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This study examines how India – both as a modern nation-state and a symbolic geography – is digested by Chinese self-cultivators to negotiate their belonging in China's spiritual nationhood, defined as the landscape of belief that corresponds to the geo-body of the nation-state. It follows the practitioners of Oneness (Heyi), one of the most popular Indian new religious movements in China today, for whom such negotiations are riddled with tensions. While Oneness practitioners align themselves with political orthodoxy disseminated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), emphasizing China's special role as a spiritual leader for humanity, they engage in quasi-religious heterodox practices, risking being labeled an "evil cult" (xie jiao). These frictions occur at the junction of two contrasting notions of spiritual nationhood, one derived from lingxing (spirituality) and the other from jingshen, a secularized notion of spirit that situates the CCP as the sacred center of the polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars note that since the early 1990s, the CCP has been invoking Chinese nationalism to rescue the party's declining ideological legitimacy. Probing China's political indoctrination (thought work), this article makes two contributions to such conventional consensus. First, empirically it argues that the rise of nationalism in the 1990s was not altogether new. Instead, from the early 1980s, the CCP had been switching to "patriotism." Second, this article argues that the communist regime's transition to nationalism was hesitant. It was an interactive process whereby multiple layers of the society and elite, confused alike, worked together to explore whether and how to embrace nationalism. The nation‐building also bore the imprint of the revolutionary and state‐socialist past. This article suggests that though the nation‐state has become the dominant political format of the world, as a pattern it fuses with a society's traditions, preconditions, and internal struggles. Such fusions made nation‐building in the non‐Western world unseparated from quasi‐national legacies such as revolution and socialism and could yield consequences other than capitalism and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative studies of nationalism rarely incorporate China as a case in their observations. Despite the rise of nationalism in salience throughout Chinese society, studies of nationalism in China are frequently tagged as insularly focused and unsuitable for comparison. However, a survey of the literature in Chinese nationalism studies reveals that similar blind spots and limitations challenge studies of China with more general comparative research on nationalism. Given this parallelism in development, I argue that looking to observations of China provides scholars of nationalism with vital opportunities to expand and refine theory to include insights from a non-western, non-democratic case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study applies CDA and story grammar analysis to investigate how Chinese language textbooks for primary schools foster Chinese national identity through their depiction of Chinese people struggling against foreign invaders. The analysis was conducted on 12 textbooks and the findings were based on stories featuring a range of ages, from children to soldiers and artists, who all displayed patriotic spirit and were willing to risk their lives for China. The textbooks also highlight China's past humiliation, such as the Nanjing Massacre and the loss of territories such as Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. The authors of those textbooks seek to encourage the students' national identity by promoting a sense of patriotism, sacrifice, vigilance against foreign threats, affirmation for the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and putting the interests of the People's Republic of China (PRC) ahead of personal interests. Additionally, students are expected to have a strong sense of territorial sovereignty, recognizing Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan as parts of China. However, the results also show that the portrayal of Chinese national identity is Han-centric, excluding ethnic minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An influential body of scholarship argues that authoritarian regimes design "hard" propaganda that is intentionally heavy-handed in order to signal regime power. In this study, by contrast, we link the power of propaganda to the emotional power of "soft" propaganda such as television dramas and viral social media content. We conduct a series of experiments in which we expose over 6800 respondents in China to real propaganda videos drawn from television dramas, state-backed social media accounts, and state-run newscasts, each containing nationalist messages favored by the Chinese Communist Party. In contrast to theories that propaganda is unpersuasive, we show that propaganda effectively manipulates anger as well as anti-foreign sentiment and behavior, with heightened anti-foreign attitudes persisting up to a week. However, we also find that nationalist propaganda has no effect on perceptions of Chinese government performance or on self-reported willingness to protest against the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a contextualised examination of whether Xi Jinping Thought, the latest rendition of Marxism-Leninism that functions as China's ideology, has made China's political system more sustainable. By scrutinising Xi's speeches and writings since he came to power in 2012, we demonstrate that his vision is premised on modifying consultative