accelerate the strengthening of China to prevent further exploitation and violation.

The 2001 spy-plane incident revisited Almost two years after the May 8 Incident, on 1 April 2001, a US Navy electronic surveillance aircraft clashed with Chinese ﬁghters attempting to intercept it in airspace over China’s coastal waters, resulting in the loss of a Chinese ﬁghter aircraft and its pilot. The damaged US naval aircraft subsequently entered into Chinese airspace without authorization and landed at the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) airport at Lingshui in Hainan Island. Chinese authorities detained the US crew. The Hainan Incident, as this became known, was probably the most serious military incident in SinoUS relations since the 1970s, and generated a new crisis in the already brittle relationship. Beijing strongly condemned the US government for violating China’s airspace and sovereignty, and demanded that the US assume full responsibility and apologize to the Chinese government and Chinese people. The George W. Bush administration took a hard line from the beginning, refusing to assume responsibility and to apologize to China. The Bush administration’s high-handed, hubristic and hegemonic disposition, as perceived by the Chinese government and people, aroused strong dissatisfaction on the Chinese side. The Hainan Incident led to another wave of anti-US activities. This time there were no massive protests and demonstrations in front of the US embassy and consulates as in 1999, but Chinese people expressed strong anti-US emotions in the mass media, and the US was again ‘demonized’ on the Internet. The US was accused of being a hegemonic power, an international highwayman, and an evil force in the global community. In the eyes of the Chinese people, international public opinion on the Hainan Incident largely supported the Chinese side. It appeared that even the US public believed that the US had to assume responsibility for the incident; Time magazine on 3 April 2001 found through an Internet opinion survey that 77 per cent of participants believed that the US should assume major responsibility. Chinese mass media widely reported the results of this survey. To ordinary Chinese people, the party at fault was amply clear. A US military surveillance aircraft entered over China’s coastal seas to engage in spying activities, threatening China’s national security. Thus Chinese ﬁghters had to intercept the US plane. Further, it was the US plane that violated the rules of aviation, making a sudden and sharp turn towards the Chinese aircraft, resulting in the air collision. By entering Chinese airspace and landing at a Chinese airport without authorization, the US military aircraft violated China’s airspace and sovereignty.

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Inevitably, the Bush administration had its own, very different, selfexonerating interpretation. For the Bush administration and the US military, responsibility for the incident fell on the Chinese side: the US military aircraft was ﬂying legally in international airspace. The Chinese ﬁghters had followed and monitored the US aircraft, so it was the ‘disturbance’ and ‘provocation’ of the Chinese ﬁghters that caused the air collision. As for the US aircraft’s entry into China’s airspace and its landing at a Chinese airport, the US authorities held that these moves had been dictated by emergency needs caused by the Chinese provocation. The US authorities ﬁrmly upheld their explanation of the incident, and were reluctant to cooperate with their counterparts in Beijing. Like the Belgrade embassy bombing, the Hainan Incident and its associated diplomatic confrontation illustrated the brittle nature and instability of Sino-US relations. Yet despite the Chinese leadership’s dissatisfaction with the Bush administration’s attitude, and the considerable pressure from the Chinese people to adopt a strong position in dealing with the US, the Chinese leadership nonetheless managed the incident rationally and with pragmatism. In the end, the renewed demonization of the US in response to the Hainan Incident did not lead to further deterioration in the bilateral relationship. The Chinese authorities valued good Sino-US relations in line with their long-term objective of maintaining a peaceful international environment to concentrate on national economic development.

Conclusion Undeniably, nationalism has been a powerful part of national discourse and a potent political force in contemporary China. In the 1990s, unofﬁcial, voluntary nationalism in China reached a new peak, and the Chinese authorities consciously managed this nationalism to maintain domestic solidarity and stability. This chapter has analysed the waves of nationalism in China following the May 8 Incident in Belgrade to show both how Chinese nationalism splits into ofﬁcial nationalism and unofﬁcial nationalism, and how the two forms of nationalism interact. Throughout the 1990s, unofﬁcial nationalism was rich in emotional and irrational responses. Since the Chinese authorities saw that ofﬁcial nationalism had to respond carefully to this unofﬁcial nationalism, they judiciously pressed into service the former to steer the latter on a rational, better-balanced path that was mindful of long-term national interests. The NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade triggered massive waves of unofﬁcial, voluntary nationalism that posed a severe test for ofﬁcial nationalism. In the Chinese authorities’ responses to this incident, ofﬁcial nationalism under the banner of patriotism allowed unofﬁcial, voluntary nationalism considerable space and channels for the people to articulate this unofﬁcial type. Nevertheless, the authorities recognized a need to limit the unofﬁcial nationalism within the nation’s legal framework

102 Joseph Cheng and Kinglun Ngok to prevent it running out of control and evolving into extreme and vitriolic nationalism that would produce confrontation with the West, especially the US. It may therefore be said that ofﬁcial nationalism in China passed an unprecedented test in the May 8 Incident. The May 8 Incident also demonstrated that despite the political struggles within the Chinese leadership, a fundamental consensus existed on Sino-US relations, China’s foreign policy and the highest priorities of domestic policy. The Chinese leaders agreed that China had to continue opening to the outside world, integrating into the international community, and accepting the challenges of globalization. The waves of nationalist outbursts following the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy did not alter this consensus. To a limited extent, the May 8 Incident also demonstrated the rational approach and maturity of the Chinese people. Although many took part in protest activities, they did not demand revenge against the US by the Chinese authorities, or termination of China’s relations with the US and other Western countries. Even at the peak of the anti-US emotions, voices of reason among the people could still be heard. Some intellectuals expressed worries about the rise of unofﬁcial, voluntary nationalism. Some university students openly declared that they would not change their plans to study in the West because of the incident. Appeals to boycott Coca-Cola and McDonalds did not attract a signiﬁcant response (Huanqiu shibao 4 June 1999). In the campaign initiated by the Chinese authorities to reﬂect on Western (US) values, most university students believed that they should analyse Western values in a comprehensive, objective manner, and rejected biases as well as a total negation of the West. In many ways, the features of this response also apply to the Hainan spy-plane incident in April 2001. While this chapter tends to stress the Chinese leadership’s consensus in approaching international affairs and its rational attitude in handling the May 8 Incident, there is no denial that the members of the Chinese leadership hold nationalist sentiments. As argued by Zheng (1998: 8–9), China as a major developing country needs nationalism. But this nationalism must be rational and not xenophobic. The Chinese authorities have their own views of the type of nationalism that China needs: ofﬁcial nationalism and probably patriotism. The Chinese authorities appear to have no intention of exploiting ofﬁcial nationalism as a tool in China’s foreign policy, using nationalist emotions to manage state-to-state relations and to engage in confrontation with the West. However, the Taiwan question appears to be an exception. Here the Chinese authorities want to exploit ofﬁcial nationalism as a domestic instrument to strengthen political stability and solidarity among the people. As such, ofﬁcial nationalism has a strong ideological function. The May 8 Incident reveals that ofﬁcial nationalism does not allow an uncontrolled outpouring of unofﬁcial, voluntary nationalism that would disturb China’s domestic politics and foreign policy. However, the Chinese authorities will

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use unofﬁcial, voluntary nationalism to confront Western values and ideologies in their attempts to unify the views of the Chinese people, especially the younger generation, and to consolidate the leadership of the Chinese communist regime. Chinese leaders fully appreciate China’s national weakness. This is why Deng Xiaoping’s foreign policy line of ‘avoiding the limelight and keeping a low proﬁle’ while concentrating on China’s own affairs has been followed by Jiang Zemin (Ming pao 23 January 1997) and most probably will also be followed by Jiang’s successor Hu Jintao. The Chinese leadership has been keen to maintain a peaceful international environment to focus on domestic economic development, as it understands that the legitimacy of the Chinese communist regime depends on the leadership’s ability to improve the people’s living standards.

Epilogue The 11 September terrorist attacks on the US provided a valuable opportunity for improving Sino-US relations after the ruptures arising from the Hainan Incident and the impressive package of arms sales by the US to Taiwan in April 2001. The Bush administration had to enlist China’s support to combat global terrorism to present a truly international united front, and Chinese leaders responded readily. US President George W. Bush attended the informal APEC summit in Shanghai in October 2001, and returned to Beijing in the following February for a working visit. The two governments reached a consensus on establishing cooperative mechanisms to combat terrorism on an intermediate- and long-term basis, an outcome that did much to enhance the atmosphere of these bilateral meetings. However, tensions between China and the US remain. The Bush administration increased military expenditure and accelerated development of the national missile defence (NMD) programme, releasing several reports on China’s military threat to the US to help justify this programme. A report by the US Central Intelligence Agency, for example, indicated that Chinese inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) aimed at the US would expand fourfold, to number about 75 to 100 in the next 15 years (Ming pao 13 March 2002). The Chinese leadership perceives that the US is consolidating its global hegemony and treating China as its most serious potential challenger. This is the biggest obstacle to improving Sino-US relations. Most Chinese experts believe that this disposition towards China will be continued, irrespective of which party controls the White House.

References Beijing qingnian bao (Beijing Youth Daily), various issues. Chanda, Nayan and Huus, Kari (1995) ‘The new nationalism’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 45: 20–8.

104 Joseph Cheng and Kinglun Ngok Cheng, Joseph Yu Shek (1996) ‘China’s US policy: a turning point’, Journal of Chinese Political Science, 2: 51–91. Fang Ning, Wang Xiao Dong and Song Qiang (1999) Quanqiuhua yinying xia de Zhongguo zhi lu (China’s Road in the Shadow of Globalization), Beijing: Zhongguo shehuikexue chubanshe. Guangming ribao (Guangming Daily), 9 May 1999. Huanqiu shibao (Global Times), various issues. Jiefangjun bao (Liberation Army Daily), 3 November 1995. Kaye, Lincoln (1995) ‘The next generation’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 35: 36. Koehn, Peter H. and Cheng, Joseph Yu Shek (eds) (1999) The Outlook for US–China Relations Following the 1997–1998 Summits: Chinese and US Perspectives on Security, Trade and Cultural Exchange, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Ming Pao, various issues. Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), various issues. Renmin ribao, online. Available http://www.peopledaily.com.cn (accessed 8, 9, 14, 17, 19 May 1999). Song Qiang, Zhang Zangzang and Qiao Biao (1996) Zhongguo keyi shuo bu – lengzhanhou shidai de zhengzhi yu qinggan juece (China Can Say No: the Political and Emotional Choice in the post-Cold War era), Beijing: Zhonghua gongshang lianhe chubanshe. South China Morning Post, various issues. Unger, Jonathan (ed.) (1996) Chinese Nationalism, Armonk, New York and London, England: M.E. Sharpe. Zheng Yong Nian (1998) Zhongguo minzuzhuyi de fuxing: minzuguojia xiang hechu qu (The Rejuvenation of Chinese Nationalism: Whither the Nation State?), Hong Kong: Joint Publishing (HK) Company. Zhongguo qingnian bao (China Youth Daily), 16 May 1999.

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Part IV

Taiwanese nationalism

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6

Taiwan’s evolving nationalism Ideology for independence C.L. Chiou

Taiwanese nationalism is a relatively recent political idea. Only since the ethnic uprising of 28 February 1947 has ethnic conﬂict become a ﬁxed feature of Taiwanese politics. It has made the advocacy of civic Taiwanese nationalism a difﬁcult proposition, even though 98 per cent of the population are ethnically Han. Attempts were made during the ﬁfty-year Japanese colonial rule of Taiwan (1895–1945) to preserve ethnic Han identity. Yet before the 28 February 1947 uprising, now popularly known as 2–28, there was little talk of Taiwanese nationalism. The 2–28 gave birth belatedly to a form of Taiwanese nationalism that was neither ethnically nor culturally based, but was related rather closely to a political struggle by the people in Taiwan and their leaders to gain selfdetermination and independence from what was for the vast non-indigenous majority their ancestral home country China, which was then under both Nationalist and communist rule. Evolving Taiwanese nationalism is therefore not anti-Confucian or anti-Han, but anti-authoritarian, anti-communist and anti-Chinese-irredentist. It is a political ideology for independence but without a distinct ‘spirit of a particular people’. It is thus a rather weak political ideology in what is still an early stage of its development. In the twenty-ﬁrst century, with the information technology revolution and economic globalization set to advance much further, Taiwanese nationalism seems in some ways anachronistic. It remains without a clear picture of where it is heading. With what many in Taiwan see as the ‘China threat’ increasing – politically and economically as well as militarily – the future of Taiwan as a nation-state and the evolution of Taiwanese nationalism are uncertain, to say the least. For leaders in Beijing, both trajectories are doomed to fail. Democracy is on Taiwan’s side. Accompanied by continuous economic growth, democracy in Taiwan may survive. And, alongside it, Taiwanese nationalism may play an important role in building a Taiwanese nation. In this sense, Taiwanese nationalism is more a ‘civic nationalism’ than an ‘ethnic nationalism’. The democratic state institutions, rather than ethnic national identity, are the basis on which Taiwanese nationalism is being built.

108 C.L. Chiou

Nationalism as a political ideology The desire for, and advocacy of, national independence is the core, indeed the engine, of Taiwan’s evolving nationalism. Iain McLean’s assessment of nationalism is helpful here: ‘Nationalism turns devotion to the nation into principles or programmes. It thus contains a different dimension to mere patriotism, which can be a devotion to one’s country or nation devoid of any project for political action’ (McLean 1996: 334). He points out that the general feature of universal principles of nationalism is an assertion of the primacy of national identity over the claims of class, religion or humanity in general. He elaborates that the application of nationalism to politics is the principle of self-determination, which seeks to base political life on the nation-state, a sovereign entity dominated by a single nation. Self-determination was the ﬁrst priority in the Taiwanese search for national identity. It is generally agreed that the core of the nationalism project is to establish political unity and independence for the island state. In their study of nationalism and democratization in China, He and Guo (2000) applied Anthony Smith’s (1994) deﬁnition that sees nationalism as part of the process of the growth of nations and nation-states, involving sentiments of attachment to and pride in the nation, an ideology and language extolling the nation, and a movement with national aspirations and goals. This deﬁnition is rather cumbersome, but it is speciﬁc. Smith’s explanation of the ideology of nationalism proceeds from perception that the world is divided into nations, each with its own character and destiny. In his view, the nation is the sole source of political power and loyalty to it overrides all other loyalties; everyone must belong to a nation if everyone is to be truly free; to realize themselves, nations must be autonomous; and nations must be free and secure if there is to be peace and justice in the world. Smith explains the goals of nationalist movements as national identity, national unity and national autonomy. Taiwan’s evolving nationalism is the result of nation building and political modernization. Thus Ernest Gellner’s idea that ‘nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist’ (Gellner 1964: 168), ﬁts well with Taiwan’s developmental agenda. Gellner claimed that nationalism engenders nations, not the reverse (Gellner 1983: 55). However, in the case of Taiwan, we see a symbiotic relationship. Democratization has fuelled nation building, which in turn has fuelled the construction of Taiwanese nationalism. John Breuilly’s functional interpretation of nationalism seems to better explain Taiwan’s experience. Breuilly asserts that nationalism is not the expression of nationality, but ‘an effective nationalism develops where it makes political sense for an opposition to the government to claim to represent the nation against the present state’ (Breuilly 1982: 382). This is what those who were until recent years in the Taiwanese opposition have done in their struggle against the Nationalists, the Kuomintang (KMT).

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They have continued to pursue democratic rights and to work against intrusion by communist China to achieve national independence. Liah Greenfeld’s comments are also useful for explaining nationalism in Taiwan: ‘national identity is, fundamentally, a matter of dignity’, and ‘nationalism is not a uniform phenomenon’ (Greenfeld 1992: 487, 490).

The past In 2002, about 400,000 people (slightly less than 2 per cent of the population) in Taiwan were known as ofﬁcially aboriginal people, yuanzhumin, and speak Austronesian languages. Aboriginal people had lived on Taiwan for thousands of years when the Han immigrants from Fujian and Guangdong began to arrive on the island in around 1600. Discussion of ‘Taiwanese-ness’, ‘Taiwanization’, Taiwanese identity and, central to this discussion, nationalism, must include these indigenous people. As Michael Stainton concluded in his sympathetic study of Taiwanese aboriginal people, ‘the politics of Taiwan aboriginal origins are ultimately the politics of Taiwan’s future’ (Stainton 1999: 42). Since 1600, Han people – hoklo from southern Fujian and hakka from northern Guangdong – have made the dangerous sea crossing to resettle across the Taiwan Strait. For centuries the Han immigrants ruthlessly persecuted and marginalized the Taiwanese aboriginal inhabitants, whom the Han massacred or drove into harsh mountainous regions. Thus for a long time the aboriginal people were called gaoshanzhu, the mountain tribe. Before 1600, Chinese ﬁshermen, smugglers and pirates visited the island but there were no permanent Chinese settlements in Taiwan. Thus, ‘Taiwan in 1600 was on the outer edge of Chinese consciousness and activity’ (Wills 1999: 85). Ofﬁcially, the Chinese government regarded Taiwan as huawai zhi di, outside of the Chinese civilization. When the Han immigrants crossed the Strait, cleared the land, and began farming on the island at the beginning of the seventeenth century, most did not expect to cut their ties with their families on the Mainland or to settle down permanently, and even less to build a new nation-state. Although the Qing began to ofﬁcially administer Taiwan in 1683, it was not until 1885, ten years before Beijing ceded the island to Japan, that the Qing court ﬁnally made Taiwan its twenty-second province. For almost 200 years, Taiwan was regarded as a far-away frontier and continued to be an uncivilized huawai colony of China. Taiwan’s 50-year colonization by Japan made the Taiwanese secondclass citizens, but created an advanced economy that became more prosperous than that of the mother country on the other side of the Strait. Economic infrastructure built in the early 1900s, including the seaports of Keelung (Jilong) and Kaohsiung (Gaoxiong), roads, railway, hydroelectric generating plants, irrigation systems, postal and telecommunica-

110 C.L. Chiou tion facilities, and modern newspaper publication, continued to play an important role in facilitating Taiwan’s economic miracle towards the end of the twentieth century. Throughout the 50-year colonization period, ethnic Han nationalism bubbled under the surface. In the early years, Han nationalists struggled against Japanese atrocities. In the 1920s, with the development of Taisho democracy in Japan, limited self-government was granted to Taiwan, but in the later years of colonial rule a Japanese assimilation policy was carried out successfully. During the long Sino-Japanese conﬂict in the 1930s, although many Taiwanese ‘still harboured opposition sentiments embodying Taiwanese and Chinese nationalistic ideals’, on the whole, ‘the Taiwanese and aborigine inhabitants performed well as imperial subjects, or komin’ (Lamley 1999: 242, 244). When Taiwan was suddenly ceded to Japan as a spoil of victory in the Sino-Japanese war in 1895, the move was much to the consternation of Taiwan’s inhabitants, who endured painful years of resistance and accommodation (Lamley 1999: 247–8). When this colonization was ended in 1945, again the outcome of an international war, Taiwan was retroceded to China in an equally abrupt manner. The transfer of rule over Taiwan was again conducted without genuine consultation with, or a semblance of self-determination by, the Taiwanese people or their leaders. In 1945, at the end of colonization, even though most inhabitants had loyally supported Japan’s war effort, they were not even given a chance to indicate their preferences for citizenship, as had been offered to them in 1895. ‘As a consequence, the Taiwanese once more came to be governed by “outsiders” – only this time they would be dominated by the Kuomintang and Mainland Chinese instead of by Japanese colonial authorities and naichijin residents’ (Lamley 1999: 248).

Taiwanese nationalism and 2–28 The sudden news of Japan’s unconditional surrender in August 1945 shocked almost the entire population in Taiwan (Lamley 1999: 246–7). The simple transfer of sovereignty from the defeated Japanese authorities to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government that ruled Mainland China was accomplished in a single day, 25 October 1945. The transfer of sovereignty was, however, much more complex than an ofﬁcial ceremonial task. Initially, the new KMT administration aroused latent Han Chinese nationalism and the Taiwanese had great expectations after their warm welcome on return to the ‘mother’ country. However, the moment the Taiwanese laid eyes on the Nationalist army, they began to have doubts about their fellow countrymen and women whom they had not seen for half a century. Inevitably, they compared the Japanese colonizers with the new Nationalist Chinese masters. They found the new rulers more corrupt, less competent,

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and just as, if not more, oppressive than the Japanese colonizers. The Nationalists from the Mainland saw, disliked and distrusted the ‘Japanized Taiwanese’, particularly the elite, who looked and acted in many ways more like Japanese than Han Chinese – a legacy of Japanese colonialism. As Steven Phillips put it: The Nationalist state failed to meet many standards of acceptable governance that the Taiwanese had formed under the previous regime. Increasingly, they saw the Mainland government and its representatives on the island as new, yet less competent, colonial rulers. Reintegration became, to many of them, recolonization. Taiwanese criticism of the state mirrored calls for expanded provincial autonomy. (Phillips 1999: 277) The tensions and incidents between Taiwanese people and the Mainland rulers increased rapidly after the reversion of Taiwan to Chinese rule. The situation worsened, leading to the 2–28 uprising on 28 February 1947. On this day, angry crowds of Taiwanese protested against the corrupt and oppressive actions of the Chinese government. The governor, Chen Yi, resorted to brutal military suppression. The Taiwanese, many Japanesetrained youth, organized into militia units. Battles, most of them small, swept through the island. The Taiwanese won the initial confrontation and forced Chen Yi to accept Taiwanese self-government. While negotiating self-government deals with the Taiwanese sociopolitical elite, Chen Yi secretly requested Chiang Kai-shek to send in troop reinforcements, which for the next two weeks indiscriminately killed thousands of Taiwanese. With General Peng Mengji’s Kaohsiung garrison command simultaneously carrying out massacres in southern Taiwan, when the ﬁrst bloody suiqing (clean-up) campaign brought peace and order to the island on 20 March, about 20,000 Taiwanese had perished without a trace, many of them intellectuals (Chiou 1993; Kerr 1965; Lai, et al. 1991; Phillips 1999). Primarily, it was economic hardship that became worse than during the Japanese colonial period, and the inept, corrupt and oppressive Chen Yi regime that pushed the generally docile people of Taiwan into rebellion. There was not a pro-Japanese conspiracy as the Nationalists claimed, or a communist conspiracy as both Nationalists and Chinese communists proclaimed. There was not an emerging Taiwanese nationalism, and neither was there an independence agenda. Yet although independence was not initially on the agenda, self-government and democracy were central to the Taiwanese demands. Ethnicity was not the reason for the 2–28 uprising, but anti-Chinese Mainlander feeling was growing. As discussed later in this chapter, after 1949 and during the long authoritarian KMT rule, the independence advocates fomented anti-Chinese Taiwanese nationalism by citing 2–28 as the source,

112 C.L. Chiou inspiration and beginning of their nationalist awakening. As a consequence, 2–28 created an ethnic nationalist divide that has troubled Taiwan’s sociopolitical landscape ever since.

From Chiang Kai-shek to Chen Shuibian The harsh oppression of Taiwanese continued from 2–28 to the end of 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government was defeated by Mao Zedong’s communist revolution and retreated to Taiwan. After 1949, about 2,000,000 Chinese Mainlanders ﬂed the Mainland for Taiwan with Chiang’s defeated army, and reinforced their ruling position over the Taiwanese. These post-1949 Mainland expatriates have constituted about 14 per cent of the population, as compared with the 2 per cent who are indigenous yuanzhumin and about 84 per cent who are Taiwanese whose ancestors crossed the channel centuries ago. Among the roughly 84 per cent Taiwanese, the Hoklo are the majority and comprise about 65 per cent of the total population, while the Hakka, the second largest ethnic group, comprise less than 20 per cent of the population (Lin 1994: 86; Shih 1997: 73–108). Since 2–28, ethnic conﬂict has become a ﬁxed feature of Taiwanese politics. This point is crucial to the discussion here, since ethnic diversity and tension have made the construction of civic Taiwanese nationalism a much more difﬁcult proposition than may be expected in a mono-ethnic society. In 1964, a promising young international law scholar, Professor Peng Ming-min, head of the political science department at the National Taiwan University, with his two postgraduate students, Xie Congmin and Wei Tingchao, secretly published an anti-Nationalist, pro-independence piece, ‘Declaration on Taiwan’s Self-salvation Movement’ (Taiwan zhijiu yundong xuanyan). It declared a hard reality: there was one China and one Taiwan. It refuted Chiang Kai-shek’s claim that the Nationalists would recover the Mainland and condemned Chiang’s brutal martial-law government. It stressed that Taiwan had more than sufﬁcient capability to become a sovereign state. It advocated the abolition of martial law and immediate democratization to let Taiwanese people decide their own future (Peng 1991: 285–94; Tao 1995: 107–23). The professor and students were arrested by the secret police before they could distribute their pamphlets. All three were charged with treason and sentenced to long prison terms, although, under international pressure, Professor Peng was pardoned and put under intensive surveillance. He managed to smuggle himself out of Taiwan in 1970 and lived in exile until 1992. He stood as presidential candidate for the then opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in 1996, but lost to his contemporary, the KMT’s Lee Teng-hui. In the 18 March 2000 presidential election, Peng helped the DPP presidential candidate Chen Shuibian to historic victory for the party, ending the KMT’s 55-year hold on power in Taiwan.

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Peng’s powerful independence declaration in 1964 was suppressed quickly by the authorities. However, the declaration’s message not only reached the people, it also touched the chord of Taiwanese consciousness and in this way can be seen as instrumental in the development of nationalism in Taiwan. Peng’s declaration has since become the Bible – and Professor Peng the father – of the Taiwan independence movement. In the 1970s, the democratization movement in Taiwan began to gather pace, pushed by the dangwai (outside the KMT) opposition. In the 1980s, the soft authoritarian rule of Chiang Kai-shek’s successor, his son Chiang Ching-kuo, was increasingly weakened. Dangwai’s ranks continued to expand and its supporters won more and more elections. By 28 September 1986, when the dangwai deﬁed martial law and formed the DPP as an opposition party, Chiang Ching-kuo was forced to admit that the political environment had shifted considerably. He ordered the lifting of martial law, which effectively allowed the new party to challenge the KMT’s monopoly on power (Chiou 1995: 96–104). From Professor Peng’s self-salvation declaration, to the increasingly active dangwai movement and establishment of the DPP, opposition to the KMT authoritarian rule became ever more a Taiwanized pro-independence movement. The DPP party platform spells out clearly that one of the party’s principal goals is to build an independent republic of Taiwan through a popular plebiscite. In building this new nation, a new Taiwanese national identity has to be fostered. Taiwanese culture, history, art, literature and languages are to be stressed and cultivated. Hence, Taiwanese nationalism has become the central focus of the DPP’s socio-political agenda. On Chiang Ching-kuo’s death in 1988, his Vice-President Lee Teng-hui succeeded him to become an unexpectedly strong KMT leader and President of Taiwan for the next 12 years. Against continuous obstruction from KMT old guards, Lee Teng-hui accomplished a great number of Taiwanization programmes. He allowed the new parliament to be elected totally from within the Taiwan area, changed the constitution to introduce direct presidential elections, and downgraded both the National Assembly and the Taiwan provincial government so that Taiwan’s political institutions more closely resemble those of an independent nation-state that is separate from China (Lee 1999). In the 1996 presidential election, he began to propagate the idea of ‘new Taiwanese’ national identity (Chiou 2000: 54–9) and helped the KMT candidate, Ma Yingjiu (Ma Ying-jeou), to win the 1998 Taipei mayoral race against Chen Shuibian by openly advocating ‘new Taiwanese’ identity. In the 18 March 2000 presidential election, Taiwanese voters stunned not only Taiwan and China but also the rest of the world by voting out the KMT and bringing to government the pro-independence DPP. As DPP leader, Chen Shuibian made history by winning the Taiwanese presidency, not only in terms of democratization for Taiwan, but also for the assertion

114 C.L. Chiou of Taiwanese nationalism, the expression of national independence, and saying loudly ‘no’ to China.

‘New Taiwan’ and ‘new Taiwanese’ Born in 1923 in Taipei county, Taiwan, Lee spent the ﬁrst 20 years of his life as a person subject to Japanese colonization, which appears to have inﬂuenced profoundly his understandings of identity and nation. He completed high school at Japanese schools in Taiwan and in 1943 went to the Imperial Kyoto University. He was a kendo (Japanese swordsmanship) enthusiast. In 1940, while still in high school, he changed his Chinese name to a Japanese name. Until defeat in the Paciﬁc War forced the end of Japan’s colonization in 1945, Lee thought he was a Japanese person. Lee attracted the attention of then president Chiang Ching-kuo in the early 1970s, when Chiang tried to recruit young Taiwanese elites into his administration to legitimize and sustain his Nationalist government. Lee was appointed to Chiang’s new cabinet in 1972 and, under Chiang, played politics with the kendo spirit of great patience and sagacity, hiding his Taiwanese–Japanese identity and concealing political ambition. Because the KMT old guards believed that he would not pose any real threat to their power, Lee was accepted as Chiang’s vice-presidential candidate in 1984 and succeeded Chiang after Chiang’s death in January 1988. Resistance against his Taiwanese leadership in the ex-Mainlander-dominated KMT was strong, but Lee began to consolidate his power in the party and government in the late 1980s and early 1990s, showing great political acumen. By steadfastly democratizing the Taiwanese political system, he managed to neutralize the conservative forces in the KMT and, slowly but surely, to ‘Taiwanize’ both the ruling party and politics in Taiwan. In the process of Taiwanizing national identity and politics, Lee Teng-hui sparked continuous anger and frustration in Beijing. Lee Teng-hui’s 1999 autobiography, The Road to Democracy: Taiwan’s Pursuit of Identity, has a brief section on his concept of Taiwanese identity. He stresses that: It is impossible to form a political culture that embodies Taiwan’s identity without, ﬁrst and foremost, an intense love for Taiwan itself. I say this all the time, but the person who will lead Taiwan in the future must be a real ﬁghter, someone who loves Taiwan deeply and will shed blood, sweat, and tears for Taiwan. (Lee 1999: 51–2) Lee raises the issues of a new Taiwan and new Taiwanese in the book’s ﬁnal chapter, and offers Ma Yingjiu as an example of the complexity of the identity/nationhood issues. Ma came to Taiwan with his KMT-ofﬁcial father after 1949. Although he grew up and was educated to tertiary level

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in Taiwan, Ma regards himself as a waishengren (out-of-province person), a Chinese Mainlander in Taiwan. He is a faithful KMT member, but he did not identify with or support Lee Teng-hui’s Taiwanization efforts. Like most waishengren, he is against Taiwan independence and wants eventual reuniﬁcation with China. However, as the KMT candidate in the 1998 Taipei mayoral election, Ma needed Taiwanese votes to win against the strong Taiwanese incumbent Chen Shuibian. Ma’s campaign promise to take the people forward as a society of ‘new Taiwanese’ has thus, strategically, a theme that was instrumental in winning Ma the Taipei mayoral race. Yet Lee’s successor as Taiwan’s president was not Lee’s anointed KMT candidate Lian Zhan (Lien Chan), but the opposition DPP’s Chen Shuibian. The voice of the ‘new Taiwanese’ had spoken through the ballot box. Chen Shuibian was born into a poor peasant family in the impoverished countryside of Tainan, southern Taiwan, in 1950. He was one of the defence lawyers in the 1980 Kaohsiung (Gaoxiong) incident trials, which made him both more aware of, and concerned by, the dark side of the KMT’s authoritarian rule. After the trials he joined the ranks of the dangwai and quickly became one of the brightest stars in Taiwan’s growing oppositionist politics (Chen 2000; Tao 1994). Chen Shuibian is seen as the ‘native son of Taiwan’. He was consistently the strongest advocate of Taiwan independence before he won the presidency. He does not have a Japanese or American educational background, as do Lee Teng-hui, Peng Ming-min and many other political leaders in Taiwan. During the 2000 presidential campaign, most people in Taiwan regarded him as a true successor to Lee Teng-hui’s ‘new Taiwanese’ leadership. In his presidential inauguration speech, Chen continued avoiding direct claims to nationalism and independence, declaring ‘Taiwan stands up, representing the self-conﬁdence of the people and the dignity of the country’. Shouting the slogans, ‘long live freedom and democracy’ and ‘long live the people of Taiwan’, Chen purposefully ignored the usual ‘long live the Republic of China’. His long speech was very brief on the thorny ‘one China’ issue: The people on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait share the same ancestral, cultural, and historical background. While upholding the principles of democracy and parity, building upon the existing foundations, and constructing conditions for cooperation through goodwill, we believe that the leaders on both sides possess enough wisdom and creativity to jointly deal with the question of a future ‘one China’. (Taipei Journal 26 May 2000: 2–3) In his 2001 New Year address to the nation, Chen called on China to denounce the use of force and engage Taiwan to push for integration. He

116 C.L. Chiou proposed that with ongoing integration of economies, trade and culture between the two sides, faith and conﬁdence can be built, which can be the basis for a new framework of permanent peace and political integration.

An uncertain future Chen Shuibian’s great care in handling Taiwanese independence and nationalism – indeed, retreating from Lee Teng-hui’s ‘state-to-state’ position and his own earlier rhetoric pushing these terms – shows how uncertain and premature both factors are in Taiwan’s search for nationhood. Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council is in charge of dealing with matters in the complex Taiwan–China relationship. The Council has compiled public opinion survey results carried out by Taiwan’s universities and other polling organizations to gauge the popular feelings on matters such as choice between status quo, reuniﬁcation and independence, and Taiwanese people’s ethnic identity.1 These ﬁgures show a people who are rather confused and living in considerable uncertainty. Most survey participants wanted to maintain the status quo, although over time the share of people who indicated their preference for eventual independence increased, while the share that preferred immediate reuniﬁcation was reduced to a very bare presence. In a June 1995 survey conducted by China Times, on the question, ‘Who are you?’, 27.9 per cent of respondents replied that they were Taiwanese, 43.6 per cent said they were both Taiwanese and Chinese, and 23.8 per cent said that they were Chinese. In an April 2000 survey, 42.5 per cent said that they were Taiwanese, 38.5 per cent said they were both Taiwanese and Chinese, while 13.6 per cent said that they were Chinese. The December 2000 survey showed similar trends (China Times 4 December 2000). Although more people than before in Taiwan now identify themselves as Taiwanese and only a small minority insist they are Chinese, ethnic conﬂicts still seriously divide Taiwanese society. Thus, the ethnic ground is not yet fertile for the healthy growth of Taiwanese nationalism. In introducing the 1999 work Taiwan: a New History, editor Murray Rubinstein identiﬁed ﬁve recurrent factors in Taiwan’s history. As discussion in this chapter makes clear, it appears almost certain that all ﬁve factors from history will together shape the nature and place of nationalism in Taiwan’s future. First, Taiwan’s political history, like its socio-economic and cultural history, is shaped by the contours of China’s larger, expansionist history. Second, a feature of this landscape is the relationship between the indigenous peoples and the Han people whose forebears migrated from the Mainland – a relationship marked by both conﬂict and cooperation. Third, the West and Japan continue to impact upon Taiwan and thus to inﬂuence nationhood and nationalism in Taiwan. The fourth factor – a core element of the nationalism project – is problematic and controversial: the development of a unique Taiwanese identity.

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However, Taiwan scholar Shih Cheng-feng believes a strong Taiwanese national identity is emerging. He observes: Taiwanese identity has evolved based originally on some ascriptive characteristics, especially linguistic distinctions. But a more contingent condition was the discriminatory policies of alien rulers including the Japanese and the Mainland Nationalists, which created common condition and memory for the native Taiwanese. (Shih 2000: 260) His native Taiwanese include aboriginal, hoklo and hakka people. He further argues, ‘a comparison of the Taiwanese with overseas Chinese shows us that Taiwanese attachment to the land is a crucial determinant in their national identity. . . . Taiwanese national identity has developed independent of Chinese nationalism’ (Shih 2000: 260). Rubinstein’s 1999 critique seriously questions the validity of these views and the assumptions undergirding them. Rubinstein observed, ‘What Taiwanese themselves have increasingly begun to assert is that, over time, they developed their own forms of economic enterprise, social structure, and modes of religious and cultural experience that reﬂect the multifaceted inﬂuences and their historical experience. Today they see their culture as unique’ (Rubinstein 1999: xi–xii). Also controversial is the ﬁfth factor, which pervades all the others: the development of Taiwanese society and culture. Rubinstein questioned whether these are simply variants of the larger Chinese culture – the great tradition – and of southern Min culture, and are products of both Western and Japanese inﬂuences, or whether they are indeed something different and distinct from their complex origins, as Taiwanese people now claim (Rubinstein 1999: xi–xiii). Clearly, today Taiwanese people themselves are still struggling to ﬁnd answers to these critical questions. With an increasingly strong and conﬁdent China posturing to eventually reassert its sovereignty at a time when domestic separatism makes this a national imperative, there is no guarantee that the people of Taiwan will be given enough time to ﬁnd their answers. After observing closely the 1996 presidential election, Ian Buruma observed astutely: The most powerful force driving Taiwan’s newborn democracy is not a rising standard of living but a peculiar kind of nationalism. It pits those Chinese whose ancestors came to Taiwan over the past several centuries against those who ﬂed to Taiwan from the Mainland in 1949. It sets the vision of an independent Taiwan against the dream of one China. At the core of the nascent democracy is the clash between Taiwan’s new nationalism and China’s old Nationalists. (Buruma 1996: 78)

118 C.L. Chiou Buruma has identiﬁed the inherent clash played out inside Taiwan, but he has failed to comment on another clash that is critical in this scenario and is played out across the Taiwan Strait: Taiwan’s new nationalism also clashes with the newly evolving Communist Party elite, whose passion to claim sovereignty over Taiwan has not diminished over time. In their volume on nationalism and democratization in China and Taiwan, He and Guo (2000) have produced some interesting ideas. They see present Chinese nationalism as essentially a state nationalism that is sponsored and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party-State, which is inventing a pan-Chinese national identity to protect the Chinese nation from secessionist tendencies. This ofﬁcial state nationalism is not conducive to China’s democratization or to its reuniﬁcation with Taiwan. It is one of the reasons why Taiwanese want to be independent and develop their own popular and civic, democratic nationalism. He and Guo argue that, in Taiwan, democratization has assisted Taiwan’s independence movement and empowered Taiwanese nationalism. From this brief look at Taiwan’s past and present, it is clear that after 2–28 the focus of the oppositionist struggle in Taiwan was self-government and democratization, against KMT authoritarianism and Chinese communist dictatorship. Aspirations for independence came later and nationalism has grown rather hesitantly. Taiwanese nationalism is not a state nationalism but, as discussed above, a popular and civic nationalism. It is difﬁcult for nationalism to evolve more rapidly and fully in Taiwan, precisely because Taiwan is a democracy and ethnic politics continue to divide Taiwanese society. Ironically, democratization has helped the development of Taiwanese nationalism, but it has also stunted some opportunities for nationalism to grow through enabling ethnic politics.

Concluding remarks Taiwanese nationalism is still at a foetal stage. Its future depends heavily on Taiwan achieving formal independence from the Mainland. Taiwanese nationalism is not an ethnic–cultural nationalism, although independence advocates try to create for the emerging nationalism an ethnic–cultural base. The development of Taiwanese nationalism is part of a logical sequence of Taiwan’s political development. With their sad colonial past, or, as Lee Teng-hui put it, their Taiwan ren de beiai (sadness in being Taiwanese), the Taiwanese people have struggled to achieve self-government, democratization, self-determination and independence. In the process, they have tried to create their own national identity in a composite of ethnicities, a national consciousness buried in their past, and in their present struggle against their large and powerful neighbour across the Taiwan Strait. The tasks of creating national identity and nationalism in Taiwan are made all the more difﬁcult by Taiwan’s de jure international status. Taiwan

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is a republic, but, unlike its Mainland neighbour, it is not recognized as a ‘nation’ by most other nations. There are no linear causal relations between anti-colonialism, democracy, independence and nationalism in the Taiwanese case. Also, not only is Taiwanese nationalism different from Chinese nationalism, but because of its distinctive historical underpinnings it is probably rather different from nationalism that has developed and been developed anywhere else. Taiwanese nationalism is today a modern functional civic nationalism with a political agenda. Hence it is manipulated and used as a functional political ideology, and in this sense it is similar to most other nationalisms in most countries in modern times. Unlike China’s statist nationalism, Taiwanese nationalism is a populist nationalism. It was initiated in the people’s struggle against their colonial rulers, and was rekindled with new impetus and direction by the 2–28 uprising. It was crystallized by Professor Peng Ming-min’s self-salvation declaration, and articulated and galvanized by the dangwai and later the DPP in battles against the KMT authoritarian rule and in struggles for independence against Chinese Communist irredentism. Taiwan’s nationalism has thus evolved as an ideology to help secure the independence of the people who live in Taiwan. They share their lives on an island state just across from the very neighbour that would like to claim the island’s sovereignty. Taiwan’s incipient nationalism helps to serve as social and political glue for a people who are not uniﬁed by shared history, ethnicity, language or indeed nationhood – the usual foundations of nationalism and national identity. Early in the twenty-ﬁrst century most people of Taiwan are uniﬁed by their aspirations to live together in peace and prosperity in Taiwan, as a democratic, economically strong island state that may in time become a new nation. These aspirations to a shared future, and the will to continue to make the most of the joint inheritance, are the new soil of Taiwan’s evolving nationalism.

Note 1

These ﬁgures can be found on the Mainland Affairs Council’s website http://www.mac.govt.tw.

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120 C.L. Chiou –––– (1995) Democratizing Oriental Despotism: China from 4 May 1919 to 4 June 1989 and Taiwan from 28 February 1947 to 28 June 1990, London: Macmillan. –––– (2000) ‘Democratizing Taiwan: the impact on Taiwan–China relations’, in C.L. Chiou and Leong H. Liew (eds) Uncertain Future: Taiwan–Hong Kong–China Relations after Hong Kong’s Return to Chinese Sovereignty, Aldershot, Brookﬁeld USA, Singapore and Sydney: Ashgate. Gellner, Ernest (1964) Thought and Change, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. –––– (1983) Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell. Greenfeld, Liah (1992) Nationalism: Five Ways to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. He Baogang and Guo, Yingjie (2000) Nationalism, National Identity and Democratization in China, Aldershot, Brookﬁeld USA, Singapore and Sydney: Ashgate. Kerr, George H. (1965) Formosa Betrayed, Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin. Lai Tse-han, Myers, R.H. and Wei Wou (1991) A Tragic Beginning: the Taiwan Uprising of February 1947, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lamley, H.J. (1999) ‘Taiwan under Japanese rule, 1895–1945: the vicissitudes of colonialism’, in Murray A. Rubinstein (ed.) Taiwan: a New History, Aldershot, Brookﬁeld USA, Singapore and Sydney: Ashgate, pp. 201–60. Lee Teng-hui (1999) The Road to Democracy: Taiwan’s Pursuit of Identity, Tokyo: PHP Institute. Lin Xiu-che (1994) ‘Taiwan shi yige duo minzu de duli guojia’ (Taiwan is a multinational independent state), in Shih Cheng-Feng (ed.), Taiwan minzu zhuyi (Taiwan Nationalism), Taipei: Qianwei Publishing Company, pp. 23–98. McLean, Iain (1996) The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peng Ming-min (1991) Ziyou de ziwei: Peng Ming-min huiyilu (The Taste of Freedom: Peng Ming-min’s Memoire), Taipei: Li Ao Publishing Company. Phillips, S. (1999) ‘Between assimilation and independence: Taiwanese political aspirations under nationalist Chinese rule, 1945–1948’, in Murray A. Rubinstein (ed.) Taiwan: a New History, Aldershot, Brookﬁeld USA, Singapore and Sydney: Ashgate, pp. 275–319. Rubinstein, Murray A. (ed.) (1999) Taiwan: a New History, Armonk, NY, London: M.E. Sharpe. Shih Cheng-Feng (1997) ‘Zu-qun cheng-zhi’ (Ethnic politics), in Shih Ceng-Feng (ed.), Zuqun zhengzhi yu zhengce (Ethnic Politics and Policy), Taipei: Qianwei Publishing Company, pp. 73–108. –––– (2000) ‘Taiwan’s emerging national identity’, in C.L. Chiou and Leong H. Liew (eds) Uncertain Future: Taiwan–Hong Kong–China Relations after Hong Kong’s Return to Chinese Sovereignty, Aldershot, Brookﬁeld USA, Singapore and Sydney: Ashgate. Smith, Anthony (1994) ‘The problem of national identity: ancient, medieval and modern?’, Ethics and Radical Studies, 17–3 (1994): 375–99. Stainton, Michael (1999) ‘The politics of Taiwan aboriginal origins’, in Murray A. Rubinstein (ed.) Taiwan: a New History, Aldershot, Brookﬁeld USA, Singapore and Sydney: Ashgate, pp. 27–44. Taipei Journal, 26 May 2000. Tao Wuliu (1994) Chen Shuibian xuanfeng (Chen Shuibian Whirlwind), Taipei: Dacun Cultural Publishing Company.

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–––– (1995) Peng Ming min xuanfeng (Peng Ming-min Whirlwind), Taipei: Dacun Cultural Publishing Company. Wills, John E. Jr (1999) ‘The seventeenth-century transformation: Taiwan under the Dutch and the Cheng regime’, in Murray A. Rubinstein (ed.) Taiwan: a New History, Aldershot, Brookﬁeld, USA, Singapore and Sydney: Ashgate, pp. 84–106.

7

The political formation of Taiwanese nationalism1 Chia-lung Lin

As an ethnically divided society that is constantly under foreign threat, Taiwan has to face challenges related to nationalism in its transition to and consolidation of democracy. What accompanies democratization in Taiwan is the awakening of long-suppressed Taiwanese consciousness, the society’s quest for international recognition, and the surfacing of domestic disputes between Taiwanese nationalists and Chinese nationalists on the issue of statehood. This chapter analyses the dynamic relations between Taiwan’s democracy-building, state-making and nation formation. I consider why the Taiwanese identity has surged ahead so quickly, and the implications of this identity-building for Taiwan’s political future. I argue that national identity is a socially and politically constructed sentiment that is subject to change, especially when under the intensive mobilization of political elites during times of regime transition. More speciﬁcally, opening Taiwanese society to elections involved the previously excluded Taiwanese people in Taiwanese politics and induced the political opposition at that time (mainly the Democratic Progressive Party) to cultivate their social base in terms of ethnic and Taiwanese identities. Opposition moves drove the incumbent Kuomintang (KMT) to indigenize its ideology and power structure to abate the impact of the opposition’s ethnic and nationalist mobilization. President Lee Teng-hui’s redirection of Taiwan’s foreign and Mainland policies, as reﬂected in ‘pragmatic diplomacy’ and ‘special state-to-state relations’ respectively, nonetheless irritated the Chinese communist regime, which claims Taiwan as an unalienable part of greater China. The Chinese communist regime’s increasing hostility towards Taiwan’s transition to democracy has given rise to a sense of common suffering among the people of Taiwan, who, regardless of their ethnic background, are forming a new political identity that is civic in nature and is focused on Taiwan. While the emergence of a civic identity in an ethnically divided society like Taiwan is a plus to its democratic consolidation, the rising cross-Strait tensions have put Taiwan’s security in a more vulnerable situation, which, if not managed well, may endanger the stability of this new democracy. This chapter turns ﬁrst to conceptual clariﬁcation around nationalism.

