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Native-place associations have played an indispensable role in the global migration of ethnic Chinese. Although there has been growing attention to their political role in advancing the Chinese state's interests, few studies have looked into how they are organized and how they operate vis-à-vis the state. This article focuses on post-handover Hong Kong, where native-place associations, despite their long presence, are still growing in number and sophistication after the 1997 handover. It posits that native-place associations there are forming a "cultural nexus" through which the Chinese state fosters political mobilization in support of its interests and policies. Based on an original set of event and biographical data, it shows that native-place associations are consolidating into a massive network connected by power-seeking elites. It also demonstrates how these associations seek to renew the significance of native-place and national identities. The findings point to how native-place associations may serve as a powerful cultural space for the Chinese state to project its influence offshore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the early Republican writings of a Daur man from Heilongjiang named Donjina who spent the second half of his life among the Sibe of Ili. It argues that Donjina developed a sense of pan-Manchu identity in dialogue with racial theories that came into vogue in late Qing and Republican China, but also drew on an older vision of Manchu identity tied to participation in the Qing imperial project. Donjina’s writings demonstrate the continued significance of the Manchu language on the Qing frontier into the twentieth century and challenge us to move beyond the physical spaces of the garrison communities of China proper in attempting to understand the development of Manchu identity. Donjina embraced the language of race, yet rejected the ideology of nationalism, offering an intriguing Manchu response to the rise of the Han Chinese nationalist movement and the founding of a Chinese nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the Sino-British Joint Declaration and Basic Law, Hong Kong was to exercise a high degree of autonomy under the framework of “one country, two systems” after the British handover of its sovereignty to China in 1997. In the initial post-handover period, Beijing adopted a policy of nonintervention in Hong Kong, but the outbreak of the July 1, 2003 protest triggered a subsequent change of policy. Since then, Beijing has embarked on state-building nationalism, adopting incorporation strategies so as to subject Hong Kong to greater central control over the political, economic, and ideological arenas. Ironically, instead of successfully assimilating Hongkongese into one Chinese nation, Beijing’s incorporation strategies are leading to a rise of peripheral nationalism in the city-state and waves of counter-mobilization. This article analyzes mainland–Hong Kong relations on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the handover and offers insights from an emerging case study that builds upon the nationalism literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Olympic narratives of young, educated urbanites in China to consider the 2008 Beijing Olympics’ role as a “diagnostic event” through which global conflicts and controversies coalesce and national identities are constructed. It illustrates how students and young professionals analyzed the Beijing Olympics to invoke discourses of similarity in the form of Western economic development models and difference in the form of essentialized tropes of Chinese culture to counter global images of China as a threat to international well-being. Exploring theories of mimicry to understand these appeals to similarity as a form of national value, this article also reveals how students and young professionals in China recommended the forms of culture manifest in the Olympics as an expression of difference to question and reformulate hierarchies of global power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines why, how, and with what implications the term “overseas Chinese ethnic minorities” has recently entered the official scholarly discourse and policy discussions on overseas Chinese in the People’s Republic of China. Through examining policy documents, reports, scholarly publications, and interviews with officials and scholars, the article shows that the shaoshu minzu category has permeated the discourse on overseas Chinese to steer the dual efforts of the Chinese authorities to overcome the Han-centricity of overseas Chinese studies in China and to mobilize transnational “ethnic unity” among Han and non-Han overseas Chinese. By way of highlighting a possible response to the government initiatives toward overseas Chinese ethnic minorities, the article also considers a written account of a Kazakh Dungan who took part in a government-sponsored tour to China in search of his “historic roots.” The analysis presented in the article points to a pervasive character of state power directed at totalizing heterogeneous transnational identities and reducing them to fixed categories. These transnational efforts emphasize unity over variety and cohesion over diversity within the Chinese nation. The inherently dichotomous understanding of diversity within the Chinese nation where the Han majority is contrasted to China’s ethnic minorities informs the People’s Republic of China’s transnational nation-building efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reexamines the relationship between the May Fourth Movement and warlordism by questioning the long-held assumption that the movement was from its inception as anti-warlord as it was anti-imperialist. In particular, it shows that popular nationalism before and at the beginning of the May Fourth Movement received continual support from many provincial warlords under and beyond the nominal control of the Beijing government. It demonstrates how and why these provincial warlords endorsed the patriotism of the movement at the national and international levels, even as they suppressed radical protests in their political domains. This analysis uncovers the long-obscured fact that the May Fourth Movement succeeded with crucial support from such provincial warlords because of its broad nationalism and the disunity of warlord politics. This rediscovery also reveals how military involvement in the movement changed the trajectory of both warlord politics and anti-warlordism in modern