Leninism, China's post-Deng Xiaoping political framework, with strongman rule. This is intended to revitalise the Chinese Communist Party as a Leninist instrument to deliver comprehensive leadership, upgrade China's economy, Sinicise Marxism, nurture a party-centric nationalism, enhance legitimacy and claim global leadership on the world stage. In the process, he has revived the Maoist mass line to induce people to embrace national goals set by the Party, ultimately to persuade them that China's Leninist party-state is more 'democratic' and better at serving them than any other political system. We found that Xi's measures have enhanced the capacity of China's consultative Leninist state and thus the resilience of the regime in the short term. However, the substitution of collective leadership by strongman rule, and the end of predictable power transition by abolishing a term limit for himself, have undermined institutionalisation and reduced the endurance of the system in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the contemporary practice of nationalistic rhetoric in Chinese society through the singing competition franchiseThe Voice of China. By employing the concept of ideograph, the authors explore how the show successfully incorporates the Chinese Communist Party's nationalistic goal of promoting a unified and strong China to both the domestic audiences and the global Chinese community by relying on the persuasive and affective power of slogan. Specifically, the authors analyze and — two political and cultural slogans articulated in a variety of sonic representations and in contestants' performative statements. The authors argue that while popular culture products in contemporary China continue to be sites of political propaganda, they are able to apply new media-influenced rhetorical strategies to reflect popular sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the history of China from 1600-1949. By using a psychohistorical approach to understand the deep humiliation enacted upon the Chinese at the hands of primarily the British and the Japanese, we understand how the Chinese Communist Party was so successful in establishing their Cultural Revolution. As a cultural anthropologist, I examine my time in Suzhou, China in October 2019, during the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party and question the Chinese sense of national identity and how they will collectively define themselves going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spring 2018 China, indignant popular nationalists demanded that the "spiritually Japanese" activities of a fringe group of young Chinese who figure themselves as Japanese be proscribed. The National People's Congress quickly complied, passing legislation that made it illegal to "beautify the war of invasion." Exploring how and why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) responded to the demands of popular nationalists, we suggest that authoritarian representation occurs in China even beyond the bounds of everyday apolitical issues like education and healthcare. Indeed, because the CCP relies upon a nationalist claim to legitimate rule, authoritarian legislators may respond to the public on politically sensitive issues like nationalism as well. Journalists and lawyers, furthermore, can play a vital mediating role between elites and masses, facilitating the transmission of the information and expertise needed for authoritarian responsiveness. Implications for our understanding of Chinese nationalism, authoritarian responsiveness and state legitimation in China today are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The author puts forth an analytical framework called party-state realism for understanding how policy makers in the People's Republic of China approach foreign policy. It has four defining characteristics. In order of importance, they are: putting the interests of the Communist Party at the core of China's national interest calculation; and on this basis adopting an instrumentalist approach; adopting a party-centric nationalism; and adhering to a neoclassical realist assessment of the country's place in the international system and its relative material power in advancing national interest. In this conception, the putting of the Chinese Communist Party's interest at the core of national interest is a constant, not a variable, factor. This does not mean the changing international context and relative national power are irrelevant, just that they take secondary importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationships between Olympic strategy, nationalism and legitimacy of the Party-state in China during a decade of reform. The analysis focuses on governmental policy prioritising elite sports and Olympic ambitions in the process of rebuilding the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) following the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Drawing on Weber's revised classification of legitimacy, this investigation contextualises sport and nationalism in the context of elite sport policy throughout the shift of political legitimacy in post-Mao China. Data were collected from a range of documents and seven semi-structured interviews. This study concludes that Chinese sporting excellence in the 1980s was closely associated with nationalism and the party's political appeal. Thus, the pragmatic Party leaders of the time contended that performance-based legitimacy was more important and effective than Mao's revolutionary ideology for transforming society in post-Mao China. Accordingly, China issued an Olympic strategy and strengthened its elite sport first policy, in the belief that sporting success in the 1980s would secure