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From here, I examine how Taiwanese people’s identity and position on the statehood issue have changed during the democratization process. I then investigate how the terms ‘Taiwanese’ and ‘Chinese’ are perceived by people in Taiwan. I consider how for most people in Taiwan, Taiwanese identity is a citizen-based political identity that is more than an ethnic identity, and how a signiﬁcant portion of the population has multiple identities, selfclaiming as politically Taiwanese and culturally Chinese. On the issue of identity transformation, I argue that political democratization and external threat are the two most critical explanatory factors shaping the nature of Taiwanese nationalism.

Nationalism and related concepts Nationalism is a widely used term without a deﬁnition on which there is consensus. Discussions of nationalism are often difﬁcult and at times confusing, largely because three vaguely deﬁned terms – nationhood, statehood and nation-state – have frequently been used interchangeably in these discussions. In one of the more concise deﬁnitions, nationalism is a political principle that calls for the building or maintaining of a nation-state or the congruence of nationhood and statehood. Nationalism demands that a nation have its own political state that comprises a homogeneous national or ethnic group. Put simply, nationalism demands one nation, one state.2 National identity is a sense of shared identity among people who believe that they belong to the same nation but do not necessarily demand that the nation builds a sovereign state. Statehood refers to being a sovereign state whose people may be of different ethnic and/or national origins. Contrary to nationalism, which demands ‘one nation, one state’, the concepts of nationhood and statehood allow for the existence of ‘one nation, multiple states’ and ‘one state, multiple nations’, respectively. Nationalist movements have many forms. Some uphold expansionism to incorporate other states; some pursue separatism, striving to control the destiny of what they believe is their nation while under the suzerainty of another; some pursue irredentism, where a national group, usually of minorities, seeks to unite with and claim the territory of their ethnic/ cultural/national cohort in another state. In Taiwan’s case, we see a group of people pursuing Taiwan independence, believing that Taiwanese and Chinese are two different nations. We also see another group pushing for the reuniﬁcation of Taiwanese and Chinese into the Chinese nation. Nationalism is, of course, not the only reason why people support Taiwan independence (TI) or Chinese uniﬁcation (CU). For instance, some support TI because they are concerned about the huge socio-economic and political differences between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, and some support CU not for ideological reasons but for the security and economic beneﬁts that they perceive to be associated with uniﬁcation.

124 Chia-lung Lin Table 7.1 Typology for distinguishing nationalists and non-nationalists Statehood preference

Taiwan Independence

Status quo

Chinese Uniﬁcation

No opinion

Taiwanese

Taiwanese nationalist

Realist

Uniﬁcationist

Passivist

Taiwanese and Chinese

Independentist

National identity

Chinese

Chinese nationalist

Note: I used two survey questions to build this typology. The question on national identity was worded: ‘In our society, some people regard themselves as Taiwanese and some regard themselves as Chinese. Do you think that you are Taiwanese or Chinese?’. The question on preferred statehood was: ‘Some people in our society advocate that Taiwan should be an independent country and some advocate that Taiwan should unite with the Mainland. Do you support Taiwan independence or Chinese uniﬁcation?’.

To distinguish between nationalists and non-nationalists in Taiwan’s population, I have constructed a typology of six categories based on both the people’s self perception of their national identity and their attitudes towards statehood (Table 7.1). The typology has two categories of nationalists: Taiwanese nationalists who self-identify as Taiwanese and support TI, and Chinese nationalists who self-identify as Chinese and support CU. Those who support TI but have some degree of Chinese identiﬁcation fall into the category of Independentist, and those who support CU but have some degree of Taiwanese identiﬁcation are classiﬁed as Uniﬁcationists. I deﬁne those who advocate maintaining the status quo regardless of their national identity as Realists, and those without opinions on the statehood issue or who ﬁnd all three situations (TI, CU and the status quo) acceptable are classiﬁed as Passivists. In Table 7.2 we see how participants’ responses indicate changes during the 1990s among the people in Taiwan in their self-perceived national identity, preferred statehood, and attitudes towards nation-state building. The table compares these data with those for the political elite (legislators). During the 1990s, the proportion of survey participants who self-identiﬁed as Taiwanese rose sharply from 16 per cent in 1989 to 36 per cent in 1996. Concomitantly, Chinese identity quickly lost popularity, falling from 52 per cent of participants in 1989 to 21 per cent in 1996, and to 12 per cent in 1999. By 1999, a signiﬁcant portion of people – a share that doubled over 10 years – considered themselves to be both Taiwanese and Chinese (26 per cent in 1989 and 52 per cent in 1999). As for the people’s statehood preferences, we found a general trend of increasing support for TI (from 6 per cent in 1989 to 23 per cent in 1999)

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Table 7.2 Changes in national identity, statehood preference and attitudes towards nation-state building over time, comparing the general public and the elite (unit: % of participants) General public 1989

1992

National identity Taiwanese 16 Chinese 52 Taiwanese and Chinese 26 Statehood preference Taiwan independence Chinese uniﬁcation Status quo Attitudes on nation-state building Taiwanese nationalist Independentist Realist Uniﬁcationist Chinese nationalist Passivist

6 55

8 40 18

Elite 1993

1996

1999

1995–6

27 33 34

36 21 41

33 12 52

59 11 30

13 39 11

18 23 41

23 17 44

35 17 49

7 6 11 17 22 37

12 6 41 13 10 18

14 8 43 12 5 18

35 0 49 11 6 0

Sources: Data in the 1992, 1993, 1996 and 1999 columns were provided by the Workshop on Electoral Studies, Department of Political Science, National Taiwan University. These four face-to-face interviews were conducted after the 1991 National Assembly election, and the 1992, 1995 and 1998 legislative elections, with the effective cases being 1,384, 1,398, 1,376, and 1,356 respectively. Data in the 1989 column came from a telephone survey conducted by The United Daily (see The World Journal, 4 July 1997). Data in the elite column are based on the author’s interviews with 66 legislators during January 1995 and April 1996 (Lin 1998: appendices 1, 2, 3). Note: Percentages in each category may not add up to 100 per cent because some interviewees gave answers that are not listed in this table, or they declined to answer.

and a sharp drop in the support for CU (from 55 per cent in 1989 to 17 per cent in 1999). Support for the status quo also rose quickly from 18 per cent in 1992 to 44 per cent in 1999. One reason for the increasing popularity of multiple identities and the status quo is that, during democratization, many whose education strongly emphasized Chinese nationalism have gradually come to regard themselves as ‘Taiwanese as well as Chinese’ and to accept the reality that CU might not be as good a choice for Taiwan as the status quo, although they still feel uncomfortable self-identifying as Taiwanese and embracing TI. By combining participants’ responses to the two questions on national identity and statehood preference (see note in Table 7.1), we can place each interviewee in the six-category typology of nationalists v. non-nationalists. Table 7.2 shows that between 1993 and 1999 the share of participants who were Taiwanese nationalists rose from 7 per cent to 14 per cent, while the

126 Chia-lung Lin share of Chinese nationalists dropped from 22 per cent to 5 per cent. The most dramatic change occurred in the Realist category, which increased from an 11 per cent share to a 43 per cent share during these years. Overall, in the late 1990s, roughly one-ﬁfth of the population came under the two categories of nationalists. Compared with the general public, a higher percentage of the elite selfidentiﬁed as Taiwanese and supported TI (roughly 20 per cent higher) by the late 1990s. The 1996 data show that while only 12 per cent of the general public could be classiﬁed as Taiwanese nationalists, 35 per cent of the interviewed political elites could be classiﬁed as Taiwanese nationalists. This ﬁnding seems to support the arguments that political elites are generally more concerned with national identity than others in Taiwan, and that the sudden rise of Taiwanese identity is to a certain extent the result of mobilizing the elites.3 Table 7.3 breaks down the data in Table 7.2 by the participants’ ethnicity. Not surprisingly, we ﬁnd a high correlation between one’s ethnicity and his/her attitude towards nation-state building. When compared to those of Mainland origin (waishengren), native Taiwanese (benshengren, including Hoklo and Hakka) tend to have a clearer sense of Taiwanese identity and are more likely to support TI. Most Taiwanese nationalists are native Taiwanese (especially the Hoklo people) and most Chinese nationalists are of Mainlander origin. It is interesting that the sharp decline in support for Chinese nationalism was evident in the native Taiwanese group and in the Mainlander-origin group, whose share of Chinese nationalists fell from 60 per cent in 1993 to only 15 per cent in 1999. However, only very few of these ex-Chinese nationalists turned to endorse TI; most of them found it more comfortable, at least for the time being, to support the status quo and remain a Realist (whose percentage increased hugely from 5 per cent of the population in 1993 to 52 per cent in 1999). Table 7.3 Changes in attitudes towards nation-state building over time, by ethnicity (unit: % of participants) Native Taiwanese Hoklo

Hakka

Mainlander-origin

1993 1996 1999 1993 1996 1999 1993 1996 1999 Taiwanese nationalist Independentist Realist Uniﬁcationist Chinese nationalist Passivist

9 7 12 18

16 7 40 11

17 9 43 11

5 7 11 17

5 3 52 15

9 10 43 13

0 3 5 14

2 3 40 22

2 4 52 17

15 39

7 20

3 17

21 40

9 17

6 18

60 19

23 11

15 10

Sources: Same as for Table 7.2.

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Taiwanese identity v. Chinese identity The awakening of Taiwanese consciousness among native Taiwanese, and the deepening sense of crisis among those of Mainland origin, have made identity politics the most salient issue on Taiwan’s political agenda since the onset of democratization. To learn more about whether the identity issue will endanger Taiwan’s democratic stability, we need ﬁrst to probe the nature of the two identities and examine whether they are competitive or complementary. People in Taiwan, especially politicians, increasingly use the labels ‘Taiwanese’ and ‘Chinese’ as political weapons for distinguishing between ‘us’ and ‘them’ to promote group consciousness. There is a tendency to assume that one’s ethnic identity is congruent with his/her national identity. However, as the data in Table 7.3 indicate, although there is a high correlation between the two, one should not equate ethnic identity with national identity. Not all who are of Mainland origin lack Taiwanese consciousness and not all native Taiwanese embrace Taiwanese identity. We should also be aware that the terms ‘Taiwanese’ and ‘Chinese’ have different meanings for different people and that meanings may change as contexts change. Tables 7.4 and 7.5 offer a clearer understanding of how the terms ‘Taiwanese’ and ‘Chinese’ are perceived in Taiwan. These data, drawn from a 1996 telephone survey by Yuanchien magazine, suggest that people in Taiwan tended to deﬁne ‘Taiwanese’ with territorial/political and subjective/psychological criteria and ‘Chinese’ with primordial/cultural criteria. Most participants deﬁned the term ‘Taiwanese’ quite loosely; 55 per cent thought that ‘Taiwanese’ refers to those born or residing in Taiwan, and 55 per cent and 39 per cent, respectively, thought that one qualiﬁes as Taiwanese as long as s/he has a strong sense of Taiwanese identity or self-identiﬁes as Taiwanese. However, a signiﬁcant portion of participants applied a narrower, thus more exclusive, set of criteria to deﬁning Taiwanese. For instance, 38 per cent thought that provincial origin should be the criterion, 22 per cent thought that the ability to speak Taiwanese (whether the Hoklo or the Hakka language) is essential, and 16 per cent thought that Taiwanese are those who recognize Taiwan as an independent state (Taiwan citizenship category). Table 7.4 shows how the elite and the general public differ in their understandings of being ‘Taiwanese’. The most signiﬁcant difference is that a much lower percentage of the elite used the narrower, more exclusive, primordial/cultural criteria for deﬁning ‘Taiwanese’. For instance, when asked as a multiple-choice question, only 6 per cent of the interviewed elite responded that they felt the ability to speak Taiwanese should be a criterion (compared with 22 per cent of the general population) and 18 per cent of the elite thought that common historical or cultural background was a must (compared with 38 per cent of the general public). When

128 Chia-lung Lin Table 7.4 Understandings about being Taiwanese (unit: % of participants)

Q. Many people in our society say ‘we are Taiwanese’. What type of people do you think of as ‘Taiwanese’? I

Primordial/cultural criteria 1 Those with common blood and lineage 2 Those who speak Taiwanese (e.g. Minnan or Hakka language) 3 Those with a common historical or cultural background

II Territorial/political criteria 4 Those who were born, live or work in Taiwan 5 Those with Taiwan citizenship III Subjective/psychological criteria 6 Those who self-identify as Taiwanese 7 Those with a strong sense of Taiwanese consciousness

General public (1996) N = 1,031

Elite (1995–6) N = 66

Multiple choice

Multiple choice (Top choice)

n.d. 22

3 6

(0) (2)

38a

18

(5)

55b

64

(40)

16c

29

(9)

39 55

32 17

(28) (17)

Sources: The data for the general public were based on a telephone survey conducted by the Yuanchien magazine on 16–18 May 1996 (see Yuanchien 15 June 1996). For data on the elite, see Table 7.2. Notes: In the survey of the general public, participants were allowed to give multiple answers to the question. For the elite interviews, the author asked the elites to identify and rank their answers to the question. The percentages in parentheses were compiled based on the elites’ ﬁrst choices. a For the survey of the general public, this choice was worded as: ‘Taiwanese are those with Taiwan provincial origin.’ b In the survey of the general public, this question was divided into two parts. While 55 per cent considered those born in Taiwan as Taiwanese, 49 per cent thought that simply living in Taiwan qualiﬁed a person as Taiwanese. c For the survey of the general public, the choice was worded: ‘Taiwanese are those who consider Taiwan as an independent country.’ n.d. No data.

given as a single-choice question, only about 6 per cent of the elite claimed primordial/cultural criteria in identifying ‘Taiwanese’. The rest claimed territorial/political criteria (49 per cent) or subjective/psychological criteria (46 per cent). Connor (1994: 75) has reminded us that ‘it is not what is, but what people believe is that has behavioural consequences’. One’s national identity is, for the most part, not simply a matter of formal documentation as

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Table 7.5 Understandings about being Chinese (unit: % of participants) Elite (1995–6) N = 66 Q. Many people in our society say that ‘we are Chinese’. What type of people do you think of as ‘Chinese’? I

Primordial/cultural criteria 1 Those with common blood and lineage from China (i.e. the Han nation) 2 Those who speak Chinese (i.e. Mandarin) 3 Those with common historical or cultural background from China (i.e. the Hua ren)

Multiple choice (Top choice)

33 6

(20) (0)

50

(32)

II Territorial/political criteria 4 Those who live and work in China 5 Those with PRC (China) citizenship

8 41

(3) (26)

III Subjective/psychological criteria 6 Those who self-identify as Chinese 7 Those with a strong sense of Chinese consciousness

17 9

(12) (8)

Sources: Same as for Table 7.2. Note: Same as in Table 7.4.

in a passport, or the determinant of which team one supports at the Olympic Games. It is also very much a matter of perception, by oneself and by others. One way for people of Taiwan to reconcile the differences between Taiwanese and Chinese identities and minimize the potential conﬂict between them, is to treat these two identities differently. They can treat their Chinese identity as a cultural expression (Hua ren) or an ethnic origin (Han ren) and treat their Taiwanese identity as a political identity, one shared by a group of people living in the same political territory with a common citizenship. The surge of Taiwanese identity need not necessarily exacerbate ethnic confrontations and bring about political instability. These circumstances can be avoided if those who self-identify as Chinese do not deny Taiwan as a sovereign political entity – as an independent state or a geographical territory, under the name ‘Republic of China’ or ‘Republic of Taiwan’ – and as long as those who self-identify as Taiwanese do not deny that the Chinese culture and the Han people have constituted large portions of the Taiwanese culture and the Taiwanese people, respectively. We may even argue that, as long as the nature of the newly formed Taiwanese identity remains liberal, civic, and politically inclusive, stronger Taiwanese nationalism is not only compatible with, but conducive to, the consolidation of democracy in Taiwan.

130 Chia-lung Lin

Political democratization and common glory National identities are not inborn, but are socially and politically constructed sentiments. They are also not immutable. While it is natural that people tend to develop a sense of group consciousness after a long period of social integration and territorial isolation, any sudden change of group identity calls for a political explanation.4 Democratization and ‘everyday plebiscite’ The impact of democratization on nation-building in Taiwan can be examined at both the mass and elite levels. At the mass level, democratization of the political system and especially electoral opening, acts like a vortex, involving most members of society in the political process through campaigning, voting, mass-media reporting, participating in political parties and social movements, and discussing public affairs among family and friends. The practice of democracy has made the people of Taiwan gradually accustomed to participating in the deliberation and decision-making of ‘national’ affairs, and has made them implicitly or explicitly accept the island as the legitimate boundary of the deliberations and decision-making. Democratization not only provides a public sphere for people to communicate and understand each other, but can also broaden and deepen the people’s daily interactions by absorbing different groups and interests into the political system. Constant political participation has gradually formed a collective consciousness among the people, transforming the term ‘Taiwan’ from a geographical location to a political society and the term ‘Taiwanese’ from an ethnic term for ‘native Taiwanese’ to a civic term for ‘citizens of Taiwan’. If a nation is, as Anderson (1991) calls it, an ‘imagined’ community comprising those within the community who imagine the nation’s existence, then the community/nation imagined by the people of Taiwan is most likely to comprise those on the island exclusively, not together with those on the Mainland. This is because the boundaries of their daily social, economic and political activities mostly coincide with the physical boundary of the island. Of the Taiwan legislators whom the author interviewed in the mid-1990s, 80 per cent felt that if the government continues to be formed through democratic procedures, then all Taiwan citizens will eventually internalize a sense of national loyalty regardless of their ethnicity and political beliefs (see Table 7.2 source). This expectation was supported by a general survey conducted after the ﬁrst direct presidential election in 1996, which found that most participants thought that this election had a very positive inﬂuence on Taiwan’s political development.5 About 70–80 per cent of those interviewed thought that the election helped to push Taiwan’s democracy forward, strengthen the people’s consciousness of sovereignty, enhance the government’s legitimacy to rule, and increase

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international support for Taiwan. Most importantly, even the Chinese nationalists and uniﬁcationists at large also thought that this election helped to achieve these four outcomes. Taiwan’s complete transition to democracy also has a profound impact on its domestic politics and foreign relations. As a democratic polity whose government draws its ruling legitimacy from the electorate on the island alone, Taiwan is no longer able to claim sovereignty over the Mainland. Inevitably, Taiwanization accompanies democratization. The ofﬁcial name of Taiwan is still the Republic of China, but the exercise of democracy on the island, especially direct presidential elections, may be seen as a form of self-determination that proves Taiwan’s independent sovereignty. Democracy becoming more ﬁrmly rooted in Taiwan has made it increasingly difﬁcult for Chinese nationalists to deny Taiwan as a sovereign state and to promote Chinese identity at the expense of Taiwanese identity. At the same time, democracy and self-determination also provide a more legitimate base for Taiwan to appeal for international recognition of its sovereign status, and especially to draw empathetic responses from Western liberal democracies. Democracy and self-determination also enhance Taiwan’s ability to subvert the claims of the Beijing government for sovereignty over Taiwan, not through the consent of the Taiwanese people but through revolutionary triumph over the KMT government in the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Elections and elite settlement Because ‘politicians are specialists in the mobilization of hopes and grievances’, as Linz and Stepan (1996) claim, one needs to examine the attitudes and strategies of political elites in accounting for people’s identity formation and transformation. In the early stage of democratization in Taiwan, opposition elites were able to use ethnic and nationalist mobilization to help consolidate their social bases. However, when this type of mobilization bottlenecked at a later stage of democratization, opposition elites modiﬁed their nationalist appeals, held cross-party dialogues, and built various strategic coalitions for securing majority popular support.6 Why were Taiwan’s political elites so ﬂexible? We can ﬁnd some answers in the opportunities that democratization provided for ethnic and nationalist mobilization, and in the elite’s cost-beneﬁt calculations on electoral gains. Opportunities for mobilizing nationalism The ﬁrst challenge that nationalist elites faced in promoting ethnic nationalism was that a signiﬁcant portion of the island’s population has dual identities and prefers maintaining the status quo on cross-Strait relations. Given the social and political conditions at that stage of transition, ethnic mobilization also quickly reached its limits, even though it was a powerful

132 Chia-lung Lin force during the initial stages. The then opposition DPP (Democratic Progressive Party) and NP (New Party) therefore chose to modify their nationalist appeals and soften their ideological stances to attract the support of median voters. The NP recognized explicit ethnic and nationalist mobilization not simply as ineffective, but also capable of yielding serious undesirable consequences. This was mainly because only about 15 per cent of the population were of Mainland origin and roughly half of the party’s supporters were native Taiwanese.7 Intensive ethnic mobilization also became less attractive to the DPP, but this recognition did not come till a late stage of the democratic transition. The KMT had by then already indigenized, which greatly alleviated ethnic tension. The KMT also came to recognize that ethnic mobilization might hinder the pursuit of Taiwan independence. Five decades of social integration, mostly through intermarriage, work and schooling, meant that most native Taiwanese have friends, in-laws or neighbours of Mainlander origin. This situation makes it very difﬁcult for any party to try to build on the island a Taiwanese state that excludes all who are Mainland-descendent. As Linz (1985: 203–53) noted, in a heterogeneous society where people of various ethnic backgrounds live together, most nationalist elites who promote separatism are eventually forced to put more emphasis on territoriality and less on primordial characteristics. Primordial mobilization is important in the initial stage of separatist promotion, but in the longer term it becomes almost impossible to build a nation-state solely on primordial ties. If in fact nation-building is possible, then primordial mobilization is too costly to implement. Emergence of multiple and cross-cutting issues The second challenge to ethnic and nationalist mobilization is the emergence of multiple and cross-cutting political issues during the democratization process. The appearance of various social and economic issues that cross-cut issues of ethnicity and nationalism has constrained the elite’s capacity to mobilize ethnicity and nationalism as forces for unifying the people. These issues have also given the elite a strong incentive to broaden their electoral base by cultivating social and economic reform issues such as social redistribution, anti-corruption, environmental protection and gender equality. Since each party has its own comparative advantages on certain issues, and a chance to form a majority coalition with others to win government, politics in Taiwan have turned into a non-zero-sum game (Lin 2000; Lin et al. 1996). As Truman (1951) and Lipset (1960) pointed out, whenever cross-cutting social cleavages emerge or cross-issue party coalitions are formed in a society, people tend to moderate their political views and exhibit greater political tolerance because they are confronted psychologically with crosspressures from their own multiple identities and conﬂicting interests.

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Lijphart (1977: 71–87) and Sartori (1987: 223–7) argued further that both the existence of cross-cutting cleavages and formation of multiparty coalitions based on cross-cutting issues are favourable for democratic stability. Downs (1957: 51–74) and Riker (1982) put forward similar views from the rational-choice perspective, arguing that in a multidimensional setting, if non-incumbent parties can strategically form a ‘coalition of minorities’, then nearly all of the incumbent’s platform can be defeated by some other platforms in a majority vote. Overall, the rise of multiple and cross-cutting issues on Taiwan’s political agenda, the existence of diverse concerns that inspire different interests and priorities among various groups, and the constant building and shifting of political coalitions among parties, serve two signiﬁcant purposes. All three developments constrain the degree of ethnic and nationalist mobilization and sway nationalist elites to modify and broaden their political appeals. Election-driven adaptation by political parties The third challenge that both Taiwanese and Chinese nationalists faced during the early stages of democratization was the ruling party’s exceptional organizational adaptability. The KMT under Lee Teng-hui’s leadership was able to indigenize the Party and pragmatically stress the compatibility of Taiwanese and Chinese identities and the de facto independent status of the ‘Republic of China on Taiwan’. This helped to dissolve the long-term political tension between different ethnic groups and to prevent potential conﬂicts. As KMT leader and Taiwan president, Lee introduced new political rhetoric and policies that most people in Taiwan appeared to ﬁnd acceptable. Lee asked the people of Taiwan to treasure their own cultural heritage, to overlook their ethnic differences, and to uphold political loyalty to the newly democratizing state called ‘Republic of China on Taiwan’.8 As the KMT moved towards the centre of the political spectrum, the more radical Taiwanese and Chinese nationalists were gradually isolated. Unwilling to be marginalized by the KMT and punished by voters in elections, the DPP and NP both moved to soften their nationalist stances. When visiting the US in September 1995, three months before a Legislative election, Shih Ming-teh, the DPP’s chairman at the time, announced that ‘The DPP will not, and will not have to, declare Taiwan independence after becoming the ruling party because Taiwan has been independent for nearly half a century.’ (The China Times 15 September 1995). Two weeks later, Dr Peng Ming-min, a long-time Taiwan independence advocate and the DPP’s nominee for the 1996 presidential election, reiterated with ‘Taiwan has been independent for decades; therefore, supporting the status quo is supporting Taiwan independence; it is uniﬁcation that will change the status quo, not Taiwan independence’ (The World Journal 1 October 1995). At the end of 1997 after the DPP triumphed in local elections, DPP chairman

134 Chia-lung Lin Hsu Hsin-liang even claimed the DPP’s Taiwan Independence Charter as a historical document stating the ideal of the DPP, rather than as a policy for the Party to carry out immediately on election to ofﬁce (The China Times 12 December 1997). A more dramatic change occurred during the 2000 presidential election. To win over the support of middle-class median voters, the DPP ofﬁcially passed a resolution on Taiwan’s political future, recognizing that the national name of Taiwan is the Republic of China. After election as President of the Republic of China (ROC) in 2000, Chen Shuibian announced in his inaugural address that as long as the Chinese communists do not intend to invade Taiwan, he will not declare Taiwan independence during his four-year term. The calculations behind the DPP’s modiﬁcation of its nationalist position, or at least its rhetoric, are partly based on how Party leaders understand Taiwan’s current situation and their expectations about Taiwan’s future development. To most DPP elites, the pursuit of de jure independence does not seem very pressing, for the following reasons. First, to the DPP and most people of Taiwan, Taiwan has enjoyed de facto independent sovereignty; uniﬁcation is just a possibility and an option. Second, the DPP is now less concerned than before that uniﬁcationists might betray Taiwan, partly because the KMT has indigenized itself, and partly because the NP’s nationalist appeal has gradually lost popularity. The third and probably most important reason why the DPP is not rushing towards de jure independence lies in its optimistic expectation about Taiwan’s political development. In the DPP’s calculation, there is no need to immediately announce Taiwan independence because the DPP’s winning of the national election to a great extent conﬁrmed the people’s support for Taiwan independence or, at least, their rejection of uniﬁcation with the Chinese Mainland.

Enduring rivalries and common suffering Making war facilitates making a state by mobilizing resources for the state and homogenizing people’s loyalty to the state. As Tilly (1975) claimed, states make war, and war makes states. We see historically that war not only makes states, it makes nations. The constant threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been a very important element in Taiwan’s recent state-building and nation-building. Ever since the People’s Republic was formed in the late 1940s, the spectre of the Chinese communist regime has constantly dominated Taiwan’s political stage. Taiwan began to normalize relations with the PRC in the early 1990s, but crossStrait tensions have not subsided. Rather, increasing cross-Strait peopleto-people and government-to-government contacts have made the differences between the two sides even more conspicuous, both culturally and politically. Taiwan’s Mainland policy has been changed quite dramatically during the 1990s, from ‘no contacts’ to allowing cross-Strait family visits and

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trade activities, terminating the wartime mobilization system, and holding various quasi-ofﬁcial talks. However, due to the huge difference in social and political systems as well as the lack of consensus and trust across the Strait, trivial frictions between the two societies can easily escalate into serious problems. The PRC authorities have viewed Taiwan’s democratization, its prolonged separation from China, and efforts to gain international recognition as moves towards independence for Taiwan. The PRC has moved (at times with military and naval muscle) to contain Taiwan, trying to force Taiwan into negotiation on PRC terms. Increasing animosity from the Chinese Mainland has raised Taiwanese people’s concerns about their national security and national identity. Indeed, cross-Strait interactions during the 1990s have impacted profoundly on Taiwan’s nation-state formation, as seen clearly in the rising number of people who self-identify as Taiwanese and support Taiwan independence. The awakening of Taiwanese consciousness Changes in public opinion reveal a positive correlation between the rise in cross-Strait tension on the one hand, and people’s self-identiﬁcation as Taiwanese and support for Taiwanese independence on the other. Telephone surveys conducted by The United Daily between 1989 and 1997 indicate that whenever displays of animosity from China increased, Taiwanese consciousness also rose as a result.9 Public opinion between 1989 and 1993 Surveys show that at the early stage of democratization (late 1989 and early 1990) when promoting Taiwan independence was still a taboo, less than 10 per cent of the population supported independence and less than 20 per cent self-identiﬁed as Taiwanese. During 1991–3, the people’s sense of being Taiwanese and their support for independence both climbed, with survey data showing a 10 per cent increase over the 1990 data. The rise followed the normalization of cross-Strait relations, with the KMT government adopting the Guidelines for National Uniﬁcation, abolition of the Period of Mobilization for the Suppression of Communist Rebellion, and holding of the Koo–Wang Talks. This was also after the PRC’s moves to further isolate Taiwan in the international community, through forcing South Korea to cease recognizing the ROC government, announcing the hostile PRC’s Principles on the Taiwan Issue, and boycotting Taiwan’s efforts to seek United Nations membership. Impact of the Thousand Island Lake Incident On 31 March 1994, 24 Taiwanese tourists were robbed and killed during their visit to Thousand Island Lake on the Mainland. Mounting evidence

136 Chia-lung Lin suggested that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army were heavily involved in the murder, but the Beijing government was quick to put a lid on the investigation, and even decided to burn the bodies to destroy the physical evidence. This incident enraged the Taiwanese people and took the newly established cross-Strait cultural and economic links several steps back. After this incident, Taiwan people’s support for independence and Taiwanese identity reached a historic high. Supporters of independence and those self-identifying as Taiwanese constituted 33 per cent and 41 per cent of those surveyed, respectively. In a popular survey conducted two weeks after the incident, 70 per cent of the interviewees claimed that they thought that the incident had hurt Taiwan people’s feelings towards the Chinese Mainland and 57 per cent thought that the PRC’s attitude towards Taiwan was hostile. Only 20 per cent of survey participants claimed that the incident had not inﬂuenced their feelings towards the Mainland and 8 per cent thought that the PRC’s attitude towards Taiwan was friendly (The United Daily 18 April 1994). This incident was critical to the rise of Taiwanese nationalism, for two reasons. First, it demonstrated the fundamental differences between the two societies in terms of respect for human rights and rule of law, and provided a sharp contrast between a civic culture and an uncivil one. Second, it enhanced the sense of common suffering among Taiwan people and imprinted a collective memory among them because many people suddenly realized that, whether they are native Taiwanese or Mainlanders in Taiwan, in the eyes of the Chinese on the Mainland, they are all ‘Taiwanese fellows’, and that both ethnic groups share Taiwan’s destiny when Taiwan is in conﬂict with China. President Lee Teng-hui spoke critically about this incident, even calling the PRC a bandit regime. In an interview with a well-known Japanese writer after the incident, Lee spoke of ‘the misery of being a Taiwanese’, implying that Taiwan has, for hundreds of years, been ruled by different foreign regimes and has never had the chance to determine its own fate. In another interview on 14 April 1994, Lee talked about his after-thoughts on the incident, highlighting cross-Strait differences: . . . the PRC does not seem to me a civilized country. Taiwan is a civilized country; we wake up every morning expecting to have our newspapers and milk delivered to our doors on time. [In Taiwan,] everything is on track and has an order. It is not like this on the Mainland. . . . The basic point is that the sovereignty should be put in the hands of the people. The Chinese communists say that Taiwan is a province of the PRC; this is ridiculous. They have never received a dime of tax from Taiwan and never ruled Taiwan for even one day; their government is also not elected by the people of Taiwan. So where did their sovereignty over Taiwan come from? (Government Information Ofﬁce 1995: 387–8)

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Lee’s talks irritated the PRC government, which began to view him as an independence advocate. The tension between Taiwan and China continued to escalate, and climaxed when Lee visited the US in June 1995 to receive an honorary degree at his Alma Mater, Cornell University. The PRC interpreted Lee’s foreign visits, especially to the US, as an intentional move towards de jure independence. In the ensuing months, Beijing retaliated with a series of military exercises and missile launches targeted at Taiwan, and started verbally bashing Lee, calling him a ‘national traitor’, ‘schemer’, ‘double dealer’, ‘lackey of the US’, with ‘ties to the underworld’ and a ‘sinner of 1,000 millennia’ who should be ‘tossed into the dustbin of history’. Despite the PRC’s assassination of his character, Lee continued to implement a pragmatic foreign policy and work on Taiwan’s normalization with the PRC. Confrontations in the 1996 presidential election As Taiwanese people began to count down the days to Taiwan’s ﬁrst direct presidential election, Beijing initiated a new wave of verbal attacks and military threats. During the election period, the PRC launched a series of large-scale military exercises and missile tests around Taiwan, some as close as 20 or 30 miles from the coast of Taiwan. Although the PRC claimed that the military exercises were just for training purposes, few people doubted that the major motivation behind these tests was political. Besides demonstrating to the international community its resolution and capacity to take over Taiwan by force should Taiwan declare independence, Beijing also tried to intimidate Taiwan’s voters and undermine their support for Lee with these military exercises. However, contrary to what the PRC had intended, Lee won the presidential race with 54 per cent popular support. Because the PRC insisted that Lee was taking Taiwan towards independence, if we add the 54 per cent supporting Lee to the 21 per cent who voted for the DPP’s presidential candidate, then 75 per cent of voters in Taiwan actually voted against uniﬁcation. This was a humiliating result for Beijing. Cross-Strait tension did not subside after this presidential election. The PRC’s subsequent moves to shut off the quasi-ofﬁcial cross-Strait dialogue channels, push the international community to recognize its sovereignty over Taiwan, and isolate Taiwan from international participation, all served to raise animosity and mistrust between the two sides of the Strait. The moves included forcing South Korea to de-recognize the ROC government, bullying other countries out of supporting Taiwan’s bids for membership of the UN and other international organizations, and boycotting countries that tried to extend invitations to Taiwan government ofﬁcials. Popular surveys in the past few years repeatedly found a much higher percentage of people in Taiwan who think the PRC is hostile towards Taiwan (around 50 per cent) rather than friendly (less than 20 per cent).10 In a survey

138 Chia-lung Lin conducted by the United Daily in mid-1997, 43 per cent of interviewees supported independence and 55 per cent self-identiﬁed as Taiwanese. Both ﬁgures reached historical heights. Effects of the PRC’s military threats Even though the PRC’s military intimidation may make the people of Taiwan more cautious in pursuing de jure independence, the rise of Taiwanese nationalism has not slowed as a result. A general survey conducted after the 1996 presidential election found that 21 per cent of the population said that they were proud of being a Taiwanese rather than Chinese, compared to only 6 per cent of the population who were proud of being a Chinese rather than Taiwanese (see Table 7.6). When cross-examining the data by self-identiﬁcation, we ﬁnd that only 19 per cent of those who self-identiﬁed as Chinese said that they were proud of being a Chinese rather than Taiwanese, but 43 per cent of those who self-identiﬁed as Taiwanese said that they are proud of being a Taiwanese rather than Chinese. In Table 7.7 we see results of a telephone survey of people’s reactions to China’s military intimidation during the 1996 election. Question 1 asked respondents whether they thought that the PRC’s military exercises would strengthen or weaken the wish of the people of Taiwan to unify with China. Responses show that the majority of people across national identities said they thought that it would weaken (62 per cent) rather than strengthen (11 per cent) their desire to unify. In the same survey, only 7 per cent of the people said that the PRC’s military exercises had made them rethink their choice of presidential candidate, while 88 per cent said Table 7.6 Taiwanese pride v. Chinese pride (unit: % of participants) Self-identiﬁcation Taiwanese n = 557 Proud only of being a Taiwanese Proud only of being a Chinese Proud of both identities Not proud of either identity

Taiwanese Chinese and Chinese n = 208 n = 605

Total N = 1,406

43

8

4

21

1 29 15

6 62 17

19 60 8

6 48 15

Sources: Same as for Table 7.2. Note: Column percentages do not add up to 100 because those who gave answers not listed here, or had no opinion, or declined to answer, were not included. The author combined two questions, ‘Are you proud of being Taiwanese?’ and ‘Are you proud of being Chinese?’, to produce these four categories of answers.

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that their choice would not be inﬂuenced. Although the military exercises had a negative effect on commercial conﬁdence, causing a big plunge in the stock market and a run on foreign exchange holdings, most people on the island did not panic. In fact, only 2 per cent and 12 per cent of the people felt very panicky and somewhat panicky, respectively. Interestingly, those who self-identiﬁed as Chinese seemed to sense more panic around them than those who self-identiﬁed as Taiwanese (see Question 2). In Question 3 we see that 20 per cent of the interviewees said they would consider emigrating if they had the money and ability to do so. Similarly, those with Chinese identity seemed more inclined to consider emigration (28 per cent) than those with Taiwanese identity (15 per cent). But overall, the majority (60 per cent) of all ethnic identities said they would not (or were very unlikely to) consider emigration even if they had the money and ability to do so. Question 4 asked ‘If the PRC continues its military threats towards Taiwan, trying to force Taiwan into accepting its “One China, Two Systems” principle and becoming its local government, do you think the Taiwanese people should accept the proposal or ﬁght to the end?’ A surprisingly high percentage of the population (74 per cent) insisted that the people should protect Taiwan to the end, and only 4 per cent thought that the proposal should be accepted. Similarly, responses to Question 5 also show that most people (62 per cent) disagreed with the view that Taiwan should stop all efforts to raise its international status (e.g. joining the UN) so as not to provoke China. Questions 6 and 7 further revealed the Taiwan people’s optimism towards the future even in the face of the PRC’s military threats. Nearly 70 per cent of the interviewees thought that if China did invade Taiwan, the people of Taiwan would very likely set aside their partisan and identity differences to jointly protect Taiwan. Just over 70 per cent said that China’s repeated military threats did not make them feel pessimistic about Taiwan’s future.

Conclusion Discussion in this chapter highlights the importance of political factors in explaining the transformation of national identity in Taiwan. I have argued that political democratization on the island and threats from the Mainland are the two most critical forces that have contributed to the sudden growth of a civic national identity among the people of Taiwan during the decade of political transition in the 1990s. The dynamism involved in these developments can be summarized as follows. On the one hand, democratization serves as a pulling force by drawing people together through the process of political participation. This not only creates in them a sense of loyalty to the political system, but generates multiple issues that are of interest to different groups and provides them

140 Chia-lung Lin Table 7.7 Reactions to China’s military intimidation during the 1996 election (unit: % of interviewees) Self-identiﬁcation Taiwanese n = 379

Taiwanese Chinese and Chinese n = 298 n = 368

Total N = 1,045

Question 1: Based on your judgement, do you think that the recent military exercises of the PRC will strengthen or weaken the Taiwanese people’s wish to unify with China? 1 Strengthen 9 9 15 11 2 Weaken 62 59 66 62 3 Will have no signiﬁcant effect 6 10 7 8 Question 2: How concerned are the people of Taiwan about the PRC’s military exercises and missile tests off the coasts of Keelung and Kaohsiung? 1 Very concerned 1 2 2 2 2 Somewhat concerned 9 9 19 12 3 Not very concerned 26 30 27 28 4 Not concerned at all 62 55 51 57 Question 3: Some people say, ‘With the situation so tense between Taiwan and the Mainland, I would consider emigrating too if I had the money or the ability to do so’. Suppose you had enough money and the ability to do so now, would you emigrate? 1 Very likely 5 8 11 8 2 Somewhat likely 10 10 17 12 3 Somewhat unlikely 17 19 14 17 4 Very unlikely 64 60 54 60 Question 4: If the PRC continues its military threats toward Taiwan, trying to force Taiwan into accepting its ‘One China, Two Systems’ principle and making Taiwan a local government within the PRC, do you think that the people of Taiwan should accept the proposal or ﬁght to the end? 1 We should accept becoming a local government 2 3 8 4 2 We should ﬁght to the end to protect Taiwan 78 72 70 74 3 Hard to say 4 7 6 6

with an incentive to form various cross-cutting issue coalitions, with no groups or interests able to permanently dominate other groups or interests. If the existence of a nation has to be demonstrated in what Ernest Renan (1939) called an ‘everyday plebiscite’, then the practice of democracy in Taiwan is deﬁnitely the most important ‘everyday plebiscite’ that has been nurturing the sense of belonging to a common nation among the people of Taiwan.

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Table 7.7 (continued) Self-identiﬁcation Taiwanese n = 379

Taiwanese Chinese and Chinese n = 298 n = 368

Total N = 1,045

Question 5: Facing the PRC’s military threat, some people say: ‘Taiwan had better stop all kinds of efforts to raise its international status, such as joining the UN, so as not to provoke the PRC.’ Do you agree with this view? 1 Strongly agree 6 7 11 8 2 Somewhat agree 13 14 19 15 3 Somewhat disagree 25 24 25 25 4 Strongly disagree 40 36 34 37 Question 6: If the PRC does invade Taiwan, how likely do you think it is that the people on Taiwan can set aside their partisan differences and different positions of the statehood issue to jointly protect Taiwan? 1 Very likely 35 29 33 32 2 Somewhat likely 29 35 40 34 3 Not very likely 15 16 12 14 4 Very unlikely 2 3 4 3 Question 7: Generally speaking, do the PRC’s repeated military exercises make you feel pessimistic about Taiwan’s future? 1 Pessimistic 21 21 28 23 2 Not pessimistic 70 75 70 72 3 Hard to say 4 2 2 3 Source: Data were provided by the DPP’s Public Opinion Survey Centre. This telephone survey was conducted on 9–10 March 1996. Note: The percentages of responses to each question do not add up to 100, because those who did not have an opinion or declined to answer were not included.

On the other hand, the Chinese communist regime’s increasing hostility towards democratizing Taiwan has served as a pushing force. The longterm and seemingly ever-growing threat from China is fostering a sense of common suffering among all people of Taiwan, regardless of their ethnicity. To protect their hard-earned civic rights against the Chinese communist regime, the people on the island are being forced to overlook their differences and recognize one another as an indispensable part of this new democratic community that is under threat. Democratization, and the threat that it has inspired from across the Strait, have therefore been instrumental in the people imagining their community. As Renan (1939) conceptualized, having suffered together actually weighs more in the formation of a nation than the sharing of triumph, because suffering imposes obligations and demands common efforts, which later become a collective memory that is part of each individual’s life.

142 Chia-lung Lin Together, the pulling and pushing forces have interacted to propel the people of Taiwan in their search for a collective identity. These forces have helped the people to develop an embracing civic identity. Their evolving civic identity looks forward to what the new democracy must be for Taiwan, rather than backward to the unrealized ideal of building a Chinese nation-state.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the conference ‘Reﬂections on nationalism at both sides of the Taiwan Strait during the last century’, Soochow University, Taipei, 2–3 December 2000. 2 Gellner (1983: 1) noted that nationalism is primarily a political principle which holds that the political and the national units should be congruent. Gellner distinguishes between nationalism as a sentiment and as a movement: nationalist sentiment is the feeling of anger aroused by violation of the principle or the feeling of satisfaction aroused by its fulﬁllment; a nationalist movement is one actuated by these types of sentiments. 3 On the rise of Taiwanese identity and support for Taiwan independence as a result of elite competition and mobilization, see Cheng and Hsu (1996), Chu and Lin (1996), Lin (1989), Lin et al. (1996), Wang (1996). 4 See Brass (1991), Breuilly (1993), Thompson (1993), Brubaker (1996), and Linz and Stepan (1996). 5 This survey was conducted immediately after the 1996 presidential election by staff at Soochow University. Data from this survey were provided by the Workshop on Electoral Studies, Department of Political Science, National Taiwan University. 6 For details, see Lin Chia-lung (2000a). 7 For the ethnic and social composition of Taiwan’s political parties, see Lin Chialung (2000a). 8 For an analysis of how Lee Teng-hui led the KMT in constructing a mixed and inclusive national identity as well as counterbalancing pro-independence and prouniﬁcation pressures, see Lin Chia-lung (2000b). 9 Surveys sponsored by Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council show a similar correlation between the rise in cross-Strait tension and the people’s self-identiﬁcation as Taiwanese and support for Taiwanese independence. 10 Those who said they believe the PRC is hostile towards Taiwan increased from 35 per cent in January 1995 (immediately after President Jiang Zemin announced his somewhat friendly ‘Eight Point Proposal’ for conducting cross-Strait relations) to 56 per cent after Taiwan’s 1996 presidential election, and remained around the 50 per cent level for the following years for which survey data are available (The World Journal 30 January 1996; 15 September 1996; 30 January 1997).

References Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London and New York: Verso. Brass, Paul R. (1991) Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison, New Delhi: Sage. Breuilly, John (1993) Nationalism and the State, Chicago: Chicago University Press.

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Brubaker, Rogers (1996) Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cheng Tun-jen and Hsu, Yung-ming (1996) ‘Issue structure, the DPP’s factionalism and Party realignment’, in Hung-mao Tien (ed.) Taiwan’s Electoral Politics and Democratic Transition: Riding the Third Wave, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 137–73. Chu Yun-han and Lin, Tse-min (1996) ‘The process of democratic consolidation in Taiwan: social cleavage, electoral competition, and the emerging party system’, in Hung-mao Tien (ed.) Taiwan’s Electoral Politics and Democratic Transition: Riding the Third Wave, Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 79–104. Connor, Walker (1994) Ethno-nationalism: the Quest for Understanding, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Downs, Anthony (1957) An Economic Theory of Democracy, New York: Harper and Row. Gellner, Ernest (1983) Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Government Information Ofﬁce of the Executive Yuan (ed.) (1995) Sacriﬁce and Hard Work: Collection of the Speeches of President Lee Teng-hui, Taipei: Government Information Ofﬁce. Lijphart, Arend (1977) Democracy in Plural Societies: a Comparative Exploration, New Haven: Yale University Press. Lin, Chia-lung (1989) ‘Weiquan shicong zhengti xia de Taiwan fandui yundong’ (‘The opposition movement under an authoritarian-clientelist regime: political explanations on the social base of the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan’), Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan (Taiwan Research Quarterly), 2 (1): 117–43. –––– (1998) ‘Path to democracy: Taiwan in comparative perspective’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University. –––– (2000a) ‘Taiwan minzhuhua yu zengdeng tixi bianqian: jingying yu qunzhong de xuanju lianjie’ (‘Taiwan’s democratization and the change of party system’), Taiwan zhengzhi xuekan (Taiwanese Political Science Review), 4: 3–55. –––– (2000b) ‘Political leadership and democratization: on Lee Teng-hui’s reform strategy and outcomes’, paper presented at the conference on Lee Teng-hui’s 12year Ruling and Taiwan’s Achievements, held by Taiwan Research Institute, Taipei, 18 May 2000. Lin Tse-min, Chu Yun-han and Hinich, Melvin J. (1996) ‘Conﬂict displacement and regime transition in Taiwan: a spatial analysis’, World Politics, 48 (July): 453–81. Linz, Juan J. (1985) ‘From primordialism to nationalism’, in Edward A. Tiryakian and Ronald Rogowski (eds) New Nationalisms of the Developed West, Boston: Allen and Unwin, pp. 203–53. Linz, Juan J. and Stepan, Alfred (1996) Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America and Post-communist Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lipset, Seymour M. ([1960] 1983) Political Man: the Social Bases of Politics, expanded and updated edition. London: Heinemann. Renan, Ernest (1939) ‘What is a nation?’, in Alfred E. Zimmern (ed.) Modern Political Doctrines, London: Oxford University Press, pp. 186–205. Riker, William H. (1982) Liberalism Against Populism: a Confrontation Between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice, Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press.

