China’s Roots in ‘Invented Tradition’
Bill Hayton, a BBC journalist and Chatham House colleague, offers a valuable and riveting analysis of the roots of modern China’s national identity politics. In a wide-ranging study, covering the selection of a name for the territorial space we refer to as
China today, national sovereignty, ethnic identity and cultural policy, manufactured historical “truth,” Chinese nationalism, promotion linguistic conformity, and China’s highly questionable territorial claims, Hayton shows that the idea of China is an “invented tradition” with little relation to empirical reality.
With vivid portraits of influential 19th- and early 20th-century Chinese thinkers, activists and polemicists, he reveals the distorting effect of multiple efforts, predating the People’s Republic of China, to impose a false homogeneity and nostalgia-infused continuity on the complex reality of modern China. Ironically, nationalism today, focused on cultural exceptionalism, has been shaped by familiar Western notions of statehood, empire and sovereignty; even the notion of “China” is itself largely a foreign construction.
President Xi Jinping’s coercive, propaganda-driven attempt to impose a single (and misleading) narrative is comparable to other nationalistic campaigns in Asia and reflects the same divisive, intolerant politics of emotion and conflict fueling populist nationalism globally. Worryingly, this campaign is not merely a state-led exercise. It also has wide popular resonance in academia and among ordinary Chinese citizens.