the satisfaction of the masses and also justify Deng's pragmatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English-language analysis of Chinese foreign policy has often cited nationalist public opinion as a key driver of Beijing's recent assertive maritime conduct. Yet these important conjectures have not been systematically tested. How can we know whether public opinion has been driving an authoritarian state's foreign policy? What are some cases in which concern about popular nationalism may have influenced Beijing's behavior in disputed maritime spaces? To answer these questions, this article constructs a methodological framework for assessing the likely impact of public opinion on particular instances of state action. Applying this to five cases typical of China's on-water policy in the South and East China Seas since 2007 indicates that popular nationalism has had little to do with China's assertive turn on its maritime periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's most prominent dissident, the late Liu Xiaobo, criticized the Chinese Communist Party's efforts "to promote what he considered a toxic mixture of traditional culture and modern patriotism." He worried more about "a mentality of world domination" characterized by a "thuggish outlook." Quoted in Orville Schell and John Delury's (2013) book Wealth and Power, this statement reveals the culmination of some 150 years of nation-building, which now encapsulates what is probably the strongest and potentially most explosive primordial nationalism in the region since Imperial Japan. This article examines the sources of Chinese nationalism and gauges the extent to which Chinese nationalism contributes to cooperation or confrontation in China's foreign relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims at investigating the role of the expanding overseas Chinese state in the construction of 'Chineseness' among Chinese migrant entrepreneurs in Ghana. It focuses especially on the manifestation of the ideology of Chinese nationalism in the migrants' living experience. Data analyzed in this study are primarily drawn from extensive interviews with private entrepreneurs, employees of Chinese state-owned enterprises and Chinese Embassy officials in Ghana. Besides, this study is supplemented by a content analysis of archive data collected from media reports, policy documents, online forums and social media. This study reveals that as an unintended consequence, private entrepreneurs enjoy tangible benefits from the expanding presence of overseas Chinese state in Ghana. Strategies and policies implemented by the Chinese government and its overseas representatives aiming at engaging Chinese diasporas also contribute to spreading nationalism and building a deterritorial Chinese identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the consequences of nationalist unrest? This paper utilizes two original datasets, which cover 377 city-level anti-Japanese protests during the 2012 Senkaku/Diaoyu Island crisis and the careers of municipal leaders, to analyse the downstream effects of nationalist unrest at the subnational level. We find both political and economic consequences of China's 2012 protest demonstrations against Japan. Specifically, top Party leaders in cities that saw relatively spontaneous, early protests were less likely to be promoted to higher office, a finding that is consistent with the widely held but rarely tested expectation that social instability is punished in the Chinese Communist Party's cadre evaluation system. We also see a negative effect of nationalist protest on foreign direct investment (FDI) growth at the city level. However, the lower promotion rates associated with relatively spontaneous protests appear to arise through political rather than economic channels. By taking into account data on social unrest in addition to economic performance, these results add to existing evidence that systematic evaluation of leaders' performance plays a major role in the Chinese political system. These findings also illuminate the dilemma that local leaders face in managing popular nationalism amid shifting national priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese Communist Party is confronted with a growing gap that separates the rhetoric about socialism and party rule from the individualism and materialism caused by capitalism and opening up to the outside world. In response, the Party has developed strategies that draw on an understanding of the dedication to the Party that is specifically religious, yet does not require belief, conviction, or faith in a doctrine. These strategies revolve around the Leninist concept of 'party spirit', which, paradoxically, has been turned into a commodity that can be produced, supplied, and consumed. Drawing on insights from the anthropology of pilgrimage, tourism, and religion, this article discusses these strategies in the context of party cadre education and so‐called 'red tourism'. The article concludes that the Party is shaping its evolution from an infallible bearer of ideological dogma to a sacred object of worship as part of a new 'communist civil religion'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article conducts a comparative biographical analysis to explain why the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) revolutionaries used non‐nationalist Marxism to boost a nationalist movement. It argues that these people, based on their own observations of the precommunist Chinese nationalism, thought that China lacked structural conditions for making a solid nationalist movement such as cultural homogeneity, mass literacy, and a shared pride in modern history. They thus turned to seek a non‐national