144 Chia-lung Lin Sartori, Giovanni (1987) The Theory of Democracy Revisited, Chatham, NJ: Chatham House. The China Times, various issues. The United Daily (1994) 8 April. The World Journal (1995, 1996, 1997), various issues. Thompson, Mark R. ‘Ethnofederalism and democratization: the role of elites in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union’, paper presented at the American Sociological Association Meeting, Miami Beach, Florida, 13–17 August 1993. Tilly, Charles (ed.) (1975) The Formation of National States in Western Europe, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Truman, David B. (1951) The Governmental Process, New York: Knopf. Wang, Fu-chang (1996) ‘Consensus mobilization of the political opposition in Taiwan: comparing two waves of challenges, 1979–89’, Taiwan zengzhi xuekan (Taiwanese Political Science Review), 1: 129–209.

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Part V

Market, democracy and national integration

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8

China’s minorities and national integration Colin Mackerras

The decline of the Soviet Union as a world power, especially its disintegration into a series of independent successor states at the end of 1991, was the ultimate contemporary example of how an apparently strong state could swiftly weaken and split apart. The 15 successor states of the Soviet Union, 12 of them members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (Turner 2000: 83–5), were mostly ruled in 2002 by people who already held power over what were then republics under the Soviet Union. None of them remained under a communist party subscribing to MarxismLeninism. Ironically, China has enjoyed very good relations with the main successor state of the Soviet Union, namely the Russian Federation. Nevertheless, it comes as no surprise that the Chinese government has stridently resisted following the Soviet Union into communist party overthrow and disintegration. Nationalities issues are among the important factors that brought down the Soviet Union, as evidenced clearly by the several republics – including the Baltic States and Georgia – that actually declared their independence before the Soviet Union fell. Nationalities issues are obviously crucial to national integration in China. Unlike the Soviet Union, China was never divided into separate republics. Yet one of the threats to national unity undoubtedly comes from several minority nationalities among which independence movements have existed in the 1990s, notably the Uygurs and the Tibetans. There are 55 state-recognized minority nationalities in China. According to the census of 1 November 2000, they accounted for 8.41 per cent of China’s total population, or 106.4 million people (Cartier 2001: 51). However, they take up some three-ﬁfths of China’s total territory, including most of the border regions. Some of the minorities are quite close ethnically and culturally to the dominant Han Chinese. The Manchus, who numbered 9,846,776 in the 1990 census (SNAC and SSB 1993: 53), have the distinction of being nearly assimilated into the Chinese people through ruling them over the period 1644 to 1911. This stands in sharp contrast to the normal pattern in which conquerors try to assimilate those they rule. On the other hand, some

148 Colin Mackerras minorities are totally different culturally and ethnically from the Han Chinese. The most prominent example is probably the Uygurs, who are Turkic, speak a Turkic language belonging to the Altaic language family, and believe in Islam.1 The extent of adherence to their own languages, cultures and religions varies strongly among the minorities. Some, like the Manchus, appear reasonably happy to adopt Han culture and abandon most aspects of their own culture. Others insist on maintaining their own culture, such as the Uygurs, Tibetans and Koreans. In some cases the dedication of minorities to religion is a major factor making them hostile to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which advocates Marxism-Leninism. There are, then, three reasons why China’s minorities are important for China’s national integration out of all proportion to their population. These are: • • •

their potential for aspiring to independence from China; their locations near China’s national borders; and the signiﬁcant differences in the cultures of some of them from the culture of the dominant Han people.

What is integration? One writer (Seymour 1976: 6) has deﬁned the term ‘integration’ when applied to a large nation-state such as China, as ‘the manner and degree to which parts of a social system (its individuals, groups, and organs) interact and complement each other’. Clearly, minority nationalities fall into the category of groups, rather than individuals or organs. Also, what we are talking about here is essentially how far and how well the minorities interact with the Chinese state and its dominant nationality the Han, and how well and how far the minorities and the Han-dominated social system complement each other. In discussing China’s minority nationalities in particular, Dreyer (1976: 1) has deﬁned ‘integration’ as ‘the process whereby ethnic groups come to shift their loyalties, expectations, and political activities towards a new centre’, which in this case would be away from their own centre or capital and towards Beijing and other main Chinese centres. A third deﬁnition, applying speciﬁcally to Tibet, suggests that integration ‘presumes a nation-state based on some form of a politically motivated citizenry’ (Shen 1998: 51). To judge how well a state and its minorities are integrated according to such deﬁnitions, which are actually more complementary to each other than contradictory, we need to appeal to a range of criteria. Some of these criteria are much more measurable than others. Some may point in different directions as regards national integration. Questions relevant to assessing

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how far China is a nationally integrated country with respect to its minority nationalities include the following: • • • • • • •

Are there rebellions by minorities against the government and how easily are these rebellions suppressed? Do the central government and the CCP hold effective political control over the minority areas and is there resistance to this control, even if the resistance does not express itself in open rebellion? Are the economies of the minority areas well integrated with the economies of the Han areas? Are there signiﬁcant Han populations in the minority areas and what impact do they have on the minorities, including the minorities’ loyalty or disloyalty towards the central government and the CCP? Is the national education system geared towards integration or towards fostering localist sentiment? Are there other factors, such as religion, that might be conducive to local loyalty or disloyalty towards the central government and the CCP? How well do the minorities get along with the Han and how extensive are dealings between minorities and Han?

In this chapter, I attempt to answer these questions, even if only brieﬂy. In doing so, I appeal to printed material in English and Chinese, including materials by both academics and journalists. In addition, I have extensive personal experiences in China’s minority areas since the early 1980s and I make some appeal to these experiences in the views and information that I present in this chapter.

The politico-strategic dimension Other than in Tibet and Xinjiang, discussed below, the political situation in China’s minority areas has been generally stable since the 1980s. The minorities appear generally content to obey Beijing, and their loyalties, expectations and political activities are directed towards the Chinese nationstate just as much, if not more than, those of the dominant Han people. In some cases, feelings of political identity among the minorities are very weak. One such case is the Tujia of central China, whom the state recognized as a nationality only in 1956. One scholar has researched a community in Yongshun, in the far northwest of Hunan, whose people designate themselves Tujia and Miao. He concludes that, although there is agreement that they are Tujia and Miao, ethnicity has no clear meaning to them and it is a classiﬁcation imposed from outside (Shih 2001: 88). Another study has focused on a prefecture in Hubei, which is also classiﬁed as Tujia-Miao. Although ﬁnding signiﬁcant differences between these people and the Han, the author argues that ‘outsiders classify others based on culture while locals classify themselves based on socio-political experience’. This author also

150 Colin Mackerras argues that there is a disjuncture between the two classiﬁcations (Brown 2001: 71). Many people consider themselves Han, even though they are classiﬁed legally as Tujia (Brown 2001: 56). There are differences between the two studies in their disciplinary emphasis, but both authors agree that the people so classiﬁed by outsiders have little or no sense of consciousness as Tujia. With 15,555,820 people according to the 1990 census (SNAC and SSB 1993: 53), the Zhuang are the most populous of China’s minority nationalities. Most scholars have considered the Zhuang to be well integrated with the Han, and, until 1949, governments mainly ignored them. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has seen campaigns to promote their identity, leading one scholar to entitle a major work about them: ‘creating the Zhuang’ (Kaup 2000). She concludes that the CCP ‘took a risk in promoting the development of a large state-created nationality’, but that the risk paid off (Kaup 2000: 180). She considers the possibility that the Zhuang could cause violent political problems for the Chinese state and rejects it, arguing instead that the CCP’s strategy to recognize the Zhuang ‘in order to integrate them into the Chinese state seems to have been successfully administered’ (Kaup 2000: 180). She has brought light to a signiﬁcant issue in discussing the extent of integration of this minority, which is so important because of its large population, and she has settled the issue by declaring that there is no danger to the Chinese state from the Zhuang. One minority with clear attachment to its own culture is the Koreans, who numbered 1,923,361 in the 1990 census (SNAC and SSB 1993: 53). The largest concentration is in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, which borders North Korea. Korean language and architecture are still strong, and Koreans still eat according to their own national diet. Is there any possibility that Yanbian’s Koreans could make political trouble for China, for example by moves to detach themselves from China and move into Korea? My answer is that the Koreans of China have shown themselves to be quite loyal to China over an extended period that dates back to even before the PRC was established. Despite their strong and distinctive culture, the Korean minority appears most unlikely to want to rejoin Korea, even if North Korea and South Korea reunite over the next decade or so. Politico-strategic problems in Tibet and Xinjiang Despite these signs of integration in most parts of China, there has been an upsurge in secessionist movements since the late 1980s, almost all in Tibet or Xinjiang, and especially in the latter. The ﬁrst separatist trouble came in 1987, when there were demonstrations by monks demanding independence from China, in the Tibetan capital Lhasa. The independence movement was quickly and brutally suppressed

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by the authorities, but continued to be evident from time to time, climaxing in large-scale demonstrations from 5 to 7 March 1989 and in the declaration of martial law for the ﬁrst time in the history of the PRC on the last day of the demonstrations.2 Martial law in Lhasa was lifted on 1 May 1990. During the 1990s, the state has run ‘patriotic education campaigns’ to reduce support for separatist activity. Although there were some pro-independence demonstrations in May 1993, such activity appears to have declined, and by the end of the twentieth century what was striking was not how strong the separatist movement was, but how weak. In a speech to the British parliament in London in July 1996, the Dalai Lama repeated a proposal he made in Strasburg in 1988, but which had lapsed after coming up against strong opposition among his own people. He suggested that Tibet should gain ‘genuine autonomy’ within China but not full independence. He subsequently persisted in putting forward the proposal in numerous fora and, as of early 2003, ‘genuine autonomy’ remained his ofﬁcial policy. In the meantime, dissension within the diaspora community in Dharamsala where the Dalai Lama is based has weakened the community’s political force, despite strong support for Tibetan independence in the West. International human rights activists have long been extremely critical of China’s policy towards, and actions in, Tibet. The Dalai Lama was very forthright on this issue in his July 1996 speech, accusing the Chinese of ‘cultural genocide’ in Tibet. The Amnesty International Report of 2000 continued long-standing accusations of gross human rights violations, ‘particularly against Tibetan Buddhists and nationalists’. It claimed reports persisted of torture and ill-treatment of detainees, but did not raise accusations of execution of political prisoners (Amnesty International 2000: Tibet Autonomous Region). On the other hand, there is evidence that ordinary Tibetans may not be as hostile to the Chinese government or as overwhelmingly in support of independence as many Western reports suggest. A team of 18 people, led by Herbert Yee (Yu Zhen) of Hong Kong’s Baptist College and including four Tibetans, surveyed 586 families from June to September 1996. Of these families, 200 were in Tibet itself, mainly Lhasa, 170 were in the Tibetan regions of Sichuan and 216 were in the regions of Gansu (Yu and Guo 1999a: 35–6). The team found considerable goodwill towards the government, which was perceived as being helpful to the people and able and willing to solve practical problems. When questioned whether the government served the people and whether everybody should obey it, of 545 respondents, 12.3 per cent agreed strongly, 79.6 per cent agreed, 6.1 per cent were unsure, and 2 per cent disagreed. No one surveyed strongly disagreed (Yu and Guo 1999a: 86–7). The question just discussed is not precisely the same as the question ‘Do you favour independence or not?’ Nevertheless, these responses certainly imply serious misgivings

152 Colin Mackerras about the strength of the Tibetan people’s desire for independence (see also Yan Hairong 2000: 158, 161). The responses also cast doubt on the Dalai Lama’s claim that 95 per cent of Tibetans support independence.3 On a question related to the issue of Tibetan integration in China, 546 responded to the statement that the Han were honest and reliable. The survey found that 12.5 per cent agreed strongly and 62.5 per cent agreed, 9.7 per cent disagreed and 1.3 per cent disagreed strongly, while the remaining 14.1 per cent said they had no opinion on the statement (Yu and Guo 1999a: 81). Contrary to widespread belief, the survey also found strong support for intermarriage between Han and Tibetan, with 70.9 per cent of 547 respondents either agreeing or strongly agreeing with the statement that ‘as long as two people love each other sincerely, it doesn’t matter whether they are the same nationality or not’ (Yu and Guo 1999a: 82). We turn now to Xinjiang, where separatist activity by Uygur people has strengthened radically, persisting into the twenty-ﬁrst century. A rebellion erupted in Akto, not far from Kashgar in Xinjiang’s southwest, in April 1990. Although it was crushed quickly, the rebellion produced a lasting effect among the Uygur people. Just as suggested for Tibet with the Dalai Lama’s speech in London, the year 1996 appears to have marked a turning point in Xinjiang. A conﬁdential memorandum dated 19 March 1996 (quoted in Becquelin 2000: 87–8) was sent to local authorities in Xinjiang from the CCP Central Committee urging far more resolute action against anybody, especially those in illegal Muslim organizations, who attacked the CCP and the government structure, and fomented separatism. Early in May, the Xinjiang authorities held a major meeting in the capital Ürümqi, conﬁrming the dictates of the Party centre and vowing to stop subversive terrorist activities (see also Mackerras 1998b: 111–13). Despite the pronouncements of the CCP and the meeting in Ürümqi, in 1997 there were large-scale demonstrations and riots against the Chinese in Yili in the northwest of Xinjiang. These were also crushed brutally with executions and ramiﬁcations that have continued into the twentyﬁrst century.4 The 2000 Amnesty International report accused Beijing of executing ‘scores’ of Uygurs, many of them political prisoners. It charged Beijing with holding show trials for which the verdicts had been predetermined, with confessions often extracted through torture (Amnesty International 2000: Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region). In other words, Amnesty’s charges against Beijing were considerably harsher over Xinjiang than over Tibet. One journalist wrote after a visit to Xinjiang in 2000 that the newly independent states bordering Xinjiang, that is Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, had become ‘sources of weapons, money, training and places of refuge’ for Uygur separatists (Lawrence 2000: 23–4). Not surprisingly, Beijing has been aware of a security threat to its west for some time. One of the ways that the Chinese authorities have tried to counter the threat has been to woo the Central Asian states that border it (Becquelin 2000: 70).

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In April 1996 the presidents of ﬁve neighbouring states – China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan – met in Shanghai, becoming known as the ‘Shanghai Five’. The meeting became an annual event, subsequently taking place in Moscow in 1997; Almaty, Kazakhstan, in 1998; Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, in 1999; and Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in 2000. The meetings have discussed military and security concerns as well as economic and other cooperation. The ﬁve countries hold a similar view on human rights and, in reaction to the events in Kosovo earlier the same year, the August 1999 Bishkek communiqué stated that ‘The protection of human rights should not be used as an excuse to interfere in others’ internal affairs’ (Beijing Review 1999: 11). The meeting of 5 July 2000 set up a joint antiterrorist centre to combat incursions by Muslim extremists and drug trafﬁckers. In mid-2001 the meeting of the group established the Shanghai Cooperation Organization: the location was again Shanghai and the president of Uzbekistan joined the original ﬁve. On 11 September 2001, suicide terrorists hijacked aircraft and ﬂew them into the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, leading to the total destruction of the towers and killing nearly 3,000 people. Shortly after this set of events, the US administration of George W. Bush launched what it called an international war against terrorism. It began with a war against the radical Islamist Taliban government in Afghanistan, including an attempt to uproot the network that the Bush administration blamed for the terrorist attacks in the United States, the al-Qaida network led by Osama bin Laden. China took the opportunity of this war against terrorism to step up attacks on the separatism in Xinjiang that had occupied its attention for some years. In a detailed report issued on 21 January 2002, the Chinese government claimed that some Uygurs were actively involved in the al-Qaida network, including undergoing training in Afghanistan. The report quoted ‘incomplete statistics’ as showing that terrorist forces ﬁghting for an independent Uygur state had been responsible for over 200 terrorist incidents in Xinjiang. These had resulted in the deaths of 162 people and injuries to over 440 other people (Information Ofﬁce 2002: 15). The obvious implication was that the Chinese government believed that its case warranted support as part of the international war against terrorism. The US reaction to this claim was ambivalent. In the ﬁrst instance, it was apparently negative. The US State Department continued to believe that China’s actions against separatism in Xinjiang fell more into the category of abuse of human rights than a contribution to the international war against terrorism. On 5 March 2002, US Assistant Secretary of State Lorne Craner said that Uygur activists were advocating greater civil liberties, which was not the same as terrorism (Torode 2002: 7). He seems not to have taken at all seriously the evidence that the Chinese authorities presented in their January report.

154 Colin Mackerras However the Counter-terrorism Ofﬁce of the Department of State reached a different conclusion, and its report on global terrorism, issued in May 2002, was quite complimentary of China’s efforts to defeat terrorism. It highlighted the situation in Xinjiang, with phraseology suggesting that the Ofﬁce accepted Chinese government’s claims about the link between Uygur separatism and terrorism. The US Department of State listed two groups in particular as a ‘cause for concern’: the East Turkestan Islamic Party and the East Turkestan Liberation Organization. The report added that Uygurs ‘were found ﬁghting with al-Qaida in Afghanistan. We are aware of credible reports that some Uighurs [Uygurs] who were trained by al-Qaida have returned to China’ (US Department of State 2002: 17). In August 2002, the US Department of State formally accepted the East Turkestan Liberation Organization as a ‘terrorist organization’ and the United Nations followed suit very soon afterwards. The section on China ends with the suggestion that ‘previous China crackdowns’ in Xinjiang had raised concerns about possible human-rights abuses, and warns against using crackdowns on terrorism ‘as a substitute for addressing legitimate social and economic aspirations’ (US Department of State 2002: 17). But this formula, which excludes political or separatist aspirations, still appears quite in line with Chinese policy and does not counter the general impression that the Counter-terrorism Ofﬁce has no real problem with what the Chinese are doing, despite misgivings in other parts of the Department of State. All along, the United States had expressed its support for actions against two major Muslim-based actions widespread in contemporary Central Asia: Uzbekistan’s attempt to suppress the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Russia’s war against separatism in Chechnya. What appears clear is that since the mid-1990s the biggest threat to Chinese integration and unity comes not from Tibet but from Xinjiang. Not only has separatism among the Uygurs grown, but it also enjoys support from Islamic fundamentalist elements outside China. From a politicostrategic point of view, Xinjiang is clearly much less well integrated into China at the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century than it was in the late 1980s. Tibet, on the other hand, has seen much less separatist activism than Xinjiang since the lifting of martial law in 1990. Moreover, by advocating ‘genuine autonomy’ for Tibet rather than full independence, the Dalai Lama has handed the Chinese a major point of advantage. At the same time, China shows no sign of coming to terms with the Dalai Lama and continues to condemn him as a ‘splittist’. Of course he has much more international support than the separatists of Xinjiang, especially in the West. But such support is unlikely to yield practical military help for his cause while China’s economic growth continues to provide trading opportunities for the West and China’s political rise persists. It is easy to draw parallels between Kosovo and Xinjiang or Tibet, but there are vast differences

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between Serbia and China and between the situation in Kosovo and those in Tibet or Xinjiang.

The economy The period of the PRC has seen a massive and largely successful attempt to integrate the economies of the minority nationalities into the national economy. The natural resources of the minority areas are used as national resources more than ever, sometimes to the displeasure of the local people.5 Commodities made in cities such as Shanghai are more than ever available in the minority areas. This writer has on occasion bought products from the local minorities only to ﬁnd that in fact the products were manufactured or processed in Shanghai. Factories in minority areas that manufacture goods special to the local people are often keener to sell these goods in the main cities or overseas than to local people. Statistics show that domestic trade has grown from a value of only RMB 480 million in 1952 to RMB 10,330 million in 1978 (SNAC and SSB 1993: 180) and RMB 117,370 million in 1999 (NBS 2000: 39). This represents an average of 43.7 per cent growth per year over the 47 years from 1952 to 1999, and 49.3 per cent annually over the larger-based 21 years of reform. Even allowing for inﬂation, this reﬂects a dramatic change in the nature of the economies in the minority areas in the direction of integration into the national economy. There is no better way to integrate an economy than through the improvement of infrastructure and communications. Although these are still very deﬁcient in China’s minority areas in world terms, they are vastly better than they were before establishment of the PRC. Table 8.1 shows the lengths in kilometres of railways, roads and postal routes in China’s minority areas since the PRC was established. The implication of these ﬁgures is that it is much easier than it used to be to transport goods out of the minority areas to major cities such as Beijing, Chongqing or Shanghai, or to the eastern provincial capitals. There are better facilities to undertake trade both ways, and to send massproduced goods from the east to the minority areas. In addition, it is easier than it used to be for people on the eastern seaboard (or anybody else) to get in touch with people in the minority areas through an improved telecommunications system. Another signiﬁcant point is that better communications make tourism to the minority areas much easier. In the 1990s the minority areas were opened to tourism, bringing both Chinese and international tourists to the minority areas in numbers that would have been unimaginable earlier, especially before the 1980s. Many of the minority-produced products cater for tourists, rather than for the local people. Tourism not only helps to integrate the minority areas into the domestic economy, but also begins to subject these areas to the inﬂuences of globalization. It is also notable that, in Tibet,

156 Colin Mackerras Table 8.1 Lengths of roads, railways and postal routes in operation in minority areas (unit: km) Year

Railways

Roads

Postal routes

1949 1962 1978 1985 1990 1997 1998 1999

3,500 7,200 9,000 12,500 13,100 16,900 17,100 17,500

11,400 127,500 208,000 254,100 293,700 364,900 374,100 402,600

n.a. 457,300 947,500 900,000 880,000 1,000,000 1,026,000 1,061,000

Sources: SNAC and SSB (1993: 155); NBS (2000: 39). Note: n.a. means not available.

tourism in one way acts against integration, since many Western tourists in Tibet actively support independence and are quite keen to carry messages of support for this cause both into and out of Tibet. Just as in the previous section considering political concern about minority secessionist movements, the two minority regions of greatest concern economically are Tibet and Xinjiang. In both, the central government has adopted the policy that a more prosperous economy and higher standard of living in these regions will result in a more stable and integrated nation. The idea is that rich people are less likely to revolt than poor people. The policy rationale is that people who are not poor are less likely to cause problems or revolt than people who are poor. Government subsidies to Tibet grew from RMB 10.466 million in 1952 to RMB 385.707 million in 1977, rising signiﬁcantly thereafter to RMB 1,057.719 million in 1985 and RMB 2,875.89 million in 1994. The 1994 subsidy was far bigger than the RMB 1,709.46 million in 1993 (Yu and Guo 1999b: 308, 323). A striking indication from the subsidy ﬁgures is that the riots in 1987 did not immediately result in greater subsidies. In 1994 the central government inaugurated 62 infrastructure projects that it hoped would accelerate Tibet’s modernization. Shakya Tsering (1999: 438) is right to comment ‘that the chief motive of the economic reforms in Tibet was to accelerate its political integration into China and to modernize the agrarian economy of the region’. However, modernization is hardly neutral and can be fraught with problems. It tends to beneﬁt urban elites who are loyal to the Chinese, far more than it beneﬁts the rural people (Yan Hairong 2000: 162). No doubt this very point explains the emphasis of the infrastructure projects on the agrarian economy. The 62 projects of the 1990s included schools, power plants, hospitals, and irrigation systems, which can be helpful to all people, whether rural or urban. In June 2001, a ceremony marked the inauguration of Tibet’s ﬁrst railway to link the region with Qinghai and thus with the rest of the country. Yet trends indicate it is highly likely that some will

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do much better than others from the infrastructure projects and other developments that come as part of ‘reform’, and that inequalities will widen. Globalization and tourism also spread their beneﬁts unevenly, including in Tibet. Just as in Tibet, the Chinese authorities did their best to improve the economy of Xinjiang and integrate it into China’s, raising the standard of living of all people there and making the minorities more willing to remain part of China. The 1990s saw the major growth of the cotton industry in Xinjiang (Becquelin 2000: 80–3). The authorities also believe that improving the region’s communications capacity will make the region much easier to control. In May 1999 the 1,451 kilometre South Xinjiang railway project was completed, linking Turpan to Kashgar. In March 2000, the government began a large-scale investment campaign to raise the economic level of China’s western regions, including Xinjiang. Writing from Xinjiang, Lawrence (2000: 22–3) was probably right to suggest that ‘the campaign may well help to strengthen Beijing’s control over Xinjiang, particularly through a network of new highways, railways and airports. But no one here expects it to smother separatist violence’. Both in Xinjiang and Tibet, but especially in Xinjiang, I have found strong impressional evidence that some minorities resent the Chinese whatever they do. Some say they would even prefer to remain poor, if prosperity means giving credit to the Chinese. They complain that the Han Chinese get far more of the beneﬁts of economic growth than do the minorities. Yet there is another side to the story. For instance, according to Rudelson (1997: 111) there is a class of Uygur merchants in Turpan, near Ürümqi, who are doing very well out of trade networks with Han Chinese and ‘express positive attitudes about being citizens of the Chinese state’. For the minorities, the economy is well integrated with China, better than at any time in the past. For most of them, that involves positive attitudes towards the Chinese state. But for some, especially the Uygurs and Tibetans, such feelings are very mixed indeed and, along with some satisfaction with the political order, prosperity can even breed resentments.

Population transfer One mechanism that large states everywhere in the world have employed to unite a country politically is to send members of the dominant nationality to settle in border and minority areas. This makes it more difﬁcult for regions to secede from the larger nation-state and hence they are better integrated politically within the nation-state. Yet this type of domestic migration also has other implications, which may point in precisely the opposite direction. The move frequently makes minorities deeply resentful, feeling that their land has been seized from them. Population transfer of the dominant Han has taken place in China over many centuries. In Yunnan it began as soon as the Ming dynasty

158 Colin Mackerras (1368–1644) incorporated Yunnan ﬁrmly into China. In the northeast provinces and Inner Mongolia, the population was already overwhelmingly Han by the time the war against Japan broke out in 1937.6 Under the PRC, the area into which immigration has been most notable has been Xinjiang. In the 1950s, many Han troops who had taken part in the CCP’s victory in Xinjiang were demobilized into reclamation work in a body called the ‘Production and Construction Corps’. At the end of the twentieth century the Corps still played a very important economic role in Xinjiang, even though its composition has changed greatly to make its membership half women and children (Becquelin 2000: 77–80). From the 1960s, many thousands of Han youths, unemployed workers, dissidents and criminals were sent to Xinjiang from the east, greatly increasing the Han population in Xinjiang (McMillen 1998: 236–7). The proportion of Han to the total population of Xinjiang peaked in 1978, when, with 5.13 million people, the Han were 41.6 per cent of the total population of 12.33 million (Sun et al. 1994: 17, 25). The proportion of Han has reduced since that time, partly because natural increase is much less for them than for the minorities, due to the population policy that applies the one-child regulation more leniently to minority people. However, immigration of Han to Xinjiang rose again from the late 1980s. One specialist claims that from 1987 some 250,000 ‘self-drifter’ Hans, that is those who go to Xinjiang on their own without ofﬁcial permission, ‘have poured into Xinjiang each year to look for work’ (Ben-Adam 1999: 206). Census ﬁgures have it that the Han population of Xinjiang grew from 5,695,626 in mid-1990, to 7.5 million in November 2000. This would represent an annual growth of just under 175,000 people per year. In other words, if the census ﬁgures are an accurate portrayal of the population, they conﬁrm the growth in immigration but suggest that the ﬁgure of 250,000 per year is a very substantial exaggeration.7 The issue of population transfer has also been extremely controversial in Tibet. This is because the Tibetan government in exile and its supporters have frequently accused the Chinese of ‘swamping’ Tibet and the Tibetan areas with Han Chinese. An inﬂuential guidebook of China typically claims that ‘a massive inﬂux of Han settlers from surrounding provinces threatens to make Tibetans a minority in their own “autonomous region” and swamp the Tibetan culture with that of the Han Chinese’ (Taylor et al. 1996: 951). In the case of Tibet, these claims have some basis in truth, but they are even more exaggerated than claims about Xinjiang. The 1990 census showed 80,837 registered Han people in Tibet, which was 3.68 per cent of a total population of 2,196,029. The area of Tibet with the highest number and proportion of Han was Lhasa, where the Han people numbered 44,945, which is 11.95 per cent of a total of 375,985.8 The 2000 census had the Han population in Tibet at 155,300, or 5.9 per cent of a total of 2,616,300. Some Han were sent as technicians to Tibet in the 1950s and 1960s. In the ﬁrst half of the 1980s, however, the number of Han people in Tibet

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actually dropped by more than 40 per cent, declining from 122,356 in 1980 to 70,932 in 1985 (Mackerras 1994: 252). According to Goldstein (1997: 94), another major inﬂux began in 1985 as a result of rapid economic development. Deng Xiaoping himself is reported to have told former US President Jimmy Carter in 1987 that: Tibet is sparsely populated. The two million Tibetans are not enough to handle the task of developing such a huge region. There is no harm in sending Han into Tibet to help. You cannot reach a proper conclusion if you base your assessment of ethnic policy and the Tibet Question on how many Han are in Tibet. The key issues are what is best for Tibetans and how can Tibet develop at a fast pace, and move ahead in the four modernizations in China. (quoted in Goldstein 1997: 95) The Han population in Tibet appears to consist mainly of economic technicians or ‘ﬂoating population’. During visits to Lhasa in 1997 and 2002, I was very struck by how Sinicized and modernized Tibet had become since my visits in 1985 and 1990, with many obviously Han people observable. However, it is valid to emphasize the point made by Yan Hao (2000: 34) that few Han technicians remain in Tibet after the completion of their particular project. There is, however, one matter concerning Han immigration to both Xinjiang and Tibet that requires emphasis. Whatever the population statistics reveal, there is a perception in both regions of large-scale Han immigration. Perhaps more importantly, local people – Uygurs and Tibetans – resent this immigration furiously. Local minority people have often told me that they think there are too many Chinese immigrants, that too many more are coming, that they dominate things far too much, and that they take up far too many scarce resources. Goldstein (1997: 94) noted that Tibetans complain about the ﬂood of non-Tibetans (both Han and Hui) who are taking over the local economy and become the main beneﬁciaries of the new growth in this region. Becquelin (2000: 84) also claims that in every rural township he visited in the south of Xinjiang, Uygur farmers ‘complained bitterly about the increased scarcity of water created by the inﬂux of Han farmers’.

Education, ideology and religion The education system appears to make a signiﬁcant contribution towards promoting national integration in China. Several features of the government education system corroborate this suggestion. •

There is a comprehensive and secular education system in China. It is dictated by the 1986 Law of the PRC on Compulsory Education, which

160 Colin Mackerras

• •

•

demands that all children should participate in the national education system. The great majority of children do at least begin school in most minority areas, although by no means all continue to graduate from primary school, and quite a few, especially girls, drop out after only two years or less. There is a national curriculum, which means that in the education system all children learn the same content throughout the country. Almost all children learn Chinese language in the education system, meaning that China is moving towards a situation where the great majority of its people can speak the national language, even though the minorities continue to know their own. The content is very much slanted towards teaching loyalty to the Chinese nation as a whole, ahead of the particular minority to which people belong. History classes teach some world history and the history of China, but there is nothing, or at best very little, about the history of any individual nationality.

It is true that there are attempts made to promote education that is speciﬁcally appropriate to the minorities. Children can learn the arts of their own nationality. Bilingual education is ofﬁcially encouraged. In those primary-school classes that are composed entirely of one minority, teachers should belong to that minority and use its language in class. Some minorities have textbooks in their own languages, such as the Uygurs, Koreans and Tibetans. In my explorations in many parts of China, I have found the implementation of bilingual education to be very patchy. In those areas where the local minority has its own script, such as Tibet, Xinjiang or Yanbian, it is followed fairly well in primary school, and there are even some secondary schools that pride themselves on maintaining the use of the local language. However, in places where there may be members of different minorities, classes are usually held in Chinese. There is some variation even among different groups of the same nationality. An illustrative example is the Dai of Yunnan. In Xishuangbanna, teachers try to use Dai language for the lowest primary school grades, in order to ensure that the Dai children can understand what they are teaching. Some boys go to temples as ‘little monks’ for a period, usually after completing primary school, their aim being partly to learn the Dai script and master the Dai Buddhist culture. In Dehong, on the other hand, classes are always in Chinese, and the practice whereby ‘little monks’ spend time in the temples is almost dead. One specialist (Postiglione 1999: 17), while pointing out the diversity of cultural traditions and practices that continue to exist among China’s minorities, regrets that these differences are ‘not fully reﬂected in the content of schooling’. He acknowledges that minority languages are given quite a bit of emphasis in minority schools, but advocates more minority

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cultural content. He claims that this would increase mutual understanding among ethnic groups and conserve their cultures within the process of economic modernization, as well as making ‘state schools much more attractive to ethnic communities, thereby strengthening their identities within the national community’. Another author (Hansen 1999: 168–9) describes a similar situation of the realities but predicts a somewhat different result. She writes that: . . . by diminishing the cultural and political values of minorities’ own languages, customs, and histories, while at the same time transmitting hegemonic interpretations of what it implies to be a minority minzu [nationality] in the Chinese nation, the educational system in fact risks producing among ethnic minorities an increased emphasis on ethnic identity and cultural differences. It remains to be seen which of these two somewhat different interpretations turns out to be correct, or if both have some currency for different minorities. Postiglione’s comments refer generally to all minority areas, whereas Hansen’s are limited just to a few areas in Yunnan, including in Xishuangbanna. My own view is that whereas minority identities may strengthen in some parts of China, it is not likely to be because of the education system, but despite it. My engagement with the local people while visiting Dai areas in September and October 2000 suggests a surviving and lively Dai identity. However, these identity feelings are not the kind that threaten the Chinese state, and in cultural terms, seem to be weakening rather than the converse. Nevertheless, in Xishuangbanna I learned of a campaign since the mid-1990s to promote more Dai people in the bureaucracy, in the CCP and among cadres. One factor in education, in particular higher education, is bringing educated members of the minorities to Beijing or another Han centre for training as cadres in one of the ‘nationalities institutes’. One Han with experience in Tibet suggested to me in private conversation that what the Chinese government was actually doing by educating Tibetans at the Central Nationalities University in Beijing was training the next generation of separatist leaders. This was because they are trained in the skills of leadership, but their experience in Beijing does nothing to dilute ethnonationalist feelings and dislike for China. But such a stricture applies only to those minorities that already have strong separatist leanings anyway and applies to particular parts of the higher education sector, not to the education system overall. Religion is similar to education in its relationship to the mind, but contrasts in being a traditional force in the societies of the minorities. In my view, forces that emphasize identities as opposed to national integration are more likely to ﬁnd sustenance in religion than in the education system. However, religion as a strong force actively opposing national

162 Colin Mackerras integration is actually limited to a small number of minorities in China, notably the Uygurs and the Tibetans. Religion continues to be practised among most of the minorities, probably more so, on the whole, than among the Han. There are functioning Buddhist temples in the larger Dai villages, and individual rural families have shrines in their own houses. Shrines are very common in the households of many of the southwestern minorities, such as the Zhuang, Yao and Miao, and even on the streets of areas where they live. The Mongolians still follow Tibetan Buddhism, although to a very much smaller extent and with much less vigour than was once the case. Religion does not necessarily make minorities disloyal to the Chinese state or obstruct their integration in it. On the whole, the Hui have been reasonably loyal to the Chinese state, despite being Muslims. Most Dai feel themselves to be genuinely part of China, even those who believe in Buddhism. My experience in Xinjiang suggests to me that the Hui, and even the Turkic minorities, other than the Uygurs, are doing quite well as part of China and are reasonably happy to stay within it. I doubt very much that the Kazakhs, for example, are really keen either to join a Uygurdominated independent East Turkestan Republic, or to leave China to join up with Kazakhstan. One scholar has looked carefully at religious education and linguistic promotion among three minorities in Yunnan – the Buddhist Dai, the Bai and the Muslim Hui – in order to discover a new conception of minority membership in the Chinese national community. She ﬁnds that minority activists on behalf of religious education and linguistic promotion ‘may see their pro-minority projects as extensions of citizenship guarantees and privileges, and as complements to national development projects’. In other words these minorities ‘may genuinely see themselves as part’ of China’s multinational experiment, and hence as assisting the Chinese nation-state, rather than opposing it (McCarthy 2000: 116). This comment would certainly not be valid for the Tibetans or Uygurs. Nobody will doubt that the Tibetans are religiously highly antagonistic to the Han. Visitors to Tibet are invariably told that all Tibetans believe in Tibetan Buddhism, and that consequently membership of the CCP is very low in the Tibetan areas. However, in both respects it is possible that Chinese inﬂuence in Tibet has been slightly more pervasive than generally believed, which would indicate that the degree of integration is not quite as low as most observers have assumed. In 1994, the total number of CCP members in the Tibetan Autonomous Region was 88,956, of whom 85.27 per cent were Tibetans.9 The survey of 586 households mentioned above found that most people accepted the leadership of the CCP (Yu and Guo 1999a: 72–3). It also found that the proportion of believers in Tibetan Buddhism among 2,758 people interviewed was 86 per cent, with 10.5 per cent not believing in religion, 1.4 per cent adhering to the traditional Bon religion, 0.9 per cent believing in

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Islam and 1.1 per cent in other religions. In Lhasa the proportion of believers in Tibetan Buddhism was only about 76 per cent, and of those not believing in any religion as high as about 22.5 per cent. Most of the non-believers were CCP members or cadres (Yu and Guo 1999a: 46–7). The following statement seems to this author to be an accurate and fair statement of the realities of religion in Tibet in the 1990s: The religious revival in Tibet following the Cultural Revolution has . . . been a matter of great delicacy: to the extent that it appears to foster Tibetan national identity, within the context of Tibetan inclusion in the multinational Chinese state, it remains (in principle at least) ideologically unobjectionable, and on this basis local governments have been able to protect and in some cases even support revival movements. . . . At the same time, when religious revival has provided the background for the emergence of genuinely nationalistic expression, the Chinese state has brought its instruments of control and, if it deems necessary, repression, to bear. (Kapstein 1998: 141–2) The main form of ‘genuinely nationalistic expression’ is attempts to secede from China. As noted above, it was principally monks who led and took part in the pro-independence demonstrations in 1987. Monks and nuns have been crucial to pro-independence forces since then. In 1995, a controversy erupted over the identity of the Eleventh Panchen Lama, with the Dalai Lama putting forward a nominee different from that of the Chinese authorities, who were accused of putting the Dalai Lama’s nominee under house arrest. This matter also showed the function of religion in creating trouble for China in Tibet. Yet despite these problems, I consider that Islam among the Uygurs is actually a greater threat to the integration of China than Tibetan Buddhism, essentially because of the attitude that many Central Asian Muslims adopt towards war. The main leader of the Akto uprising of 1990 was a religious student called Zahideen Yusuf, who took his inspiration from the ‘holy war’ ( jihad) concept that the Afghan Mujahideen were practising (Winchester 1997: 31). His death in the rebellion did not prevent further instability or end the inﬂuence of this student or the ‘holy war’ that he led. When this writer visited Kashgar in 1994, he heard that people had reacted with both admiration and fear at seeing some of the leaders of the rebellion led through the streets. These people admired anybody who would stand up to the Chinese State, but at the same time feared the State’s might. According to Lawrence (2000: 24), Islamic missionaries from Central Asia ‘now target Xinjiang’s Muslims’ and Uygurs are ‘starting to take part in armed Islamic movements abroad, from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan and even Chechnya’. The situation in Central Asia itself is volatile; Islamic militants are trying to spread the ‘holy war’ in several countries, especially

164 Colin Mackerras Uzbekistan. The leader of one such movement, Tahir Yuldeshev, told the Voice of America on 7 October 2000 that ‘We have declared a jihad to create a religious government in Uzbekistan’ (quoted in Rashid 2000: 30). One journalist claims that Yuldeshev’s movement recruits Uygur Muslims from Xinjiang to its ranks (Rashid 2000: 30). The strength of Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia has dwindled since the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the US administration declared a war against terrorism. Yet it is hardly surprising that most of the governments of the region feel that they share a common interest, with each other and with the US, in opposing this tide of Islamic militancy.

Conclusion The incidence of disturbances by minorities in China since 1987 generally points towards less national integration, not more. This is especially the case in Xinjiang, where hostility towards the central government and the CCP appears to have grown among the Uygurs, although not necessarily among the other minorities. On the other hand, the minorities of Yunnan and the northeast have been quiet, and in Inner Mongolia there has been no serious trouble since the early 1990s. Although Islamic fundamentalists have been able to make use of Xinjiang’s borders with countries to its west to stir up religiously based trouble, China’s national borders have generally been secure from a military point of view. China enjoys better relations with its neighbours than in earlier times, since 1990 getting on better with Russia and India than since the 1950s. In economic terms, the minorities are much better integrated into the Chinese nation-state than ever before. There are more trade and other dealings between the eastern seaboard and the west than ever. Communications systems have been improved and investment has grown greatly. This is not to insinuate that greater economic integration always fosters positive feelings towards the central government and the Chinese nation among those who are integrated economically, but this is a far more common pattern overall than the converse. Similar strictures apply in terms of population. The many Han people in the minority areas doubtless provide a major reason for keeping all areas as part of China, and hence these migrant people help to integrate the country. In Tibet and Xinjiang, Han immigration also causes resentments among the minority people, which is clearly a factor working against satisfactory integration. Among most of the minorities, education is currently functioning as an integrative force. It does so more strongly at the beginning of the twentyﬁrst century than at any earlier time, simply because secular state education is more prevalent than ever before. Religion, on the other hand, does not obstruct integration among most minorities, but it certainly supports nationalist identities among both the Uygurs and the Tibetans, especially

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the former. The Islamic ‘holy war’ makes radical Uygur Muslims more dangerous to Chinese integration than Tibetan Buddhism, with its paciﬁst tendencies. The role of the international community, and especially the United States, is quite interesting here. It is well known that the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism in general have great support in the United States, including in the Congress and other inﬂuential quarters. Western images of Tibetan Buddhism certainly arouse fears among Chinese authorities of attempts to split off Tibet from China and consequently militate against China’s national integration. Neither the Uygurs nor Islam as it is practised anywhere in China have any ﬁgure corresponding to the Dalai Lama with inﬂuence in the West. Western images of Islam are generally quite negative. Among Western human-rights activists, violence of an Islamic rebellion will not be castigated nearly as heavily as the violence of authorities who opt for suppression. Yet Western and American leaders are seen as not particularly friendly to Muslim causes generally, and as being very hostile indeed to any with a fundamentalist tint, especially since the US administrations’ linking of terrorism with radical Islam post-11 September 2001. The last criterion discussed above for judging the extent of integration concerned how well the minorities get on with the Han and how many dealings they have with them. The ﬁrst part of the question is essentially impossible to answer, because nobody can see into another person’s mind. There are, however, suggestions and implications in the material presented above which can be summarized as follows. There are cases of hatred and rebellions, and the main ones of the last years of the twentieth century are discussed above. However, most of the minorities accept the Han reasonably well, and hatred or resentment here may be no keener than among people of the same nationality. Certainly the Han and the minorities work and trade together, and coexist well enough to hold the State and the nation together. Under normal circumstances, it is reasonable harmony that dominates. If this chapter has allocated more space to discussing hatreds and resentments than such a summary would warrant, it is because such emotions are much more newsworthy and cause more trouble to decisionmakers attempting to maintain national integration. My overall evaluation is that, for all its problems, China has ‘integrated’ its minority nationalities well enough to function as an effective nationstate and, other than in Xinjiang, better so at present than in 1990. Like most other countries, especially large ones, China faces ethnic divisions, some of them serious. On the other hand, there is little likelihood that either Tibet or Xinjiang will be able to secede from China over the next ﬁve to ten years, or that, if they tried, they would win the kind of outside military support that could lead to victory against the might of the Chinese State. Factors outside Tibet, Xinjiang or even China itself may turn out to exercise greater impact on China’s national integration than what happens

166 Colin Mackerras domestically. But although some of the components of a Bosnia-type situation exist in Xinjiang, a war in Xinjiang is certainly not inevitable. In my view, a war over Taiwan is much more likely in the ﬁrst decades of the twenty-ﬁrst century than is a war over nationality issues on the Mainland.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5

6 7

8

9

From the 1990s, considerable scholarship has been undertaken on China’s minorities. Book-length studies concerning the minorities as a whole include Mackerras (1994, and 1995), Safran (1998) and Harrell (1994). There is a substantial and increasing number of excellent studies on individual minorities, including Gladney (1991) on the Hui, Shakya (1999) on the Tibetans, Rudelson (1997) on the Uygurs, Litzinger (2000) on the Yao, Kaup (2000) on the Zhuang, Schein (2000) on the Miao, and Harrell (2001) on the Yi. For one account of this period in Tibetan history, see Shakya (1999: 416–30), and for an account of the Chinese attempts to suppress the independence movements of the time see Schwartz (1994). For example, he made this claim in an interview telecast on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation programme Compass on 26 November 2000. For accounts of separatist activity in Xinjiang in the 1990s, see Mackerras (1998a: 289–94) and Winchester (1997: 30–42). For evidence of executions in mid-2000, see O’Donnell (2000). According to NBS (2000: 37), the total area of natural resources of the minority areas, including areas of grasslands in pastoral and semi-pastoral areas, forest area, stock volume of forests, and hydropower resources accounted for 6,119,600 square kilometres. This is 63.75 per cent of China’s total national area (9,600,000 square kilometres). For more detailed treatment of minority population issues in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, see Mackerras (1994: 119–31), with the northeast and Inner Mongolia discussed in pp. 120–4. The 1990 ﬁgures are from the census of that year and come from Liu (1995: 891). The 2000 census ﬁgures are from Gilley (2001: 27). According to Renmin ribao 3 April 2001, p. 1, the total population of Xinjiang in November 2000 was 19,250,000. The 1990 census ﬁgures come from the extremely detailed tabulations in Duojie Ouzhu et al. (1992: I, 38–9). The population of Tibetans in Tibet was then 2,096,718, which is 95.48 per cent of the Tibet population of 2,196,029. The remaining 4.52 per cent were almost all Han, Hui, Moinba and Lhoba. In Lhasa, Tibetans numbered 327,882 or 87.21 per cent of the city’s population. Figures for the nationality and gender of each part of Tibet can be found in Duojie Ouzhu et al. (1992: 38–82). The 2000 census ﬁgures are from Renmin ribao 3 April 2001, p. 1. By comparison, in 1992 the number of monks and nuns in Tibet was about 34,000, a ﬁgure that rose to 46,000 by late 1997 (Mackerras 1998a: 298).

