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The author responds to criticisms of his book "Embattled Glory: Veterans, Military Families and the Politics of Patriotism in China, 1949-2007" which appeared in the article entitled "Patriotism, Nationalism and China's US Policy: Structures and Consequences of Chinese National Identity," by Peter Hays Gries, Qingmin Zhang, H. Michael Crowson, and Huajian Cai, in the No. 205 issue of "The China Quarterly." Topics considered include contemporary Chinese nationalism, patriotism, and Chinese attitudes towards Western countries and Japan,

This article traces the unique process of reconstructing the identity of the Macau Special Administrative Region and its people after the political resumption to China in 1999, and the political and economic significance of the reconstruction. As in other postcolonial contexts, identity is an arena of political contest where various discourses that embody re-appropriation of political traditions and legacies criss-cross. In Macau, the post-handover identity comprises the local, the national and the international components, with Macau characterized as a historical, colonial/cultural hybrid and economic object. In fact, the Macau identity after 1999 represents a re-appropriation of the image of colonial Macau propagated by the Portuguese administration since the 1980s. Also, identity making has been a process of incorporating instead of repressing or eliminating the identities of "the other," and building a stand-alone national identity is not the prime task in the reconstruction of an identity. Rather, multiple identity components are deliberately incorporated and promoted. The success of the process has fabricated Macau's relatively smooth reintegration with China and enhanced the legitimacy of its new government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the October 2008 slapping incident of historian Yan Chongnian as a case study, this article attempts to contextualize and critically examine the articulation of Han supremacism on the Chinese internet. It demonstrates how an informal group of non-elite, urban youth are mobilizing the ancient Han ethnonym to challenge the Chinese Communist Party's official policy of multiculturalism, while seeking to promote pride and self-identification with the Han race (han minzu) to the exclusion of the non-Han minorities. In contrast to most of the Anglophone literature on Chinese nationalism, this article seeks to employ "Han" as a "boundary-spanner," a category that turns our analysis of Chinese national identity formation on its head, side-stepping the "usual suspects" (intellectuals, dissidents and the state itself) and the prominent role of the "foreign other" in Chinese ethnogenesis, and instead probing the unstable plurality of the self/othering process in modern China and the role of the internet in opening up new spaces for non-mainstream identity articulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]