ideology that could still fulfil the functions of integrating leading elites, mobilizing the masses, and motivating the patriots themselves. Then, to explain why the CCP leaders particularly adopted Marxism, this article draws comparison with the Kuomintang (non‐communist nationalists) elites who advocated for more patience and insistence to develop regular nationalism. The comparison shows that the CCP's impatient jump stemmed from their disadvantaged backgrounds that had limited their ideological horizon: lower‐class origins, narrow overseas experiences, poor education, and weak attachment to traditional culture. To pre‐existing literature, this article makes three contributions: (1) provides a more detailed interpretation of the CCP's diagnosis of Chinese nationalism; (2) explains why the same structural dilemmas produced nationalist and non‐nationalist responses alike; and (3) draws a biographical database of the CCP and the Kuomintang. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructing national identity with collective memory based on traditional culture has long been a policy and research concern. China's recent revival of its traditional culture, previously denounced by the Communist Party of China (CPC), has caused diverse academic concerns. Yet few studies have addressed how the CPC-led state interacts with domestic actors in cultivating students' national identity with a previously denounced culture, and what paradoxes lie therein. Documentary review shows that in the process, the state is concerned about creating a consensus around providing traditional Chinese culture (TCC) education, and about maintaining its defining role in designing the project, especially when interacting with diverse actors who had different interests in TCC education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study looks at the sources of anti-Japanese sentiment in today's China. Using original survey data collected in June 2014 from 1,458 students at three elite universities in Beijing, we quantitatively investigate which factors are associated with stronger anti-Japanese sentiment among elite university students. In particular, we examine the link between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s nationalist propaganda (especially patriotic education) and university students' anti-Japanese sentiment. We find that nationalist propaganda does indeed have a significant effect on negative sentiment towards Japan. Reliance on state-sanctioned textbooks for information about Japan, visiting museums and memorials or watching television programmes and movies relating to the War of Resistance against Japan are all associated with higher levels of anti-Japanese sentiment. The findings suggest the effectiveness of nationalist propaganda in promoting anti-Japanese sentiment. We also find that alternative sources of information, especially personal contact with Japan, can mitigate anti-Japanese sentiment. Thus, visiting Japan and knowing Japanese people in person can potentially offset some of the influences of nationalist propaganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a critique of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) pragmatic retrieval of traditional precepts, arguing for a fuller re-embrace of the traditional Chinese mores as a way to resolve the crisis afflicting China today. It begins by addressing Beijing's current sweeping offensive against a corrupt officialdom, contending that in order to restore moral rectitude China needs to transcend the prevailing secular temperament and reabsorb the ancient sacred ethos anchored on Tien. The next criticism is Beijing's stoking of ethnic and cultural pride to coalesce a fragmented country. If committed to a harmonious world a unified China ought to be founded on Confucian universalism in lieu of the prevalent ethnocentric nationalism. Finally, for a comprehensive response to a looming ecological disaster, the case is made for China to undertake a fundamental realignment in worldview, from the present anthropocentric to the ancient anthropocosmic view of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 2014, the Chinese Communist Party committed to the establishment of a “socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics.” Since then a group of Chinese political elites that we refer to as new legalists has been calling for ethnic conflict to be managed in accordance with the rule of law. This article finds that the deeply embedded and highly politicized problem of ethnic conflict in China lends credence to the legalist position that new law-based approaches are needed, although a number of practical problems arise when attempting to strengthen the rule of law. There are for instance powerful factions in the country supporting the continuation of repressive policies or selective ethnic preferentialism, and there are relatively low levels of legal awareness in ethnic-minority communities and general inadequacies in the Chinese legal system. We argue that an elite group of new legalists in China is attempting to reshape ethnic-minority policy in order to break free from the everyday protean politics of ethnic relations that is based largely on a negative cycle of violent confrontation and financial compensation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers the author's view on the People's Republic of China (PRC) President Xi Jinping and his revival of the teachings of Chairman Mao Zedong. It mentions his campaign of promoting the ideology involving communism, Leninism and nationalism for enhancing and correcting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It also notes his efforts in acquiring support from the public for his movement.