References Amnesty International (2000) Amnesty International Annual Report 2000: China, including Hong Kong and Macao, London: Amnesty International Publications. Becquelin, Nicolas (2000) ‘Xinjiang in the nineties’, The China Journal, 44 (July): 65–90. Beijing Review (1999) ‘Bishkek statement’, Beijing Review, 42 (37): 11–12.

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Ben-Adam, Justin (1999) ‘China’, in David Westerlund and Ingvar Svanberg (eds) Islam Outside the Arab World, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, pp. 190–211. Brown, Melissa J. (2001) ‘Ethnic classiﬁcation and culture: the case of the Tujia in Hubei, China’, Asian Ethnicity, II (1): 55–72. Cartier, Michel (2001) ‘1,265 million Chinese: some thoughts on census 2000’, China Perspectives, 35 (May–June): 49–55. Dreyer, June Teufel (1976) China’s Forty Millions: Minority Nationalities and National Integration in the People’s Republic of China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Duojie Ouzhu et al. (comp.) (1992) Xizang zizhi qu 1990 nian renkou pucha ziliao (dianzi jisuanji huizong) (Material from the 1990 Population Census of the Tibet Autonomous Region, Computer Tabulation), 4 vols, Lhasa: Tibet People’s Press. Gilley, Bruce (2001) ‘Uighurs need not apply’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 164 (33): 26–27. Gladney, Dru C. (1991) Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic, Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, distributed by Cambridge (MA) and London: Harvard University Press. Goldstein, Melvyn C. (1997) The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Hansen, Mette Halskov (1999) Lessons in Being Chinese: Minority Education and Ethnic Identity in Southwest China, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Harrell, Stevan (ed.) (1994) Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. –––– (2001) Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Information Ofﬁce of the State Council (2002) ‘ “East Turkistan” terrorist forces cannot get away with impunity’, Beijing Review, 45 (5): 14–23. Kapstein, Matthew T. (1998) ‘Concluding reﬂections’, in Melvyn C. Goldstein and Matthew T. Kapstein (eds) Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet: Religious Revival and Cultural Identity, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, pp. 139–49. Kaup, Katherine Palmer (2000) Creating the Zhuang: Ethnic Politics in China, Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner. Lawrence, Susan (2000) ‘Where Beijing fears Kosovo’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 163 (36): 22–4. Litzinger, Ralph A. (2000) Other Chinas: the Yao and the Politics of National Belonging, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Liu Weixin et al. (comp.) (1995) Xinjiang minzu cidian (Xinjiang Nationalities Dictionary), Ürümqi: Xinjiang People’s Press. Mackerras, Colin (1994) China’s Minorities: Integration and Modernization in the Twentieth Century, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Mackerras, Colin (1995) China’s Minority Cultures: Identities and Integration Since 1912, Melbourne: Longman, New York: St Martin’s Press. Mackerras, Colin (1998a) ‘The minorities: achievements and problems in the economy, national integration and foreign relations’, in Joseph Y.S. Cheng (ed.) China Review 1998, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, pp. 281–311. –––– (1998b) ‘Some observations on Xinjiang in the 1990s’, in David Christian and Craig Benjamin (eds) Worlds of the Silk Roads: Ancient and Modern, Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 105–20.

168 Colin Mackerras McCarthy, Susan (2000) ‘Ethno-religious mobilisation and citizenship discourse in the People’s Republic of China’, Asian Ethnicity, I (2): 107–16. McMillen, Donald H. (1998) ‘Xinjang Uygur Autonomous Region’, in Colin Mackerras, Donald H. McMillen and Andrew Watson (eds) Dictionary of the Politics of the People’s Republic of China, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 236–7. National Bureau of Statistics, People’s Republic of China (NSB) (comp.) (2000) Zhongguo tongji nianjian 2000 (China Statistical Yearbook 2000), Beijing: China Statistics Press. O’Donnell, Lynne (2000) ‘China executes ethnic separatists’, The Australian, 21 June: 8. Postiglione, Gerard A. (1999) ‘Introduction: state schooling and ethnicity in China’, in Postiglione, Gerard A. (ed.) China’s National Minority Education: Culture, Schooling, and Development, New York and London: Falmer Press, pp. 3–19. Rashid, Ahmed (2000) ‘Asking for holy war’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 163 (45): 28–30. Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), various issues, Beijing. Rudelson, Justin Jon (1997) Oasis Identities: Uyghur Nationalism along China’s Silk Road, New York: Columbia University Press. Safran, William (ed.) (1998) Nationalism and Ethnoregional Identities in China, London: Frank Cass. Schein, Louisa (2000) Minority Rules: the Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Schwartz, Ronald D. (1994) ‘The anti-splittist campaign and Tibetan political consciousness’, in Robert Barnett and Shirin Akiner (eds) Resistance and Reform in Tibet, London: Hurst, pp. 207–37. Seymour, James D. (1976) China: the Politics of Revolutionary Reintegration, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Shakya, Tsering (1999) The Dragon in the Land of Snows: a History of Modern Tibet since 1947, London: Pimlico. Shen, Tong (1998) ‘Tibet: an unavoidable issue’, in Changching Cao and James D. Seymour (eds) Tibet Through Dissident Chinese Eyes: Essays on Selfdetermination, Armonk and London: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 41–53. Shih, Chih-yu (2001) ‘Ethnicity as policy expedience: clan Confucianism in ethnic Tujia-Miao Yungshun’, Asian Ethnicity, II (1): 73–88. State Nationalities Affairs Commission (SNAC) Economics Ofﬁce and State Statistical Bureau (SSB) General Team for Investigating the Societies and Economies of the Peasant Villages (comp.) (1993) Zhongguo minzu tongji 1992 (Statistics of China’s Nationalities 1992), Beijing: China Statistical Press. Sun Jingxin et al. (comp.) (1994) Kua shiji de Zhongguo renkou, Xinjiang juan (The Population of China Towards the 21st Century: Xinjiang volume), Beijing: China Statistical Press. Taylor, Chris, Storey, Robert, Goncharoff, Nicko, Buckley, Michael, Lindenmayer, Clem and Samagalski, Alan (1996) China: a Lonely Planet Travel Survival Kit, Melbourne: Lonely Planet Publications, ﬁfth edition. Torode, Greg (2002) ‘Uygur activists not terrorists, says US’, South China Morning Post, 6 March, p. 7. Turner, Barry (ed.) (2000) The Statesman’s Yearbook: the Politics, Cultures and Economies of the World 2001, Houndmills, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan.

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US Department of State, Counterterrorism Ofﬁce (2002) Patterns of Global Terrorism 2001, Washington: US Department of State. Winchester, Michael (1997) ‘Beijing v Islam’, Asiaweek, 23 (42): 30–42. Yan, Hairong (2000) ‘The Tibet question and the conundrums of modernisation’, Asian Ethnicity, I (2): 156–64. Yan, Hao (2000) ‘Tibetan population in China: myths and facts re-examined’, Asian Ethnicity, I (1): 11–36. Yu Zhen and Guo Zhenglin (1999a) ‘Xizang Sichuan Gansu Zangqu shehui fazhan diaocha baogao’ (Report of a social survey in the Tibetan areas of Tibet, Sichuan and Gansu), in Yu Zhen and Guo Zhenglin (eds) Zhongguo Zangqu xiandaihua – lilun shijian zhengce (The Modernization of China’s Tibetan Regions: theory, practice, policy), Beijing: Central Nationalities University Press, pp. 35–100. –––– (1999b) ‘Zhongyang caizheng butie yu Xizang fazhan’ (Central ﬁnancial subsidies and Tibetan development), in Yu Zhen and Guo Zhenglin (eds) Zhongguo Zangqu xiandaihua – lilun shijian zhengce (The Modernization of China’s Tibetan Regions: theory, practice, policy), Beijing: Central Nationalities University Press, pp. 302–43.

9

China’s national identity A source of conﬂict between democracy and state nationalism Baogang He

Introduction China faces a number of pressing problems that concern national identity. At the heart of these problems is the contested issue of nationhood. Chinese authorities confront separatism and resistance to national reuniﬁcation. Sections of the national population do not identify with the Chinese nationstate in which they live, and endeavour to create their own political identity through reconstructing a distinctive cultural and ethnic identity. The Tibetan people and their efforts to rebuild Tibetan cultural and ethnic identity are one clear example. In Taiwan, where the people’s voices are expressed through an elected government, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government and some members of the Nationalist opposition Kuomintang (KMT) refuse Taiwan’s reuniﬁcation with the People’s Republic of China, which recognizes the island state as a renegade province that should be incorporated formally within the Chinese nation. Separatist communities like Tibetans and pro-independence Taiwanese feel disunity with China, even though both are ofﬁcially recognized by most national members of the international community as part of China. Nevertheless, the issues that most concern both groups are very different from each other and require different treatment. Tibet is a ‘state’ in exile without territory, while Taiwan has had its own state with a clearly deﬁned territorial boundary for more than 50 years. Tibet is governed by the PRC, while Taiwan is really only nominally part of the PRC. And while Tibet has a unique cultural identity, Taiwan’s cultural identity, despite reconstruction in recent years, has long been associated with Chinese cultures. Regardless of these differences, however, Beijing’s response to the two areas is the same. The Chinese leadership refuses to adopt a democratic approach, that would allow the people of Tibet and Taiwan to choose for themselves to be part of, or separate from, the Chinese nation. Chinese state nationalists ﬁrmly oppose democratization, which they see as a threat to China’s control of the territories and hence to national unity. The Chinese leadership, which is dominated by state nationalists, is thus reluctant to initiate large-scale democratization at the national level. It fears

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that people in territories where Chinese nationhood is contested will use a newly won democratic voice to gain independence from China. The breakup of the former USSR and the separation of East Timor from Indonesia have reinforced Beijing’s fears of, and resistance to, democracy. Meanwhile, China’s successful reunions with Hong Kong and Macau have strengthened Beijing’s belief that national power, not democracy, is the source of Chinese national unity. In contrast to nationalists, Chinese liberal dissidents such as Yan Jiaqi, Wei Jingsheng and Hu Ping call for democratic federalism to resolve questions over the sovereign status of Taiwan and Tibet. This view argues that through federalism, a grand-coalition government and genuine autonomy, China might be able to maintain its size and unity while becoming democratic.1 In this chapter, through empirical study of China’s modern history, I will explore why the Chinese leadership rejects the liberal dissidents’ view. I will consider how the historical effect of national identity has produced tensions between Chinese nationalism and the political will of Chinese leaders to undertake democratization. The leadership sees nationalism as essential to its top priority of maintaining national unity, and sees democratization as likely to break national unity. While this view prevails, the Party-State will cast democratization as antithetical to national unity and nationalism, and the tragic fate of democratization in China will continue.2 In the contemporary scholarly debate on China’s national identity, Rawski (1996) has detailed the historical legacy of the Qing period in the context of the gravity of the national-identity question that China faces today. Friedman (1994) also discussed the eclipse of anti-imperialist national identity and the formation of a southern identity based on Chu culture. Both examinations portray the pressing nature of China’s national identity as a long-standing issue. But neither relates the national identity issue to explicitly political concerns about democratization and the fate of political liberalism in China. I aim to address this epistemic gap, turning ﬁrst to Atul Kohil (1997) whose study of India argued convincingly that democracy can accommodate ethnic nationalism. Kohil recognizes that a precondition for democratization to proceed is the operation of a well-institutionalized central authority that sets ﬁrm national boundaries within which political movements operate. Systematic discussion of this precondition in the Chinese case helps us to understand the clash between Chinese nationalism and democratization. It also highlights the limits of political liberalism in addressing the nationalidentity question, not the limits of anti-liberalism as McCormick and Kelly (1994) have argued. Before proceeding with this discussion I wish to make clear that, in explaining the Chinese Party-State’s resistance to democracy, by no means am I seeking to justify the Party-State’s resistance actions. No matter how hostile and obstructive the Party-State is to democracy, some of the Chinese

172 Baogang He population demand democracy as their inherent right, and I acknowledge that this is a right that no intellectual theorizing can deny. I pursue my discussion through ﬁve sections. The ﬁrst offers a historical overview of China’s national-identity dilemma through elaborating on the controversial ‘empire thesis’ and providing a brief account of the various episodes in which Chinese nationalism has clashed with democratization on the issue of national identity. In the second, third and fourth sections I examine the clash between democratization and nationalism in contemporary China, looking successively at Hong Kong, Tibet and Taiwan. In the ﬁfth section I consider theoretically the tension between national identity and democratization, using the asymmetrical effect of democratization to help to explain why national identity provokes a clash between democratization and state nationalism in China.

The ‘empire thesis’ and China’s historical trajectory China’s national-identity problem can be understood only in a historical context. Rawski’s (1996) analysis offers a cogent explanation of how Qing history inﬂuences contemporary Chinese identity issues. Rawski explains how the territory of China today is a product of the Qing Empire through the long historical interactions between Inner and East Asia. The Qing dynasty was particularly successful in empire-building, incorporating China into an empire that spanned Inner and East Asia, and colonizing the region’s ethnic minorities. This dynasty made Xinjiang a province of the empire in 1884, but never made provinces of Mongolia, Qinghai and Tibet. Just after the Qing dynasty was overthrown in the 1911 Revolution, the Provisional Law of the Republic (1912) speciﬁcally identiﬁed Mongolia,3 Qinghai and Tibet as integral parts of the new Chinese nation. However, the earlier loyalty of these three territories to the Qing dynasty did not translate automatically into their loyalty to the Republic of China. The Mongols never considered themselves part of a Zhongguo (China) (Rawski 1996: 840) and, even today, the exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama claims that just as the Qing dynasty was not China, the relationship between Tibet and Manchu is not the relationship between Tibet and China (Xu 1999: 122–3). China’s suzerainty over Tibet was not modern sovereignty, and neither did Tibet’s autonomous status render it independent in sovereignty from China. As Bockman (1998) observed of China’s nation-building: . . . former barbarian buffers like Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet had to be either excluded or included. Faced with different imperialist designs, late Imperial, early Nationalist, and Communist leaders went for the second option: the vast ethnic regions of the former Empire were transformed into inalienable parts of the motherland. (Bockman 1998: 317)

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Thus, in the republican period from 1911, China struggled to retain all the Qing territories in the new Chinese republic. As with its predecessors, when the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, its communist leadership worked hard to retain the inherited Qing territories through consistent repression of independence movements in Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. In the process of modern nation-building, China successfully defeated the attempts by Tibet, Manchu and Uygur to establish independent statehood. China also successfully reclaimed sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997 and over Macau in 1999. Nevertheless, China still confronts secessionist movements in Tibet and Xinjiang, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) has coexisted with, rather than become part of, the People’s Republic of China since the PRC’s formation in 1949. Behind China’s response to the national-identity question is the thorny task of nation-building. Fitzgerald (1996) argues that China has a state but lacks a nation, which is still developing. For Bockman (1998: 332), China is still an empire-state and a new Chinese nation based on citizenship has not yet formed. Bockman even concludes that ‘the country is not a nationstate in the regular sense of the term, and . . . it probably never will be’. These two views indicate that as some see it, China is far from developing into a modern nation-state. Chinese people and their leaders have worked hard to build a modern nation-state for China alongside other nation-states. Reformers in the later Qing and the early Republic period (including inﬂuential intellectual Liang Qichao) as well as some current Chinese intellectuals, have proposed the notion of a pan-China. However, the two main processes in building the Chinese nation-state are in opposition to each other. One process involves retaining territories of the former Qing ‘empire’ while building a new modern nation-state. In such a move, super- or pannationalism employs visions of a broad political community that binds together the old empire’s different ethnic groups and nationalities to prevent disintegration of the nation. Liang Qichao invented the notion of a panChinese identity as a way to retain the restive Qing peripheries. As Rawski (1996: 841) pointed out, ‘Only a deﬁnition of the nation that transcends Han identity can thus legitimately lay claim to the peripheral regions inhabited by non-Han peoples, since these claims rest on the empires created by the Mongols and the Manchus’. To strengthen Chinese national identity in the contested regions, local identities have been reconstructed in terms of vertical hierarchy rather than vertical relations, to discover and defend the national signiﬁcance of the local identities (Finane 1994). The Party-State has also done its best to redeﬁne and homogenize Han Chinese images of national minorities as a way to gain more control over the Han majority (Gladney 1994). The other main process in building the Chinese nation-state moves from ‘empire’ to nations and often involves ethno-nationalism, which is said to lead inevitably to the proliferation of smaller and more ethnically

174 Baogang He homogeneous states. This brings us to the ‘empire thesis’. The core idea of the empire thesis is that China is the ‘last empire’, as all other empires such as the British, Ottoman and Russian have collapsed. The rise and persistence of ethnic nationalism and independence movements in the PRC are seen as evidence of the logic of the breakdown of the world’s ‘last empire’ into several nations. For a comparative insight, let us examine the empire thesis ﬁrst in other imperial contexts and then turn to the context of China. The Ottoman Empire was undermined by Western forces in the nineteenth century, and Turkey’s defeat in World War I settled Turkey’s territorial concerns. After the breakup of the empire, under the rule of Mustafa Kemal, a process of ‘Turkeynization’ was implemented to replace the old Ottoman identity with a new Turk identity for the new nation, Turkey. This process of building a new, post-imperial, national identity preceded democratization: elections were held in 1946 and the People’s Party was replaced by the Democratic Party in 1950 (Ahmad 1993). In the case of the Russian Empire, Wang Weimin and Yi Xiaohong (1996) have argued that the emergence of Russian ethnic nationalism played a decisive role in generating the centrifugal forces that tore apart the Soviet Union. Eisenstadt (cited in Harmstone 1997) argued that, given the centre–periphery relations in the former Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR), the collapse of the Soviet Empire was inevitable. Historically, a highly active Russian centre exercised centralized control over a politically passive periphery. However, during the Soviet period, the political centre mobilized the periphery, activating it socially and politically to such a degree that it changed the power balance between the centre and the periphery. The totalitarian regime maintained tight controls, forbidding the formation of autonomous subsystems but legitimating national cultures within a universalistic framework. Once the totalitarian controls weakened, the rise of ethno-nationalism through these national cultures sharpened ethnic tensions, leading to the breakdown of the Soviet Empire system (Harmstone 1997: 92). In China’s case, the process of evolving – or perhaps devolving – from ‘empire’ to a collection of nation-states challenges China’s territorial integrity. China’s ‘family union’ was achieved under the Qing empire. Since the 1949 take-over of the Chinese republic by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the Party-State has maintained this union through tight control over any efforts by ‘members of the family’ to separate or otherwise resist. This historical context pushes forward a question of immense importance to world politics, to millions of Chinese, particularly in restive provinces, and to the very being of the present Chinese nation as it builds towards great national power: will China break up as a modern state if it is democratized? Will this ‘family’ union that today comprises the Peoples’ Republic of China be broken by people in territories who will choose independent nationhood if they are given a democratic right to determine their own

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future. The lessons of the empire thesis indicate that ‘the empire’ will break up if those of separatist leaning are given a democratic voice to make this choice. There are different versions of the empire thesis. Victor Louis, a member of the Soviet’s KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) intelligence agency, presented his empire thesis as a rationale to justify a Soviet ‘war of liberation’ against the PRC in 1979. Louis outlined three key ideas of this thesis. First, the present Chinese leadership was continuing the traditional imperial expansionist line in laying claim to vast areas of the Soviet Far East, Siberia and Central Asia. Second, for several decades the people of the outlying regions of China, all along the Sino-Soviet border, had been waging an unrelenting struggle for their national selfdetermination and independence. Third, the solution, according to Louis, was to grant independence to the people of Manchuria, Mongolia, Eastern Turkestan and Tibet. For him, this was a just solution to the nationalidentity problem (in his terms, the ‘nationalities question’), and would largely remove the threat of Chinese expansion towards adjacent territories (Louis 1979: 186). Louis predicted that future developments would show how soon the national aspirations of the Manchu, Mongols, Uygurs and Tibetans could become reality (Louis 1979: 187). Taiwanese scholar Zhuang Wanshou has presented another version of the empire thesis. He argued that the inevitable breakup of the Chinese Empire will historically determine Taiwan’s independence movement (Shih Cheng-Feng 1994: 276–7). In similar vein, many who support independence for Tibet claim that Tibetan independence should be seen as a just and ineluctable outcome of this same historical trajectory.4 Those who hold this position claim that China annexed and colonized Tibet. Although China modernized Tibet with a ﬂow of central ﬁnancial and technological support, the colonization or de-colonization experience shows that rapid modernization always empowers indigenous people who will demand their autonomy and independence. On the other hand, if modernization fails, indigenous people tend to blame the failure on the colonizers’ policies. Modernization, whether successful or unsuccessful, thus works against colonizers. Viewing Tibet in this light, it is argued that, whatever Tibet has achieved, its ‘golden cage’ is still a cage and the best option for China is to pull out.5 Chinese nationalists certainly dislike the empire thesis. Most argue that Tibet is not a Chinese colony and that China did not colonize Tibet because Tibet was a part of China for several centuries. They also claim that Han immigrants bring their culture and create a cultural fusion in Tibet. This is consistent with the PRC government position and the rationale of its Tibet policies. Chinese history textbooks stress that all Chinese people have suffered from the Western imperial invasion and expansion during modern Chinese history; that all the Chinese people uniﬁed to struggle against

176 Baogang He Japanese imperialism and its invasion. Mao Zedong claimed that the selfdetermination of China’s nationalities was decided, once and for all, by their common revolutionary struggle and voluntary incorporation into the PRC (Smith 1990: 78). Consistent with this claim is the argument that the Qing Empire was broken up by 1919 and that therefore the empire thesis does not apply to contemporary China. Some who reject the empire history of China dispute the application of the ‘empire’ concept to contemporary China. Renowned historian Wang Gungwu elaborates this position well in claiming that ‘China’s concept of historical empire was unlike that of the Persians, Greeks or Romans (that of Asoka, Tamerlane or Babur), or, in modern times, that of the Ottomans, the British, the French or tsarist Russia. These were empires by conquest’. By contrast, ‘with the exception of the short Mongol period of 90 years, when China was itself part of the world empire of the Mongols, no armies marched out of traditional Middle Kingdom (Zhongguo) lands’ (Wang 1995: 55). For some Western leaders, commentators and others, and in particular for those who struggle for independence inside or outside China, the empire thesis still holds, despite differences between Western and Chinese empires.6 Thus, irrespective of the view articulated by the Chinese PartyState, China needs to face the national-identity question even if only because secessionist minorities think that China was an empire and those in the former Chinese tributary states claim their independence from China. Chinese governments have faced the national-identity question and advocated, but never put into practice, a democratic solution to this complex issue. In 1924, nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, who founded the Kuomintang Party on his ‘Three Principles’ of nationalism, democracy and socialism, addressed the national-identity problem in the manifesto of the First Chinese Nationalist Congress: The Kuomintang solemnly declares that the right of self-determination is recognized for all the nationalities inhabiting China; following the victory of the revolution over the imperialists and militarists there will be established a free and united (formed on the basis of a voluntary union of all nationalities) Chinese republic. (cited in Louis 1979: 114) The Kuomintang later completely abandoned this policy of self-determination, in theory and in practice. Sun Yat-sen had advocated a federal system that would curb the power of the central government and grant autonomy to the provinces and minority regions, but abandoned this idea when he witnessed the rise of regional militarists (geju). Radical Marxist Chen Duxiu took a similar turn. Chen, who had originally favoured selfgovernment and federalism, realized that the circumstances of feudalistic

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politics meant the self-governing movement was doomed to become a pawn in the game of the militarists. He concluded that if federalism was built upon the aspirations of regional militarists, it could never achieve national unity and strength (Duara 1990: 12). Around 1934–5, the national identity and unity issues again rose to prominence. This time Chinese intellectuals hotly debated ‘democracy v. dictatorship’. In rejecting ‘military uniﬁcation’, the scholar Hu Shi favoured ‘political uniﬁcation’, which involved establishing a national congress where people from different provinces would be invited to take part in national politics. This, he believed, would cultivate the centripetal force that would help to build a strong national identity (Cheng Yishen 1989: 88–91). In contrast, Jiang Tingfu and Chen Zhimai expressed their preference for an authoritarian leadership that could unify China by force. They asserted that the political reality of China was such that a few soldiers could close down the parliament. For them, even though a few representatives of localities were sent to central governmental organizations, those who did not favour uniﬁcation were not to be trusted, since they might use parliament for their own political purposes (Cheng Yishen 1989: Ch. 3). Here the problem of fostering national identity was intertwined with the problem of choosing a political system. For liberal intellectuals, democracy was seen as the best means to overcome local division and develop a national identity, while anti-liberal intellectuals saw dictatorship as the best option. In the end, rather than adopting the idea of democratic national identity and uniﬁcation, anti-communist KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek opted for an authoritarian one-party government to combat the warlords and Communists. The Chiang regime had an outward parliamentary form that made no attempt to achieve revolutionary translation of power to the masses. Moreover, when the Japanese army invaded and occupied northern China, most Chinese liberal intellectuals and democrats gave up the democratic enterprise and became nationalists in defence of China’s national unity. Initially, the Chinese Communist Party entertained the idea of selfdetermination. The Constitution of the Chinese Soviet Republic declared in November 1931: The Soviet government in China recognizes the right of selfdetermination of the national minorities in China; the Mongols, Moslems, Tibetans, Miao, Li, Koreans and others inhabiting the territory of China enjoy the complete right to self-determination, that is, they may either join, or secede from, the Federation of Chinese Soviets, or form their own state as they may prefer. (Central Data Library 1991: 775–6)7 Louis (1979: 115) explained that in 1945, Mao Zedong wrote in On a Coalition Government that the future People’s China would ‘grant nations

178 Baogang He the right to be their own masters and to voluntarily enter into an alliance with the Han people . . . All national minorities in China must create, along voluntary and democratic lines, a federation of democratic republics of China’. In the later edition of Mao’s Selected Works that passage had vanished, and the original words of ‘granting of the right to national self-determination to all national minorities’ were replaced by the phrase ‘the granting of the right to national autonomy to all national minorities’. In the early 1950s, the CCP also rejected Soviet-style federalism on the grounds that it would enable various nationalities of China to form separate states and thus allow the national autonomous regions to secede (Louis 1979: 116). Chinese leaders have therefore confronted continuously the twin problems of national identity and unity, and at times have advocated democratic as well as nationalist approaches to deal with them. Both the nationalist and communist parties adopted ideas about self-determination and federalism – elements of the democratic approach to managing the national-identity problem – but abandoned these ideas immediately after the parties became powerful. Democrats in the late Qing period and liberal-minded intellectuals in the 1930s advocated construction of a democratic nation-state, but this concept was not taken seriously and was not implemented. The winners in debates about national unity and self-determination were always the nationalists, authoritarians or centralists. This was because those who held power perceived that democracy would undermine the unity of China, as in the historical circumstance of the 1930s Japanese invasions. It appears, then, that fundamental statist traditions overrode considerable ideological differences between the nationalists and communists in their bids to achieve or maintain national unity. The historical overview above brings me to the core of this chapter’s central argument, which is as follows. Fighting over national territorial integrity is highly likely to alter the direction of democracy in China because, as a general rule, the course of democracy in China has been reined in by the leadership whenever the unity of China has been threatened. When there is territorial conﬂict, the drive for national unity is sure to subordinate the claims of the individual and the apparent popular will of a separatist territory. Liberal democracy will be shunted aside by a form of authoritarianism in which the diverse wills of the people are overridden by a leader who, in some prepossessing fashion, articulates the national ethos. Manifestations of nationalism in various parts of the world during the 1980s and 1990s triggered revival of the debate on democracy v. neoauthoritarianism in modern history. The national-identity question raises a difﬁcult issue for Chinese democrats in particular: how can China maintain national unity and reunify with Taiwan through the democratic process? In the next three sections I consider the impact of national identity on contemporary Chinese democratization in three contexts, Hong Kong, Tibet

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and Taiwan, analysing the tension between Chinese nationalism and democracy in each of these cases.

Democratization of Hong Kong denied8 The British colonial government ignored the absence of democracy in Hong Kong for most of its 100-year colonial rule. It was only the prospect of Hong Kong’s reversion to PRC sovereignty that prompted British authorities to take steps in the early 1980s to establish the institutions and public ethos in which democracy could begin to grow. Thus, the British administrators put in place the beginnings of the institutional democratization of Hong Kong in 1982 with direct elections for some district board seats, followed in 1985 by direct elections for 12 of the 56 members of the Legislative Council (Legco). During the events of June 1989 that became known as the Tiananmen incident, about 1,000,000 people in Hong Kong publicly demonstrated their support for Chinese students in Beijing. Soon after, the British colonial government attempted to introduce a bill of rights for the Hong Kong people, and a report by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee proposed that 50 per cent of Legco members be elected by citizenry in the 1991 election, with all Legco members to be directly elected by 1995. The 1991 election was won by the newly formed Hong Kong Democratic Alliance (HKDA), led by Li Zhuming. These were indications that democratization was progressing at both popular and institutional levels in Hong Kong. However, as negotiations for a smooth 1997 hand-over continued, Chinese authorities gave clear indications of their grievances about this development. In 1992 a dispute ensued between China and Britain when China refused to accept Governor Christopher Patten’s Democratic Plan. Beijing continued to resist Hong Kong’s democratization, recognizing this as a source of opposition to PRC rule and with potential to strengthen claims for Hong Kong’s independence. After the reversion of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China in July 1997, Beijing replaced the Legco with its own legislature to truncate the British moves to institutionalize democracy. Chinese state nationalists were also quick to denounce that democracy had contributed to the smooth reversion process. For them it was through political, military and economic power that China reclaimed this territory and expanded its national boundaries; had the people of Hong Kong been allowed a referendum to decide their political fate, this would have inspired separatist tendencies. Yet the fate of Hong Kong’s democracy has been shaped not only by rivalry between China and Britain as former colonizer, but also by the rise of Chinese nationalism, which supports a uniﬁed China under the Communist Party and rejects the notion of elected representative government. The Chinese authorities promoted the idea of pan-Chinese nationalism to help make reversion to the PRC palatable to the people of Hong Kong.

180 Baogang He Since Chinese authorities have considered democracy to work against both pan-Chinese nationalism and the consequent national unity that they strive to promote, democracy in Hong Kong is unlikely to take root and develop into an entrenched institution. Thus it can be said that the democratization of Hong Kong has been largely conditioned and constrained by the Chinese authorities.9

Nationalist management of the Tibet question The boundary problem between Tibet and China has a considerable and troubled history. With the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the Dalai Lama of the time declared independence from China. That the Dalai Lama’s idea of Greater Tibet claimed thousands of square kilometres of territory in the provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan. This territory has have been under Chinese administration and jurisdiction since 1949, and is regarded by Beijing as a serious challenge to China’s territorial integrity. For Chinese leaders, the radical Tibetan nationalists’ idea of Greater Tibet challenges more than China’s territorial integrity. It deﬁes the founding principle of the modern Chinese State, which closed off all territorial disputes. If the PRC government accepts their claim to Tibetan territory for the people of Tibet and allows Tibet to assume national independence, this would not only remove from Chinese control a vast chunk of the existing Chinese nation but would create a precedent for other separatist nationalities to break away. This is the antithesis of the national unity that remains paramount to Chinese authorities. The Chinese State adopted three main measures to deal with Tibet. First, it has used force to crush any rebellion in Tibet against Chinese rule and has used divide-and-rule tactics to control the Tibetan elite. This approach has, however, failed to neutralize the secessionist movement and has driven the secessionists underground. The movement is therefore likely to re-emerge if the State weakens its political and military control. The second measure has been efforts to ‘buy off’ secessionists with promises of wealth and provision of funding. For example, in recent years, the Chinese government has funded 50 development projects in Tibet, but these projects are explicitly or implicitly integrationist in design and it appears that economic ‘sweeteners’ cannot staunch secessionist aspirations. Neither can economic integration deﬂect the demand for political and cultural identity by Tibetans. In short, Tibetan secessionism is not a matter of economics, but of politics. The third measure is to accommodate secessionist claims by offering a kind of semi-autonomy coupled with an afﬁrmative-action policy towards minorities. The afﬁrmative-action policy seeks to prevent minorities from forming a privileged social group that may undermine the unity of the state. In the eyes of Chinese State nationalists, the best strategy for ruling Tibet effectively requires all three measures. Chinese State nationalists reject a

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democratic solution to the Tibet problem. They believe that democracy and human-rights discourses brought down the USSR. They argue that if there is no solution to the Tibet secession problem, there should be no democracy in Tibet even if democratization proceeds in other parts of China.10 The Chinese State’s fear of the disintegrating effects of democratization has resulted in the State’s continued resistance to implementing true autonomy in Tibet. The breakup of the Soviet Union and ‘peaceful evolution’ in Eastern Europe were alarming precedents for Chinese leaders who put their own self-defensive interpretations on these events. Chen Kuiyuan, Party secretary of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), explained the Chinese State’s tough policies towards Tibet by referring to international changes in the post-Cold War era: Especially under the inﬂuence of the international macro-environment, separatist activities have intensiﬁed in Tibet and the situation of the anti-separatist struggle has sharpened. These factors are causing political instability. (Karmel 1995–6: 494) China’s ofﬁcial press also claimed that the Dalai Lama’s supporters harboured ‘a hidden motive’: They want to take advantage of (turmoil) to split China. To be frank, they want to bring about another ‘Bosnia-Herzegovina’ in China! But China is not Yugoslavia. (cited in Karmel 1995–6: 494) The CCP has little faith in democracy. The Party’s monopoly on political power makes it difﬁcult for its leaders to accept a solution based on the devolution of power. The CCP also resists any type of federalism that would result in transfer of power from the centre to localities. Beijing thinks that the Hong Kong model of autonomy cannot be applied to Tibet because its purpose was speciﬁc to Hong Kong. That model was to re-unite Hong Kong with the Mainland. But Tibet is already under China’s control. In the eyes of Beijing, a ‘one country, one system’ relationship between the PRC and Tibet has already been in place for several decades, rendering the Hong Kong model’s ‘one country, two systems’ approach inapplicable to Tibet (Sautman and Lo 1995). In the case of the Indonesian government’s struggle to hold in the actively separatist province of Aceh,11 resource wealth gives this province political leverage vis-à-vis the central government, which has offered Aceh some concessions. Tibet does not have this leverage from natural wealth to bolster its bargaining power. And since Han Chinese dominate China’s government and society, Tibet loses out further through the ethnic minority status of its indigenous people.

182 Baogang He Thus the Chinese State has very limited compulsion to make concessions to Tibet. On the contrary, China’s current rise as a world power may incline the Chinese State to be even less willing than in past decades to accept a democratic solution based on compromise and power-sharing, let alone selfdetermination for Tibet, especially while some foreign powers such as the US favour this outcome. The self-righteousness of the Chinese State about its control of Tibet, the feelings that the State has cultivated among Chinese people – that China suffered under Western imperialism, and the State’s resoluteness that China will not be dominated by the preferences of foreign powers exclude any democratic thinking inside China on the Tibet issue. The CCP holds that no territory under Chinese sovereignty has the right to self-determination or to secession. Only the state has the right to deﬁne territorial boundaries in China, and it does so through diplomatic efforts rather than through democratic mechanisms, as is evident in the settlement of Hong Kong’s sovereignty reversion. Chinese leaders ﬁrmly believe that the State has the right to suppress any secessionist movements by whatever measures the leadership perceives to be necessary. The State’s argument against secession is grounded on communitarian (or collectivist) claims that are supported by state-sponsored nationalism. Individual consent has little relevance here and is, at best, a supplement to the power of the State. Furthermore, in the Confucian tradition, secessionists do not generate popular appeal if their claim is grounded on material considerations. Secessionist developments through the 1990s in the Baltic republics would be quite inconceivable in China. Chinese people would generally regard such breakaway moves as narrowly self-concerned, and, largely for this reason, secessionist groups in China can have great difﬁculty mobilizing citizens to struggle for their cause. Hence the disparity between rich and poor regions is most likely to be seen as an invalid motivation to support secession, and indeed as having the potential to undermine the unity of the State by changing the power balance between the centre and local regions. Recognizing this, Tibetan nationalists ground their cause in the issue of distinctive Tibet identity and culture, and do not push the issue of wealth disparity to win popular support inside China. Tibetan nationalists demand democracy because they believe it will support their cause. They argue that separating Tibet from China will not damage China’s integrity because China has no legitimate claim over Tibet in the ﬁrst place. Some Tibetan nationalists cherish the idea of a ‘Greater Tibet’ as one autonomous region that extends into three provinces in China, as articulated by the then Dalai Lama in a bid for territory after the 1911 revolution. This radical faction of Tibetan nationalism has been committed to a pan-Tibetan identity since 1959 and has remained on a collision course with Chinese nationalists over the sensitive internal boundary question. While neither the Tibetan nor the Chinese nationalists are willing to compromise, continued conﬂict is inevitable.

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By contrast, some more moderate, pro-integrationist Tibetans argue that Chinese nationalism has much to gain from democratization because it will serve to legitimize the Chinese State and make secession more difﬁcult. They maintain that as human-rights violations in China decrease, the moral force for secession will diminish; if Tibetan people enjoy freedom while under Chinese sovereignty, why would they continue to demand secession? If Tibetan people still want to secede even after democratization, this would be seen as little more than a political power struggle among Tibetans and would be unlikely to attract international support. Radical Tibetans argue that in this scenario the most favourable timing for Tibetan secession would be before democratization in China rather than after it.12

The Taiwan question In approaching the Taiwan question, Chinese nationalists appeal to Chinese culture, common traditions and history that Taiwan and the PRC share, in order to legitimize the PRC’s claims over the territories of Taiwan. Chinese nationalists assert it is undeniable that Taiwan was historically a province of China under Qing rule and that therefore Taiwan should be incorporated back into Chinese sovereignty. As PRC Department of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Tang Guoqiang claimed, ‘No matter what kind of election is to be held in Taiwan, no matter what the outcome of any election, it cannot change the fact that Taiwan is a part of China and a province of China’ (China Times 4 December 1997, p. 9). Beijing considers a democratic solution to the Taiwan issue infeasible and undesirable. For example, in 1999 Vice-Prime Minister Qian Qichen claimed it illegitimate, fruitless and pointless to declare Taiwan’s independence through a referendum (Renmin ribao [overseas edition], 29 January 1999, p. 1).13 In the view of Chinese central authorities, if a referendum on sovereignty were held in Taiwan, the result would swing against uniﬁcation with Mainland, since Taiwanese nationalism and a democratic spirit have already developed. For Chinese nationalists, democracy or anything else over which they have control will never compromise the ‘One China’ policy. They see the uniﬁcation of Mainland China and Taiwan as primary in building a strong nation-state. The rationale is that ‘Taiwan was an inalienable part of China, thus any self-determination process that might result in a permanent separation was totally unacceptable’ (Chiou 1986: 480). For leadership in Beijing, the One China policy presupposes both the membership of China’s sovereign community and the precedence of Chinese national identity over democratic enterprise. For Chinese nationalists, in disputes over what constitutes ‘the people’, Chinese nationalism provides the preponderant answer. Chinese nationalism is a guiding principle for uniﬁcation

184 Baogang He that overrides the ideological competition between socialism and the ‘three principles of the people’ (Zhao 1988: 54–5). By contrast, the people of democratizing Taiwan increasingly recognize the importance of popular voice, civil society, public opinion and referendums in settling the Taiwan question. As institutionalizing moves, the Promoting Referendum Foundation was established in July 1990, and the Association for Promoting Referendum was established in November 1991. Yet opinion on resolving the Taiwan question is clearly divided, even within the main political parties. For example, some members of the ruling DPP advocate establishing an independent state of Taiwan as determined through a referendum. After the DPP suffered a setback in the 1998 election, many Party members urged the Party to drop from its Party platform phrases such as ‘establishment of a Republic of Taiwan’ and ‘determined by referendum’, but this was rejected in early 1999 (Lu 1999a: 2). On the other hand, former DPP chairperson Hsu Hsin-liang described prospects for a plebiscite on the future of Taiwan as a ‘frightening’ scenario that would ‘bring disaster’ to Taiwan (Baum 1999: 28). Both the KMT and the New Party opposed a referendum on independence on the grounds that voting could stir up disputes over national status, erode social cohesion, invite China’s intervention and threaten the status quo (Lu 1999b: 1). On 24 May 1999, the Ministry of the Interior of the ROC (Republic of China) approved a draft of the initiative and referendum law. This law enables the public to vote on local issues and national policy matters. It excludes any vote on national territory and sovereignty, and on changes to the name and ﬂag of Taiwan, power over which continues to reside with the National Assembly (Lu 1999c: 2). On the other hand, the democratization now under way in Taiwan makes it difﬁcult for a party or government to promise not to become independent because such a promise cannot be made against the will of the people. Because of democratization in Taiwan, any signiﬁcant change with regard to the national-identity question cannot take place without the rulers consulting the people. As Tien Hungmao (1990: 190) remarked, ‘Democratization helps open up the debate over legitimacy of the ROC identity, deﬁned by the KMT ruling elite but increasingly challenged by the advocates of an independent Republic of Taiwan.’ Just as the diplomatic negotiation model used for reversion of Hong Kong sovereignty cannot be applied to Tibet, neither can it be applied to Taiwan. Taiwan is not subject to a treaty of colonization with a speciﬁc validity period, and on which its status is negotiable with a colonial power. De facto, Taiwan acts as an independent actor in international affairs. Yet international diplomacy alone cannot decide Taiwan’s status. By comparison, because it lacks democratic legitimacy, the PRC leadership, to a large degree, depends on its solution to the Taiwan issue prevailing, in order to maintain its hold on the national leadership. As Wang Gungwu (1996: 2) points out:

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The theme of reuniﬁcation is at the heart of the restoration of nationalism. Restoration is not only an essential part of the structure of legitimacy, the supremacy of continental interests. It is also the best defence against other threats to the sanctity of China’s borders. The tense developments of 1995–6 in cross-Strait relations testify to the emotional force that this view of its destiny can still generate. China’s authoritarian state not only refuses to resolve Taiwan’s nationalidentity question through democratic procedure, but also refuses to rule out the use of force. Thus, Beijing insists on military options as a preventive measure against Taiwanese independence; it will not use force to conquer Taiwan, but will use force to prevent Taiwan from gaining independence. According to the PRC’s White Paper released on 21 February 2000, China will use force against Taiwan under three circumstances: 1 2 3

a Taiwanese declaration of independence; foreign intervention in Taiwan; and if Taiwan indeﬁnitely refuses peaceful reuniﬁcation through negotiations.

Liu Huaqing, Vice-chair of the Central Military Commission, stated ﬁrmly that if Taiwan moves towards independence, China will use force to defend its sovereignty (Zheng Ming 1994: 24).14 Beijing believes that only military force can deter an independence movement in Taiwan. To use a Machiavellian explanation, Beijing does not need to please the ‘enemy’ by renouncing the use of force. For Beijing, force is a necessary resort. Moreover, the politics of Chinese national identity operate within the framework of nationalism, where as Chen (1996: 1059) claims ‘Any leader who is perceived as soft on this issue [Taiwan] and fails to protect Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity would be regarded as another Li Hongzhang and discarded by the people’.15 In fact, as CCP leader and China’s president, Jiang Zemin was accused of adopting a soft policy on Taiwan and, in 1994, others in the CCP leadership demanded that he take a tough stance. Containing Taiwan’s independence remains a major task for Chinese nationalism, since no one in the leadership dares to even suggest that Taiwan be given the right to self-determination. Chinese leaders believe they could not retain their hold on power as individuals and as a Party if they failed to prevent Taiwan from achieving independence. With this imperative, China’s political actors are therefore likely to adopt more extreme policies to combat Taiwan’s independence movement as the movement gains momentum in Taiwan. Two other factors deepen understanding of the conﬂict between Mainland China and Taiwan. First, both sides are concerned with identifying the agents dealing with the Taiwan question, i.e. who is to decide the answer.

186 Baogang He The PRC side recognizes only the right of the state to deal with the Taiwan question, which PRC authorities cast as a problem of national identity. Yet, for democratizing Taiwan, the state cannot be the exclusive arbiter. The statist solution to the Taiwan question clashes with the belief held by some members of the ruling DPP that referendums should decide the question of Taiwan’s sovereignty. A key issue here is not so much the CCP’s aversion to democratic development in Taiwan, but the nature of political regimes, how they gain legitimacy, and how they maintain legitimacy to support their hold on power. Second, the conﬂict between the two sides is also revealed in the difference with attitudes towards democracy in respect to the Taiwan question. Chinese nationalists support national unity with consequent commitment to Taiwan’s uniﬁcation with PRC. For the PRC politicians, this uniﬁcation is a fundamental goal of the Chinese nation, while democracy is merely a means. Chinese nationalists have an instrumental view of democracy determined by the national uniﬁcation goal: if democracy can promote uniﬁcation, then they might introduce it; if democracy cannot do this, then they will reject it. Beijing’s talk about uniﬁcation without mentioning democracy indicates that, in the Beijing view, democracy is incompatible with, or is not needed to achieve, uniﬁcation. While Beijing realizes that, in effect, the logic of democratization favours Taiwan’s independence, Beijing will push for uniﬁcation with Taiwan at the cost of democracy. In Taiwan, however, the DPP’s talk about both independence and democracy indicates that in the eyes of Taiwanese nationalists, who seek to establish a republic of Taiwan, democracy is both compatible with, and can help to achieve, independence. The DPP therefore intends to declare or maintain de facto independence through democratization and referenda. No wonder that diplomat Li Jiaquan warns that Taiwan should not use public opinion or democratization to pursue its independence cause (Renmin ribao [overseas edition] 23 March 1996).