China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's invasion of China in the summer of 1937 dealt a devastating blow to Chinese journalism. Yet despite the hardships, China's wartime reporters produced a legacy of vivid writing. In the face of a series of major defeats, the journalists attempted to shore up morale and stressed the heroic resistance of Chinese forces. They reported on Japanese atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing, but not to such an extent that might erode morale. During the Maoist era, the legacy of this war reportage largely faded from a public memory which privileged the revolution. When a "new remembering" of the war emerged in the reform era, the heroic resistance narrative from war reportage dovetailed nicely with the new nationalism of today's China. But this literature has been less helpful in developing the theme of Chinese victimhood, a key component of the new memory of the war. Finally, memoir literature, so common in most combatant nations, has been problematic in China. Those who remember their war experiences do so through the prism of later traumas, particularly the Cultural Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the discourse of masculinity in contemporary Chinese popular culture by critical readings of TV drama serials (dianshi lianxuju), a crucial and underresearched site for the study of ideology, shown on prime-time national channels in recent years (2003-2007). In particular, it examines the male images in three sweepingly popular TV programs-The Big Dye House (Da ranfang), Halfway Couples (Banlu fuqi), and Unsheathing the Sword (Liangjian)-as "cultural types." It looks at the social, economic, and cultural factors that have affected men and representations of men in today's China against the backdrop of the dynamic interplay between nationalism, globalization, and consumerism. Building on the burgeoning research on Chinese masculinity in the past decade, it argues that forms of masculinity are becoming increasingly hybrid in a globalizing China and that the male images in these dramas are a product of social changes tied in with new formations of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the writings of Fan Wenlan, a leading historian in post-1949 China, this article examines the origins of the "revolutionary narrative" in the Marxist historiography of modern China in the context of political and intellectual struggles between the Nationalists and Communists and within the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s. The author argues that Fan's new account of modern China emerged primarily as a product of the Communists' resistance to the "modernization narrative" in Nationalist historiography. It was also a product of the Chinese Communists' challenge to the "orthodox" Marxist interpretation of modern Chinese history prevailing in Russia and among Chinese Marxists in the 1920s and 1930s. But Fan's background as a philologist, his poor training in Marxism, and his nationalist commitment greatly weakened his analysis of history from a Marxist perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1892, Terrien de Lacouperie (1845-1894), professor of Chinese at University College in London, set out to prove that the Chinese migrated from Mesopotamia in prehistoric times. Despite mixed responses from his colleagues, Lacouperie's "Sino-Babylonianism" found its way into China and captured the imagination of Chinese historians from the 1900s to 1930s. Whether they supported or opposed Lacouperie's view, Chinese historians were intrigued by his boldness in linking early China to the global network of trade and cultural exchange. This article examines how Chinese historians adopted, transformed, and appropriated Sino-Babylonianism in their discourse on the nation. It argues that the rise and fall of Sino-Babylonianism coincided with the Chinese perceptions of the world system of nation-states. Sino- Babylonianism was warmly received when the Chinese perceived the world system of nation-states as a hierarchy in temporality, prescribing a process of evolution that all human communities must follow. Sino-Babylonianism was fiercely rejected when the Chinese saw the world system of nation-states as a hierarchy in space, characterized by incessant territorial expansion of imperialist powers. In both instances, Sino-Babylonianism was no longer what Lacouperie had proposed in the late nineteenth century. Rather, it was an important benchmark for the Chinese understanding of the modern global order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Northern Expedition, Guomindang (GMD) policy makers balanced popular anti-imperialism with measures to improve foreign relations. Military pressures meant that top revolutionary leaders could not afford to engage both the warlords and imperialists at the same time, yet rapid advances excited anti-imperialist forces eager to destroy foreign influence once and for all. Opting for security and control, party chiefs restrained popular anti-imperialism. However, when British/warlord collusion produced signs of a Southern Expedition in late December 1926, top party heads released these restraints, encouraging anti-imperialist groups to assail foreign institutions, including the British concessions in Hankou and Jiujiang. Although a great success, the move also caused Britain to initiate troop buildups. Facing new pressures, revolutionary leaders decided to dismantle revolutionary anti-imperialism. In short, mass anti-imperialist organizations were dissolved in April 1927 for practical political reasons that extend beyond factional conflict between the CCP and GMD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the rise of the True Jesus Church (TJC) as part of an emerging indigenous Chinese Christianity. Begun in 1917 under the influence of American Pentecostalism, the TJC developed into a lively popular sect with more than a million members by the 1990s. The birth of this independent and often antiforeign group coincided with, and was aided by, the surge of patriotism in the early Republican period and arguably constituted a religious expression of Chinese nationalism. More importantly, the TJC—with its messianic proclamations and bold displays of Pentecostal power—helped shape a twentieth-century Protestant millenarian movement in China amidst political disintegration, foreign aggression, and widespread suffering. Its growth signaled an evolution of popular religion in which Christianity joined local beliefs in supplying the core ideology of sectarian movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary reflects on the contributions of the five principal essayists in this volume of Modern China. It seeks to grasp the role and weight of historical and distinctively Chinese factors in relation to global forces operating in China since the early twentieth century in these macroscopic essays. Building on their contributions, I develop a "globalization paradigm" in which the embeddedness of nations in global discourses and practices are often misrecognized as national and domestic. But while many national practices represent globally familiar reactions to recognized global tendencies, several of these essays help us to identify often unarticulated historical tendencies and emergent practices, including those from the Chinese socialist experience. They suggest ways in which Chinese and global practices become intertwined, as for instance adaptations of the Qing imperial idea to the current day. These practices not only make China different from other nations, but also have the potential to make a difference in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the little research that has been done on Uyghurs living in Beijing, they have usually been identified as internal migrants and studied in a framework that focused on socioeconomic factors. This article, by contrast, argues that the experience of many of these Uyghurs actually more closely resembles that of exiles, being linked primarily, as I show, to ethnic politics and particularly to the ongoing political repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Because historically in China people were normally exiled from Beijing to Xinjiang, I refer to the Uyghur experience in Beijing as "inverted exile." The article explores the Uyghur exile through the life and creative work of two Uyghur individuals, one musician and one writer, and points out their expressions of alienation, nationalism, nostalgia, longing for return, and ethnic dissent. With emphasis on the last, the article suggests that the exile in Beijing has surprisingly provided Uyghurs with a rare freedom to voice dissent at a time when Uyghur oppositional voices have been almost totally silenced in Xinjiang. After analyzing several examples of dissent, the article examines why Uyghur dissent was possible in Beijing and considers the implications of this dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Prasenjit Duara's strategy for "de-constructing China." this article traces the development of several competing narratives of national unity and origin during the formative Republican era ( 1911-49) of Chinese history. Faced with the difficult task of incorporating the heterogeneous peoples of the Qing empire into the new Chinese nation-state, Han Chinese intellectuals looked backward into their own history for scientific pr(x)f of this unitary national imaginary. The article focuses on the tension between, on the one hand, a racial formulation that placed the source of Chinese trinity in the "common origin" (tongyuan) of its people and, on the other hand, a more subjective formulation that located this unity in the gradual, evolutionary "melding" (ronghe) of several distinct cultures and races into a new national consciousness. In the process, it highlights the role played by social scientific discourses--as institutionalized in the disciplines of history, archaeology, and ethnology--in the construction of national identity in twentieth-century China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses both Manchu and Han sources to interrogate the relationship between Qing and China. After toppling the Ming reign, the Qing rulers identified their state with China as their eighteenth-century campaigns in Inner Asia redefined what China was. By the early twentieth century, educational institutions had Facilitated the Manchu efforts to gain the hearts and minds of the Han intellectual elite, who embraced the idea that China was a multiethnic state. Although Manchu rule ended in 191 I, the Chinese people never returned to the position that "China" was the property of the Han people: China's modem identity would be that of a unified multiethnic state. In other words, the Qing legacies to modem China include not just the country's vast territory but also a new concept of China that laid the solid foundation for the rise of its national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional understandings of Chinese nationalism often portray it as anti-Western, focusing on Chinese nationalists' obsession with a powerful state and on their ambition to recover the glory of China's historical empire. Such understandings clearly underlie the fear and hostility toward rising Chinese nationalism today. But this view relies too heavily on China's conflictive relations with the West and overemphasizes the impact of China's unique history, culture, and politics, making it hard, if not impossible, to draw on the concept of nationalism in understanding China's relations with its non-Western neighbors. Such a perspective neglects the importance of ideas and ideals from the international system that animate Chinese nationalism. In this article, the author characterizes Chinese nationalism as fusing realpolitik ideas and ideals and a fervent quest for national identity and power. A realpolitik nationalist, as defined here, is someone who frames an external threat to China in terms not of the country's unique culture or history but of a breach of the prevailing norms of the nation-state system, whose key dimensions include sovereignty, territoriality, and international legitimacy. Finally, the author applies this notion in examining China's conflicts with India in 1962 and with the Southeast Asian countries involved in the dispute over the Spratly Islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on how the sexual transgression in the novel 'Fengru feitun' turns into an issue of national sovereignty and subsequently develops into a violent and intricate confrontation between the Chinese self and the foreign Other. Characteristics of the surge in nationalism in China in the mid-1990s; Controversy surrounding the title of the novel; Portrayal of bastardy or illegitimate children in the Chinese literature.

Traces the interrelation between two constructions of territorial identity in sojourning communities in Shanghai in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Native place identity; Chinese identity; Study of the role of native place associations in shaping nationalist movements; Case study of the May Fourth Movement; Native place and national identity in the Republican era.