After more than three decades of stupendous growth, China is in the process of making the painful transition to a lower growth path. As it does so, the ruling CPC is increasingly turning to nationalism to provide legitimacy in the eyes of its own people. China now openly seeks to ‘display its prowess’ and ‘assume its responsibilities’ in the world. However, it still lacks the capability to impose a political or security order of its own in its immediate neighbourhood. There is, therefore, likely to be a period of instability in the Asia–Pacific region, and the environment in which India pursues its interests will get more complex. China and India today have a relationship with elements of both cooperation and competition. While both countries have a common interest in improving on the existing security and economic order, they compete in the periphery they share. A danger present in present-day India–China relations comes from the mutual gap between perception and reality. Nevertheless, this article argues that this is a moment of opportunity for India–China relations, and that each country could benefit its core interests by working with the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the contested history of International Women’s Day (IWD) in China during the first half of the twentieth century. It explores the processes of cooption and subsumption that have diminished the “international” in IWD in the Chinese context as the feminist movement confronted powerful forces of nation building, party building and militarised warfare as battles waged between Japan and China, and between the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist Party. It argues that IWD was put to use by myriad competing groups and these appropriations diminished the event’s original goal of forging international solidarity among women around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article sheds light on the literacy-education mechanism by which the literacy programs of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were able to mobilize villagers during the Jiangxi Soviet period (1931–1934). Beginning in the late 1920s and continuing throughout the Jiangxi period, the CCP gave substantial attention to literacy education. Based on political documents and published literacy primers, this article explores the CCP's notion of what was possible and desirable with respect to the way the party and villagers would participate in political life. The Jiangxi Soviet conceived of literacy education within the context of military and political struggle against the Nationalists. Literacy education in this period reflected the party's desire to socialize villagers into its revolution, equipping them with a class-centered worldview and transforming them into Communist comrades. Meanwhile, owing to the modernization ideology of literacy formed around the turn of the twentieth century in China, literacy education also served as the legitimating symbol for the soviet government's rule nationwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As populist nationalism and criticism of government emerge from the Chinese online sphere, the potential influence of public engagement in online communication on Chinese politics has drawn much scholarly and media attention. To illuminate the role of user-generated online communication for political change, this study investigates how online political expression among Chinese Internet users relates to their nationalistic attitudes and support of the status quo. An analysis of survey data demonstrates that online political expression, facilitated by news consumption, enhances support for the existing sociopolitical system both directly and indirectly through nationalism. The results suggest that partial inclusion of the public in the online deliberation process serves to bolster system stability and legitimacy, as the Chinese Communist Party intends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Xinjiang Class is a four-year, national-level boarding school program established by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the year 2000. The overarching aim of the program is clear: the CCP intends to train a core group of young Uyghurs who have internalized the ideals of the Party. This article, which is based on interviews and regular interaction with over 60 graduates of the Xinjiang Class, casts doubt on whether the boarding schools have been effective in ‘interpellating’ young Uyghurs as compliant members of the Chinese Nation (Zhonghua minzu). This article contends that Uyghur graduates of the Xinjiang Class have instead embraced a non-Chinese ethno-national identity—an identity bound by Central Asian and Islamic cultural norms—and have largely rejected the Zhonghua minzu identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to provide a new perspective on the relationship between Nationalist Party (GMD) cadres and Chinese intellectuals. By studying the Central Politics School, a major GMD political training institute for professional party cadres, I hope to reassess the nature of the GMD one-party state and remind researchers of the difficult choices it faced between backing party-liners needed for the political struggle and accommodating depoliticized intellectuals needed for public administration. This paper will argue that GMD political impotence in competition with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was due less to an inadequate recruitment of capable experts than to the over-specialization of its well-trained cadres on technical tasks. In fact, the cadres from the Central