Theoretical propositions From the above discussion of historical and contemporary developments in Chinese nationhood and nationalism, we can draw some important theoretical propositions about democratization and national unity in China. Here I discuss three, although I note the possibility of many other theoretical observations. The ﬁrst proposition is as follows: if a state confronts the question of national identity, then it will have difﬁculty building a modern nation-state and in particular, resolving the national-identity problem through democratic means.16 The basic concerns for China in building a modern nation-state are these. What is the most effective and normatively persuasive way to deﬁne State boundaries? Are the sources of legitimacy for

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the territories of the nation-state historical or democratic? Which is the most appropriate form for the State: unitary or federal? What is the social base of the nation: Han Chinese or all Chinese citizens living in the PRC, irrespective of their ethnicity? To conﬂate these questions, can freedom and democratization settle China’s national-identity dilemma in favour of China’s national unity? The answer to the last question is no. China’s mix of socio-historical circumstances makes democratization difﬁcult and unappealing to the leadership. Democracy needs a civic culture in which it can develop and be sustained, but this culture is largely absent in China. A centralized power structure, the idea of national cohesion and unity, and a long tradition of appointment from above to powerful positions characterize China’s traditional culture. This underlay makes it very difﬁcult for a civic culture to take root in China and for adopting a federalist approach to deal with the national-identity question. Moreover, the logic of democratization will undermine the starting position of Chinese authorities that China’s territory is already ﬁxed and is immutable. Democratization empowers minorities and ethno-nationalism, which may break up the unity of the old ‘empire’. Democratization gives rise to the immediate and divisive question of: who are ‘we’, ‘the people’? In addition, democratization presents a huge challenge to the present political entity, the CCP, and the unitary form of its national administration. Democratization opens a window on the possibility of a federal political system for China in the future – a prospect that is both promising and dangerous. Democratization challenges those who wield power in an authoritarian system. In particular, democracy challenges the image that the CCP projects of itself as a unifying force that maintains China’s territorial integrity – the equation in which the CCP = Chinese Nation = Chinese State. The second theoretical proposition here is: if democratization is regarded as an independent variable, and the national-identity question as a dependent variable, the impact of democratization on secession and uniﬁcation is most likely to be asymmetrical, favouring the former (He 2002). In the context of global trends towards independence or secession and the marginalizing of uniﬁcation, democratization serves more to facilitate independence than it does to encourage uniﬁcation.17 Recognizing the likely asymmetrical effect deepens understanding of why Chinese authorities do not favour democratization as a way to resolve the nation’s nationalidentity question. Empirically, democratization is associated with far more political divorces than marriages. Among the 47 new member states in the United Nations since 1974, 26 won independence while their ‘parent states’ were democratizing. By comparison, among those states that have successfully achieved reuniﬁcation since 1974, such as Vietnam, Germany, Yemen and China–Hong Kong, only the uniﬁcation of the two Germanys and the two

188 Baogang He Yemens was related to democratization. China’s reuniﬁcation with Hong Kong and Macau was through diplomatic negotiation on expiry of colonial treaties with Britain and Portugal respectively, while the reuniﬁcation of Vietnam was achieved through war, following the surrender of the southern government to the North in April 1975. In the case of East Germany, it could be argued that democratization broke down the communist state, which facilitated German reuniﬁcation. Indeed, experiences of democratization in Eastern Europe served as examples that inﬂuenced the uniﬁcation of the Yemens, by pushing the Marxist government of the former People’s Democratic Republic towards democratization and reuniﬁcation. However, the merger of the former Yemen Arab Republic and the Marxist People’s Democratic Republic took place in 1990 prior to the national election in 1993, and this sequence of events should not lead us to overestimate the role of democratization in promoting uniﬁcation in Yemen.18 In the case of Taiwan, democratization has resulted in virtually abandoning the project of reuniﬁcation with China and, thus, in a de facto independence for Taiwan. Much of the difﬁculty in establishing democracy in China is historically embedded. China’s democratization challenges the territorial basis of the Qing Empire, just as the project of China’s nation-building and maintenance continually confronts this historical legacy. And so I derive the third theoretical proposition: when the empire thesis is combined with the structural argument that democratization does not favour reuniﬁcation, the national-identity problem works against introducing democracy in China. In other words, where promoting nationalism is at the hands of an ‘empire’ that aims to hold on to its territories as part of the ‘imperial’ nation, political leaders are likely to disavow democracy, as in China at present.19 In these circumstances, democracy is seen as instrumental in breaking down the empire system because it enables multi-ethnic groups or nationalities to register their individual and collective voices for independence. There are more tensions between nationalism and democracy in the process of building a nation-state when three basic conditions are present: a history of empire, a multinational state, and large and territorially concentrated ethnic minorities, all of which are present in the case of China. Another important factor is how democratization relates to the opposing sides’ perceptions of the nature of the national-identity question. For instance, there are more tensions between nationalism and democracy in the case of the PRC’s uniﬁcation with Taiwan than there are in the case of Taiwan’s independence, because the prospect of democratization in the PRC produces uncertainty about the desired reuniﬁcation, while Taiwan’s democratization has assisted its independence cause. In this context it is difﬁcult to be both a democrat and a patriot in the PRC. The liberal and democratic camp appears to be fundamentally opposed to Chinese nationalism, and so is unpopular with the nationalist camp. It is therefore difﬁcult today for PRC democrats to overcome the

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tensions between democracy and nationalism, and some contemporary PRC liberals face a dilemma in their attitude towards the US. While they favour the apparent democratic style of political institutions in the US, they oppose US government policies favouring self-determination for Tibet and Taiwan. If these liberals do not exhibit an anti-American stance by opposing self-determination for Tibet and Taiwan, they are likely to be criticized by their Chinese compatriots as ‘traitors’. In particular, if PRC democrats do not support reuniﬁcation with Taiwan, Chinese nationalists claim that this position is inconsistent with a call to introduce democracy in China. Today, Chinese liberals or democrats feel they cannot speak out about a democratic solution to the national-identity question since they will be treated as ‘traitors’. Thus, they leave the matter to Chinese nationalists. The political space for Chinese liberals or democrats has narrowed as they attempt to address the national-identity problem. The problem has such tremendous import in Chinese political life that the fate of Chinese political liberals is predetermined by this issue. Their fate is bleak since the authorities recognize the liberalist ideology as unlikely to produce a solution to the national-identity question that the leadership ﬁnds acceptable.20 In the politics of national identity, political liberals are doomed to failure. They cannot openly challenge Chinese nationalists, and must present as a ‘sort of’ nationalist if they want to contribute publicly on the national-identity question. By highlighting the tensions between nationalism and democracy in China, this chapter illustrates the tragic fate of Chinese democracy. This tragedy, concerning the transition from ‘empire’ to nation-state, has been played out throughout China’s history. As ethno-nationalism has threatened to break up the ‘empire’, pan-Chinese nationalists have attempted to maintain imperial territory at the cost of democracy. For Chinese State nationalists to be patriotic they feel that they must support the continued rule of the CCP, which embodies an authoritarian state. This is a major problem for contemporary China and, if this problem cannot be resolved, democracy will be unable to ﬂourish. This is the crucial connection between democracy and the question of national identity, and between democracy and the existence of the Chinese nation-state. Democratization threatens the very existence of the Chinese nation-state. As noted above, the clash between pan-Chinese nationalism and democracy derives from China’s unique position as a multinational country with a historical legacy of empire. Pan-Chinese nationalists are driven to defend their nation – even at the cost of democratization, if democratization threatens to break up or reduce the extent of present-day China. The logical tension between nationalism and democracy can thus be seen as a ‘historical accident’. It is ‘an accident’ in the sense that the historical circumstance of each country is highly contingent. Taiwan is now a semi-independent state and can easily win full independence without having to worry about disintegration of its boundaries,

190 Baogang He at least through internal forces. China, like the former Soviet Union, has a historical burden as an empire, and its state was formed through wars. It is therefore very difﬁcult for Chinese authorities to reconstruct a new nation in accordance with democratic procedure. China’s special context and circumstances do not favour the adoption of democratic procedure to settle the national-identity question by any Chinese nationalists. Chinese nationalists’ commitment to the historical principle, that China as a nation is entitled to claim its territories on historical grounds, is understandable. Their commitment has contributed to the tension between nationalism and democracy in China. An analysis of the centrality of the national-identity problem and its impact on Chinese democratization demonstrates the reasons why nationalism has prevailed and democratization has been delayed in China. The prediction that rapid democratization would follow in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s death has not been realized. On the contrary, post-Deng Xiaoping China has witnessed the very slow progress of democratization. This is mostly because, fearful of repeating the Soviet experience, Chinese leaders have delayed full-scale democratization to enhance the strength of the nation’s identity and avoid the potential threat of national breakup. Initiating democratization in China requires not only the breakup of the CCP’s monopoly on power, it also needs the national-identity issue to be addressed. If democratization is seen to threaten the unity of China, then history may repeat itself, so that democracy is sacriﬁced in what Chinese authorities see as the higher interest of saving the existing nation-state. We can say, therefore, that state nationalism and democracy are in an intrinsic state of constant tension and contradiction. This inherent tension creates an ominous prospect for democratization in China.

Concluding remarks The 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States have strengthened Chinese sensitivity about national security and national unity. Articles published in the high-proﬁle journal Zhanlue yu guanli (Strategy and Management) before and after 11 September show the strength of Chinese concern with national interests and unity. Tang Shiping, a scholar from the Institute of Asia-Paciﬁc in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, dismissed as ‘empty talk’ the argument that China should be more responsible with its growing power, and offered justiﬁcation for the legitimate ‘selﬁshness’ of the Chinese nation-state (Zhang and Austin 2001). Tang (2001) regards the obstacle to China’s reuniﬁcation with Taiwan as stemming from the United States, since the majority of American elites assume that China’s reuniﬁcation with Taiwan will threaten America’s domination of East Asia. Based on this realist assessment of the Taiwan question, Tang advocates that China develop its naval power in order to solve the Taiwan question.

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Zhang Wenmu, a scholar in China’s Institute of Contemporary International Relations, concurs with Tang Shiping’s assertion that the rise of China as a great power depends on the development of its naval capabilities. Zhang Wenmu (2002) contends that the Taiwan question is essentially about China’s naval right to access the sea. He argues that peace across the Strait will come only from Chinese power and might, not from words or goodwill. Zhang Wenmu also puts forward a strong statist argument for non-secession of Tibet. He argues that when all the nationalities joined the Chinese nation-state, they transferred their right to self-determination to the Chinese state and so have no right to withdraw from China’s union. For Zhang, America’s promotion of democracy in China is designed both to divide China and to weaken Chinese competitive ability. The Party-State has now taken advantage of the national-identity question and appropriated the issue as a part of what might be called its ‘crisis management programme’. Chinese leaders appear to propagate the idea that democracy threatens the unity of China and undermines the pan-Chinese national-identity project. State nationalists disseminate the view that promotion of democracy by the US is a conspiracy aimed at China’s disintegration. Leaders aim to convince the people of China that their nation faces the possibility of breakup and that democratization would be the destructive lever. The leadership peddles its invented equation that the CCP = China, and that if the CCP collapses, then China will break up. This idea has penetrated the minds of many Chinese people who think that the CCP is the only organization capable of maintaining the unity of the Chinese nation. The Chinese Party-State seems to depend on such an argument as a basis of its legitimacy and thus constructs anti-democratization within the basis of its power, whatever other reasons the Party-State may actually have for forestalling democratization.

Notes 1 This option cannot be ruled out. China’s history of unity and capacity to recover and rebuild a strong state are remarkable in world history and will help China to maintain the unity of the Chinese modern state. China is different from the former Soviet Union in the ethnic composition of its population, since the Han constitute 92 per cent. Moreover, Chinese leaders are uniﬁed in their approach to dealing with the national identity question. Importantly, Chinese authorities have learned a great deal from the collapse of the Soviet Union and will do their utmost to avoid a similar fate. 2 Shaohua Hu (2000) put forward historical legacies, local forces, the world system, socialist values and economic development to explain China’s difﬁculty in establishing democracy. Some other observers may point more directly to the threat that democratization presents to the Chinese leadership’s hold on power, another strong motivating force for the Party-State to hold back democratization of the Chinese nation.

192 Baogang He 3 The northern part of Mongolia (Outer Mongolia) achieved autonomy in the wake of the 1911 revolution. In 1921, Outer Mongolia was transformed into the Mongolian People’s Republic. 4 See website: http://www.tibet.com/Status/icj-es.html; and website http://www. tibeticlt.org/reports/occupied.html. 5 Such a view was presented several times, for example, at the International Workshop on Autonomy and Self-determination, Heritage Village, New Delhi, India, 10–12 November 1999, and at the Asian Confederation Workshop, organized by the European Academy of Bolzano, Italy, 24–26 August 2000, both of which I attended. 6 See website: http://www.tibet.com/Status/icj-es.html; and website: http://www. tibeticlt.org/reports/occupied.html. 7 In the translation of this constitution by Louis (1979: 114–15), he stresses ‘their (national minorities) right to complete separation from China, and to the formation of an independent state for each national minority’. 8 Numerous scholars have explored this issue, including Cheek-Milby and Mushkats (1989), Cheng (1989), Davis (1989), Ghai (1991), Kuan (1991), Lam (1993), Lau and Louie (1993), Lo (1990), Scott (1989), So and Kwitko (1990), and Tsang (1988). 9 Some observers, such as Alvin So (2000), challenge this view. 10 The author attended a debate on this issue at the Eleventh European Association for Chinese Studies Conference on China and the Outer World, 4–7 September 1996, in Barcelona. While some Chinese scholars advocated delaying democratization in China as well as in Tibet to deal ﬁrst with the national boundary problem, Western scholars such as Brian Hook contended that such an approach is likely to delay democracy in China indeﬁnitely. In contrast, one Russian scholar suggested communism as the best medicine for national integration. 11 As with the Chinese state’s deep fears about the precedent value of a Tibetan breakaway from China, the Indonesian government is bound by similar fears of national disintegration should Aceh’s independence struggle succeed. One former province, East Timor, won national independence in 1999. 12 This discussion has beneﬁted from the author’s conversations with Professor Samdhong Rinpoche, Speaker of the Tibetan Parliament in Exile and Director of the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies. The conversations were held in Hobart, Australia, in April 1998. 13 An article by a research fellow in the Institute of Taiwan Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Zhang Fengshan (1999), offers a systematic critique of the use of a referendum to resolve the Taiwan question. 14 For a discussion of the conditions under which China will use force, see Lin (1996). 15 Li Hongzhang was a diplomat who was regarded as ‘selling Chinese territories to foreigners’ in the Qing period. 16 It should be noted that the national identity question makes it difﬁcult, but not impossible, for democratization to take place. Elsewhere I have argued strongly that the national identity question has not prevented democratization from occurring in many countries. See Baogang He (2001). 17 I make a conceptual distinction between the maintenance of existing national unity and the reuniﬁcation of different sections, states, countries and societies into one political community, and focus on the latter. It should be acknowledged that democratization programmes have contributed to the unity of nation-states in the Philippines, Spain and other countries. 18 In 1981, a Yemen Council that embraced the two chief councils, and a Joint Ministerial Council, were established, promising to submit a draft constitution for a uniﬁed Yemeni Republic to referendums in the two states. However these

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referendums were not held and the constitution was ratiﬁed by the respective parliaments in 1990 (Banks et al. 1997: 942–4). 19 We have to acknowledge that Chinese nationalists will not venture to openly reject the principle of democracy in this age where nationalism is linked to the modern idea of ‘the people’. The people – the mass of ordinary human beings – are believed to have a sense of their own worth and of their rights. For political mobilization, Chinese nationalist leaders, from Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zeming have used, at least rhetorically, some form of democracy to speak in the name of the people. The naming of the nation provides similar testament: The People’s Republic of China. 20 Nevertheless, the ideology of economic liberalism dominates in a market economy, and so is compatible with the disposition of Chinese nationalists who want to build a great China based on national economic strength.

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194 Baogang He Ghai, Yash (1991) ‘The past and future of Hong Kong’s constitution’, China Quarterly, 128: 794–813. Gladney, Dru C. (1994) ‘Representing nationality in China: reﬁguring majority– minority identities’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 53 (1): 92–123. Harmstone, Teresa-Rakowska (1997) ‘Soviet nationalities and Perestroika’, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, 24 (1–2): 92. He, Baogang (2001) ‘The national identity problem and democratization: Rustow’s theory of sequence’, Government and Opposition: International Journal of Comparative Politics (London), 36 (1): 97–119. –––– (2002) ‘Democratization and the national identity question in East Asia’, in Yue-man Yeung (ed.) New Challenges for Development and Modernization: Hong Kong and the Asia-Paciﬁc region in the new millennium, Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, pp. 245–73. Hu Shaohua (2000) Explaining Chinese Democratization, Westport, Connecticut: Praeger. Karmel, Solomon (1995–6) ‘Ethnic tension and the struggle for order: China’s policies in Tibet’, Paciﬁc Affairs, 68 (4): 485–608. Kohil, Atul (1997) ‘Can democracies accommodate ethnic nationalism? Rise and decline of self-determination movements in India’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 56 (2): 325–44. Kuan Hsin-chi (1991) ‘Power dependence and democratic transition: the case of Hong Kong’, China Quarterly, 128: 774–93. Lam, Jermain T.M. (1993) ‘Chris Patten’s constitutional reform package: implications for Hong Kong’s political transition’, Issues and Studies, 29 (7): 55–72. Lau Siu-kai and Louie Kin-sheun (eds) (1993) Hong Kong Tried Democracy: the 1991 election in Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Institute of Asian Paciﬁc Studies, No. 15. Lin Gang (1996) ‘The conditions, consequences and prevention of conﬂicts between Mainland China and Taiwan’, Modern China Studies, 2: 93–7. Lo Shui-Ling (1990) ‘Democratization in Hong Kong: reasons, phases and limits’, Issues and Studies, 26 (5): 100–17. Louis, Victor (1979) The Coming Decline of the Chinese Empire, New York: Times Books. Lu, Myra (1999a) ‘DPP opts not to revise wording of platform’, The Free China Journal, 16 (2): 2. –––– (1999b) ‘Legislature again shelves DPP’s bill on plebiscites’, The Free China Journal, 16 (16): 1. –––– (1999c) ‘Interior Ministry approves draft of Referendum Law’, The Free China Journal, 16 (21): 2. McCormick, Barett L. and Kelly, David (1994) ‘The limits of anti-liberalism’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 53 (3): 804–31. Rawski, Evelyn S. (1996) ‘Presidential address: reenvisioning the Qing: the signiﬁcance of the Qing period in Chinese history’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 55 (4): 829–50. Renmin ribao (People’s Daily) (1996) [overseas edition], 23 March, p. 1. Renmin ribao (People’s Daily) (1999) [overseas edition], 29 January, p. 1. Sautman, Barry and Lo, Shiu-hing (1995) The Tibet Question and the Hong Kong Experience, Occasional Papers/Reprints Series in Contemporary Asian Studies, No. 2, School of Law, University of Maryland.

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Scott, Ian (1989) Political Change and the Crisis of Legitimacy in Hong Kong, London: Hurst. Shih Cheng-Feng (ed.) (1994) Taiwan Nationalism, Taipei: Qianfeng. Smith, Warren W. (1990) ‘China’s Tibetan Dilemma’, The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, 14 (1): 77–86. So, Alvin Y. (2000) ‘Hong Kong’s problematic democratic transition: power dependency or business hegemony?’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 59 (2): 359–81. So, Alvin Y. and Kwitko, L. (1990) ‘The new middle class and the democratic movement in Hong Kong’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 20: 384–98. Tang Shiping (2001) Lixiang anquan huanjing yu xin shiji Zhongguo da zhanlue? (Re-examining China’s grand strategy), Zhanlue yu guanli (Strategy and Management), 4: 29–37. Tien Hungmao (1994) ‘Toward peaceful resolution of Mainland–Taiwan conﬂicts: the promise of democratization’, in E. Friedman (ed.) The Politics of Democratization: Generalizing East Asian Experiences, Boulder, Colarado: Westview Press. Tsang, Steve Y.S. (1988) Democracy Shelved: Great Britain, China, and Attempts at Constitutional Reform in Hong Kong, 1945–1952, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Wang Gungwu (1995) The Chinese Way: China’s Position in International Relations, Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. –––– (1996) ‘The revival of Chinese nationalism’, Lecture Series 6, International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden. Wang Weimin and Yi Xiaohong (1996) ‘Minzu yishi: lijie qiansulian minzu wenti de guanjian’ (National consciousness: understanding the crux of the national problem of the former Soviet Union), Shanxi shida xuebao (Shanxi Normal University Studies Journal), 4: 17–21. Xu Mingxu (1999) Intrigues and Devoutness: the Origin and Development of the Tibet Riots, Canada: Mirror Books. Zhang, Fengshan (1999) ‘On Taiwan’s independence referendum’, Taiwan Studies, 2: 14–21. Zhang Wenmu (2002) ‘Quanqiuhua jincheng zhong de Zhongguo guojia liyi’ (China’s national interests in the process of globalization), Zhanlue yu guanli, Strategy and Management, 1: 52–64. Zhang Yongjin and Austin, Greg (eds) (2001) Power and Responsibility in Chinese Foreign Policy, Australian National University, Canberra: Asia Paciﬁc Press. Zhao Quansheng (1988) ‘ Liangan tongyimoshi yu duoyuan zhengzhi’ (A proposed model of uniﬁcation and plural politics), Zhongguo luntan (China Forum), 26 (5): 54–5. Zheng Ming (Contention) (1994), September, Hong Kong.

10 Reaching out to Taiwan, keeping in Xinjiang The impact of marketization and globalization on national integration Leong H. Liew

Introduction Globalization and the PRC government’s policy of marketization1 are sources of truly profound change across China. This chapter explores the impact of these forces of change with respect to national integration, and then considers the policy response of the PRC government as it seeks to manage these forces to reinforce and recover the full extent of what it recognizes as the PRC’s national sovereignty. I explore two speciﬁc cases of contested territory, one whose population and socio-cultural identities are mostly very similar to the Han culture dominant in Mainland China (Taiwan), and the other whose population and socio-cultural identities comprise a rich ethnic mix in which Han is not dominant (Xinjiang). I consider how the economic integration that the forces of globalization and marketization induce promotes national integration with the PRC in the case of prosperous Taiwan, and promotes separation from the PRC – and gradual re-integration within the adjacent Central Asian region – in the case of the indigent northwestern province of Xinjiang. I argue that globalization and the government’s policy of marketization provide means through which the Mainland Chinese state ‘reaches out’ to Taiwan, and reason for Taiwan to reach towards the PRC as Taiwan people seek to maximize economic gain in integrating markets. For Xinjiang, however, marketization provides means through which the Chinese State struggles to ‘keep in’ a restive province that is ever more reaching out from the PRC, as forces of globalization both propel growing sectors of Xinjiang’s economy and society closer to Central Asia and advance ethnic rather than national identiﬁcation. In both cases we see how factor endowment, geo-strategic location, and ethnicity are the key factors shaping these apparently antithetical inﬂuences of marketization and globalization on Chinese nationhood. Central to my argument is the complex concept of nation; its existence is assumed in this discussion of national integration. ‘Nation’ has been

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explored rigorously by numerous scholars.2 For this discussion I deﬁne a nation simply as a community of people who have the same legal rights and obligations in a demarcated territory that is exclusive to members of that community and is recognized as such both inside and outside the territory, and who share a ‘imagined identity’ on that basis. Seymour casts national integration as ‘the manner and degree in which parts of a social [economic and political] system (its individuals, groups and organs) interact with and complement each other’. As Seymour explains the importance of integration in maintaining a nation, ‘the more differentiation and specialization that occur, the more integration is required’ (Seymour 1976: 6). The nation differs from the State, which, as Smith explains, is the set of autonomous public institutions that enjoys a monopoly of coercion and extraction within a nation. A state thus exists within a nation, which is a ‘social, territorial and political union’ (Smith 1991: 146). The PRC government recognizes Taiwan as a renegade province and Xinjiang as a province torn by separatist elements. Taiwan and the PRC have different political systems and their territories are separated by sea. Yet Taiwanese culture, which is very much Han at its core, is very similar to the Han culture that is dominant in the PRC.3 If we accept that culture is linked inextricably with social life, Taiwan’s reuniﬁcation with the PRC is more a question of territorial and political than social union. Unlike Taiwan – in some ways the reverse – Xinjiang is within PRC national territory and the PRC’s political system, but Xinjiang has a cultural mix somewhat dissimilar from the Han culture dominant elsewhere in the PRC. Hence Xinjiang’s fuller integration within the PRC is more an issue of social integration than territorial or political integration. In this chapter I argue that globalization is more likely to promote territorial and political union between Taiwan and the PRC than to promote the social integration of Xinjiang with the PRC. Political liberalization in the PRC and the PRC’s growing economic integration with Taiwan are drawing the PRC and Taiwan closer together. However, these forces appear to have the reverse effect between the PRC and Xinjiang. By creating economic inequalities that have been met with inappropriate state responses, marketization in Xinjiang is exacerbating tensions between the province’s strong ethnic minorities and its Han population. Furthermore, marketization and globalization promote closer economic integration not only between Xinjiang and other provinces of China, but also between ethnic minorities in Xinjiang and their brethren across the border in Central Asia. These developments are reviving cross-border feelings of shared ethnic identity, which are inimical to China’s national integration.

PRC–Taiwan economic integration Marketization as the key plank of PRC economic policy helps to eliminate one of the major obstacles to PRC–Taiwan reuniﬁcation by promoting

198 Leong H. Liew political liberalization in the PRC. This is a political outcome of marketization, to be achieved over the long term. But marketization also lubricates this reuniﬁcation in the short term through economic linkages derived from increasingly interdependent markets across the Taiwan Strait. It is useful, then, to consider here the consequences for national integration and reuniﬁcation with Taiwan from the economic outcomes of marketization in the PRC. Marketization in the PRC promotes the PRC’s increasing participation in the world economy including Taiwan. Indeed, the complementary nature of the PRC and Taiwan economies, their geographical proximity and shared cultural contexts are likely to accelerate the economic integration that marketization in the PRC is already promoting. Part of this intregration is through push from Taiwan to the Mainland. Around 25 per cent of Taiwan’s exports and 40 per cent of Taiwan’s overseas investment ﬂowed to Mainland China by the end of the 1990s. I have argued in my analysis of Taiwan–PRC economic relations (Liew 2000) that any attempt by the Taiwanese leadership to seriously limit Taiwan’s economic dependence on the PRC is likely to fail. From the late 1980s, the leadership in Taipei has pushed a policy of ‘go south’ (to Southeast Asia) to counter the decision of many Taiwanese ﬁrms to ‘go west’ (to the Mainland). In 1997 the Taipei leadership imposed restrictions to limit the value of each Taiwanese project on the Mainland to no more than US$50 million and disallowed investments in PRC state-owned corporations (Hong 2000: 374). But Taiwanese investors are able to circumvent these restrictions easily, and the imperatives of global competition coupled with the attractiveness of the Mainland’s low production costs are driving Taiwanese ﬁrms to do so.4 We see this clearly in the experience of one of Taiwan’s leading industrialists, Wang Yung-ching, whom Taiwanese authorities on several occasions prevented from making large investments on the Mainland. But these numerous blockages have not prevented Wang’s son, Winston, from partnering with Jiang Mianheng, son of former PRC president and Party General-Secretary Jiang Zemin, in a US$1.6 billion semiconductor project in Shanghai (Kazer 2000). Yet it is not simply the outward push from Taiwan; the inward pull from the Mainland also lubricates this westward cross-Strait ﬂow. First, entry of the PRC into the World Trade Organization (WTO) has increased competitive pressure on Taiwan. Taiwanese manufacturers and multinational ﬁrms in Taiwan are facing up to the need to follow their many multinational competitors that have already relocated to Mainland China for lower production costs, in order to remain competitive. The major Japanese corporations NEC and Toshiba are among the electronics giants that are relocating production facilities from Taiwan to the Mainland (Reuters 2002b, 2002c). Second, the potential size of the Mainland market since the PRC’s entry into the WTO is particularly attractive to most outside producers. The China Semiconductor Industry Association estimated that

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China would become the world’s second biggest semiconductor market by 2010 (Reuters 2002a). The lure of the Mainland’s huge market and the push of Taiwan’s cost pressures have led Taiwanese businesses to lobby the Taiwanese government to lift trade and investment restrictions against the Mainland. The Taiwanese government also faces pressure from US businesses. US computer giant Dell Computers, the largest customer of Taiwan’s laptop computer producers, was reported to have pressured Taiwan ofﬁcials to establish direct trade and transport links with the Mainland (CSRC 2002: Ch. 5). Closer economic integration between Taiwan and the Mainland is inevitable. One industry where the developments are already clear is information technology (IT). Meritt Todd Cooke of the American Institute in Taiwan, appearing before the US Congress China Security Review Commission (CSRC), testiﬁed that Taiwanese companies generated 70 per cent of Mainland China’s US$25.5 billion IT production in 2001, and that, by 2002, 90 per cent of Taiwan’s 411 high-technology companies would have investments in the Mainland. For the ﬁrst time in 2000, Mainland China moved into third place ahead of Taiwan in world IT production after the US and Japan (CSRC 2002: Ch. 5). Stan Shih, chairperson of Taiwan’s top personal computer manufacturer Acer, criticized the Taiwan government’s prohibitions on high-technology investment on the Mainland, claiming that increased investment on the Mainland is required if Taiwanese companies are to strengthen their global competitiveness. Shih claimed that Acer’s continued expansion on the Mainland is inevitable (Reuters 2001). Complaints by Shih and other business people produced some notable results. Partly as a result of business lobbying and partly because of the difﬁculty of enforcement, in 2001 the Taiwanese government eased restrictions on IT investments on the Mainland (Luh 2002). In November 2001, it lifted both a 50-year ban on direct trade and investment across the Taiwan Strait and the US$50 million investment limit on individual projects on the Mainland (Yau and Reuters 2001). In the following March, Taiwanese premier Yu Shyi-kun announced that Taiwanese semiconductor companies could invest in manufacturing 200 mm (8-inch) wafers on the Mainland (Engbarth 2002). Taiwanese and Mainland companies are also cooperating in the strategically important energy industry. Chinese Petroleum Corporation (Taiwan) and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (PRC) are cooperating in a US$25 million joint venture to conduct oil and gas exploration in the Taiwan Strait, and Taiwan Power Company has signed one-year contracts to purchase 1.2 million tonnes of Mainland coal (CSRC 2002: Ch. 5). Taiwanese banks are also following in the footsteps of IT and energy companies, with two of Taiwan’s top three commercial banks, the Hua Nan Bank and the First Commercial Bank, setting up representative ofﬁces on the Mainland (Chan 2001). And in 2002, drought-affected Matsu bought water from the Mainland (Reuters 2002d).

200 Leong H. Liew Taiwan President, Chen Shuibian, favours resuming direct trade, transport and postal links with the PRC because he believes that normalizing bilateral trade relations is an essential preliminary step towards normalizing cross-Strait relations. Moreover, these bans are easily circumvented and serve no purpose except to increase transaction costs for Taiwanese businesses. Taiwanese shippers are particularly keen for direct links across the Taiwan Strait to be re-established, regardless of Taiwanese membership of the WTO. The resumption of direct transport links will give them a share of the transport trade between Taiwan and the Mainland that currently passes through Hong Kong, and will provide them with the opportunity to compete for the business of transporting exports from the Mainland. A Chinese international shipping company, COSCO, is in several joint ventures with the Taiwanese shipping company Evergreen, and has business links with another Taiwanese shipping company Yangming, which has KMT connections (Stratfor 2000). Civil aviation on both sides of the Strait will also beneﬁt from resumption of direct links. On 5 September 2001, China Eastern Airlines (CEA) and Taiwan’s China Airlines (CA) signed a deal for CA to take a 25 per cent stake in CEA’s China Cargo Airlines (CCA) (Lo 2001). The deal gives CEA a global partner that will assist its cargo business and provide CA with potential access to the Mainland passenger market (Reuters 2000a). In an earlier study (Liew 2000), I speculated that increased economic integration between the two economies would produce economic lobby groups on both sides of the Taiwan Strait that have an interest in peaceful resolution of the ‘Taiwan question’. I argued that economic integration would induce greater interest in national integration through creating shared political and strategic interests as well as closer social, cultural and directly human ties. In 2002 there is already growing evidence to suggest that this speculation is correct. The human links that economic ﬂows have generated from Taiwan to the Mainland are already considerable. More than 200,000 Taiwan business people live in the PRC, including former military ofﬁcers and many other retired government ofﬁcials. Best known among them is Pan Hsihsien, a retired major general and chief of personnel at the National Security Bureau, Taiwan’s top intelligence agency, before he moved into his new job as vice-president in a Taiwanese electronics ﬁrm in Shenzhen (Baum 2000: 22). Cross-Strait trade in cultural goods, made easy by satellite television and PRC’s fast-expanding entertainment press, has blossomed. Four of the bestknown Taiwanese actors in this cultural trade are members of Taiwan’s F4 band, which has a large following on the Mainland. According to one media report, an estimated 10,000 of their Mainland fans, mostly young teenage girls, queued for up to 15 hours to see the band at a Shanghai shopping

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centre (BBC 2002). When communities share a common language and cultural heritage, trade in cultural goods more than any other forms of trade can bring communities closer together.

Marketization and globalization in Xinjiang Ethnic minority areas of the PRC have beneﬁted economically from the marketization and globalization of the PRC economy, as has the rest of the PRC. However, the beneﬁts have not been shared equally across the Mainland. Marketization and globalization have led to growing inequalities between and within geographical regions. Markets tend to reward production factors according to their economic contribution, and ownership of stocks, and productivity of production factors vary considerably across countries, domestic regions and population. Table 10.1 shows the comparative economic performance in the ﬁrst 20 years of economic reform for the PRC nationally, ﬁve autonomous nationalminority regions in the PRC that have provincial status, and the most economically successful province, Guangdong. While the standard of living of Guangdong has leaped way ahead of the national average, the standard of living of the ﬁve national-minority provinces has remained behind the national average, and for three of these provinces – Tibet, Ningxia and Neimenggu – has fallen further behind. Tibet and Ningxia, in particular, have performed badly in relative terms. In 1978, Tibet’s per capita GDP was 98.9 per cent of the national average, but by 1998 it had fallen to 58.4 per cent. Ningxia’s per capita GDP was a respectable 97.6 per cent of the national average in 1978 but by 1998 had dropped to 66.8 per cent. These national-minority provinces have managed to achieve respectable economic growth rates since 1978, but have fallen relatively further behind economic growth in the rest of the nation because of their poorer resource endowment and geographical locations that markets penalize. Xinjiang appears to be an economic success story and an exception to the economic performance of most hinterland provinces. Its GDP and per capita GDP growth between 1978 and 1998 were above the national averages, with per capita GDP increasing from 82.6 per cent to 97.4 per cent of the national average over this period. One might expect that this economic success would contribute positively to the closer integration of Xinjiang into the PRC. However, closer examination of these data indicating Xinjiang’s recent GDP growth casts doubts on this positive evaluation. When Xinjiang’s GDP ﬁgures are broken down into expenditure components, we see not only that economic growth in this province through the 1990s is driven primarily by investment, but that state units were responsible for most of this investment – more so than for investments nationally and for almost all other provinces (see Table 10.2). In 1998, state units’ share of investment in ﬁxed assets was 81.3 per

202 Leong H. Liew Table 10.1 National and provincial GDP (1978 and 1998) National Guang- Tibet dong GDP (100 million yuan) 1978 3,624.1 185.9 1998 79,395.7 7,919.1 GDP per capita (yuan) 1978 379 369 1998 6,392 1,1143 Share of national GDP (%) 1978 100.0 1998 100.0

6.7 91.2 375 3,736

Xinjiang 39.1 1,116.7 313 6,229

Ningxia NeiGuangxi menggu 13.0 227.5 370 4,270

58.0 75.9 1,192.3 1,903.0 317 5,069

225 4,076

5.1 10.0

0.2 0.1

1.1 1.4

0.4 0.3

1.6 1.5

2.1 2.4

Ratio of provincial per capita GDP over national per capita GDP (%) 1978 100.0 97.4 1998 100.0 174.3

98.9 58.4

82.6 97.4

97.6 66.8

83.6 79.3

59.4 63.8

Average annual GDP growth 9.7 (78–98)a

14.0

8.8

10.6

8.6

b

b

Average annual per capita GDP growth (78–98)a

12.0

6.9

8.6

6.3

b

b

8.3

Source: NBS (1999) and author’s calculations. Notes: ‘National’ means Mainland China, excluding Hong Kong. a Author’s calculations from NBS data. b Not reported because the calculations (which are based on real GDP and real GDP per capita indices data) give inconsistent results.

cent in Xinjiang5 and the 1996 and 1997 shares are similar. This means that at least 60 per cent or higher of Xinjiang’s GDP was attributable to government ﬁnal consumption and investment by state units, compared to about 33 per cent nationally. Xinjiang’s GDP is more dependent on government consumption and investment even than Tibet.6 Xinjiang is a poor, net-importing province. It is highly dependent on state ﬁscal subsidies and loans, although less so than Tibet. This is indicated in Table 10.3, which displays the sectoral compositions of the current account identity of Xinjiang, Tibet and Guangdong. The identity states that (T – G) + (S – I) = (X – M) + R, where: (T – G) = provincial government revenue – provincial government expenditure, (S – I) = non-provincial government saving – non-provincial government investment, (X – M) = net exports (domestic and overseas), and R = central ﬁscal transfers.

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Table 10.2 National and provincial compositions of GDP (%) Net exportsa

GDP

Household Government Investment consumption consumption

National 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998

100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

45.5 45.1 46.1 47.1 46.5 46.2

13.0 12.7 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.9

43.5 40.9 40.8 39.3 38.0 38.1

–2.0 1.3 1.7 2.1 3.8 3.8

Xinjiang 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998

100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

45.2 41.7 45.3 46.4 44.3 44.1

14.3 14.0 15.0 17.1 16.7 16.6

70.4 72.4 68.0 52.7 53.8 61.4

–29.9 –28.1 –28.3 –16.2 –14.8 –22.1

Tibet 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998

100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

48.9 54.9 40.4 46.7 45.2 41.6

13.8 15.2 12.9 14.2 15.3 16.3

37.3 49.3 46.7 40.9 39.7 39.1

0.0 –19.4 –0.1 –1.8 –0.2 3.1b

Guangdong 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998

100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

42.3 44.5 45.1 44.5 43.4 42.1

10.8 9.6 10.5 11.0 12.8 13.2

45.2 43.9 41.5 41.7 37.4 38.5

1.7 2.0 2.8 2.7 6.4 6.2

Source: Author’s calculations using data in NBS (1999). Notes: a Aggregate exports (overseas exports and exports to the rest of Mainland China) less aggregate imports (from overseas and rest of Mainland China). b This ﬁgure is likely to be incorrect (see Note 6).

Guangdong, in contrast to Xinjiang and Tibet, is a net-exporting province and, as Table 10.3 shows, makes a signiﬁcant contribution to national saving, even though its provincial government receives net positive ﬁscal transfers from the centre. Xinjiang’s high level of dependency on the state for economic growth is foremost a result of the continuing dominance of state units in the local economy’s ownership structure. In 1998, 66.1 per cent of gross industrial output was produced by state-owned industrial enterprises in Xinjiang,

204 Leong H. Liew Table 10.3 Current account identity 1998 % GDP

Local revenue – local expenditure (T – G)

Net transfers (R)

Saving – investment (S – I)

Net exports (X – M)

Xinjiang Tibet Guangdong

–7.2 –45.5 –2.3

7.0 45.8 2.1

–7.8 94.3 10.7

–22.1 3.1 6.2

Sources: Author’s calculations using data in NBS (1999) and table 11.2 of Wang (this volume).

compared to 10.5 per cent in Guangdong and 28.8 per cent in Guangxi, the other national-minority province that has improved its relative economic position (NSB 1999: 603, 629, 879). But this by itself is an inadequate explanation because Tibet’s economy is just as dependent on state production as Xinjiang is: in 1998 Tibet’s state-owned units produced 65.5 per cent of the province’s industrial output in 1998 (NSB 1999: 757). The reason for Xinjiang’s extraordinary dependence on the state sector is found not on the production side but on the demand side. Instead of production by state-owned units, it is the investment demand by stateowned units that explains this dependence. This demand is explained by the large state investments in the oil and gas industries and cotton production. They are part of the large state infrastructure projects that aim to promote Han migration to Xinjiang to integrate the Han and non-Han areas within Xinjiang, in order to integrate Xinjiang with the rest of the PRC. A large part of the state investments in Xinjiang is channelled through the Xinjiang New Construction Corporation (Xinjiang xinjian gongsi), better known by its former name, Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) (Xinjiang shengchan jianshe bingtuan). This is a centrally funded paramilitary-cum-production unit directly responsible to the State Council, which has been used traditionally to promote Han migration into Xinjiang. XPCC’s share of Xinjiang’s economy declined from 30.7 per cent in 1965 to 13.4 per cent in 1993. But, since then, according to Seymour and Anderson (1998: 105), the Corporation’s share has risen to between 20 and 25 per cent in 1995. Becquelin (2000: 78) calculates that it was responsible for 14 per cent of Xinjiang’s GDP in 1997. The estimates of Seymour and Anderson seem slightly too high, but are nevertheless consistent in pointing to expansion of the role of the XPCC in Xinjiang’s economy in the mid-1990s after a period of decline. This is also consistent with the discussion above regarding the instrumental role of state investment in Xinjiang’s economic growth, in comparison to its role in the economic growth of almost all other national-minority provinces. These data shed light on how unambiguously the central government’s political motivations help to explain the extraordinary contribution of state investment to Xinjiang’s GDP. The national leadership sees large-scale

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state investment as a multipurpose tool for managing separatist leanings of the province’s strong ethnic population. The investment serves ﬁrst to temper and control separatist tendencies in Xinjiang and second to narrow the massive economic gap between the poor west and the prosperous south and eastern coastal regions, a gap that inﬂames these separatist tendencies. In Premier Zhu Rongji’s 2000 government report he outlined plans to develop western China, focusing on the development of highways, railways and telecommunications. This, he reported, was aimed at strengthening the unity of nationalities (jiaqiang minzu tuanjie), maintaining social stability (weihu shehui wending) and consolidating national borders (gonggu bianfang) (RMRB 2000: 2). Here the political intent of carefully targeted state investment to achieve more cohesive nationhood was made quite clear. On his inspection tour of the region in the same year, Zhu was even more explicit, calling for the creation of a ‘rock-hard’ stronghold in Xinjiang to thwart separatists (Reuters 2000b). However, in attempting to control separatist movements in Xinjiang through massive state investment into the region, Beijing is contributing to the separatist problem through an inappropriate choice of investments. Beijing has selected two industries to be the black (hei) (oil) and white (bai) (cotton) pillars (zhizhu) for developing Xinjiang, through exploiting the province’s natural resources (Dai 1999: 102). According to Dai, Xinjiang is one of the PRC’s ﬁve largest oilﬁeld bases and the PRC’s largest cotton producer. In 1998, Xinjiang ranked third in the PRC in production of crude oil and natural gas,7 producing 10.1 per cent and 10.2 per cent of the nation’s output, and ranked ﬁrst in production of cotton, with 22.4 per cent of the nation’s output (GTJ 1999: 392, 442). Using ofﬁcial data from the national statistical yearbook (GTJ: 1999), I have calculated that crude oil and natural gas contributed about 10.8 per cent to Xinjiang’s GDP in 1998.8 However, contribution to GDP is only one of the multiple considerations important to PRC leaders in their Xinjiang policy. Another particularly pressing imperative is creation of jobs for the Han immigrants from elsewhere in PRC, whose in-bound migration the government encourages to dilute the strong ethnic component of the province’s population that is increasingly inclined to separatism.9 Since oil and gas production are capital-intensive activities, they are less effective for the central government’s job-creation mission than labour-intensive cotton production. Cotton production is especially targeted to generate jobs for incoming Han immigrants because it uses labour-intensive technology. Cotton production in Xinjiang increased 25.5 times between 1978 and 1998, when about 40 per cent of Xinjiang’s cotton was produced on farms managed by the XPCC (Becquelin 2000: 78). Thus, politics rather than economics are responsible for the impressive growth of cotton production in Xinjiang. Yet cotton production in Xinjiang is riven with tensions. First, the politics and economics of cotton production are in ever-deeper conﬂict with

206 Leong H. Liew each other. While political interests propel cotton production for job creation for immigrant Han people in line with the central government’s national-integration imperative, economic interests seek to curb this production, which is increasingly unproﬁtable. Xinjiang’s cotton is competitive against other domestic suppliers in price and quality, but is not competitive against overseas imports (Du 2000: 251) and so is being hit particularly hard by the PRC’s entry into the WTO. A study by China’s Academy of Social Sciences, forecasting developments in the cotton industry after the PRC entered the WTO, projected a nationwide 12.6 per cent fall in production, with a corresponding decline in employment of 22.6 per cent (Li et al. 2000: 75). Meanwhile, the state was holding 4 million tonnes of cotton in a stockpile after a partial collapse in demand by the textile industry in the late 1990s (Pomfret 2000). Second, Xinjiang’s cotton industry faces a conﬂict between national and provincial policies. While the central government in Beijing uses its cotton policy in Xinjiang to combat separatism and promote national integration, the provincial government in Xinjiang uses Beijing’s cotton policy as on opportunity to increase revenue for the province. Financial subsidies from the centre are granted to Xinjiang to open up more lands for immigrant Han labour for cotton production. Land reclamation is a ﬁxed cost and variable production subsidies on top of the market price have to be given to households to encourage production levels above what would be induced by the market. But the Xinjiang government often pays households a procurement price that is lower than the market price as a means of generating additional revenue for the province. Subsidies available to households, like low-price fertilizers, are insufﬁcient compensation for what is effectively a marginal tax by the Xinjiang government on cotton production. In the face of this disincentive to producers, it is not surprising that Becquelin (2000: 82) reported that the Xinjiang government enforces a cotton production quota on households to ensure high production levels. Third, and with ecological and political consequences for both the province and the nation, Xinjiang is environmentally not suited to cotton production. The crucial factor here is water, which is likely to be the deciding factor in halting Xinjiang’s cotton production. Cotton production requires vast amounts of water that Xinjiang, in the nation’s very dry northwest, does not have. Worsening water pollution, greater demand, and unequal geographical distribution make water an increasingly scarce and precious resource nationwide, and therefore increasingly contentious. Nowhere is this felt more acutely than in Xinjiang, whose average precipitation is about one-ninth of the southeast’s level (Economy 1999). Becquelin (2000: 84) detailed how competition between agricultural projects in Xinjiang has led to desertiﬁcation, since irrigating a new project upstream cuts off the ﬂow of water downstream. By the late 1990s, desertiﬁcation afﬂicted 53 of Xinjiang’s 87 districts. And worsening the environmental impact of cotton production is the excessive use of fertilizer

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and pesticides that government subsidies encourage. Fertilizers pollute groundwater and rivers, causing other biological imbalances, and while pesticides have eradicated some pests, they have caused other pests to ﬂourish (Zheng and Qian 1998: 219–20). Fourth is the inevitable tension within the Xinjiang population. The central government’s cotton policy is highly unpopular among the Uygurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, who deeply resent the dilution of the minority population in Xinjiang, which this policy seeks to support. Competition for water and other resources between the ethnic population and Han immigrants is worsening social relations between these people. So too is competition for jobs in the state sector, as ethnic and Han workers compete for the remaining jobs in reformed state-owned enterprises and state bureaucracies. Like the ‘white’ cotton pillar, the ‘black’ oil pillar of the central government’s strategy for Xinjiang is also far from successful in promoting national integration. But the similarities go no further. The oil industry is proﬁt-making and exists largely because of market economics. Using capital-intensive technology, this industry generates few jobs, which are largely for skilled labour and so exclude the predominantly low-skilled ethnic minorities. Ethnic minorities generally resent Han immigrants taking an unfair proportion of the oil jobs, since the remuneration and status of these jobs are higher than for most other employment in the province. But without the government-promoted cotton and oil industries, what alternatives does Xinjiang have for surviving economically in a market economy? This province has neither the factor endowments, nor the favourable location that would enable it to ﬂourish in a market economy in the absence of state intervention. Light manufacturing using labourintensive technology could soak up the abundant supply of low-skilled labour in Xinjiang. However, Xinjiang is far from the coast and Guangdong, through which most of the PRC’s light industrial goods are exported, and the necessary transport infrastructure for linking Xinjiang to the south and the coast is poor. Xinjiang is not attractive to overseas Chinese investments, partly because it lacks the family connections and familiar language that help to lower business transaction costs and make Fujian and Guangdong the favourite destinations of many overseas Chinese investors. Rising production costs in the south and along the coast are driving many factories inland, but largely because of the poor transport infrastructure and distance, the northwest continues to be unattractive to most producers of exportoriented light manufacturing goods. The one type of enterprise that has been attracted to Xinjiang is the ‘dirty industries’. Local ofﬁcials, eager for outside investments and with very few options, are allowing these enterprises to relocate to Xinjiang from the prosperous eastern regions with little regulation. In a survey of 936 such enterprises in August 2000, 404 (43 per cent) failed to meet national environmental standards (AFP 2000). The beneﬁts that these enterprises

208 Leong H. Liew bring to Xinjiang through employment opportunities are negated by their detrimental effect on the environment, including ill health of the population and the adverse effect of water pollution on agriculture. Since indigenous agriculture will suffer some of this adverse effect, relocation of ‘dirty industries’ to Xinjiang is also likely to inﬂame ethnic tensions if allowed to continue without stringent environmental safeguards. Nevertheless, imposing strict environmental safeguards will make Xinjiang no longer attractive for enterprises attempting to evade environmental safeguards and will leave Xinjiang with even fewer avenues for accessing the purported rewards of marketization.