Politics School generally resembled those considered to be ‘intellectuals’ at educational level and in ideology. This compels us to reconsider how to define ‘intellectuals’ and whether they were as uniformly alienated from the one-party state as most of the scholarly literature suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the emergence of distorted memories of Imperial China. Through popular online sites and media, populist nationalists have obtained exaggerated yet extremely sensational knowledge of Chinese history, which portrays Imperial China as benevolent, strong and more advanced than the western world. Based on these distorted memories, they blame all diplomatic controversies on other countries—western nations for their imperialist exploitation and especially neighboring countries for their ungratefulness to the Chinese empire. Due to the declining appeal of communism, as well as the corruption and isolation of official academia, the Chinese government is under heavy pressure to follow the distorted memory and restore China's historical glory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses economic and political problems facing China. Topics include the reliance of China's economy on state investment in infrastructure projects, the possibility of economic reforms to move toward a more consumer-based economy, and the use of nationalism to build support for the Chinese Communist Party. Also addressed are Chinese public opinion regarding democratization, the opinions of Chinese President Xi Jinping on Maoism, and the prosecution of former internal security official Zhou Yongkang by Xi's government.

Nationalism in various forms has been a fixture of modern Chinese politics and society; however, its form has changed and over the past decade or so, the CCP has begun to appropriate China's cultural nationalism through its extensive use of propaganda and by other less nefarious methods. This paradigm shift embodies the deliberate manoeuvring that state nationalism is exerting on cultural symbols, concepts and legacies in China. Through imagery and emotionally laden political marketing that favour Party policy and rule, this form of nationalism surreptitiously caters to the cultural tastes of, and appeals to, the emerging middle class of contemporary Chinese society. It is a more nuanced and creative type of propaganda. Using the 2009 China Central Television (CCTV) Moon Festival (Mid-Autumn Festival) Gala as a case study, this paper examines Party-state appropriations of cultural nationalism. The Gala is a rich reservoir of moon-inspired traditional Chinese cultural elements, and the intriguing manoeuvring of these culturally bound images and iconography signifies a new propaganda strategy that combines poetic nostalgia, poignant romance and abstract philosophical pursuit, through which cultural elements are skilfully woven into a patriotic and nationalist appeal. These traditional cultural signifiers, illusions and fantasies serve the Party's political aims as it attempt to reinforce its legitimacy by forging a culturally bound national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to spark a conversation about shifting conceptualizations of disaster under modernizing states. It employs case studies of two major disasters, the North China Famine of 1876–79 and the Yellow River flood of 1938–47, to map changes and continuities in Chinese responses to disaster. State approaches to the late-Qing famine both drew on a millennium of Chinese thinking about disaster causation and anticipated new issues that would become increasingly important in twentieth-century China. The catastrophic Yellow River flood occurred when China's Nationalist government deliberately breached a major dike in a desperate attempt to “use water instead of soldiers” to slow the brutal Japanese invasion. The Nationalist state's technologization of disaster, its rejection of cosmological interpretations of calamity, and its depiction of flood victims as heroes sacrificing for the nation mark departures from late-imperial responses to disaster, but foreshadow features of the devastating Mao-era Great Leap Famine of 1958–62. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the wake of the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, China's Communist government developed close relations with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. China's conciliatory diplomacy toward Egypt and other non-communist countries in the Arab world has long intrigued historians, who have interpreted this campaign as a way to break out of diplomatic isolation and gain political influence in the Middle East. Such an interpretation neglects the relevance of Sino-Egyptian relations to Chinese domestic politics, especially the Communist Party's interest in incorporating Muslims into its vision of the Chinese nation. By using relations with Egypt to present China as a staunch supporter of global Islam, the government encouraged all its citizens-and Muslims in particular-to reaffirm their allegiance to Chinese nationalism and the Communist government that championed it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessing the durability of the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) poses both theoretical and empirical challenges. This introductory essay analyzes the two dominant perspectives on the CCP's capacity to maintain its political monopoly. The authoritarian resilience perspective, fashionable and influential among leading China watchers until recently, is centered on the premise of institutional adaptability and responsiveness. However, this