Prospects of integrating Taiwan and Xinjiang in the PRC As discussed earlier in this chapter, the effects of globalization and PRC’s marketization help to draw PRC and Taiwan into ever-closer economic links that lead towards increasing economic interdependence. Coupled with the political liberalization in Mainland China that has begun to accompany economic liberalization, these forces enhance the prospects of Taiwan’s integration in PRC. Taiwan enjoys a large surplus in its trade with the PRC and is a signiﬁcant source of capital and technology for the PRC’s labour-intensive export sector. Taiwan’s former labour-intensive companies are able to retain their competitiveness by relocating to the PRC, and its high-technology industries beneﬁt from exporting their capital-intensive products to the PRC. Thus, PRC–Taiwan economic relations have a direct positive impact on the livelihood of populations on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. These relations create jobs for both the abundant low-skilled labour in the PRC and the relatively higher skilled labour in Taiwan, as well as repatriated proﬁts for Taiwan and economic spin-offs for the Mainland. Relocating from Taiwan the labour-intensive industries and relatively low-technology operations of high-technology industries causes problems for unskilled and semi-skilled labour in Taiwan. However, the historical experiences of Western industrialized countries suggest that the problems are temporary while Taiwanese industry is restructured. Moreover, Taiwanese companies will shift their labour-intensive and relatively low-technology operations to other low labour-cost countries if they are unable to shift them to the Mainland. PRC–Taiwan economic relations therefore have a positive effect on the future prospect of reuniﬁcation between the PRC and Taiwan. The data in Table 10.4 compare Xinjiang with the most economically successful province in the south, Guangdong. We see from these data that, unlike Guangdong, Xinjiang does not run a trade deﬁcit with the rest of the PRC in order to export abroad. Guangdong runs a trade deﬁcit with other PRC provinces because it produces goods mostly for overseas export, using raw materials imported from these provinces. Xinjiang’s trade deﬁcit with the rest of the PRC, on the other hand, is driven largely by state invest-

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Table 10.4 Domestic, foreign and border trade, Xinjiang and Guangdong

Xinjiang Guangdong

Net domestic exports (100 million yuan)a

Net foreign exports (100 million yuan)b

Net border trade (100 million yuan)

Share of border trade to total foreign (100 million trade (%)

–253.29 –1,283.12

6.92 1,774.87

– 9.73

56.8

Sources: Author’s calculations using data in NBS (1999), GTJ (1999: 499) and XTJ (1999: 591). Notes: a Exports to the rest of Mainland China less imports from the rest of Mainland China. b Overseas exports less overseas imports.

ment in Xinjiang and not by overseas exports. Xinjiang’s trade is mainly one-way, importing much but exporting little domestically and internationally. This mainly one-way trade contributes little to the PRC’s foreign exchange earnings, and as a signiﬁcant net importer of capital from the rest of the PRC, Xinjiang is clearly limited in its economic integration with the rest of the PRC. This situation may change in the future if, as the state expects, more oil and gas is discovered in Xinjiang and exported to other provinces. In July 2002, a consortium of two Chinese companies – PetroChina and China Petroleum Corporation – and Royal Dutch Shell signed an agreement to build a 4,200 km pipeline to bring gas from Xinjiang to Shanghai. The pipeline is part of a US$6 billion-gas supply project that will involve future collaboration between these companies in upstream, midstream and downstream operations (Chan 2002). Besides producing oil and natural gas, Xinjiang is also a natural transit point for the import of energy into the PRC. PRC is a net importer of energy and its oil and gas reserves are recognized as insufﬁcient to meet potential demand. Although transporting oil from coastal ports inland is the least costly strategy for the PRC, the vulnerability of its ports and shipping lanes to blockades in the event of an international crisis has led it to secure longterm oil supplies from Central Asia’s vast petroleum reserves (AndrewsSpeed and Vinogradov 2000: 393). In 1997, the PRC won a bid to explore two of Kazakhstan’s richest oilﬁelds. Part of the deal included building a 3,000 km pipeline from Kazakhstan to northeast China (Tang 2000: 365, 367), which will pass through Xinjiang. Thus, potentially, the major export of Xinjiang to other parts of the PRC will be oil and gas and energy-related services. However, even if oil and gas exports cause Xinjiang’s domestic trade to be more balanced than it is now, the direct beneﬁt to its ethnic minority population will be small. As mentioned earlier, oil (and gas) is a capital-intensive and skilled-labour-intensive industry, which will at best employ a relatively small portion of the ethnic population who are largely

210 Leong H. Liew low skilled. How much the ethnic population will beneﬁt economically from the oil developments will depend on the extent and nature of secondary effects: the level of local economic activity that the oil industry can generate in Xinjiang. Trade between Xinjiang with other parts of China will be dominated potentially by oil and gas. The human element in oil and gas trade is low in contrast to the human element in everyday trade in services and consumer goods. Although there are various grades of oil and gas, these resources are largely homogeneous in nature and traded among large corporations at prices that are widely known. On the other hand, services and consumer goods, even of the same kind, are heterogeneous and their prices are not widely known. Thus, for questions like: what is fashionable?; who offers the best quality and price?; and which transport company is the most reliable?, business networks, often based on common ethnic ties, are the best sources of information. Post-Mao economic reforms have brought about new roads and improved telecommunications that link minority areas with both Han areas and other minority areas. The development of transport, post and telecommunications in Xinjiang over this period has been phenomenal (see Table 10.5). It has led to increased contact between minorities and the Hans, but it has also brought closer together individual minorities such as the Uygurs, as groups who identify by their ethnicity. Trade within and among individual minority groups has increased as a result. This trade is mainly in services and consumer items, requiring extensive socio-economic networks that serve to reinforce ethnic identity among the ethnic minorities. The PRC’s trade with Xinjiang’s neighbours, notably Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan comprised basic consumer goods manufactured in northwest China, and accounted for just 0.25 per cent of the PRC’s international trade (Andrews-Speed and Vinogradov 2000: 380). The low level of economic development of these former Soviet states and their poor transport links with the PRC are the main causes of this low volume of trade. This trade will expand as these states develop economically. Meanwhile the contribution of foreign trade to Xinjiang’s economic development and employment for its indigenous population and recent immigrants is limited. However, the impact of trade on national integration and ethnic identity cannot simply be measured by the dollar value of trade. Again there is a political dimension that cannot be valorized. The contribution of the crossborder trade between Xinjiang and Central Asia to Xinjiang’s GDP underestimates the signiﬁcance of that trade in cultivating and promoting Uygur identity, which as a potential stimulant to separatism is a potential ‘cost’ to the central government. The number of people engaging in that trade and the distribution of gains from that trade are just as, if not more, important. Most of Xinjiang’s foreign trade is border trade (see Table 10.4), largely between Xinjiang’s minorities and their brethren across the border in

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Table 10.5 Transport, post and telecommunication services in Xinjiang Indicators

1978

Length of railways (km) 1,030.5 Length of highways (km) 23,818 Passenger trafﬁc (10,000 persons) (railway, highway) 941 Volume of freight (million tonnes km) (railway, highway) 106.96 Number of civil motor vehicles 37,683 Number of letters posted (10,000) 4,842.7 Local urban telephone subscribers 18,594

1998

Growth (%)

23,818 32,762

2,211.3 37.6

21,747

2,211.1

553.6 313,655 6,582.1 881,020

417.6 732.4 35.9 4,638.2

Source: NBS (1999: 882–4).

Central Asia. Individuals and small businesses acting as brokers conduct most of the PRC’s trade with the Central Asian Republics and other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) (ZDH 1999: 275). While foreign trade is not a signiﬁcant contributor to Xinjiang’s GDP, Xinjiang’s trade with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan is a signiﬁcant part of Xinjiang’s total foreign trade. In 1997, for example, these countries accounted for 31.6 per cent of Xinjiang’s foreign exports and 67.1 per cent of its foreign imports. Signiﬁcantly, Kazakhstan, which shares a long border with the PRC – much of it with Xinjiang province – and has a large Uygur population, accounted for 38 per cent of Xinjiang’s foreign trade in 1997 (XW 1998: 238–9). Thus, by giving ethnic minorities the incentive and the legal capacity to engage in foreign and domestic trade, globalization and the state’s policy of marketization have increased the economic linkages between the ethnic groups across these national borders. These linkages have created the opportunity for Uygurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang to reinforce their sense of ethnic identity within Xinjiang and across borders with their ethnic cohorts in neighbouring countries. This strengthening of ethnic identity among the Uygurs has yet to lead to the signiﬁcant development of Uygur nationalism. Uygurs remain divided according to social groups and local oasis identities, which hinder the development of a uniform Uygur nationalist ideology (Rudelson 1997: 8, 18). But this situation can easily change in the future with further deepening of ethnic ties. If we compare the ‘identity’ effect of marketization/globalization on Xinjiang with the identity effect in the case of Taiwan, we ﬁnd economic and social forces at work in the Taiwan case that foster cultural similarities with the Mainland rather than cultural differences. These promote a shared ‘Chinese’ identity across the Strait. This is particularly so when globalization means there are now others competing actively in the Chinese market who come from outside China, do not have socio-cultural links with Mainland or Taiwan, and are clearly not ‘Chinese’. Whereas for some in

212 Leong H. Liew Xinjiang, marketization/globalization have stimulated a re-alignment of their interests and identities with ethnic groups outside PRC, for many in Taiwan the re-alignment of interests and identities has moved closer to those of the Mainland. In Taiwan–PRC economic relations, the human element is very important. Most of the commodities in this economic relationship are labourintensive and require the support of extensive business and other personal networks, where shared language and social relationships are important. Most Taiwanese investment to the PRC is in Fujian and Guangdong. Taiwanese businesspeople may have chosen Guangdong purely for economic reasons, but for Fujian the choice is inﬂuenced by its strong cultural and social ties with Taiwan. Fujianese and native Taiwanese share the native language (Minnanhua), as well as many customs. Just as Uygurs in Xinjiang ﬁnd it relatively easy conducting business with fellow Uygurs in Central Asia, Taiwanese have a relative advantage compared to other overseas investors conducting business with Fujianese. Indeed, the cultural and linguistic advantage of Taiwanese businesses extends to many parts of the Mainland since almost all Taiwanese speak Mandarin, which is the lingua franca on the Mainland.10 As noted earlier, the major barriers dividing Taiwanese from Han Chinese are not cultural, but based on economics and politics. With continuing marketization and political liberalization in the PRC, these barriers are lowering slowly. This reduction of differences highlights an essential bedrock in the PRC–Taiwan reuniﬁcation picture, one that may bridge the gap more than increasing economic interdependence: the Mainland has become more attractive to the people of Taiwan than it was in earlier decades. Young Taiwanese increasingly see the Mainland as a place of economic opportunity.11 This means that the PRC’s approach of ‘reaching out’ across the Taiwan Strait reaches into an economic, political and socio-cultural context that is ever more receptive to linkages with the Mainland, which serves to fertilize the soil for eventual reuniﬁcation. With Xinjiang there is almost the reverse. Globalization is not helping to generate a similar kind of coming together within the PRC. Neither are the consequences of the PRC’s marketization, nor the PRC central government’s approach of ‘keeping in’ Xinjiang through further integration. To the contrary, despite Beijing’s ‘keeping in’ approach, some consequences of globalization/marketization have enabled and encouraged segments of Xinjiang’s strong ethnic population to ‘reach out’ themselves beyond the PRC – for economic gain, identity reinforcement, and for some, the possibility of non-Chinese nationhood. By weakening the state’s control over society, marketization has reduced the central government’s ability to inﬂuence economic and political developments. But, to some extent, the ability to inﬂuence these developments has not shifted to the market and the local population but to local ofﬁcials.

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As Gladney (1995: 246) observed, local ofﬁcials often beneﬁt from acting in support of local minority interests instead of acting in the interest of the state as directed by Beijing. Local ofﬁcials’ loyalty to Beijing could weaken further if their jobs become dependent on the votes of local ethnic minorities in the course of political liberalization. Two factors in particular inﬂuence the political leverage of Xinjiang’s ethnic population. First, the in-bound Han immigration cultivated by Beijing is to some extent offset by the higher birth rate of the Uygurs and other ethnic minorities, so the ethnic component of Xinjiang’s population is not guaranteed to decrease. Second, the central government’s desire to expand overseas trade as part of marketization helps to force Beijing to respect the wishes of the nation’s ethnic minorities, such as those in Xinjiang. Expanding PRC trade with the Middle East and other Muslim countries means that policy-makers in Beijing need to be sensitive to governments that may press Beijing to temper its repression of Islamic movements and Muslim separatism. And despite the PRC’s support for the ‘global war against terrorism’ after 11 September 2001, the US administration has made it clear to Beijing that the US does not see as ‘terrorism’ the non-violent actions of PRC’s domestic separatist movements, such as those by the Uygurs and others in Xinjiang (Chung 2002). Ethnic minorities in the PRC start from a disadvantaged position in a marketizing system, particularly since they have fewer means of production at their disposal. The State introduced a national policy of afﬁrmative action in favour of ethnic minorities, fearing the effect of ethnic disadvantage on ethnic–Han relations and thus on national unity and stability. Uygurs and other national minorities in Xinjiang are given extra points to help them to gain entry into universities (Rudelson 1997: 125). But, as Gladney (1995) and Rudelson (1997) have noted, the state’s afﬁrmative action on the basis of ethnicity can lead to an unwanted backlash. Preferential policies like the right to have more than one child per family encourage the assertion of ethnic identity and cause resentment on the part of the Han population. Some Uygurs in Xinjiang conduct businesses in which personal relationships with Han inside and outside the province are important. But these are limited; mostly, Han–Uygur business relationships resemble those between competitors rather than between partners. One exception is the Turpan region, where Uygurs have extensive and proﬁtable trading contacts with Hans. Uygurs have been able to take advantage of the region’s comparative advantage in grape production and have become prosperous through Chinese economic reforms (Rudelson 1997: 111). But as a whole, afﬁrmative policies in Xinjiang have not produced the type of ‘Ali Baba’ relationships between the Malays and Chinese, as seen in Malaysia, where Chinese capital combines with the Malays’ special privileges to the mutual beneﬁt of both parties.

214 Leong H. Liew

Conclusion Marketization and globalization have had uneven impacts upon the contested territories of Chinese sovereignty, and thus upon the Chinese state’s attempts to reunify or more ﬁrmly integrate these territories as part of the PRC. In this chapter I have examined the PRC’s moves to reach out to Taiwan, and why this approach enhances but does not guarantee the prospects of reuniﬁcation in the long term. In this relationship, the impacts of marketization and globalization strengthen a shared cultural underlay, not only by helping to diminish the political and strategic differences between these two ‘Chinas’, but also by creating new shared interests, stronger economic interdependence, and mutual appeal across the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan clearly has some reasons to respond favourably to the Mainland’s outreach. We have seen a quite different set of forces and interests at work in the case of Xinjiang. This far northwestern province has poor factor endowment, ethnic separatism, a dominant Muslim population, and an immigrant Han population that Beijing seeks to enlarge to dilute the ethnic population. Beijing’s approach to national integration of Xinjiang – a very important part of the national integration strategy – has been inevitably quite different from reaching out to Taiwan: to control the impacts of globalization and marketization to keep in this restive province, i.e. a policy of containment. However, the ‘keep-in’ strategy has been less successful for PRC national integration than the reach-out strategy towards Taiwan. In Xinjiang, globalization and marketization have mixed outcomes that create opportunities for disaffected ethnic groups to resist the holdback and ﬁrmer integration with the PRC, and instead reach out themselves across the national border into Central Asia, for economic beneﬁt, shared identity and liberation from Chinese nationhood. The forces of globalization, marketization and political liberalization in the PRC impact differently upon Taiwan and Xinjiang, as two of a number of contentious territories that the Mainland is keen to retain or re-integrate within the fold of Chinese sovereignty. A complex web of political, economic, strategic and socio-cultural factors inﬂuences not only the PRC central government’s strategies of reaching out to Taiwan and keeping in Xinjiang, but also, inevitably, the outcomes of these integration strategies. The outcomes will not be evident for some time, although in 2002 it appears that reaching out to Taiwan has stronger prospects for national integration than holding in Xinjiang.

Acknowledgement Comments from Joseph Cheng, Arif Dirlik and Shaoguang Wang, which have helped to improve arguments in this chapter, are gratefully acknowledged. Part of the research in this chapter was ﬁnanced with a grant from the Australian Research Council.

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Notes 1 By marketization, I mean the process of replacing the use of the administrative method of resource allocation with the market and expanding non-state property rights. 2 Anderson (1983) and Smith (1991) have strongly inﬂuenced my understanding for this discussion. 3 China as a nation comprises 56 nationalities, of which the Han is the largest nationality grouping, with 91.6 per cent of Mainland China’s total population (GTJ 2001: 100). 4 A large project worth more than US$50 million can easily be broken into a number of projects worth less than US$50 million each. Taiwanese government statistics show that Taiwanese investment on the Mainland in 1996 was worth US$1.2 billion. This contrasts with the PRC ofﬁcial statistic of $US7.1 billion (Leng 1998). 5 Calculated from data in NSB (1999). This is compared to 93.7 per cent in Tibet, 44.1 per cent in Guangdong and 54.1 per cent nationally. 6 Some ﬁgures for Tibet are spurious. If Tibet’s value of net exports for 1998 is correct, then based on data for ﬁscal transfers from the Centre to Tibet, the excess of non-provincial government’s saving over its investment must be over 90 per cent of provincial GDP (Table 10.3), which cannot possibly be correct. Most investment in Tibet is undertaken by the State. Thus, the error most probably lies in undervaluing household consumption and overvaluing non-provincial government saving. Local government expenditures include subsidies granted to households, and are therefore not equivalent to government consumption and investment. This means that the statement that Xinjiang’s GDP is more dependent on government consumption and investment than Tibet is not invalidated by the error in the data. I thank Shaoguang Wang for pointing out the inconsistency in Tibet’s ﬁscal data and data on net exports. 7 Ranked after Heilongjiang and Shandong in crude oil production, and after Sichuan and Guangdong in natural gas production (GTJ 1999: 442). 8 The value-added of crude oil and natural gas production in PRC was 118,641 million yuan in 1998. About 10.15 per cent was produced in Xinjiang (GTJ 1999: 432, 442). The 1998 GDP of Xinjiang was 111,670 million yuan (Table 10.1). Thus, the contribution of oil and gas to Xinjiang’s GDP was about 10.8 per cent (0.1015 × 118,641/111,670). 9 The Xinjiang Uygurs Autonomous Region has a population of about 17.2 million, of which 47.7 per cent (8 million) are Uygurs, 38.4 per cent (6.6 million) are Han, 7.4 per cent (1.3 million) are Kazakhs, and 4.5 per cent (0.8 million) are Hui (XW 1998: 9). 10 Referred to as Putonghua (common language) in the PRC and Guoyu (national language) in Taiwan. 11 In a 2001 poll of 14,664 people in Taiwan (76 per cent aged between 22 and 34), 65 per cent expressed interest in working on the Mainland. Of these, 25 per cent claimed they were attracted to the Mainland because of its good prospects for career advancement, 13 per cent cited higher pay and 30 per cent cited the size of the Mainland market (YYW 2001).

References AFP (2000) ‘Xinjiang draws China’s heavy polluting ﬁrms’, The Straits Times Interactive 26 September. Online. Available wysiwyg://12/http://straitstimes.asia1. com.sg/asia/ea2_0926.html (accessed 27 September 2000).

216 Leong H. Liew Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Andrews-Speed, Philip and Vinogradov, Sergei (2000) ‘China’s involvement in Central Asian petroleum’, Asian Survey, 11: 377–97. Baum, Julian (2000) ‘Security lapse’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 13 July: 22. BBC (2002) ‘Taiwan “boy band” rocks China’, Asia-Paciﬁc, BBC News. Online. Available wysiwyg://15/http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/e...asia-pacific/newsid_ 1998000/1998138.stm (accessed 21 May 2002). Becquelin, Nicolas (2000) ‘Xinjiang in the nineties’, The China Journal, 44: 65–92. Chan, Christine (2001) ‘Taiwanese banks join rush to Mainland’, South China Morning Post 18 December. Online. Available http://biz.scmp.com (accessed 18 December 2001). –––– (2002) ‘Oil giants to sign pact’, South China Morning Post 4 July. Online. Available http://biz.scmp.com (accessed 4 July 2002). China Security Review Commission (CSRC) (2002) Report to the Congress of the US: the National Security Implications of the Economic Relationship between the United States and China, July. Chung Chien-peng (2002) ‘China’s “war on terror”: September 11 and Uygur separatism’, Foreign Affairs, 81, July/August: 8–12. Dai Xiaoming (1999) Zhongyang yu difang guangxi (Centre–Local Relations), Beijing: Zhongguo minzhu fazhi chubanshe. Du Lingchang (2000) ‘Xinjiang nongxuye fazhan zhanlue’ (Strategy for developing Xinjiang’s agriculture and husbandry), in Ye Lianxin and Tu Minzhu (eds), Zhongguo nongcun fazhan yanjiu baogao 1 (China’s Rural Development Report 1), Beijing: Shehui kexue wenjian chubanshe. Economy, Elizabeth (1999) ‘The case study of China: reforms and resources: the implications for state capacity in the PRC’, Occasional Paper, Project on Environment Scarcities, State Capacity, and Civil Violence, Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the University of Toronto. Engbarth, Dennis (2002) ‘Security fears put pressure on chip technology transfer plan’, South China Morning Post 13 March. Online. Available http://columns. scmp.com (accessed 25 March 2002). Gladney, Dru (1995) ‘Economy and ethnicity: the revitalization of a Muslim minority in southeastern China’, in Andrew G. Walder (ed.) The Waning of the Communist State: Economic origins of Political Decline in China and Hungary, Berkeley: University of California Press. Guojia tongjiju (GTJ) (1999, 2001) Zhongguo tongji nianjian (China Statistical Yearbook), Beijing: Zhongguo tongji chubanshe. Hong Meihua (2000) ‘Liangan guangxi wenti yu Taishang’ (Cross-Strait relations and Taiwanese business), in Zheng Chiyan and Zhang Zhijie (eds), Taishang yu liangan guangxi taolunhui: lunwen ji (Collection of Papers from the Conference on Taiwan Business and Cross-Strait Relations), Hong Kong: Lingnan daxue zuqun yu haiwai huaren jingji yanjiubu, Xianggang haixia liangan guanxi yanjiu zhongxin. Kazer, William (2000) ‘Cross-Strait carrier pact grounded’, South China Morning Post 30 November. Online. Available http://www.scmp.com/News (accessed 5 December 2000). Leng Tse-Kang (1998) ‘Dynamics of Taiwan–Mainland China economic relations: the role of private ﬁrms’, Asian Survey, 38: 494–509.

The impact of marketization and globalization 217 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45111

Li Shantong, Zhai Fan and Xu Lin (2000) ‘Jiaru shijie maoyi zuzhi dui Zhongguo de yingxiang’ (Impact on China from entry into the WTO) in Yu Yongding, Zheng Bingwen and Song Hong (eds) Zhongguo ‘rushi’ yanjiu baogao: jinru WTO de Zhongguo chanye (Research Report on China’s Entry into the WTO: impact on China’s industries), Beijing: Shehui kexue wenjian chubanshe. Liew, Leong H. (2000) ‘A political economy analysis of Taiwan–Mainland economic relations’, in C.L. Chiou and Leong Liew (eds) Uncertain Future: Taiwan–Hong Kong–China Relations After the Return of Hong Kong to Chinese Sovereignty, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Lo, Joseph (2001) ‘Cross-Strait deal sparks stock surge’, South China Morning Post 6 September. Online. Available http://biz.scmp.com (accessed 6 September 2001). Luh Shu Shin (2002) ‘Strait just wafer-thin’, South China Morning Post 27 March. Online. Available http://china.scmp.com (accessed 9 April 2002). National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) (1999) Comprehensive Statistical Data and Materials of 50 Years of New China, Beijing: China Statistics Press. Pomfret, John (2000) ‘In China’s wild west, a face-off between development and unrest’, International Herald Tribune 18 September. Online. Available http:// www.iht.com/IHT/TODAY/MON/IN/han.2.html (accessed 19 September 2000). Renmin ribao (RMRB) (2000) ‘Zhu Rongji Zongli zai jiujie quanguo renda sanci huiyi shang de zhengfu gongzuo baogao (zhai deng)’ (Excerpts of Premier Zhu Rongji’s government work report at the Third Plenum, Ninth National People’s Congress), 6 March: 2–3. Reuters (2000a) ‘China Eastern eyes bold cross-Strait stake sale’, South China Morning Post 8 September. Online. Available http://www.scmp.com (accessed 8 September 2000). –––– (2000b) ‘China denies ethnic tension exists in Xinjiang’, MSNBC. Online. Available http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/reuters09–26–020408asp?reg= PACRIM (accessed 27 September 2000). –––– (2001) ‘Acer chief says China expansion a must’, South China Morning Post 18 January. Online. Available http://technology.scmp.com (accessed 18 January 2001). –––– (2002a) ‘Taiwan chip moves to help China’s tech plans’, South China Morning Post 3 April. Online. Available http://technology.scmp.com (accessed 9 April 2002). –––– (2002b) ‘Toshiba plans new plant in China’, South China Morning Post 12 April. Online. Available http://technology.scmp.com (accessed 24 April 2002). –––– (2002c) ‘NEC in talks on China LCD venture’, South China Morning Post 18 April. Online. Available http://technology.scmp.com (accessed 18 April 2002). –––– (2002d) ‘Water ship relieves drought-hit island’, South China Morning Post 6 May. Online. Available http://china.scmp.com (accessed 13 May 2002). Rudelson, Justin Jon (1997) Oasis Identities: Uyghur Nationalism Along China’s Silk Road, New York: Columbia University Press. Seymour, James D. (1976) China: the Politics of Revolutionary Reintegration, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Seymour, James D. and Anderson, Richard (1998) New Ghosts, Old Ghosts: Prisons and Labor Reform Camps in China, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Smith, Anthony D. (1991) National Identity, London: Penguin Books. Stratfor (2000) ‘China targets Taiwan’s wallet’. Online. Available http://www. stratfor.com/asia/commentary /0006270117.htm

218 Leong H. Liew Tang Shiping (2000) ‘Economic integration in Central Asia’, Asian Survey, 11: 360–76. Xinjiang Weiwuer zizhiqu difangzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui (XW) (1998) Xinjiang nianjian (Xinjiang Yearbook), Ulumuqi: Xinjiang renmin chubanshe. XTJ (Xinjiang tongjiju) (1999) Xinjiang tongji nianjian (Xianjiang Statistical Yearbook), Beijing: Zhongguo tongji chubanshe. Yau, Winston and Reuters (2001) ‘Taiwan scraps 50-year China ban’, South China Morning Post 8 November. Online. Available http://biz.scmp.com (accessed 8 November 2001). YYW (104 yitou wang) (2001) ‘Qiuzhi xijin da diaocha jieguo baogao’ (Report of results from a large investigation into seeking employment in the west). Online. Available http://www.104poll.com.tw/Columan/Columan0223.asp (accessed 1 July 2002). Zheng Yisheng and Qian Yihong (1998) Shendu youhuan: dangdai Zhongguo de kechixu fazhan wenti (Grave concerns: problems of sustainable development for China), Beijing: Jinri Zhongguo chubanshe. Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo duiwai maoyi jingji hezuobu (ZDH) (1999) Zhongguo duiwai jingji maoyi baipishu (China’s White Paper on Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation), Beijing: Jingji kexue chubanshe.

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Part VI

Institutions promoting national integration

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11 For national unity The political logic of ﬁscal transfer in China Shaoguang Wang

Governments in all countries where there is more than one level of government use intergovernmental ﬁscal transfers. These transfers of public money have attracted a great deal of attention from economists, particularly concerning justiﬁcations for them (Buchanan 1950; Oakland 1994). Generally, these justiﬁcations are morally inspired and concern pursuit of equality among people within the country. Normative deliberation is useful for designing an equitable and effective system for transferring ﬁnances between governments, but it does not necessarily help to explain what the Chinese or any other national government actually does and what motivates decisions on ﬁscal transfers. In practice, political factors may be as important as, and probably even more important than, ethical and economic considerations for those who make transfer decisions. This is certainly true in the case of China. Thus, rather than asking ‘what ought to be’, we need to examine the underlying political logic of the Chinese central government in effecting these intergovernmental transfers. Of course, the political logic of ﬁscal transfers varies across the political system, whether it is federal or unitary, and across place and time. In normal situations, central politicians may use transfers to reward their own constituencies or to ‘buy’ support from those who can be lured (Nordhaus 1975; Rich 1989), while regional actors try to lobby for as many central subsidies as possible (Rao and Singh 2000; Treisman 1996). Wherever and whenever national unity is at stake, however, intergovernmental ﬁscal transfers assume a different function, one of appeasing centrifugal forces. In this study of China’s intergovernmental transfer system, we ﬁnd a heavy seam of this logic, as the central government continues to place extremely high priority on maintaining national unity in the face of separatism by some in ethnic minorities, and uses ﬁscal transfers as one means to this end. The most obvious contemporary example of steering ﬁscal transfers for national unity is Germany. East and West Germany were uniﬁed formally on 3 October 1990. However, uniﬁcation posed a new challenge, the crux of which was regional disparity. While the ‘old’ Federal Republic enjoyed a high degree of interregional balance, it became politically imperative to extend this interregional equality to the East and to establish

222 Shaoguang Wang equivalent living conditions throughout the ‘new’ Federal Republic. For this reason, each year after 1990, the federal government has transferred at least DM 150 billion, or 5 per cent of the GNP of former West Germany to the former East Germany. Without such infusion of resources to narrow the overall income differential, the process of German uniﬁcation would have been much bumpier. The government of the Federal Republic recognized ﬁscal sacriﬁce as a necessary price to pay to further consolidate the country while newly uniﬁed politically (Heilemann and Reinicke 1995; Renzsch 1998). Germany is not exceptional. In post-Soviet Russia, for instance, despite its inability to collect taxes and make ends meet, Moscow still tried to placate separatist demands through central largess. As a result, regions that had posed a serious threat to the country’s political stability and territorial integrity were rewarded with larger net per capita central transfers (Treisman 1996, 1998a, 1998b). As Treisman pointed out, ‘The practice of appeasing mobilized anti-centre regions was one reason why, despite separatist pressures, economic crisis, and weakened central institutions, Russia did not disintegrate in the early 1990s as all three other post-communist federations had done’ (Treisman 1998b: 198). National unity may come, or be sustained, at a high price, but central policy-makers everywhere seem to view this price as worth paying.1 This chapter examines the politics of intergovernmental transfers in China. Today, China is a united country that faces no imminent danger of breaking up. However, the situation was not ever thus. Since 221 BC when the Qin Emperor ﬁrst united China, the country has disintegrated as often as it has been united. As recently as in the 1910s and 1920s, for instance, China was divided into feuding warlord-run kingdoms. This repeated experience of breakup has powerfully shaped the approach of Chinese authorities to national and local policies, and the transfer of funds from the central government to lower levels of government to conduct these policies. This chapter therefore explores the importance of national unity when Chinese policy-makers allocate ﬁscal transfers. Here I apply the technique of least-squares multiple regression to two sets of data. One is a set of cross-section data that cover all of China’s 31 provincial units (Ministry of Finance 1999a), and the other is a set of data for the 2,135 counties in these units (see Appendix 1 and Ministry of Finance 1999b). Measures of per capita receipts of transfers are regressed upon factors that may affect central allocators’ decision-making, which in my view is unlikely to be a process free of political inﬂuence. The key hypothesis here is that central politicians tend to allocate ﬁscal transfers according to their ranking order of preferences, with the top priority on maintaining national unity, which these politicians recognize as essential in maintaining their own personal political pre-eminence in the country.

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I do not rule out a priori the possibility that central-government politicians give ﬁrst priority to assisting regions with poor tax bases and socio-economic needs greater than in other regions. Therefore, to ascertain to what extent policy-makers are motivated by a concern for national equity, I include indicators of social needs among the independent variables in the models that I have used for this study. I also include measures of provinces’ bargaining power, since it is reasonable to assume that all provincial governments want to extract as much of the central transfers as possible. This study ﬁnds strong evidence that national unity is a far more important concern than interregional equity when political elites decide the allocation of ﬁscal transfers. The chapter is organized as follows. Section I provides estimates of ﬁscal disparities in China. Section II offers an overview of China’s transfer system and deﬁnes the dependent variable. Section III lists possible determinants of intergovernmental transfers, including test variables and some control variables. Section IV presents the results of my regression analyses, followed by discussion of those results in Section V. The ﬁnal section discusses the implications of this study’s empirical ﬁndings.

I Fiscal disparities in China Intergovernmental transfers can be justiﬁed only if there are substantial gaps between sub-national governments in their costs to produce, and capacity to ﬁnance, a standard package of public services for their region. In this understanding, the larger these gaps, the more indispensable the ﬁscal transfers. Covering 9.6 million square kilometres, China is the world’s third largest country. Its huge geographical size means there have always been signiﬁcant spatial variations in geographical conditions, resource endowments, the sectoral distribution of economic activity, and the level of socioeconomic development. Given the regional economic inequality, ﬁscal disparities are inevitable: lower-income regions may not be able to provide their residents with a standard package of public services that are taken for granted by the residents of high-income regions. In such circumstances, poorer regions may seek support from richer regions to reduce inequality in provision of public services, either directly or via transfers from higher levels of government. First we need to consider the current size of the ﬁscal disparities between regions in China. For 1998, variations in per capita GDP appear to be fairly large across China’s 31 provinces. China’s poorest province, Guizhou, registered a per capita GDP (2,342 yuan) of 31.8 per cent of the national average (7,373 yuan), while Shanghai, China’s leading industrial and commercial centre, enjoyed a per capita GDP (28,253 yuan) nearly four times higher than the national average and more than 12 times that of

224 Shaoguang Wang Table 11.1 Fiscal disparities among China’s 31 provinces, 1998 (unit: yuan per capita) Minimum GDP 2,342 Budgetary revenue 145 Budgetary expenditure 348 Expenditure on capital construction 16 Expenditure on education 56 Expenditure on health 15 Administrative expenditure 37 Expenditure on law and order 22 Extra-budgetary revenue 63 Extra-budgetary expenditure 40

Maximum

Mean

SDa

CVb

28,253 2,606 3,218

7,373 491 814

5,269 512 620

0.71 1.04 0.76

655

96

127

1.32

452 171

120 43

83 37

0.69 0.85

308

72

48

0.67

180

52

38

0.73

942

254

197

0.78

865

240

187

0.78

Source: Ministry of Finance (1999a). Notes: a SD standard deviation. b CV coefﬁcient of variation.

Guizhou (Ministry of Finance 1999a). Relative differences in per capita budgetary revenue for 1998 are even more striking. Table 11.1 provides useful indications. As Table 11.1 reveals, the coefﬁcient of variation – a measure of dispersion equal to the standard deviation divided by the mean – of per capita revenue was much higher than that of per capita GDP. It is worth noting, however, that inequality of per capita expenditure was signiﬁcantly smaller than inequality of per capita revenue, in about the same magnitude as inequality of per capita GDP.2 Clearly, some central transfers helped to reduce provincial ﬁscal inequality, so that gaps in two key areas of public spending (education and administration) were less pronounced than income gaps. But in three other key areas of public spending (health, capital construction and law and order), gaps were larger. In any event, inequality of per capita budgetary expenditure in all areas of public spending was quite large by international standards. Table 11.1 appears to suggest that while central transfers in China were progressive, they were either not progressive enough or were too small to alleviate inter-provincial disparities. Thus, it is natural for us to ask which regions tend to receive more net transfers from the central government and why. But before moving to this question, a brief introduction to the channels of intergovernmental transfers in China is in order.

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II Intergovernmental transfers in China During Mao’s era, the central government enjoyed considerable control over the distribution of resources. The ﬁscal system was arranged in such a way that rich provinces had to remit large proportions of their revenues to the central government and poor provinces were allowed to ‘retain all their revenues and receive additional direct subsidies from the central government’ (Lardy 1980: 172–3). Acting as a redistributor, the central government could use ﬁscal transfers to inﬂuence behaviour of sub-national governments. In the ﬁrst 15 years of economic reforms, however, the central government’s ability to allocate transfers was critically enfeebled. Under the ﬁscal contract system prevailing from 1980 to 1993, all the provinces, rich and poor, were compelled to become more independent ﬁnancially. Most taxes were collected and most expenditure undertaken on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis (Wang 1997). As ﬁscal surpluses from rich provinces drained away, the funds available for the central government to redistribute became increasingly limited. The result was growing ﬁscal gaps between provinces. Rich provinces could use part of their larger tax bases to either directly invest more with their budgetary capital or offer more generous tax concessions to potential investors. The same ﬁscal autonomy, however, worked to the detriment of poor provinces. With fewer central subsidies, poor provinces were hard-up even for resources to support daily government operation and to provide such basic services as health and education, not to speak of conducting productive investment.3 By the early 1990s, there was growing concern that a widening income gap between the prosperous coast and the laggard interior might eventually cause the breakup of the Chinese nation-state (Hu et al. 1995; Wang and Hu 2001). To arrest this dangerous trend, Chinese authorities overhauled the nation’s ﬁscal system at the beginning of 1994. The new system was called the tax-assignment system (fenshuizhi). One of the stated goals of the 1994 reform was to restore the central government’s redistributive ability so that it could again transfer surpluses extracted from more-developed provinces to less-developed provinces. The post-1994 Chinese ﬁscal ﬂows between the central and provincial governments can be divided into four broad categories: returned revenue; old-system subsidies (or remittances); new-system subsidies (or remittances); and transfer of the transition period. Returned revenue Because strictly following the new rules would lower the revenue income of every province, when the government introduced the 1994 system, it made a pledge of compensating every province for what it would have to sacriﬁce for accepting the new system. Hence each province’s net loss

226 Shaoguang Wang in accepting the new system was calculated.4 Thereafter, a province was supposed to receive every year from the central government compensation (or ‘returned revenue’) amounting to: Rt = R0 (1 + 0.3Gt )t where Rt is the central compensation in year t; R0 is the compensation baseline or the calculated net loss of the province for the ﬁrst year; Gt is the average growth rate of VAT and consumption tax in the province in year t; t represents the ﬁrst, second, third . . . year after the introduction of the new system. Since the mechanism of ‘returned revenue’ was designed primarily as a kind of side payment for the provinces not to resist the new system, its distribution was not expected to conform to the equity principle. Old system subsidies (or remittances) Even after 1994, part of the revenue-sharing contracts negotiated under the old system remained effective. The provinces continued to remit a certain amount of their locally collected revenues to, or receive a certain amount of subsidies from, the central government as they had under the pre-1994 regime. The only difference was that now the amounts of remittance or subsidies were ﬁxed once and for all. Normally, a province that received subsidies did not have to remit to the central coffers. Shandong was the only exception. Among the other 30 provinces, 16 were on the recipient side and 14 on the remitting side. The former group included all eight provinces where minority nationalities are concentrated (Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Guangxi, Qinghai, Yunnan, and Guizhou) and other poor provinces such as Sichuan and Jiangxi. Rich provinces such as Shanghai, Beijing, Guangdong and Liaoning all belonged to the latter group. Thus, this mechanism contained elements of ﬁscal equalization. But, the signiﬁcance of this mechanism will diminish because, as time goes by, the relative size of such transfers in the ever-growing public ﬁnance total will become smaller and smaller. New system subsidies (or remittances) These subsidies were ‘new’ because they were introduced after 1994. All the transfers in this category were for speciﬁc purposes, such as disaster relief, subsidies to certain regions (e.g. Beijing, Chongqing, Xinjiang and Yan’an), subsidies to certain projects (e.g. education, environmental protection and industrial restructuring), and the like. Transfer of the transition period Introduced in 1995, this transfer was speciﬁcally designated to address horizontal ﬁscal imbalance. Unlike other ‘new system subsidies’, this was

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the only formula-based type of transfer, determined by objective measurements of ﬁscal capacities and ﬁscal needs of the provinces.5 Table 11.2 presents data on central–provincial ﬁscal ﬂows in 1998. Net central transfers to the provinces can be calculated by subtracting provincial remittances of taxes to central coffers from the total of all central transfers to the provinces. In 1998, this ﬁgure amounted to 272.4 billion yuan, which accounted for about half of the central revenue, or 3.4 per cent of China’s GDP. However, the bulk of central transfers took the form of ‘returned revenues’, a kind of de facto provincial entitlement over which the central government could exercise little discretionary power. If ‘returned revenues’ were excluded, net central transfers were barely 65 billion yuan. As for the most redistributive ‘transfer of the transition period’, its size (6 billion yuan) was too small to be signiﬁcant. Given the heterogeneous nature of different forms of central subsidies, it may be useful to distinguish two concepts of net central transfers, with one including ‘returned revenue’ and the other excluding ‘returned revenue’. Net Transfer I = Returned revenue + Old subsidies + New subsidies + Transfer of the transition period – Old remittances – New remittances Net Transfer II = Old subsidies + New subsidies + Transfer of the transition period – Old remittances – New remittances The dependent variables in this study are per capita Net Transfer I and per capita Net Transfer II.

III Determinants of intergovernmental transfers As noted above, political considerations may matter in the process of ﬁscal transfer allocation in China every bit as much they do under electoral democracies. Chinese national policy-makers do not have to stand for election and re-election, but like their counterparts elsewhere they care a great deal about their political legitimacy and survival, as do provincial leaders. This legitimacy has a special potency while the ruling party continues to direct national policies towards market and other forms of socio-economic liberalization while maintaining its claim to be a communist party. Preoccupied with unusually deep concern for national unity and political stability, Chinese central politicians tend to use ﬁscal transfers to reward prospective supporters and/or to neutralize potential threats. Provincial governments are inclined to extract as much central transfer funding as possible to please their own constituents. The allocation of ﬁscal transfers

5,448.48

4,514.25

3,377.69

9,153.4

8,529.89

Fujian

Jiangxi

Shandong

Henan

5,872.75

Heilongjiang

Anhui

4,766.13

Jilin

9,519.87

9,920.4

Liaoning

Zhejiang

3,148.52

Inner Mongolia

15,544.37

4,323.27

Shanxi

Jiangsu

8,246.01

Hebei

16,720.16

4,702.13

Tianjin

Shanghai

7,592.57

207,661.6

Beijing

Nation

Returned revenues

0

158.62

45.46

541.78

0

0

0

0

0

106.62

0

1,841.91

0

0

0

0

11,092.48

Old subsidies

1,522.1

288.77

0

0

936

3,491.9

8,072.12

12,000

760.72

0

3,486.78

0

703.18

2,066.23

2,856.05

3,663.04

53,814.82

Old remittance

4,724.21

6,504.04

5,553.48

2,443.58

4,271.43

4,279.77

3,715.76

4,959.35

6,423.64

4,444.76

8,268.58

3,930.33

1,852.38

3,228.05

1,771.15

3,079.09

107,345.93

New subsidies

Table 11.2 Central–provincial transfers, 1998 (unit: million yuan)

151.42

2,246.35

41

545.14

49.28

1,073.19

51.38

95

17.9

53.12

2,079.8

28.27

24.91

35.27

0

53.34

5,898.18

New remittance

432

0

243

0

205

0

0

0

192

134

0

576

196

191

0

0

6,054

Transition transfer

12,012.58

13,280.94

9,178.63

6,954.47

8,939.63

9,234.55

11,136.63

9,584.51

11,709.77

9,398.39

12,622.4

9,468.49

5,643.56

9,563.56

3,617.23

6,955.28

272,441

Transfer I

3,482.69

4,127.54

5,800.94

2,440.22

3,491.15

–285.32

–4,407.74

–7,135.65

5,837.02

4,632.26

2,702

6,319.97

1,320.29

1,317.55

–1,084.9

–637.29

64,779.41

Transfer II

3,593.44

12,852.14

Guizhou

Yunnan

667.9

655.51

2,111.05

Gansu

Qinghai

Ningxia

Xinjiang

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1,640.98

0

0

2,390.38

1,213.93

2,691.67

Old remittance

3,463.48

1,367.98

1,397.26

2,813.81

3,355.55

1,534.33

3,048.36

2,334.77

4,096.21

3,659.11

709.99

2,556.45

3,969.08

5,792.01

5,923.15

New subsidies

241.56

0

0

15.88

32

0

419.34

12

65.45

6

5.55

5.66

518.42

40.62

57.51

New remittance

597

221

397

229

272

210

24

558

381

76

88

298

0

234

303

Transition transfer

7,867.2

2,777.94

3,118.23

7,169.21

7,600.35

4,188.47

16,178.63

7,216.48

12,414.03

5,387.36

1,802.48

8,588.18

16,726.46

12,546.74

10,938.43

Transfer I

5,756.15

2,122.43

2,450.33

3,152.53

3,715.81

4,032.59

3,326.49

3,623.04

4,754.36

2,088.13

1,163.49

3,456.62

1,060.28

4,771.46

3,476.97

Transfer II

Note: There are some discrepancies between ﬁgures reported in the central budget and the sum totals of provincial ﬁgures. One explanation is that there are independent accounting units other than the provinces, such as Dalian, Ningbo, Qingdao, Xiamen and Shenzhen, which are not included in this table. But some discrepancies cannot be explained by this factor, either.

1,937.23

533.45

656.07

125.6

120.26

2,288.26

673.47

742.27

342.6

0

371.05

607.83

0

0

0

Old subsidies

Source: Ministry of Finance (1999a).

3,884.54

4,016.68

Shaanxi

155.88

7,659.67

Sichuan

Tibet

3,299.23

638.99

Hainan

Chongqing

5,131.56

Guangxi

15,666.18

7,775.28

Hunan

Guangdong

7,461.46

Hubei

Returned revenues

Table 11.2 (continued)

1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45111

230 Shaoguang Wang thus often becomes a focus of contention in intergovernmental relations between the national and sub-national levels. I have used three categories of independent variables in this attempt to uncover the key determinants of central transfers in China: central decisionmakers’ concern for equity, central decision-makers’ political concerns, and regions’ bargaining power. My choice of independent variables within each category was of course limited to issues/concerns for which there are quantiﬁed data that are available to the public, which I could access for use in this study. Central decision-makers’ concern for equity As we can expect, a broad sweep of considerations shape central decisionmakers’ moves to create or maintain equity to some extent across the nation, taking into account the uneven distribution of factors of production as discussed above. Most important among these considerations are likely to be: •

•

•

•

•

Per capita GDP: this is a proxy for taxable income, i.e. the potential to raise revenue. A major source of ﬁscal disparity arises from asymmetries in the distribution of taxable income, which in turn arises from asymmetries in income distribution. The lower the per capita GDP, the lower the ﬁscal capacity. If central decision-makers’ objectives in allocating transfers were to mitigate ﬁscal disparities and to level the ﬁscal playing ground, a negative regression coefﬁcient would be expected. Per capita cost of natural disasters: China is prone to natural disasters. In any year, some areas may incur greater losses than others. Central decision-makers are supposed to take this into consideration when they allocate ﬁscal transfers. If they do, we can expect a positive coefﬁcient. The share of agriculture in the regional economy: this is an indicator of underdevelopment. If central transfers were targeted to subsidize underdeveloped regions, one would expect a positive regression coefﬁcient. Dependency ratio: this is the share of the population that is below and above working age. It serves as an indicator of ﬁscal need. Regions with a larger dependent population are expected to receive larger per capita transfers. Population density: this is a proxy for the unit costs of social services. Fiscal disparities can be the result of differences in revenue bases as well as in the unit cost of provision. There may be many environmental factors affecting costs of provision. Population density is just one of them. Presumably, the lower the population density in a region, the higher the unit cost of delivering any particular level of social services

The political logic of ﬁscal transfer 231 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45111

to the population. If central policy were to compensate cost differences, one would expect a negative coefﬁcient. Central decision-makers’ political concerns Again as we might expect, decision-makers are concerned about a number of potential sources of political unrest that could destabilize communities, regions or indeed national unity, and ultimately the politicians’ own hold on government. Two potential sources of unrest in particular are likely to shape the decision-makers’ concerns and inﬂuence their choices of intergovernmental transfers: •

•

The proportion of minorities in the population or whether an area is an autonomous area: regions with a high concentration of non-Han inhabitants can be thought to be more likely to cultivate separatist aspirations than an area where Han people are prevalent. If a signiﬁcant regression coefﬁcient is found, we may conclude that the central government uses ﬁscal transfer as an instrument to pacify the most potentially troublesome areas that have a high level of minority population. The instances of labour disputes: this is an indicator of social stability. If social stability were a major concern for central leaders, one would expect a positive regression coefﬁcient.6

Regions’ bargaining power Bargaining power between levels of government is certainly one crucial determinant of ﬁscal transfers. Regional leaders recognize that where possible they can use the central decision-makers’ concerns about minority populations and labour disputes to enhance their region’s power to bargain with the central authorities. Three other regional characteristics are also likely to inﬂuence the bargaining power of each region vis-à-vis the centre, and thus inﬂuence the centre’s decisions about ﬁscal transfers. •

• •

The representation in the Politburo: this is a dummy variable, which takes the value 1 for all provinces that have a representative in the Politburo, the most powerful decision-making organ in China, and 0 for all others. A signiﬁcant positive regression coefﬁcient on this variable would suggest the existence of ‘pork-barrel’ allocation in China.7 The size of the population: Beijing might be more likely to yield to pressure from a province with a population of 50 million or more than from a province with fewer than 10 million. The size of the economy measured by provincial GDP: this is another proxy for bargaining power. Provinces with greater economic power are expected to receive higher per capita transfers than less economically powerful provinces, due to their political weight.

232 Shaoguang Wang

IV Results In this section, I discuss the conduct of regression analyses on central– provincial transfers. Dependent variables are per capita transfer 1 and per capita transfer 2 as deﬁned in Section III. Independent variables are those discussed in the previous section. Since there is no explicit model, regressions reported below should be seen as exploratory rather than as an attempt to test a theory. They are used to explore the extent to which ﬁscal transfers in China are governed by economic and ethical considerations, and to what extent political considerations override economic and ethical considerations. Table 11.3 presents the results of linear regressions for each of the two dependent variables. In both cases, columns marked (a) offer estimated regression coefﬁcients when a broad range of theoretically relevant predictors are included, while columns marked (b) give results for short regressions that exclude all independent variables that do not signiﬁcantly improve the ﬁt of the regression, as judged by an F-test at the 0.10 level. Regression (1a) in Table 11.3 presents the results for per capita transfer 1 as the dependent variable. Three observations can be made from these data. First, the equity consideration does not appear to have played any clear role in allocating transfer 1. Four of the ﬁve variables in this regard have the ‘wrong’ signs. Transfer 1 is positively related to ‘per capita GDP’ and ‘population density’, and negatively related to ‘the share of agriculture in the economy’ and ‘dependency ratio’. In other words, the richer the province and the higher the population density, the greater the per capita transfer. A province with a less-developed economy and a larger dependent population tends to receive smaller rather than larger per capita transfer. In any event, none of the ﬁve variables are statistically signiﬁcant. Second, pressure politics also do not appear to have played a major role in central allocation.8 Two of the three variables measuring regions’ bargaining power carry the ‘right’ signs. Membership of the Politburo and GDP (which measures the economic importance of a province) are positively related to per capita transfer. However, neither is even close to being signiﬁcantly different statistically from zero at the conventional level. On another measure of provincial bargaining power – population size – this turns out to be negatively related to receipts of transfer. Less populous provinces tend to do better in per capita terms,9 but this variable is not statistically signiﬁcant. Third, the most dramatic result of Regression (1a) is the high signiﬁcance of two variables measuring central policy-makers’ political concerns. The ethnic composition variable has a positive coefﬁcient that is statistically signiﬁcant (signiﬁcant at p = 0.000). The higher the proportion of non-Han population among the province’s population, the larger per capita transfer the province receives. Interestingly, per capita transfer is negatively correlated with one of the variables measuring provinces’ social stability:

The political logic of ﬁscal transfer 233 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45111

Table 11.3 Testing variables that explain central–provincial transfers, 1998 Variables

Concern over equity Per capita GDP Per capita disaster cost % agriculture in economy Dependency ratio Population density Political concerns % minority in population Labour disputes/population Regions’ bargaining power Have seat in the Politburo Population GDP Constant R2 Adjusted R2 N

Per capita transfer 1

Per capita transfer 2

(1a)

(2a)

(1b)

6.4E–03 (0.246) 1,400.11 (1.164) –9.573 (–1.457) –4.583 –3.125 0.320 (1.532)

2.3E–02b –2.1E–02 (3.920) (–0.714) 1,643.191 (1.220) –6.865 (–0.933) –3.125 (–0.483) 0.172 (0.738)

12.33c (6.481) –120.64b (–2.728)

11.70c (8.398)

104.6 (0.851) –4.3E–02 (–1.158) 2.2E–06 (0.286) 726.02a (1.810) 0.824 0.737 31

11.47c (5.384) –115.71b (–2.338)

(2b)

10.82c (7.928) –71.41b (–3.445)

43.985 (0.320) –5.8E–02 (–1.400) 9.4E–06 (1.115) –13.47 (0.224) 0.720 0.701 31

610.45 (1.360) 0.819 0.729 31

113.70a (1.980) 0.767 0.750 31

Notes: t-ratios in parentheses. a p < 0.1. b p < 0.05. c p < 0.01 (all two-sided).

the instances of labour disputes/population. Rather than calming down lessstable provinces by allocating more per capita transfers, such provinces appear to have been penalized.10 Central policy-makers seem to bias allocation in favour of provinces that are able to maintain social stability. Indeed, it appears that central policy-makers think it may be politically unwise to ‘reward’ troubled provinces with ﬁnancial concessions. After excluding variables that fail the F-test, Regression (1b) retains only two variables. The provincial ethnic composition remains highly signiﬁcant.

234 Shaoguang Wang The other variable is per capita GDP, which is again positively related to per capita transfer. This is not entirely surprising, given that ‘returned revenue’ makes up more than three-fourths of transfer 1. As pointed out above, ‘returned revenue’ is a remnant of the pre-1994 ﬁscal system, the distribution of which by deﬁnition is not governed by the equity principle. Thus, rich provinces are able to draw more rather than less per capita ‘returned revenues’ from Beijing. Let us turn to transfer 2. Clearly, Regression (2a) more or less resembles Regression (1a) in all aspects except one: the sign of the coefﬁcient for per capita GDP. While per capita GDP is positively related to per capita transfer 1, it is negatively related to per capita transfer 2. This implies that concern for equity plays a greater role when policy-makers come to the allocation of transfers other than ‘returned revenues’. However, the negative relationship between per capita GDP and per capita transfer 2 is not statistically signiﬁcant. Remarkably, the two measures of political concerns remain highly signiﬁcant in Regression (2a), as they are in Regression (2b). This is fairly strong evidence that policy-makers are motivated by political concerns more than anything else in allocating transfer 2. As shown in the Appendix of this chapter, provincial governments in China follow the same political logic when they allocate ﬁscal transfers to county governments. In sum, from the regressions reported in Table 11.3, we may draw three broad conclusions. First, equity considerations seem to have played little role in central–provincial transfers. Second, contrary to the conventional wisdom, there is little scope for bargaining as far as ﬁscal transfers are concerned. Third, the most important determinant of ﬁscal transfers turns out to be policy-makers’ political concerns, in particular, their concern to maintain national unity. All four regressions in Table 11.3 reinforce each other and point to this conclusion.

V Discussion All countries where there is more than one level of government use ﬁscal transfers, the key determinants of which differ from country to country. Some countries (e.g. the United States) favour conditional (or speciﬁc purpose) grants, while others (e.g. Canada) prefer unconditional (or general purpose) grants (Ma 1997). Where unconditional grants dominate and transfers are calculated according to certain elaborate formulas, the possibility of political intervention is minimized (e.g. Germany). When rules for allocating general-purpose grants are vague, there is considerable room for bargaining (e.g. India and Russia) (Rao and Singh 2000; Treisman 1996). Systems dominated by conditional grants provide a perfect institutional environment for pork-barrel politics (e.g. the United States) (Ferejohn 1974). In China, general-purpose transfers account for the major part of the total transfers. However, the bulk of general-purpose transfers in China consist

The political logic of ﬁscal transfer 235 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45111

of ‘returned revenues’, the distribution of which is generally made according to certain formulas. Even though those formulas do not embody the equalization principle, they nevertheless limit the scope of bargaining. So do old subsidies and remittances. It is therefore no wonder that all of this study’s variables measuring bargaining power add little to the explanation. As pointed out above, the ‘returned revenues’ are designed to recognize the vested interests of the localities, rather than to address the issue of growing regional disparity. That explains why it is hard to ﬁnd evidence that the central distribution of transfers favours low-income areas. In a sense, it seems fair to say that in the allocation of ﬁscal transfers there is not much room for central policy-makers to act at will. Of course, I do not suggesting that these policy-makers are powerless. The allocation of some ﬁscal transfers is surely still within their discretion. The question is what would be their priorities in allocating funds under their control. The analysis in the previous section suggests that national unity is probably their number one concern. This is by no means a new ﬁnding. In a study of ﬁscal transfers in China during the period 1978–92, Martin Raiser found that all poor provinces received some subsidies, but the poorest provinces had not necessarily received the highest levels of subsidies. Provinces with predominantly nonHan population were given the highest levels of subsidies, even though their income levels exceeded those of the poorest provinces. This ﬁnding led Raiser to suspect that ﬁscal transfers in China might have been motivated largely by political concern rather than by concern over equity (Raiser 1998). The present study provides systematic evidence to support Raiser’s conjecture. It also points to a crucial question. Why does national unity ﬁgure so prominently in the allocation of ﬁscal transfers in China? China is a multinational country with 56 nationalities. The majority nationality, the Han, comprises 91 per cent of the population. The remaining 55 minority nationalities comprise 9 per cent of the population. However, the minorities hold an importance for China’s long-term development and national security that is disproportionate to their share of the national population. First, although their 9 per cent share is a small proportion of the national population, China’s minorities are large in number. The absolute population of China’s minority nationalities actually exceeds the national populations of large European countries such as Germany, France and Great Britain. Few people realize that China has one of the world’s largest Muslim populations – nearly 20 million, which is more than of the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Libya or Malaysia. Second, the minority nationalities population has grown at a much higher rate than the growth rate of the Han population. The Han population grew by 10 per cent between 1982 and 1990, while the minority population grew 35 per cent in this period from 67 million to 91 million. A sample

236 Shaoguang Wang survey conducted among 1 per cent of the total population in 1995 showed that 108.46 million people belonged to minority ethnic groups, accounting for 8.98 per cent of the country’s total population of more than 1.2 billion, a 0.94 percentage point increase over the ﬁgure in 1990 (Information Ofﬁce of the State Council 1999). If the minority populations’ growth rate continues at this rate, it is estimated that minorities could total 864 million by 2080 (Zhang 1999). Third, the national minorities are scattered over vast areas. There are minorities in every province, autonomous region and municipality directly under the central government, and in most county-level units. However, minority nationalities are mostly concentrated in west China, which spans nearly two-thirds of the country’s landmass (National Bureau of Statistics 1999: 37). Fourth, the areas most heavily populated by minorities happen to be resource-rich areas. Energy is a bottleneck for China’s future development and West China seems to hold the key. Northwest China has plenty of coal, China’s chief fuel, and southwest China has unlimited hydroelectric potential. Qinghai’s Qaidam basin has quantities of natural gas, and Xinjiang’s Tarim basin holds both oil and gas. Gold and other metals are plentiful in Tibet, Guizhou and Yunnan. Finally, China’s ethnic groups live mostly along the nation’s borders, such as the Mongolians in the north, Uygurs and Tibetans in the west, and the Zhuang, Yi and Bai in southwestern China. Indeed, China’s border areas are mostly inhabited by minority peoples. In counties and villages along many border areas in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Yunnan and Guangxi, over 90 per cent of the local population belong to minority groups. From a national security point of view, those areas have enormous strategic value as China’s outposts for national defence. In recognition of the minorities’ ofﬁcial status as well as their strategic importance, the central government has created four levels of autonomous administration, including ﬁve regions, 30 prefectures, 120 counties (or, in Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, banners) and more than 1,200 villages. These autonomous areas do not enjoy true political control over local affairs, but minorities are pleased to obtain autonomous status, since groups identiﬁed as minorities in these designated areas can receive real beneﬁts from the implementation of various afﬁrmative action programmes. The most signiﬁcant privileges include to express their cultural differences through the arts and popular cultures, to have more children than the Han people are allowed under the nation’s one-child policy, to obtain better opportunities for their children’s education, have greater access to public ofﬁce and, above all, pay fewer taxes and receive more subsidies. Prior to 1980, autonomous areas depended very much on ﬁscal transfers. So did poor areas that were inhabited by Han Chinese. Since the early 1980s, however, the magnitude of ﬁscal transfers has diminished substantially (Ma 1994) and poor areas have received less transfer than they

The political logic of ﬁscal transfer 237 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45111

did in the 1970s. Yet there were a few exceptions. As Martin Raiser noted in his 1998 study, even before the 1994 ﬁscal reform, all recipients of large transfers were provinces with big minority populations, such as Tibet, Xinjiang and Qinghai. The present study shows the continuity of this distribution pattern. This study also suggests that what motivates China’s central policymakers to favour minorities in ﬁscal transfers is above all a strong desire to maintain national unity. A great fear of the country breaking up lies deep in the psyche of the Chinese authorities. As noted earlier, China’s 2,000-year history of repeated breakup and reuniﬁcation has powerfully shaped the approach of Chinese authorities to national and local policies. China in 2002 is a uniﬁed country with no imminent danger of breaking up again. Yet China’s leaders do not want to leave such a crucial concern to chance, especially when there are separatist leanings or actual movements in some minority regions. The worries of Chinese political leaders are twofold here. First, economic gaps persist between coastal regions where the Han Chinese dominate and western regions that are most heavily populated by minority nationalities. China’s market-oriented reform only widens this gulf (Wang and Hu 1999). There is little sign that eastern prosperity has trickled west, so central decision-makers have reason to worry that such disparities may fuel ageold resentments along ethnic, linguistic and cultural lines. Second, separatist activities and ethnic unrest in some of China’s border areas, especially Xinjiang and Tibet, constitute another evil omen for those holding the reins in Beijing. In particular, the creation of several new nations on China’s Central Asian frontier has raised central-government concerns about the inﬂuence of separatist sentiment spilling across the border into China’s Muslim areas. Beijing’s challenge is to convince China’s minorities that they will beneﬁt more from cooperating with their national government than from breaking away. Central policy-makers therefore have to take into account the interests of minority nationalities and so use ﬁscal transfer as a political instrument to appease ethnic or religious independence sentiments, real or potential. The Chinese government is willing and even happy to admit this. In fact, whenever the issue of ﬁscal transfers comes up, the central government never tires of emphasizing that ethnic regions deserve preferential treatment,11 as do provincial governments (Hunan Provincial Government 2000; Qinghai Provincial Government 1997). Political considerations underlying ﬁscal transfers are made evident by the data in Table 11.4. Per capita locally collected revenue is generally lower in the eight minority-concentrated provinces than in the other provinces. Thanks to central transfers, however, per capita expenditure is generally much higher in those eight provinces than in the rest of the country, with the exceptions of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Guangdong. Of even more interest, when allocating ﬁscal transfers, the central

238 Shaoguang Wang Table 11.4 Fiscal transfers to minority-concentrated provinces, 1998 (unit: yuan) Provinces

Minority Per as % of capita popula- GDP tion

Per Per Per capita capita capita transfers transfers revenue (excluding (including returns) returns)

Tibet Xinjiang Qinghai Guangxi Yunnan Ningxia Guizhou Inner Mongolia

96.18 62.42 42.14 39.24 33.41 33.27 32.43 19.42

3,716 6,229 4,367 4,076 4,355 4,270 2,342 5,068

1,613.39 324.25 466.20 72.39 79.89 389.01 95.30 264.32

Beijing Tianjin Hebei Shanxi Liaoning Jilin Heilongjiang Shanghai Jiangsu Zhejiang Anhui Fujian Jiangxi Shandong Henan Hubei Hunan Guangdong Hainan Chongqing Sichuan Shaanxi Gansu

3.83 2.31 3.94 0.29 15.62 10.24 5.67 0.47 0.23 0.51 0.58 1.55 0.27 0.60 1.18 3.97 7.95 0.56 17.00 5.70 4.56 0.48 8.30

18,482 14,808 6,525 5,040 9,333 5,916 7,544 28,253 10,021 11,247 4,576 10,369 4,484 8,120 4,712 6,300 4,953 11,143 6,022 4,684 4,339 3,834 3,456

–49.59 –112.10 19.38 40.22 64.27 172.09 152.83 –478.49 –60.74 –6.33 55.41 73.23 136.53 46.28 36.37 57.64 72.20 14.81 150.59 66.37 54.84 101.71 123.50

Source: Ministry of Finance (1999a).

1,676.27 445.21 598.85 181.30 388.92 510.76 193.40 397.67

Per capita expenditure

145.60 1,812.80 377.43 842.66 255.66 882.68 257.13 426.21 408.42 796.31 332.40 844.94 179.90 366.44 332.56 729.22

541.27 1,845.94 2,258.09 373.76 1,061.78 1,444.29 143.79 315.81 460.59 175.71 330.08 520.86 300.25 638.02 941.02 350.62 355.24 721.17 306.94 418.05 689.58 642.69 2,606.64 3,218.42 153.48 413.93 593.02 204.98 445.62 645.17 143.00 258.61 393.26 208.71 571.10 774.56 216.65 232.97 420.24 148.93 399.92 553.62 127.19 224.38 348.78 182.67 286.84 475.59 190.60 241.08 422.06 233.68 902.85 1,163.32 235.12 450.13 734.09 173.13 233.14 412.19 144.28 233.16 379.28 208.81 260.48 463.86 282.01 215.56 500.06

The political logic of ﬁscal transfer 239 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45111

government seems to have given ﬁrst priority to provinces that are most susceptible to ethnic separatism, namely the provinces mainly inhabited by Tibetans and Muslims (Tibet, Xinjiang, Qinghai and Ningxia). On the other hand, provinces where minorities make little trouble (e.g. Guangxi and Guizhou) do not seem to have much favour with Beijing on ﬁscal transfers.

Conclusion Fiscal transfers are supposed to be allocated according to the principle of national equity in line with national policy, but politicians use transfers for pursuing other political objectives – in China as in all nations with subnational levels of government. Empirical ﬁndings of this study suggest that central policy-makers’ concerns to preserve national unity dominate intergovernmental transfers. As a result, an area with a large non-Han population tends to receive much more per capita transfer than one with a predominantly Han population, even if the former has higher per capita GDP than the latter. For instance, 10 provinces had per capita GDP lower than Xinjiang’s GDP, but Xinjiang received per capita transfers several times greater than the transfers to those 10 provinces (Table 11.4). The key explanation for such a large discrepancy is Xinjiang’s predominantly nonHan population. More striking is a comparison between Shaanxi, Gansu and Ningxia (in China, they are often lumped together and called the Shan–Gan–Ning region), three neighbouring provinces that resemble one another in almost every aspect except one: Ningxia is inhabited by a large number of Chinese Muslims, whereas Shaanxi and Gansu are the legendary birthplace of the Han Chinese. That difference seems to be crucial in explaining why Ningxia received far more per capita transfer than its two neighbouring provinces, even though its per capita GDP exceeds theirs (Table 11.4). Does this ﬁnding imply that Beijing cares little about the issue of regional inequality as such? Probably not. After all, growing regional disparities even among Han-dominated provinces may undermine the country’s political instability. The problem is that the Chinese central government simply does not have many ﬁscal resources at its disposal to address the issue. In 1998, its revenue (including provincial remittances) accounted for barely 7 per cent of GDP, far lower than the ratio in most countries (20 per cent and above). Even then, this small revenue base was not all within the central government’s discretion. The 1994 ﬁscal regime obligated the central government to ‘return’ a substantial share of its revenue (38 per cent in 1998) to the provinces. What was left fell far short of covering the central government’s own basic expenses. To allocate transfers to the provinces, the central government had to run deep into debt. The weak extractive capacity forced the Chinese central government to carefully order its priorities. Beijing sees its most

240 Shaoguang Huang fearsome prospects to be when regional disparities overlap ethnic and cultural distinctions. Therefore, in the data for 1998 analysed here, the central government gave top priority in allocating limited ﬁscal transfers to appeasing ethnic or religious groups, at the risk of upsetting poor provinces with predominantly Han populations. In this sense, ﬁscal transfers represent a price of national unity, which Chinese policy-makers see as very much worth bearing.

Appendix Provincial–county transfers Imitating the central–provincial ﬁscal relations, all the provincial governments also make transfer arrangements with county governments within their respective jurisdictions. In addition to money from Beijing, some provincial governments also provide funds from their own budgets to ﬁnance downward transfers. Details of such arrangements vary greatly from province to province, but funds ﬂowing to and from counties largely fall into the same four categories mentioned in Section II (Zhang Hongli 1999; Du et al. 1999; Yang 2000). Unfortunately, we do not have information about provincial ‘transfer of the transition period’ to county governments, which was aggregated in the category of ‘new subsidies’. Table A11.1 details information about provincial–county transfers in 1998. How do provincial governments allocate ﬁscal transfers to county governments? Do they follow the same political logic as the central government does? Table A11.2 hints at the answer to this question. Regrettably, due to the unavailability of data on many important variables, both of the two regressions in Table A11.2 contain only ﬁve independent variables. Regression (A) reported in Table A11.2 presents the results for the case where the dependent variable is per capita transfer 1. The coefﬁcients on four of the ﬁve variables are signiﬁcantly different from zero at the 1 per cent level. The only exception is GDP, which I interpret as an index of bargaining power. The other measure of bargaining power, the size of the population, is signiﬁcant but, again, has the ‘wrong’ sign. One possible explanation is that sparsely populated counties tend to have a large proportion of non-Han population. As will be shown below, such areas are normally given more per capita transfers than other areas. In any event, the size of the population does not appear to be a useful bargaining chip. The two indexes of concerns over equity – per capita GDP and the share of agriculture in the economy – are not only statistically signiﬁcant but carry the ‘right’ signs in Regression (A). This implies that provincial governments are substantially motivated by equity considerations in allocating ﬁscal transfers, including ‘returned revenues’. However, that does not mean that political considerations are not important. In fact, the dummy variable registering whether a county is categorized as an autonomous area

0

2,612.24

1,646.17

Tianjin

Hebei

Shanxi

1,535.29

1,437.34

1,520.6

1,083.47

6,928.8

5,571.09

1,355.75

1,260.72

1,462.67

Liaoning

Jilin

Heilongjiang

Shanghai

Jiangsu

Zhejiang

Anhui

Fujian

Jiangxi

967.52

1,028.75

Beijing

Inner Mongolia

54,875.65

Nation

Return

11.31

0

55.39

0

27.55

0

80.48

212.69

570.84

1,153.58

256.26

113.15

149.8

0

10,722.11

Old subsidies

795.17

808.59

437.41

3,371.2

3,998.28

805.6

322.04

177.02

98

235.62

1,093.01

871.94

0

0

18,317.25

Old remittance

Table A11.1 Provincial–county transfers, 1998 (unit: million yuan)

1,680.23

1,402.83

1,061.29

2,584.95

2,255.66

1,004.58

2,062.19

1,125.07

1,527.83

2,017.37

1,379.31

1,952.34

87.8

860.98

46,863.87

New subsidies

193.66

207.05

464.65

842.52

1,940.23

47.61

467.21

0

549.67

363.57

0

517.08

8.66

36.69

10,426.3

New remittance

2,165.38

1,647.91

1,570.37

3,942.32

3,273.5

1,234.84

2,874.02

2,598.08

2,986.29

3,539.28

2,188.73

3,288.71

228.94

1,853.04

83,718.08

Transfer I

702.71

387.19

214.62

–1,628.77

–3,655.3

151.37

1,353.42

1,160.74

1,451

2,571.76

542.56

676.47

228.94

824.29

28,842.43

Transfer II

1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45111

281.31

940.18

Hainan

Chongqing

910.28

560.86

187.18

103.92

693.72

Shaanxi

Gansu

Qinghai

Ningxia

Xinjiang

Source: Ministry of Finance (1999b).

30.19

Tibet

1,698.51

1,683.24

Guangxi

Yunnan

5,024

Guangdong

787.68

1,930.65

Hunan

Guizhou

2,060.77

Hubei

2,811.64

2,511.45

Henan

Sichuan

4,249.66

Shandong

Return

Table A11.1 (continued)

1,598.52

228.59

178.65

419.71

301.84

499.76

2,925.25

155.47

361.73

81.34

119.11

548.87

34.74

297.83

22.71

0

316.94

Old subsidies

473.78

0

19.31

118.02

310.54

0

155.07

29.11

1,396.83

306.34

29.07

238.41

0

462.57

378.33

0

1,385.99

Old remittance

591.49

458.17

393.21

1,326.37

1,052.53

248.28

4,419.11

1,362.69

2,496.86

1,157.05

433.77

2,048.82

2,763.11

1,523.28

1,482.24

1,928.12

2,176.34

New subsidies

92.46

4.79

11.96

73.67

240.18

0

624.21

54.4

634.29

22.94

29.73

529.3

99.53

956.89

732.43

367.4

313.52

New remittance

2,317.49

785.89

727.77

2,115.25

1,713.93

778.23

8,263.59

2,222.33

3,639.11

1,849.29

775.39

3,513.22

7,722.32

2,332.3

2,454.96

4,072.17

5,043.43

Transfer I

1,623.77

681.97

540.59

1,554.39

803.65

748.04

6,565.08

1,434.65

827.47

909.11

494.08

1,829.98

2,698.32

401.65

394.19

1,560.72

793.77

Transfer II

The political logic of ﬁscal transfer 243 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45111

Table A11.2 Explaining provincial–county transfers, 1998 Variables

Central concern over equity Per capita GDP % agriculture in economy

Per capita transfer 1 (A) –5.9E–03 148.03

Per capita transfer 2 (B) (–4.169)a (9.780)a

2.1E–03 105.08

(12.311)a

103.19

Other political concerns Whether an autonomous area

96.64

Regions’ bargaining power Population GDP

–1.75 (–11.514)a 1.2E–05 (0.522)

Constant R2 Adjusted R2 N

111.32 0.380 0.379 2,133

(8.692)a

(1.281) (5.854)a

(11.090)a

–1.76 (–9.751)a –3.3E–07 (0.012) 129.94 0.260 0.258 2,133

(8.568)a

Notes: t-ratios in parentheses. a p < 0.01 (all two-sided).

is highly signiﬁcant.12 If a county is classiﬁed as an autonomous area, it tends to receive much more in per capita provincial transfers than a county that is not. Regression (B) in Table A11.2 presents the results for the case where the dependent variable is per capita transfer 2, or transfers that exclude ‘returned revenue’. It reveals a pattern almost identical with results of Regression (A). The only difference is that per capita GDP is now positively related to per capita transfer. Other things being equal, the poorer the county, the less it seems to receive in per capita transfer 2 from the provincial government. This is quite puzzling, as equity concern is supposed to weigh more in allocating transfer 2 than transfer 1. I cannot offer any plausible explanation, but I will point out that the coefﬁcient is not statistically signiﬁcant. What interests us most is that Regression (B) reconﬁrms the importance of decision-makers’ political concern over national unity. At any given income level, the status of being minority-nationality autonomous counties may enable these counties to receive much more per capita transfer 2 than other countries without this status.

Notes 1 According to Melanie Beresford, a Vietnam specialist at Macquarie University, Australia, her empirical studies reveal that when the Vietnamese government allocates ﬁscal transfers, the most important consideration has been to appease minority nationalities (Beresford pers. comm., 23 July 2001).

244 Shaoguang Wang 2 For comparison we can note that the coefﬁcient of variation of per capita expenditure in China was smaller than that in Russia, but larger than that in the United States (Treisman 1998a: 895). 3 The devastating effect of declining transfers on poor provinces can be seen in the case of Guizhou. In the early 1980s, central transfers ﬁnanced almost 60 per cent of the province’s total budgetary expenditures. By 1993, this share dropped to less than 20 per cent (Selden 1997: 9–10; West and Wong 1995: 80). 4 The net loss of a province was calculated according to the formula: R = S + 75%V – T, where R is the net loss of the province for the ﬁrst year or the compensation baseline; S is revenue from consumption tax; V is revenue from VAT; and T is the province’s actual revenue in 1993. 5 Every year after 1995, the Ministry of Finance issued detailed guidelines on how the distribution formula was designed. For a collection of those yearly guidelines, see Zhang Hongli (1999). 6 Data on labour disputes in China are available only for urban areas. No data are available on farmers’ disputes or other labour unrest in non-urban parts of the country. 7 Treisman’s study of the politics of intergovernmental transfers in post-Soviet Russia used whether a region has a permanent representative in Moscow as a variable measuring the inﬂuence of the region (Treisman 1996: 316). In the case of China, however, all provinces have a permanent liaison ofﬁce in Beijing. 8 This ﬁnding presents a signiﬁcant contrast between China and Russia (Treisman 1996, 1998a, 1998b). 9 This is also true in Russia (Treisman 1996: 325). But a case study of ﬁscal politics in India found population size had a positive effect on per capita transfers (Rao and Singh 2000: 23). 10 This ﬁnding is contrary to ﬁndings about Russia, where regions with more workplace strikes were found to receive more central transfers (Treisman 1996: 319). 11 The central government’s 1999 White Paper on minorities is also explicit on this point (Information Ofﬁce of the State Council 1999). 12 There are altogether 642 minority nationality autonomous units at the county level, including all autonomous counties and counties in both autonomous prefectures and autonomous regions (National Bureau of Statistics 1999: 37).

References Buchanan, James M. (1950) ‘Federalism and ﬁscal equity’, American Economic Review, 40 (4): 583–99. Du Shanxue, Su Ming and Li Hao (1999) Difang caizheng pingheng wenti yanjiu (A Study of Balanced Budgeting at Local Level), Taiyuan: Shanxi jingji chubanshe. Ferejohn, John (1974) Pork Barrel Politics: Rivers and Harbors Legislation 1947–68, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Heilemann, Ulrich and Reinicke, Wolfgang H. (1995) ‘Together again: the ﬁscal cost of German unity’, The Brookings Review, 13 (2): 42–7. Hu Angang, Shaoguang Wang and Kang Xiaoguang (1995) Zhongguo diqu chaju baogao (A Study of China’s Regional Disparities), Shenyang: Liaoning renmin chubanshe. Hunan Provincial Government (2000) ‘Hunan sheng renmin zhengfu guanyu jiakuai shaoshu minzu he minzu diqu shehui jingji fazhan ruogan youhui zhengce de tongzhi’ (Hunan provincial government’s announcement on policies targeted

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at speeding up socioeconomic development in minority-concentrated areas). Online. Available http://www.xxz.gov.cn/zzfw/zzf/zcfg/mcyhzc.htm (accessed April 2000). Information Ofﬁce of the State Council (IOSC) (1999) National Minorities Policy and Its Practice in China, Beijing: IOSC. Lardy, Nicholas R. (1980) ‘Regional growth and income distribution in China’, in Robert F. Dernberger (ed.) China’s Development Experience in Comparative Perspective, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ma Jun (1994) ‘Macro-economic management and intergovernmental relations in China’, Policy Research Working Papers (1408), Washington, DC: World Bank. –––– (1997) ‘Intergovernmental ﬁscal transfer: a comparison of nine countries’, Policy Research Working Paper (1822), Washington, DC: The World Bank. Ministry of Finance (1999a) Zhongguo caizheng nianjian 1999 (China Public Finance Statistical Yearbook, 1999), Beijing: China Financial Economic Press. –––– (1999b) 1999 nian quanguo dishixian caizheng tongji ziliao (Public Finance Data of Prefectures, Municipalities, Counties, 1999) Beijing: China Financial Economic Press. National Bureau of Statistics (1999) China’s Statistical Yearbook, 1999, Beijing: China Statistics Press. Nordhaus, William D. (1975) ‘Political business cycles’, Review of Economic Studies, 42: 169–90. Oakland, William H. (1994) ‘Fiscal equity, an empty box’, National Tax Journal, 47 (1): 199–210. Qinghai Provincial Government (1997) ‘Qinghai sheng guoduqi zhuanyi zhifu banfa’ (Qinghai Provincial Transfer Formula for the Transition Period). Online. Available http://www.tz123.net/lawandcode/showdetaillaw.asp?no=3012014. Raiser, Martin (1998) ‘Subsidizing inequality: economic reforms, ﬁscal transfers and convergence across Chinese provinces’, The Journal of Development Studies, 34 (3): 1–26. Rao, M. Govinda and Singh, Nirvikar (2000) ‘The political economy of central-state ﬁscal transfers in India’, unpublished manuscript, University of California. Renzsch, Wolfgang (1998) ‘Financing Germany unity: ﬁscal conﬂict resolution in a complex federation’, Publius, 28 (4): 127–46. Rich, Michael J.L. (1989) ‘Distributive politics and the allocation of federal grants’, American Political Science Review, 83: 193–213. Selden, Mark (1997) ‘China’s rural welfare system: crisis and transformation’, paper presented at the PRC Political Economy: Prospects under the Ninth Five-Year Plan Conference, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, 7–10 June, 1997. Treisman, Daniel (1996) ‘The politics of intergovernmental transfers in post-Soviet Russia’, British Journal of Political Science, 26: 299–335. –––– (1998a) ‘Deciphering Russia’s federal ﬁnance: ﬁscal appeasement in 1995 and 1996’, Europe–Asia Studies, 50 (5): 893–906. –––– (1998b) ‘Fiscal redistribution in a fragile federation: Moscow and the regions in 1994’, British Journal of Political Science, 28: 185–222. Wang, Shaoguang (1997) ‘China’s 1994 ﬁscal reform: an initial assessment’, Asian Survey, 38 (9): 801–17. Wang, Shaoguang and Hu Angang (1999) The Political Economy of Uneven Development: The Case of China, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

246 Shaoguang Wang –––– and –––– (2001) The Chinese Economy in Crisis: State Capacity and Tax Reform, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. West, Loraine A. and Wong, Christine P.W. (1995) ‘Fiscal decentralization and growing regional disparities in rural China: some evidence in the provision of social services’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 11 (4): 70–84. Yang Chanming (2000) Zhengfu jian caizheng zhuanyi chifu zhidu yanjiu wenji (Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers: a collection), Beijing: Jingji kexue chubanshe. Zhang Hongli (1999) Zhongguo guoduqi caizheng zhuanyi zhifu (Fiscal Transfers in the Transition Period), Beijing: Zhongguo caizheng jingji chubanshe. Zhang Tianlu (1999) ‘Xiandai Zhongguo shaoshu minzu renkou zhuangkuang’ (Analysis of the contemporary China minority nationality population situation), paper presented at the Conference on Contemporary Migration and Ethnicity in China, Institute of Nationality Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, 7–8 October 1999.

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12 Nationalism, the Chinese defence culture and the People’s Liberation Army Ji You

Nationalism has become a new ideological guide for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (Unger 1996; Zheng 1999). This may represent progress in China’s social and political development as China breaks away from a rigid understanding of communism. In China, nationalism does not repel democracy or market capitalism that paves the way for democracy to take root. Nationalism promotes national cohesion while the nation is plagued with a deepening crisis of faith. It gives the nation a clear goal of development for building a prosperous economy and strong military. It generates a national consensus on reuniﬁcation and empowers the people to join the trend of globalization. Nationalism can help China go through its current difﬁcult phase of modernization. Certainly nationalism can become a double-edged sword, which hurts the Chinese ruling elites who incite it and ordinary citizens who embrace it blindly. If the CCP leadership pursues state-centric nationalism too stridently, the move will only narrow policy space for constructing beneﬁcial international relations. A nationalist population whose collective memory is still imbued with a humiliating image of China’s recent past would question the Party’s legitimacy if the Party acts softly on matters of national sovereignty. Anti-foreignism can be rekindled, with far-reaching consequences. And a state ideology based on nationalism may serve to reinforce the existing authoritarian government structure. In a country without a democratic tradition, it is very difﬁcult to strike a balance between efforts to promote national development and nationalism. In many national contexts, the military plays a major role in shaping the nation’s world outlook. Soldiers are closely linked to the realities of war and peace that are central in world politics, and they can help to construct a sense of pride and security in a nation. The Chinese military is now involved in this task. In this chapter, I analyse rising Chinese nationalism from a military perspective. I consider the reconstruction of China’s defence culture and the role of the Chinese military – the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) – in the CCP’s campaign of promoting nationalism, recast as ‘patriotism’, in contemporary China.

248 Ji You

Reconstructing the national defence culture Most Chinese appear to believe that building nationalism in China cannot be separated from building a powerful military that protects the country’s national interests. A strong Chinese military has been a national dream for over 100 years. It provides a solid social base for promoting a defence culture in China that directs the people to identify with the goals of the state. This defence culture serves as a foundation for Chinese nationalismin-construction, because it promotes a basic interpretation of China’s history, traditions and self-image (Whiting 1989: 15). A powerful defence culture also serves as a rallying point for national cohesion. It enshrines the struggle to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and therefore justiﬁes the use of force for this national goal. The defence culture under construction also has practical purposes: to indoctrinate a pro-martial spirit in the minds of Chinese who are increasingly intoxicated with material enjoyment and to stimulate them to support fulﬁlment of the unﬁnished mission of national reuniﬁcation. A pro-military social mood is also useful for the state to deal effectively with what it perceives as a hostile international environment in the post-Cold War era. The government believes that the population should prepare for some worst-case scenario events.1 The outcome of this promotion is what Scobell calls a ‘Cult of Defence’. Here Chinese elites maintain that their country’s strategic culture is paciﬁst, non-expansionist and purely defensive, and they justify virtually any use of force – including offensive and pre-emptive strikes – as defensive in nature (Scobell 2002: 2). Indeed, through enhanced war-game activities, the PLA is sharpening among the population a sense that China faces a serious external threat, which provides validation and real substance to the construction of Chinese nationalism. Indeed, the PLA is building a bridge between nationalism as an abstract ideological concept and as an everyday concern of the people for the security of their country. The PLA is a major beneﬁciary of China embracing nationalism, since this supports increased defence spending, better preparedness for action and wider public support for military modernization. As the PLA assumes a primary mission to deter the forces in Taiwan pushing for independence, it will constantly lift the bar on the threat of war. Nationalism provides fuel for such a course. Realism as the foundation for the new defence culture In the current defence-education campaign, people are taught that the rise and fall of successive Han empires prove one fact: without military superiority, China’s moral and cultural superiority will be hollowed out. This echoes the late Qing reformers’ argument that being militarily backward was the cause of national destruction. When Qing reformers tried to build

PLA and nationalism 249 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45111

a modern state 150 years ago, they started with creating a powerful army. Today, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is repeating this move and systematically translating the concept of power politics into foreign and defence policies. Johnston (1995: 32–64) perceives realpolitik as an integral component of China’s defence culture now under construction. As Chinese realize the sharp gap between China and the West in terms of science, industrialization and military technology, a deep sense of social Darwinism has emerged among the elites, who see in the world a struggle where only the ﬁttest survive. This conviction propels them to call for military budget increases.2 China’s new defence culture incorporates the concept of strategic relations, shaping how Chinese see themselves in the international order and how they interact with other world powers. China’s door to the world outside was opened by force in 1840. Since then, China has participated in geo-politics from a position of weakness, playing foreigners against foreigners. The critical security environment facing China in the twentieth century highlighted the need to learn the rules of the balance-of-power game. Mao and Deng were masters of the game. Mao used the opportunity of the US wanting to end its Vietnam involvement to join the Western camp for a common struggle against the USSR. Deng sought to normalize relations with the Soviet Union in the late 1980s to lessen China’s security dependence on the US. On leaving the historical stage, Deng put forward to the third generation of Chinese leaders a 28-character foreign policy principle mainly on how to react to Western pressure from a position of continued military weakness. The core of this strategy is taoguang yanghui: take a low-proﬁle foreign policy stance while quietly strengthening the PLA’s capabilities (You 1996: 233–73). Deng’s idea was that making China unchallengeable requires cleverly using the contradictions between major powers and between countries of north and south to position China favourably in the changing world-security landscape. This would enlarge China’s survival space (shengcun kongjian) to cope with a hostile environment and has become a key element of China’s defence culture. Patriotism as a weapon to link the nation to the State Coping with an external enemy helps the Chinese government to reconstruct a defence culture useful for maintaining national unity. This is done in the name of patriotism. The population accepts that the nation faces an international challenge, which has served to draw the people towards the State. At the time of the US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, China faced mounting domestic problems such as large-scale laying off of state workers and the widening gap between rich and poor. The government needs a striking slogan and an effective icon to rally the people, and has found these in national campaigns for patriotism.

250 Ji You Patriotism was a key element in China’s traditional defence culture. Whenever the nation was invaded, rulers resorted to popular patriotism for national defence and China’s traditional patriotism was largely defensive. Today’s patriotism has new meanings as both a defensive and a proactive strategy. The proactive approach reﬂects rising Chinese conﬁdence in dealing with world affairs, as Chinese draw strength from their ever-growing national economy. American patriotism is built at least partially on US leadership in international affairs. Proactivity in Chinese patriotism may point to a similar direction for China as the people take great pride in international recognition of China’s global role. However, until the PLA’s backwardness is fully addressed, this layer of meaning will remain invisible. Patriotism also has other practical uses, particularly since the CCP has avoided the word ‘nationalism’ to deﬁne its reconstruction of a new ofﬁcial ideology, recognizing nationalism’s unwanted connotations. First, when the concept of nationalism was introduced to China, Han intellectuals were waging a deadly struggle against the Manchus in the late Qing period. The Han Chinese used nationalism to help restore Han centrality. But since nationalism was then narrowly deﬁned and raised the question of who the Chinese were, Han centrality confused the notion of Zhonghua minzu or the Chinese nation (Chang 2000: 259–93). The current situation is different, but the historical legacy lingers. Second, the concept of nationalism can be misunderstood as a policy to advance external expansion. This is especially true in Asia, where ultranationalism drove Japanese aggression in World War II. China is vulnerable to such a regional perception since it is so large, so close, and has a rich history of unfortunate encounters with neighbours. Thus, an ofﬁcial Chinese ideology of nationalism would alarm the Asia-Paciﬁc region and add substance to the myth of the ‘China threat’ (Cheng 1999: 176–202). The CCP prefers ‘patriotism’ (aiguozhuyi) to ‘nationalism’ in its ofﬁcial language. Patriotism is ethnically neutral and centred more on distinctive geographic and cultural connotations than on speciﬁc political meaning. Since it can be applied to all nationalities living within Chinese borders, the ofﬁcial interpretation of patriotism entails no visible conﬂict with the notion of all Chinese consisting of 55 minority nationalities. Politically its proactive content reﬂects the Chinese desire to enlarge China’s role in world affairs, but militarily the concept is basically defensive, largely responding to a perceived external threat. It does not justify expansionist behaviour, but conveys the message that there is nothing wrong in defending the nation’s legitimate frontiers. Patriotism can also have a powerful appeal to the population. Translated literarily, aiguozhuyi means ‘love-state-ism’, and the word guojia can be the state, the people and the country. The Party uses this combined meaning cleverly. The historical stories of national heroes like Yue Fei, Wen Tianxiang and Lin Zexu, whose motivation was to repay a personal debt

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to the State, are told repeatedly to arouse people’s determination to ﬁght foreign invasion. The people are made to believe that when the security of their country is under threat, their service is needed to protect the State and their family. Patriotism establishes this link between the people and the State. The Party tries to instil a notion that if you love the country, you should ﬁrst love the State and defend it. Thus patriotism as the central concept of China’s defence culture plays a crucial role in binding the people to the government.