essay shows that such adaptability is inherently limited. The CCP's main sources of resilience are derived from its repressive power and appeals to Chinese nationalism. The authoritarian decay perspective provides an analytical framework for understanding the micro and organizational drivers of political degeneration. It focuses on ideological atrophy, opportunism, and competition for power in the CCP as sources of regime decay. The debate between these two competing perspectives can stimulate our thinking on China's future, but the validity of the two theories can only be tested by future events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does empirical evidence support treating “nationalism” and “patriotism” as separate concepts in China and is there a relationship between strong nationalist/patriotic attitudes and foreign policy preferences? To analyse the construction of Chinese national identity, Chinese university students (N = 1346) took part in a survey in Beijing in spring 2007. The data supported the assumption of a conceptual separation between nationalism and patriotism. CCP members and students from rural backgrounds were more nationalistic than non-members and students with urban upbringings. Moreover, nationalism had a stronger link to foreign policy preferences than patriotism, and respondents with a greater degree of nationalism were less likely to favour international cooperation and more likely to prefer protectionist policies. The associations of nationalism and patriotism with foreign policy attitudes, and the contribution of other potential explanatory factors to the relationship between nationalism, patriotism and policy attitudes were explored with linear regression models. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

According to conventional wisdom, the Chinese collective memory constructed within the enterprise of state-driven nationalism largely conforms to the presentist view of memory studies. The memory-based legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party ( CCP), however, is premised upon some basic assumptions embedded in the indigenous political culture. In the consumption of the collective memory of foreign aggression and invasion, the memory-encoded social norms have grounded the domestic expectations of the state's diplomatic behavior, which can both enable and constrain the deliberation and execution of Beijing's foreign policy. Due to China's fragile domestic politics and the resurgence of popular nationalism, collective memory manipulated by the authoritarian regime to enhance its legitimacy has become an endogenous variable of the CCP's diplomatic decision making and has led to China's paradoxical performance on the international stage. The rationality of the party-state on the foreign relations front has been bounded by the historical institution of collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The worldview as reflected in the textbooks of the People's Republic of China during 1949–1966 centred on Party-led nationalism, anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. This article emphasizes both the continuities and changes in nationalist ideology during the Republican and Maoist periods. First, textbooks in Maoist China presented the imperialist powers as shifting away from Britain, Russia and Japan under the KMT government and towards the United States (since 1949) and the Soviet Union (since the 1960s), and emphasized class struggle. Second, the CCP had far greater control over the production of textbooks than the KMT. In this sense, the CCP truly carried out “partified” (danghua) education, a goal shared by the KMT which it never had the ability to achieve. In addition, “the language of Cultural Revolution” appeared with the outbreak of the Korean War. In other words, the education that cultivated revolutionary successors began in the early 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Cultural Palace of Nationalities, one of the Ten Monumental Buildings built in 1959 in Beijing to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), is considered a ‘political building’ in that it brings together ethnicity, architecture, art, technology and, most importantly, representations of the Party-state’s policy on the unity of the many different nationalities in China. A careful examination of the history of the Palace’s construction and its exhibits reveals two unsettling problems: the Chinese Communist Party’s manipulation of official images of national minorities, along with the Party’s difficulties in dealing with ethnic nationalism, regional separatism and local identity in the first decade of the PRC. These same thorny issues continue to cause the current government a major headache. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the relationship between sport and politics in 20th-century China following the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) rise to power. According to the authors, CCP authorities created sport organizations and movements such as the All China Sports Federation (ACSF) and Great Leap Forward (GLF) of Sport in order to train its citizens for national defence and labor. Particular focus is given to the influence of the Soviet Union on Chinese sport. It is suggested that the Soviet Union played a significant role in China's relationship with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and helped facilitate Chinese nationalism and patriotism in its athletic competition against the West. Other topics include the 1952 Olympic Games and the role of Taiwan in the the Olympic movement.

The article discusses the ideological divide between the left-wing faction and their liberal opponents within the Communist Party of China (CPC). The author contends that the political struggle within the CPC poses a question for China's future as to whether China will return to egalitarian socialism or move towards democratic socialism. An overview of the political left and right wings of the CPC, including the former's adherence to nationalism under the banner of Maoism and the latter's criticism of communist leader Mao Zedong and push for economic reform, is presented.

The Chinese public's prevailing admiration and respect for the United States was widely observed in the 1980s when reforms first began. However, since the early 1990s significant anti-American sentiments have started to emerge in China. Such a dramatic shift in Chinese people's attitudes toward the U.S. has significant implications for both U.S. domestic politics and foreign policies. Many politicians, journalists, and scholars have identified the increasing reliance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on nationalism for mobilizing political support, as well as its still firm control over the domestic mass media for propaganda campaigns, as critical factors driving this dramatic public opinion shift. Nevertheless, without systematic and appropriate empirical evidence, it is extremely difficult to adjudicate the validity of speculations on why such a change occurred. Taking advantage of a 2005 two-city survey in China with pertinent survey instruments, we (a) explored Chinese urban residents' usage of different media sources, (b) examined the dimensionality of their evaluations of the U.S., and (c) scrutinized the impacts of Chinese urbanites' usage of diversified media sources on their perceptions of the U.S. The findings show that people's attitudes toward U.S. foreign policies can be clearly distinguished from their evaluations of American political institutions and socioeconomic achievements. Most importantly, our analyses also reveal that, embedded as they are in China's partially transformed and partially diversified media environment, Chinese urban residents do not become pro-American (or vice versa) from the usage of alternative media sources beyond the CCP's control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the concept of ethnic unity and the ethnic barriers in Urumchi, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China. Particular focus is given to the ethnic tension and conflict among the Muslim Uyghurs and Han Chinese people in Urumchi. The author contends that this ethnic divide is contrary to the nationalistic focus, or imagined community, of the Chinese Communist Party ruling the country. An examination of Chinese national identities and the relationship between ethnicity and state in China is also presented.

The article explores the academic significance and impact of the book "Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power," by Chalmers Johnson, on the field of contemporary China studies. The author reflects on the nationalistic aspects of the Chinese Communist Party in mobilizing popular support during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945. Emphasis is given to how Johnson conceived of the Chinese nature of communism in China and the development of peasant nationalism. Other topics include programs for social justice, communism as a foreign import, and the withdrawal of the Nationalist Party.

The article focuses on racial theories in the People's Republic of China wherein race was viewed as a concept capable for the promotion of nationalism after the collapsed of Qing Empire in 1911. The notion of race, which was often mixed to the politics of nationalism, adjusts continuously to various social and political contexts from the reformist movement in 1980s to the Chinese Communist Party's eugenic policies. It mentions that the race concept emerged as a powerful and cohesive form of identity due to the diversity of religion, family structures, and regional cultures of Chinese. Racial theories were distributed through school textbooks and travel literature. Moreover, the term Chinese was assumed as a language, culture, and a race even the members were scattered across the globe.