The PLA and Chinese defence culture The PLA plays an active role in building this new defence culture, which is seen as indispensable to China’s modernization in general and war preparation in particular. The PLA’s special political position in society gives it major inﬂuence in a gradually changing public perception of war and peace, especially concerning Taiwan.3 Public opinion on the nine wars that the PLA has fought since 1949 is very positive, and the people want to see the Chinese military powerful and proactive. Therefore, the PLA’s campaign for its own corporate interests has paralleled rising nationalism in China, in the ways discussed below. Projecting an image of the guardian of national interests The concepts of national sovereignty and territorial integrity, introduced to China only in the nineteenth century, are relatively new to the Chinese. Since the introduction was accompanied by repeated foreign invasions, the Chinese developed a unique understanding of these concepts as intimately linked to a nation’s military power. There is still a national consensus that without a powerful military, national sovereignty is an unaffordable luxury; national borders are simply lines on a map respected by no foreign state. How the military contours these concepts has become a key component of China’s defence culture to penetrate deeply into the minds of the Chinese people. The national psyche favouring well-protected national sovereignty and secure national borders shapes the PLA’s mindset and sense of mission. It also helps to restore the PLA’s special political and social status inside China, for which the PLA has worked hard to project its image as the guardian of national interests and national security. The PLA has not hesitated to wage battle with a number of its neighbours in the past in the name of protecting China’s borders, and it will not shy from doing so in the future. Establishing national reuniﬁcation as the PLA’s primary goal National reuniﬁcation today drives the construction of China’s defence culture, which is built on a foundation of humiliation from losing considerable

252 Ji You land through military defeat. This bitter historical experience provides very little room for compromise on the issue of national reuniﬁcation. To most Chinese, national reuniﬁcation is not just about settling an old debt, but is also about a forward-looking national fulﬁlment. Without recovering lost territories, China cannot completely close a humiliating historical chapter and truly overcome its most painful historical burden so that the nation can move ahead. Most Chinese hold that these territories were ceded to foreign powers at gunpoint when China was weak. China is now surely on the rise again, but the Chinese cannot feel satisﬁed if their nation cannot repossess the key part of its lost territories.4 As reuniﬁcation has become a non-negotiable national consensus, the legitimacy of the government is judged by its attitudes towards reuniﬁcation. The PLA is actually the key political force for establishing this consensus. The PLA believes that since reuniﬁcation (even if peaceful) cannot be achieved without military strength and deterrence, modernization of the PLA is crucial. A principle of China’s defence culture is that any major concession in the national reuniﬁcation effort is an act of treason. Guided by this defence culture, ordinary people are led to believe that national reuniﬁcation is worthy of war: ‘broken jade is better than unbroken tile’ (Liu 2000: 12–21). Promoting a pro-military social mood Defence culture requires ofﬁcial breeding and forced indoctrination. In recent years, the PLA has engaged in a tenacious campaign to promote a pro-military mood in China. Shangwu qiangbin – worshipping martial spirit and enhancing the military – is a key slogan in national defence education. The PLA and local governments jointly set up over 10,000 military schools across the country to train teenagers who must spend part of their vacation receiving intensive military education (Zhongguo guofangbao 29 July 2002). The people are reminded of the danger of war while they enjoy a peaceful life. To the PLA, this pro-military social mood is not about worshipping militarism; it is a practical means of getting the people behind its war preparation against separatist elements. The commitment to martial spirit is seen as a powerful driver for national revival (Yao 1999: 3–44). The core of the effort to build a ‘Cult of Defence’ is to uplift the military’s popular image (Wu 1997: 16–20). Military power was seldom cherished traditionally. Imperial rulers relied on soldiers to establish their dynasties, but civil ofﬁcials enjoyed far greater prestige than generals (Huang 1981). The military increased its status during the period of war against foreign invasions; however, the Chinese people suffered at the hands of corrupt soldiers when the country was in chaos. In peaceful times the population has looked down on the military, so, despite the PLA’s contribution to restoring order, before long the old social bias returned. Since

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1949, public responses to the PLA have moved through worship, criticism and disdain. Soldiers are poorly paid, their important function of protecting the nation against external threats is not appreciated, and joining the service is often seen as a last career choice (Wang 1999: 54–7). Throughout the 1990s, the Party and the military tried tirelessly to repair the PLA’s damaged image as a people’s army. Public support peaked in 1998 when 300,000 soldiers and about 100 generals battled ﬂoods along the bank of the Yangtze River and saved millions of lives. The campaign under way to promote a pro-military social mood has helped to strengthen civil–military ties, which contribute to China’s political stability (Joffe 1997: 53–70). Indeed, a pro-military social mood in China is a key component of building a strong economy and powerful military. Late Qing reformer Liang Qichao’s famous words are now constantly put forward: ‘The Chinese civilisation, the nation’s primary drive (yuanqi) and survival lie in those supporters of military power’. Although it is difﬁcult to measure how much this pro-military social mood has been integrated into China’s defence culture, there is considerable potential for a pro-military spirit to inﬂuence Chinese youth under certain domestic and international conditions.

The PLA’s efforts to enhance military nationalism The PLA has long been an instrument of the CCP’s promotion of nationalism. Anti-imperialism was one of its primary missions together with nationalist ferment that was sharpened in eight years of struggle against the Japanese from 1937 (Johnson 1962). As a professional military, the PLA fought a stalemate with the powerful US Army in the Korean War. On the 50th anniversary of the war in October 2000, the PLA was hailed as the guardian of national independence. The PLA has been seen as similar to the Israeli armed forces in being a revolutionary professional army, although the PLA’s nationalist inclination forges this resemblance more closely. In the last two decades, the Chinese military’s image as a revolutionary army has been replaced by the image of a full professional organization driven by a nationalist course (You 2001: 23–47). This is a continuation of the PLA’s nationalist tradition and a natural outcome of the nation’s embrace of nationalism. Let us consider some key indications of the PLA’s nationalist disposition. De-ideologizing the military Before reform, the PLA had strong ideological leanings based on Maoist revolutionary theory. Ideological control was an integral part of Party control over the gun. The PLA thus became class-based and an ideological model for Chinese society to follow. With the CCP shifting towards nationalism, the PLA has moved in the same direction, focused on dealing

254 Ji You with external threats. Efforts to de-ideologize the military propel this trend. First, Marxism is now seen to be too abstract for the PLA’s modernization drive by rejecting professionalism as a primary goal. Second, it is easier for the Party and the PLA to ﬁnd common ground in nationalism. With the PLA no longer required to serve the needs of the working class, it can embrace a wider deﬁnition of national interests and is thus more readily acceptable to the wider population. Third, if Party–PLA ties are built on common national consensus, i.e. building a strong economy and powerful military, rather than on maintaining ideological correctness, there is less need to indoctrinate soldiers. Soldiers are imbued with patriotism through the national defence culture. Replacing Maoist ideology reorients the PLA’s missions. This can be seen in the PLA’s support for the CCP’s decision in the early 1980s to drop communist ideology as the guideline for conducting foreign affairs. Since the founding of the PRC in 1949, the PLA has been involved in nine wars, which can be roughly categorized into two groups: wars fought for ideological reasons and wars fought to protect national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Certainly there are cases in the second category that have an ideological imprint. Most were waged in the 1950s and 1960s. The fading of war action after China stopped responding to nations on an ideological basis has signiﬁcantly reduced the reason for war. The government realized in the 1980s that the military solution of conﬂict should be used only as a last resort, although China has always adopted a nonnegotiable approach towards sovereignty and territorial issues (Yao and Liu 1994: 71–6). In fact, China made more concessions than its counterparts in all border negotiations. Contrary to the claim that China has an expansionist agenda, Chinese territory is smaller now than it was in 1949 (Mao and Zeng 1996: 132–4).5 Johnston (1998: 78–9) has correlated China’s reduced involvement in military disputes between 1949 and 1992 with the nation’s increased international status and greater economic interdependence with the world economic system. Removing ideology as the foundation of foreign and defence policy serves the PLA well. The PLA paid a heavy price in the ideologically driven Korean War in the 1950s and almost suffered a nuclear surgical strike from the USSR in 1969. Without Maoist ideology, the PLA can effectively tackle its major problem of backward equipment. A focus on national reuniﬁcation and national security does not necessarily make the PLA more peaceful, but it does give the soldiers the drive to enhance their professionalism and organizational cohesion. Setting up a new national defence strategy One key measure to gauge a nationalist military is its defence strategy. Since 1949, the PLA has altered its defence strategy several times, from following Mao’s ‘people’s war’ doctrine to taking Revolution in Military

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Affairs (RMA) as the guide for modernization. Preparation for RMA warfare has accelerated the PLA’s shift away from being a tool of revolution dictated by the ‘people’s war’ principle that required close interaction between soldiers and the masses. The RMA mission is mainly externally oriented. The soldiers are made ready for high-tech warfare against an external enemy. The RMA has provided a guideline for the PLA to improve its national defence strategy for forward defence, stress on offensive operations and ideas about pre-emptive strikes (Guo 1995: 47–9). In 1993 the CCP formulated a new national defence strategy for the PLA’s modernization. The PLA is convinced more than ever that winning a hi-tech war relies on hardware superiority, sound tactics and a suitable force structure (You 1999: 325–45). China’s national defence strategy now focuses mainly on defence against strategic concerns, namely the major military powers. The strategy is forward-looking and ﬂexible, catering to different scenarios from major wars to small-scale border conﬂicts. This is the PLA’s response to the changing security environment in the post-Cold War era. It prescribes concrete measures for weapons programmes, force organization, campaign tactics and research priorities aimed at equipping the PLA at the frontiers of hi-tech breakthroughs (Tao 1997: 65–73). All these demonstrate that the PLA has become more and more professionalized. External threats, real or imagined, have quickened the pace of the PLA’s modernization. ‘War against terror’ After the terrorist attack on the US on 11 September 2001, China immediately launched its own campaign against terrorism domestically. The PLA’s contribution to the campaign has been crucial, although most of the combat was done by the People’s Armed Police (PLAAP) under the PLA. This has greatly helped the promotion of nationalism in China, where ‘war against terrorism’ is used to consolidate national sovereignty and territorial integrity through suppressing China’s ethnic insurgents, mainly in Xinjiang. International cooperation against the Taliban networks enhances China’s national security, removing a time-bomb along China’s northern borders. Therefore, waging a war against ‘international terrorism’ has been a good opportunity for China to combat ethnic separatist movements and advance national uniﬁcation. For the CCP, terrorism in China takes the form of violent struggle for ethnic independence and is deeply rooted. Insurgency inspired by religious fundamentalism was the chief mechanism for promoting the separatist course, while foreign support drove this struggle against Beijing (Song 2001: 173). Beijing has had no effective way of tackling this problem. The 11 September attack on the US, however, provided new grounds for China to deal militarily with Xiangdu (independence ﬁghters in Xinjiang) without international protest.

256 Ji You Immediately after the 11 September attack, a top ofﬁce coordinating all matters related to the war against terror was set up under the command of the Central Military Commission (CMC), an anti-terrorist research centre was set up in the Beijing Institute of Contemporary International Relations, and a number of special anti-terrorist fast-response units in the PLAAP were set up in sensitive cities and regions (South China Morning Post 18 January 2002). A three-month clampdown was launched in Xinjiang in mid-October 2001 to chase insurgents and destroy their networks. Six weeks later, 20 bases were destroyed and over 250 people were arrested, at least 100 of whom were said to have received training with al-Qaida in Afghanistan (Renmin Ribao 21 February 2002). The PLA has claimed major victory over the Xinjiang insurgents. The ﬁnished campaign has served important political goals by helping to: 1 2 3

secure the safety of long land borders in northwest China; build an environment conducive to implementing the Grand Western Strategy of developing China’s indigent west, and squeeze all separatists into Tibet, and the Muslim areas, such as Xinjiang.

Ethnic separatism may never be eliminated, but the movements have been basically contained, to Beijing’s great relief.

The PLA and national reuniﬁcation The CCP has injected new ideas about nationhood and nationalism into China’s defence culture, and is guiding the nation’s defence forces – the PLA – as a vehicle to promote a certain type of nationalism – aiguozhuyi – in China. Chinese leaders are supplementing military force to conduct national security by marshalling popular sentiment around the ‘nation’. They are recasting national ideology and mobilizing nationalism to help ﬁll the ideological lacuna, hold the nation together, and drive the mission of national reuniﬁcation. National reuniﬁcation has been the PRC’s central task ever since the nation was founded in 1949. The PLA has been the primary instrument to accomplish the mission. Since the return of Hong Kong and Macau to Chinese sovereignty in the 1990s, Beijing has put more political urgency on reuniﬁcation with Taiwan. Taiwan’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) winning power in 2000 has accelerated the pace of creeping independence, and, increasingly, reuniﬁcation through peaceful negotiations seems to be out of the question. Beijing sees a military solution probably not as a way to achieve reuniﬁcation, but as deterrence to Taiwan’s independence. Taiwan’s slide towards independence has stimulated the PLA to step up war preparedness in recent years. Despite the PLA’s relatively low public

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proﬁle in Taiwan policy, the PLA holds the ﬁnal say on the matter. Its position therefore has a decisive impact on how both sides of the Strait handle the dispute. The PLA is especially sensitive to the DPP’s unilateral effort to change the status quo. A stronger nationalist disposition for the PLA has not made war inevitable, since the PLA knows that nobody beneﬁts from a major war. However, it is acting on plans preparing for a worst-case scenario. National reuniﬁcation is the PRC’s political goal. For the PLA, which is seeking a forward presence in the Paciﬁc, Taiwan’s strategic value is enormous: China is semi-concealed by the ﬁrst island chain. If it wants to prosper, it has to advance into the Paciﬁc, in which China’s future lies. Taiwan, facing the Paciﬁc in the east, is the only unobstructed exit for China to move into the ocean. If this gateway is opened for China, then it becomes much easier for China to manoeuvre in the West Paciﬁc. (Jiang and Duan 1995: 9) Furthermore, Taiwan’s strategic importance has been assessed from its position in the hub of Sea Lanes of Communication (SLOC) in the West Paciﬁc: it is situated conveniently to control the Balin and Bashi Straits in the south, to block the Gonggu and Naguo waterways in the north, and to protect the Mainland in the east. As such, it may be used to adversely affect forward deployment by the US, Japan’s economic lifeline and Russia’s southward freedom of movement on the ocean. So if Taiwan is reuniﬁed with the Mainland, this will not only help China’s efforts to resolve the South China Sea problem, but will also disrupt the US’s front strategic chain in the Asia-Paciﬁc region (Jiang and Duan 1995: 9). Therefore, the PLA will never give up on Taiwan. Its brinkmanship in 1995/96 served as a indicator of the changing attitude of senior ofﬁcers towards a more hardline approach to territorial issues. The civilian and military leaders have come much closer to a consensus on the direction of China’s defence policy in the years ahead: while a non-confrontational policy approach should be continued with maximum effort, preparation for war must be stepped up. Both saw in the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade that the choice between peace and war was no longer in Beijing’s hand. The CCP promised that the PLA should develop the capability to win a high-tech war with a major military power as quickly as possible (Peng et al. 2000: 9). This compels substantial increases in the national defence budget. The Party’s central task is still designated as promoting national economic growth, but the Party holds a favourable view on the PLA’s demands (Peng et al. 2000: 9). The consequences are profound. By the late 1990s, the new academic assessment of the world order was the most pessimistic since the beginning of the 1980s (Yan 1998: 15). Jiang Zemin has claimed

258 Ji You repeatedly that the negative new trends in international politics have imposed great urgency on China’s military and technological modernization. Economics are still in command, but more national resources will be devoted to military build-up (Peng et al. 2000: 10). The PLA is the main winner in such a policy change.

Conclusion There is no doubt that the PLA is spearheading the nationalism drive in China. The military is crucial in bringing about two overriding goals of national policy: national reuniﬁcation and national defence through resisting external pressure. The CCP and the PLA therefore have a shared interest in modernizing the defence force as quickly and effectively as possible. By replacing Maoist ideology as a guiding principle, nationalism also helps the PLA to consolidate its professionalism and corporate identity. Nationalism inspires the largely externally oriented mission of safeguarding national interests that drives the PLA’s reform programmes, training and weapons development. The PLA is thus a major beneﬁciary of the CCP’s effort to transform the foundation of the Party’s legitimacy from Maoist communism to patriotic nationalism. Taiwan’s reuniﬁcation with the Mainland always remains a powerful driver for the PLA to increase its war capabilities. Nothing is more effective than the Taiwan issue for keeping the PLA in the race for better strategies, tactics and hardware to deter Taiwan from declaring independence. The nationalist orientation unambiguously generates popular support for this position in the name of national reuniﬁcation. The PLA’s tough rhetoric and concrete war preparations appear to have generated powerful momentum for further advancement in the national reuniﬁcation project to reclaim sovereignty over Taiwan. Meantime, clear national goals, a comprehensive defence strategy, and considerably more ﬁnancial and popular support cannot but create a more powerful military in China. This is the pivotal meaning of Chinese nationalism for the PLA.

Notes 1

2 3

After Chen Shuibian raised his thesis of ‘two separate countries on each side of the Taiwan Strait’ in July 2002, preparation for action moved beyond the military. Shanghai, for instance, conducted the ﬁrst civil air defence exercise in its downtown area in more than 50 years in August 2002. The area has a concentration of Taiwanese businesses. In recent years, military spending is the least controversial item in the debate over state budget among deputies at the annual meetings of the National People’s Congress. Zhongguo qingnian bao (Beijing Youth Daily) 27 March 2000 reported that in a public-opinion survey that it conducted among 10,000 people just after Chen Shuibian’s election as Taiwan’s president, 95 per cent of respondents voiced their willingness to join the PLA to ﬁght if Taiwan declared independence. They agreed

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4

5

that war was necessary and just to protect China’s territorial integrity. Notably, most of the respondents had a university degree. The hope to recover lost territories does not include all the land that China ceded to foreigners in the past. The Chinese know that many of these territories are not recoverable. Here lost territories mainly mean Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. These are recognized as Chinese by the international community, so by nature the effort is not irredentist. The PRC’s largest loss of territories took place in the early 1950s when Beijing, for political and diplomatic reasons, quietly watched India’s occupation of 900,000 square kilometres of Chinese territory.

References Chang Pao-min (2000) ‘Nationalities, nationalism, and globalisation: the case of China’, in Leo Suryadinata (ed.) Nationalism and Globalisation, Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, pp. 259–93. Cheng, Joseph (1999) ‘China’s ASEAN policy in the 1990s’, Contemporary Southeast Asia, 21 (2): 176–204. Guo Yongjun (1995) ‘Fangkong zuozhan ying shuli quanquyu zhengti fangkong de sixian’ (Air defence should be guided by the theory of area and integrated defence), Junshi xueshu (The Study of Military Science), 11: 47–9. Huang, Ray (1981) 1587, A Year of No Signiﬁcance, New Haven, Yale University Press. Jiang Minfang and Duan Zhaoxian (1995) ‘Taiwan zhanlie diwei danxi’ (Analysis of Taiwan’s strategic position), Haijun zazhi (Naval Magazine), 8: 8–10. Joffe, Ellis (1997) ‘How much does the PLA make foreign policy?’, in Gerald Segal and David Goodman (eds) Rising China: Nationalism and Interdependence, London: Routledge. Johnson, Chalmers (1962) Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: the Emergence of Revolutionary China 1937–1945, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Johnston, Alastair (1995) ‘Thinking about strategic culture’, International Security, 19 (4): 75–91. –––– (1998) ‘China’s militarised interstate dispute behaviour, 1949–1992: a ﬁrst cut at the data’, China Quarterly, 153: 76–92. Liu Jianggui (2000) ‘Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun yu Zhonghua minzhu de weida fuxing’ (The PLA and the grand rejuvenation of the Chinese nation), Zhongguo junshikexue (China’s Military Science), 2: 12–21. Mao Zhengfa and Zeng Yan (eds) (1996) Bianfanglun (Theory of Territorial Defence), Beijing: PLA Academy of Military Science Press. Peng Rixuan, Ying Lin and Li Tao (2000) ‘Zhongguo jundui xiandaihua jianshe huigu yu zhanwang’ (A review and forecast of China’s military modernization), Guofang daxuexuebao (Journal of the PLA National Defence University), 5: 8–10. Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily) (2002) 21 February. Scobell, Andrew (2002) China and Strategic Culture, Carlisle, PA: US Army War College. Shi Yukon (1998) ‘Shixi xinshiqi quanmin guofang jiaoyu zhiduhua’ (On institutionalisation of national defence education for all society in the new era), Zhongguo junshikexue (China Military Science) 3: 41–6. Song Zhuangzhi (2001) Zhongya xingejiu yu diqiu anquan (The New Order and Regional Security in Central Asia), Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe.

260 Ji You South China Morning Post (2002) 18 January. Tao Bojun (1997) ‘Dangde sandai lingdao jiti yu keji qianjun’ (The Party’s third generation leadership and strengthening the armed forces through technological breakthroughs), Zhongguo junshikexue (China Military Science), 3: 65–73. Unger, Jonathan (ed.) (1996) Chinese Nationalism, New York: M.E. Sharpe. Wang Lidong (1999) ‘Shehui zhuyi shicang jinji tiaojian xia budui guanbin renshengguan jiazhiguan de bianhua ji duice’ (The changing value judgement and world outlook of soldiers under the socialist market economy), Guofang daxuexuebao (Journal of the PLA National Defence University), 4: 54–7. Whiting, Allen (1989) China Eyes Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press. Wu Rusong (1997) ‘Zhongguo gudai zhanlie guannian de lishi wenhua yuanyuan’ (Historical and cultural origins of ancient Chinese strategic concepts), Zhongguo junshikexue (China Military Science), 1: 16–20. Yan Xuetong (1998) ‘21 Shiji zhongguo jieqide guoji anquan huangjing’ (The security environment for China’s rise in the twenty-ﬁrst century), Guofang daxuexuebao (Journal of the PLA National Defence University), 1: 15–18. Yao Yanjin and Liu Jixian (1994) Deng Xiaoping xinshiqi junshi lilun yanjiu (A Study of Deng Xiaoping’s Military Theory in the New Era), Beijing: PLA Academy of Military Science. Yao Youzhi (1999) ‘Qianbin shi anbang xinguo de yongheng zhuti’ (Building up powerful armed forces: the eternal theme of bringing peace and stability to a country), Zhongguo junshikexue (China’s Military Science), 2: 344. You, Ji (1996) ‘Huiying houlengzhan shidai de tiaozhan’ (Coping with the challenge of the post-Cold War era), in Tien Hung-mao (ed.) Huolengzhan shiqi yatai jiti anquan (Post-Cold War Collective Security in Asia and the Paciﬁc), Taipei: National Policy Research Institute, pp. 233–73. –––– (1999) The Armed Forces of China, Sydney, London: Allen and Unwin, New York: I.B. Tauris. –––– (2001) ‘China: from a tool of revolution to a professional military’, in Muthiah Apalagapa (ed.) The Professionalism of Asian Armed Forces, Hawaii, East–West Centre Press, pp. 93–110. Zheng Yongnian (1999) Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China, London: Cambridge University Press. Zhongguo qingnian bao (Beijing Youth Daily) 27 March 2000. Zhongguo guofangbao (China Defence Daily) 29 July 2002.

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Index

2–28 uprising, Taiwan (1947) 14, 107, 111–12 11 September attacks 103, 153; Chinese response 54–5; as excuse for ‘terrorism’ clampdown 255–6; liberalist v. New Left response 54–5 aboriginal people (yuanzhumin), Taiwan 109 Aceh, Indonesia 181 agriculture, and ﬁscal transfer 230 aiguozhuyi see patriotism Amnesty International 151, 152 Anderson, Benedict 14, 66 anti-nationalist views 4–5 anti-NATO sentiment 66–9, 71 anti-US activities, post-Hainan Incident 100 anti-US/West propaganda 75–80 anti-US/West sentiment 10–12, 54, 46–7, 66, 73–4, 80, 85–7, 92–7; human rights hypocrisy 93–4; post-Belgrade 67–9 arms trade 87 aviation industry, Taiwan 200 Baiying ziben (Silver Capital) 48 bargaining power, and ﬁscal transfer 231 Belgrade bombing 11, 12, 13–14, 47, 85–101; Chinese authorities’ responses 90–2; media reaction 65–83; as trigger for nationalism 88–90; views following 47, 66–83, 87–90, 91–9, 102 benshengren (native Taiwanese) 126 Bockman, Harald 172, 173 Breuilly, John 108

British colonial government, Hong Kong 179 Buddhism 162 Buruma, Ian 117–18 Bush, George W. administration 100–1, 103, 153 Cao Changqing 48, 54–5 CCP see Chinese Communist Party centralization 9 Changjiang dushu jiang (Changjian Dushu Prizes) incident 48–9 Chen Duxiu 176–7 Chen Kuiyuan 181 Chen Shuibian 113–14, 115–16, 134, 200 Chen Yi 111 Chen Zhimai 177 Cheng, Joseph 13 Chiang Ching-kuo 113, 114 Chiang Kai-shek 112, 177 China Can Say No books 47, 87 ‘China threat’ thesis 10, 11–12, 86–7, 107, 250 ‘Chinese’, perception of term in Taiwan 127–9 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 6, 8, 13, 30, 34, 177, 191; anti-West propaganda 77–9, 81–2; and Confucianism 35; lack of faith in democracy 181–2; members in Tibet 162–3; patriotism 250–1; property rights 27; ‘second liberation’ 45; Taiwan sovereignty 118; Zhuang strategy 150; see also Renmin ribao Chinese Embassy, Belgrade, bombing see Belgrade bombing ‘Chinese liberalism’ 34, 35 ‘Chinese nationalism’ see nationalism

262 Index Chinese uniﬁcation (CU) see uniﬁcation Chiou, C.L. 14 clash of civilizations thesis 11, 74–80 cohesion see uniﬁcation colonialism 51, 56; Hong Kong 179 communications, improvement under PRC 155–7 ‘comprehensive democracy’ 32 conditions in China, liberalists v. New Left views 52–4 Confucianism 3, 35, 36; compatibility with democracy 35–6; democratic theory 31–2 ‘Confucian liberalism’ 35–6 ‘containment’ strategy, Western 86–7 corruption 33, 52; and market economies 53 cotton industry, Xinjiang 205–7 cross-cutting issues, Taiwan 132–3 cross-Strait relations 134–7, 185–6; economic 17, 197–201, 208–11, 212 CU see uniﬁcation Cui Zhiyuan 50 ‘Cult of Defence’ see defence culture cultural goods industry, Taiwan 200–1 ‘cultural iconoclasm’ 34 Cultural Revolution 8 culture 7, 31, 33–6, 82; backwardness of 7; as barrier to democracy 187; Chinese v. Western 30; as Confucian 35; European 56; as focus of national loyalties 73–4; subjugation to Western ideas 30–1; Taiwanese 117; unity through 3

resistance to 171–2; as Say-no objective 32; Taiwan 107; undermining unity 178 democratic politics (tuichu minzhu) 31 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) 132, 256–7; establishment of 113; modiﬁcation of nationalist stance 133–4; views on Taiwan 184 ‘democratic socialists’ 28–9 democratization: Eastern Europe 188; and free market 28; Hong Kong 179–80; liberalism and nationalism as barriers to 26–7; national-identity challenges to 186–90; nationalism as obstruction to 30; opposition to 170–1; Taiwan 107, 113, 118, 122, 130–5, 139–41, 184, 186, 188; as threat to national identity 174–5; Tibet 181–3 demos (common people) 29; as threat to freedom 28; rule by 33 Deng Xiaoping 86, 159, 249; reforms 8 dependency ratio, and ﬁscal transfer 230 diaspora, Chinese 50 dictatorship 4, 29–30, 177 ‘dirty industries’, Xinjiang 207–8 dissidents 47; call for democratic federalism 171; smear campaign against 76–7 disunity, as end of Chinese nation 70 DPP see Democratic Progressive Party Du Pu 96 Dushu magazine 49, 50

Da cankao (Big News) 54 Dai: education 160, 161; religion 162 Dai Qing, criticism of Dushu 49–50 Dalai Lama 151–2, 154, 163, 172, 180, 181 dangwai (outside the KMT) 113, 115 defence culture 248; patriotism as base 249–51; and PLA 251–3; realism as base 248–9 defence strategy 254–5 democracy: attempts at 7–8; and Confucianism 31–2, 35–6; and dictatorship 29–30, 177; French model 32; liberal approaches 27–9; and national identity 33–7; and national integration 16–17; nationalist approaches 29–33; v. neo-authoritarianism 178;

Eastern Europe, democratization 188 East Turkestan Liberation Organization 154 economics 5, 6, 7; corruption 53; integration, PRC–Taiwan 17, 197–201, 208, 212; minority areas 155–7, 201–5; Tibet 156; Xinjiang 156, 157, 201–11, 212; see also ﬁscal system; ﬁscal transfers; gross domestic product education: ethnic minorities 160–1; military 252; patriotic 78; promoting integration 159–60; see also students elections: Hong Kong 179; Taiwan 130–4, 137 elites, nationalist, Taiwan 131–4 ‘empire thesis’ 174–6

Index 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45111

263

energy industry, Taiwan 199 Enlightenment 44, 45, 50–1, 56 ethnic minorities 70, 71; adherence to culture 147–8; conﬂict, Taiwan 112, 116; education 160–1; ﬁscal transfers to pacify 17–18, 231, 236–7, 239, 242; identity 149, 211–12; integration 15–16; and nation-state building 126; relations with Han 165; religion 161–2 ethnic minority areas 235–6; bargaining power 231; economy 155–7, 201–5; infrastructure developments 210, 211; political leverage 213; population transfer 157–9; PRC policy 213; separatism 15–16, 255–6 ethnic mobilization, Taiwan, challenges to 131–2 ethno-nationalism 173–4 Euro-centrism 3 European culture, as universal 56 ‘everyday plebiscite’, democracy in Taiwan as 140 expansionism 250 expatriate Chinese, role in nationalist movements 47, 72

Gellner, Ernest 14, 108 Germany, unity via ﬁscal transfers 221–2 global capitalism 51 globalization 16–17; ‘identity’ effect 211–12; post-Belgrade views 95–7; Xinjiang 201–8 goodwill (xiaoqi zhi lu), towards US 87 Gramsci, Antonio 56 Greater China, appeals to 72–3 ‘Greater Tibet’, idea of 180, 182 Great Wall, as national symbol 70–1 Greenfeld, Liah 6, 109 gross domestic product (GDP): ethnic minority areas 201–4; and ﬁscal transfer 230, 234, 239; growth 5; variations between regions 223–4; see also economics Guangdong: GDP 202, 203, 204; trade 208–9 Guangxi, GDP 202 Guizhou, GDP 223–4 Gu Mu 35 Guo Longlong 97–8 Guo Yingjie 9, 23–38, 108, 118 Gu Zhun 24

Fang Keli 23 Fang Ning, attack on US culture 94–5 federalism 178 ﬁscal system: Mao era 225; and national integration 17–18; regional disparities 223–4 ﬁscal transfers 225–7, 228–9, 234–5, 240–1; determinants 227, 230–4, 237; ethnic minority areas 17–18, 231, 236–9, 242; new-/old-system subsidies 226; provincial–county 242–3; returned revenues 225–6; transition period 226–7; unity via 221–3, 235, 237, 239 Frank, Andre Gunder 48 freedom 51; negative 29; personal v. national identity 37–8 ‘free trade’ doctrine 53 Friedman, Edward 171 fuguo qiangjun (rich nation, strong army) 69 Fujian, Taiwanese investment 212

Hainan Incident (2001) 11–12, 13–14, 100–1 Hakka see Taiwan Han: Han-centric nationalism 70; immigrants, minority areas 109, 112, 127, 132, 158–9, 205–6, 207; population transfer 157–9; relations with ethnic minorities 165 Hansen, Mette Halskov 161 Hardt, Michael 4 He, Baogang 8, 16, 108, 118 He Qinglian 50 He Xin 30 Hillman, Ben 7, 12–13 historical legacy 73–4 Hoklo see Taiwan Holland, Lorien 11 Hong Kong 173; democratization 179–80 Hu Jintao 91 human rights 32, 33, 153; Chinese/Western differences 31; post-Belgrade views 93–4; smear campaign against 75–6; violations, Tibet 151 Huntington, Samuel 11, 80 Hu Shi 177

Gansu 239 Gao Mobo 9 Gao Xingjian, Nobel Prize 47 GDP see gross domestic product

264 Index iconoclasm 35; totalistic 34 identity, cultural 34, 36 identity, national 17, 171, 211–12; deﬁnition 123; and democracy 33–7, 186–90; historical context 172–9; v. personal freedom 37–8; suspicion of 36 identity, Taiwanese 14, 113, 117, 118–19, 122; v. Chinese 127–9, 138–42 ideology: Marxist-Leninist 4, 5, 8; nationalism as 108–9; removal of 253–4 ‘imagined’ communities 130–1 imperialism 51; defence against 3 independence: Taiwan 108, 112–13, 116, 133–4, 135–6, 185–6, 256–7; Tibet 150–1, 152, 175 Independentists, Taiwan 124, 125–6 Indonesia 181 industry: Taiwan 199, 200–1; Xinjiang 205–10 information technology (IT) industry, Taiwan 199 infrastructure improvements 155–7, 205, 210; Tibet 156–7, 180; Xinjiang 211 integration 15–17, 150; criteria 148–9; deﬁnitions 148; economic 17, 155, 197–201, 208, 212; importance of ethnic minorities 148; US-style 96 intellectual maturity 52–3 intelligentsia, post-Belgrade views 94, 97–8 Internet: as forum for debate 45–6; post-Belgrade protests 89 Islam, as threat to integration 163–4, 165; see also Muslims IT see information technology Japan: aggressions 65; colonization, Taiwan 109–11; conﬂict (1930s) 110 Ji An 47 Jiang Tingfu 177 Jiang Zemin, President 35, 91–2, 185 Jia Qingguo 98 Jiefangjun bao (Liberation Army Daily) 86–7 journalism see newspapers Kazakhstan 153; oil 209; trade with PRC 210 KMT see Kuomintang

knowledge systems 56 Kohil, Atul 171 Koreans 150 Krauthammer, Charles 10 Kuomintang 114, 122, 132, 176; administration 110, 111; organizational adaptability 133; rule, Taiwan 112–13; views on Taiwan 184 Kyrgyzstan 153; trade with PRC 210 Lee Teng-hui, President 12, 87, 113, 114, 122, 133, 136–7 left/right divisions 46–9; modernity 49–52; post-Belgrade 47 Legislative Council (Legco), Hong Kong 179 Leninism see Marxist-Leninist ideology Liang Qichao 253 Liang Xiaosheng 97 ‘liberalism’: as term 24; Chinese 34, 35 ‘liberalists’: and 11 September attacks 55; and modernity 50; v. New Left 51–4; as term 46 liberals: approaches to democratization 8–9, 27–9; ‘marketism’ 27; v. nationalists 24–7 Lin Chia-lung 14 ‘literati’ 45; as term 46 Liu Junning 24–5, 35; republicanism 28 Liu Shoaqi 8 Liu Xiaobo 26, 54 Li Zehou 9, 34–5 Long River (Chiang Jiang), as national symbol 70 Louis, Victor 175, 177–8 Luxemburg, Rosa 4 Macau 173 Mackerras, Colin 15 McLean, Ian 108 Mainland Affairs Council, Taiwan 116 Mainlanders, Taiwan 109, 112, 127, 132 Manchus 147 Maoist ideology, removal 254 Mao Zedong 4, 8, 176, 177–8, 249 ‘marketism’ (shichang zhuyi) 27 marketization 7, 16–17; ‘identity’ effect 211–12; PRC 197–8; Xinjiang 17, 201–8 martial law, Tibet 151 Marx, Karl 56 Marxist-Leninist ideology 4, 5, 8

Index 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45111

May 8 Incident see Belgrade bombing May Fourth Movement 3, 4, 25, 34, 35, 44, 48, 65, 67, 74 Ma Yingjiu 114–15 media: campaign to smear NATO 66–7; post-Belgrade responses 67–83; view of nationalism 12–13; see also newspapers Miao 149 military education, and defence culture 252 military intimidation: Taiwan 137, 138–9, 140, 185; Xinjiang 255–6 military, the see People’s Liberation Army minben, Confucian notion of 31 model liberalists 55 modernization 9–10; left/right division 49–52; v. Westernization 51–2 Mongolia 15, 172 ‘Mr Democracy’ and ‘Mr Science’ 48, 74 Muslims: incursions 153; US support for action against 154; see also Islam; Uygurs Nanfang zhoumo (The Southern Weekend) 49 Nathan, Andrew 7, 16 ‘nation’, deﬁnition 196–7 national costume, as symbol of unity 71 nationalism 4–6, 25–6, 123; cultural 7, 33, 35, 82; deﬁnitions 24, 108, 123; ethno-nationalism 173–4; ‘negative’ 73–4; ofﬁcial v. unofﬁcial 85–6, 101–3; pan-Chinese 173, 179–80, 189, 191; as political ideology 108–9; and sports 48; state-centric 247; themes 67–8 nationalists 33; democracy debates 9; v. liberals 24–7; v. non-nationalists, typology 124–6; Say-no Club 32, 33, 35; Taiwan 124–6, 131–4 ‘nationalities institutes’ 161 ‘national rights’ (zuquan) 32 national sovereignty 251 national unity see uniﬁcation nation building 68–9, 172–3; Taiwan 124–6 nationhood, deﬁnition 123 NATO: post-Belgrade condemnation 67, 68, 69, 71; smear campaign against 66–7; Taiwan’s support 73

265

NATO bombing, Chinese Embassy, Belgrade see Belgrade bombing NATO-style intervention, threat of 74–5 natural disasters, and ﬁscal transfer 230 natural resources 205, 207, 209–10, 236 negative freedom 29 ‘negative’ nationalism 73–4 Negri, Antonio 4 Neimenggu, GDP 202 neo-authoritarianism 8, 9, 35 neo-Enlightenment (xin qimeng) 45, 50–1 ‘neo-nationalism’ 46–9; as term 46 New Left 9, 24; and 11 September attacks 55; conception of democracy 32; criticism of globalization 56; criticism of government 52; v. liberalists 51–4; as term 46, 50; and Western modernization 51 New Party, Taiwan 132; modiﬁcation of nationalist stance 133 New Right see liberals newspapers 85; as disseminating nationalist ideas 65–6; Jiefangjun bao 86–7; Nanfang zhoumo 49; post-Belgrade responses 67–83; Renmin ribao 12, 47, 89; see also media ‘new Taiwan/Taiwanese’ 114–16 Ngok, Kinglun 13, 85–103 Ningxia 15, 239; GDP 201, 202 NP see New Party ofﬁcial v. unofﬁcial nationalism 85–6, 101–3 oil industry, Xinjiang 205, 207, 209–10 Olympics 2008, left/right division 48 ‘One China’ policy 183 Opium Wars 65 ‘otherization’ of China 30 ownership, State v. private 27 Pan Hsi-hsien 200 pan-nationalism 173, 179–80, 189, 191 Passivists, Taiwan 124, 125–6 Patriotic Education Campaign 78 patriotism (aiguozhuyi) 99, 256; and defence culture 249–51

266 Index Peng Ming-min 112–13, 133 people, the (demos): as threat to freedom 28; rule by 33 People’s Armed Police (PLAAP) 255 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) 18, 136, 247, 248; and defence culture 251–3; de-ideologizing 253–4; PLAAP 255; promotion of nationalism 253–6; and reuniﬁcation 256–8; and Taiwan 256–7 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 173; economic integration 155, 197–201; GDP 201, 202; hostility towards Taiwan 134–5, 136–7, 138–41; infrastructure improvements 155–7; views on Taiwan 183–6 Phillips, Steven 111 PLA/PLAAP see People’s Liberation Army Politburo 231 political concerns, and ﬁscal transfer 231, 237, 239 ‘political radicalism’ 34 ‘political uniﬁcation’ 177 population density, and ﬁscal transfer 230–1 population transfer, minority areas 157–9 postcolonialism 55–6 Postiglione, Gerard A. 160, 161 postmodernism 45, 55–6 power, post-Belgrade reassessment 98–9 ‘pragmatists’ 28–9 PRC see People’s Republic of China primordial mobilization 132 pro-democracy activists, smear campaign against 76–7 Production and Construction Corps 158 pro-military mood see defence culture, PLA propaganda, post-Belgrade 81–2 property rights, CCP 27 protest actions see student demonstrations pro-US sentiment 54–5, 97 ‘pseudo democracy’ 29 al-Quida 153 Qiangguo luntan (Strong Nation Forum) 45–6 Qing Empire 109, 172, 173, 176 Qinghai 172

racism, China’s belief in West’s 80 Raiser, Martin 235, 237 Rawski, Evelyn S. 171, 172, 173 realism, and defence culture 248–9 Realists, Taiwan 124, 125–6 realpolitik 249 religion: ethnic minorities 161–2; post-Belgrade unity 71 Renan, Ernest 140, 141 Renmin ribao (RMRB) (People’s Daily) 12, 47, 89; post-Belgrade responses 66–83 republicanism 28 Republic of China (ROC) see Taiwan reuniﬁcation, and defence culture 251–2; and PLA 256–8; see also uniﬁcation revenues, returned 225–6 revolution, rejection of 34–5 Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) 254–5 right/left divisions 46–9; modernity 49–52; post-Belgrade 47 RMRB see Renmin ribao ROC see Taiwan Rubinstein, Murray 116, 117 Russia see Soviet Empire Rustow, Dankwart 16 Say-no nationalists 32, 33, 35 Sea Lanes of Communication (SLOC) 257 secessionist movements: Tibet 180–2; upsurge in 150–5 ‘second liberation’ 44 self-determination: CCP 177–8; Taiwan 108 separatism 15–16, 70, 237; Tibet 150–1, 154, 180–2; treated as terrorism 255–6; Uygurs 70, 152, 153–4; Xinjiang 205 September 11 attacks see 11 September attacks Seymour, James D. 148, 197 Shaanxi 239 Shambaugh, David 10 Shan–Gan–Ning region see Gansu; Ningxia; Shaanxi Shanghai Cooperation Organization 153 ‘Shanghai Five’ 153 Shi Yinhong 98 Shih Cheng-feng 117 Shih Ming-teh 133

Index 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45111

Shih, Stan 199 shipping industry, Taiwan 200 Sino-Japanese conﬂict (1930s) 110 Sino-US relations 13, 85; conﬂict 30, 34; post-11 September 103; postBelgrade 91–2, 97–8; post-Hainan Incident 100–1; pre-Belgrade 86–8; see also United States SLOC see Sea Lanes of Communication Smith, Anthony 108 ‘soft power’ 30 Soviet Empire 10–11, 153; disintegration 6, 147, 174, 181; unity via ﬁscal transfers 222 sports, and nationalism 48 spy-plane collision see Hainan Incident Stainton, Michael 109 ‘state’, deﬁnition 197 state-centric nationalism 247 statehood, deﬁnition 123 ‘state rights’ (guoquan) 32 student demonstrations 77; postBelgrade 81–2, 88, 90 students: anti-US indoctrination 93–4; patriotic propaganda 77–8; postBelgrade views 102; see also education subsidies, new-/old-system 226 Sun Yat-sen 3, 176 super-nationalism see pan-nationalism Taiwan 15, 34, 87, 102, 118, 124–6, 170, 173, 189, 190–1; competitive pressure 198–9; democratization 107, 122, 188; historical factors 109–10, 116–17; identity 14, 113, 117–19, 122, 124–9, 135–42, 211; independence (TI) 12, 13, 108, 112–13, 116, 123–6, 133–4, 135–6, 185–6, 256–7; integration, PRC 17, 197–201, 208, 212; KMT 112–13, 184; Mainland policy 134–5; military intimidation 137–40, 185; nationalism 14–15, 54, 107–19, 122–42, 183–6; ‘new’ 114–16; post-Belgrade responses 72–3; uprising (1947) 14, 107, 111–12 ‘Taiwanese’, perception of term 127–9 Taiwanese nationalists 124–6 Taiwan Independence Charter 134 Taiwanization 131 Tajikistan 153 Tang Shiping 190

267

taoguang yanghui see defence culture tax-assignment system (fenshuizhi) 225 territorial integrity 251 terrorism: 11 September attacks 54–5, 103, 153, 255–6; Sino-US cooperation 103; war against 153–4, 255–6 Thousand Island Lake incident 135–7 TI see Taiwan, independence Tibet 15, 34, 156, 165, 172, 173, 191; Beijing’s response to 151, 170; CCP members 162–3; economy 156, 201, 202, 203, 204; Han immigration 158–9; independence 150–1, 152, 175; infrastructure projects 156–7, 180; nationalist approach 180–3; separatism 70, 150–1, 154, 180–2; tourism 155–6 Tibetans: attitude towards Chinese government 151; education in Beijing 161; Han intermarriage 152; religion 162–3 ‘totalistic iconoclasm’ 34 tourism, minority areas 155–6 trade 5; arms 87; former Soviet states 210; ‘free trade’ doctrine 53; Guangdong 208–9; Xinjiang 208–11; see also economics; industry; World Trade Organization tradition see culture transition period, ﬁscal transfers 226–7 Tujia 149–50 ‘Turkeynization’ 174 uniﬁcation 3, 4, 69–72, 123–5, 178; by ﬁscal transfers 221–3, 235, 237, 239; ‘political’ 177; Yemen 188 Uniﬁcationists, Taiwan 124, 125–6 United States 153–4; anti-China sentiment, post-Belgrade 87–90; attitudes towards 10–12, 38, 54, 46–7, 66–9, 73–4, 80, 85–7, 92–7; ‘China threat’ thesis 10, 11–12; Chinese demands, post-Belgrade 91; support for Tibet 165; Taiwan President’s visit 87; see also Sino-US relations unity see uniﬁcation unofﬁcial v. ofﬁcial nationalism 85–6, 101–3 uprising, Taiwan (1947) see 2–28 uprising

268 Index Uygurs 71–2, 148; ethnic identity 211; government accusations of terrorism 153–4; separatism 70, 152, 153–4; Uygur/Han business relationships 213 Uzbekistan 153; trade with PRC 210 victimization, sense of 73–4, 79, 82–3 waishengren (out-of-province persons) 115, 126 Walzer, Michael 29 Wang, Shaoguang 17, 50 Wang Deshang 9 Wang Gungwu 176, 184–5 Wang Hui 24, 49, 50–1 Wang Huning 30 Wang Jisi 12 Wang Xiaodong 32, 35, 80 Wang Yizhou 96–7 Wang Yung-ching 198 war: against terrorism 255–6; readiness for 254–5; reduced involvement 254; as state-making 134 water shortage, Xinjiang 206 Wen/Xiaomin 49 West, the 10, 11, 54; ‘containment’ strategy 86–7; grievances against 7, 13, 73–4; modernization 51; postBelgrade views 94–5; seen as racist 80 Westernization 30–1, 45; v. modernization 51–2 ‘Westernizers’ 24 World Trade Organization (WTO): China’s admission 53, 87, 96–7, 198; effect on Xinjiang 206 xenophobia 10, 79–80 xiahai 45 Xiang Zhen 48 Xiao Gongqin 7, 35

Xia Yong 31 xing zai le huo (schadenfreude) 55 Xinhua Press Agency 66 Xinjiang 15, 152, 153–4, 164, 165–6, 173, 213; economic relations, PRC 208–11, 212; economics 156, 157, 201–8; Han immigrants 17, 158, 159, 205–6, 207; industry 205–7, 209–10; infrastructure developments 211; marketization 17, 201–8; military clampdown 255–6; separatist movements 205; trade 208–11; water shortage 206 Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) 204 xin qimeng (neo-Enlightenment) 45, 50–1 Xu Youyu 36, 48 Yahuda, Michael 13 Yang Ping 94 Yemen, uniﬁcation 188 Yi Dan 30–1 Yi zichan huan tequan see corruption You, Ji 18 yuanzhumin (aboriginal people), Taiwan 109 Yu Jie 55 Yuldeshev, Tahir 164 Yunnan 157–8; education 160, 161 Yu Ying-shih 26, 34 Yu Zhen 151 Zhang Wenmu 191 Zheng Yongnian 5 Zhongguo zhuyi (China-ism) 47 Zhuang 150 Zhuang Wanshou 175 Zhu Rongji, Premier 205; visit to US 87 Zhu Xueqin 29 zonghe guoli (national strength) 69 Zuo Dapei 53

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