My Dear Fellow Countrymen,
First, I must assure you that I wrote this with complete honesty and sincerity. I am a patriot, as you are. I am “born under the red flag and raised in New China.” My grandparents are poor but proud farmers; my parents are diligent civilians and party members, and myself a passionate member of the Youth League. With an ardent love for our country, I’m writing this with a deep concern for our shared future – not because of an imminent danger like a foreign invasion but as a cautionary note in our seemingly best times.
I will begin with the recent controversy over Chinese director Chloe Zhao, the first Chinese and woman of color to win an Oscar with her film Nomadland. At the height of her fame, Zhao was praised as high as the “pride of China” by state news outlets. In the acceptance speech, she gratefully recited the ancient proverb she memorized as a child growing up in China: “People at birth are inherently good.” However, intense public backlash soon followed when she was found criticizing China as a place where “lies are everywhere” in a 2013 interview. The issue became politicized as netizens questioned: “what is her nationality?” “Has she forgotten her roots?” “If she is American, why should we celebrate her success?” Denounced as a “Han Jian [race-traitor],” Zhao’s name is censored, the hashtag “#Nomadland” blocked, and her film canceled.
In a New York Times article, it is said that Zhao’s fall from grace is part of the growing nationalist sentiment in China. It also shows that despite the central government ultimately controlling foreign films’ entry to China, “more and more, China’s online patriots can also influence the fate of a film or a company” (Qin and Chien, “Backlash”). Still, I would argue that it’s not simply the result of the global surge of nationalism and conservatism. We too often understand things in the metaphor of disease today, as if nationalism is a disease, spreading across borders, but can be contained and cured without tackling the cultural and political implications behind it. We also too often dismiss others as being “too extreme;” for those who took part in the cancellation of Nomadland, H&M, or Nike, we conveniently invented the term “Xiaofenhong [little pink]” to distance ourselves from those “ultranationalists,” as if we are not part of the problem. Yes, brothers and sisters, I’m writing this to argue that all of us Chinese are part of the problem. There is no clear boundary between “good patriotism” and “bad nationalism” since they are profoundly intertwined and rooted in our historical understanding of our nation. Ultimately, it’s about different visions of our nation. What should China be? Who are Chinese? These are not big questions devoid of meaning but practical questions we would encounter in real life. We canceled Zhao because of her seeming “betrayal” of her nation and race, calling her a “Han Jian,” which literally means “a traitor to the Han race.” But what is “Han” in the first place?
Conventionally, we have two names for our nation – “Hua” and “Han.” Though both are translated to “Chinese” in English, there are nuanced differences. In What is China, Professor Ge Zhaoguang proposes that “Hua,” etymologically meaning beauty, represents an ancient ideal – Chinese are the most civilized people under heaven, marked by the grandness of their ceremonial etiquette, beauty in their clothing, and the harmony of their existence with the world (60). On the other hand, “Han” is a much more politically charged term. As Mark Elliott points out in “Hushuo,” Han is a shifting ethnic label that emerged within ancient identity politics of distinguishing Self against Other, “us” against “them.” In the North Wei dynasty, Sarbi conquerors call all the Central Plain dwellers they conquered “Han” (Elliot 16). However, in the Yuan dynasty, “Han” is attributed to the third-class citizen, northerners on the side of Mongol conquers, while their rebellious southern counterpart is derogatorily named “Nanren” (Elliot 24). Finally, in the Ming dynasty, with the Mongols repelled, “Han” was again adopted as an ideological tool to reintegrate northerners and southerners alike into one group to serve Ming’s unification project (Elliot 26). Hence, Han was – and still is – a deeply politicized and racialized term, especially when it comes to dominate the way we construe China in modern times, facilitated by the “national humiliation discourse.”
According to William Callahan in China: The Pessoptimist Nation, the national humiliation discourse is a strategy developed against a contemporary identity crisis. The racial label “Han” and the civilizational signifier “Hua” were once unified when ancient Chinese defined themselves as the civilized “Han” while all others were “Yi [foreigners]” or “Hu [barbarians].” However, the racialized understanding of civilization was challenged when the British Royal Navy made its appearance on the Qing empire’s shore in 1839 (Callahan 48). Forced to yield before westerners’ cannons and ships in the Opium War, the Daoguang Emperor came to realize he was no longer the one and only “Son of Heaven” and our “Central Plain” is no more than the “Far East” for the British. Once proud elites and intellectuals were forced to open up borders, accepting modernization as the only way out. They discovered, embarrassingly, “now, we became the barbarians” (Callahan 45). The nation felt frustrated and humiliated – what were we now? Can we no longer cling to the Hua ideal, becoming merely a mundane Han ethnicity? It was only more shocking when the Japanese, our neighbor who had been submitting to us for hundreds of years, invaded China proper in 1937. In response to a series of political and identity crises, Callahan argues that a “national humiliation discourse” emerged. Functionally, the discourse is a promise that brings together the divided vision of Hua and Han. The “national story of blood and tears” is derived its strength from a racialized and politicized distinction of “us” and “enemy” (Callahan 40). “We” are backward because “they” have obstructed our rise, so if all enemies are cast out of China and traitors purged, China would be rejuvenated as glorious as it was in the Hua ideal. Appealing to our glorious past and disgraced present, promising a rejuvenated, civilized future, the discourse acts as a powerful patriotic mobilization uniting all ethnic groups and political parties in China alike during the Sino-Japanese war (Callahan 165). In 1989, the national humiliation discoursed was again revived in response to the ideological, regime, and cultural crisis posed by the Tiananmen Square protests and later entrenched in top-down patriotic education campaigns to foster political loyalty and unity for the new republic (Callahan 35).
Still, the national humiliation is not cleansed once and for all after China achieved prosperity. When China started an extraordinary economic growth and rose to the second-largest economy after Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 reform, the national humiliation discourse did not fade away but is reproduced over and over again in textbooks, films, museums, festivals, and maps (Callahan 39). Historically effective in turbulent times, the discourse continues to foster a crisis mentality in a racialized understanding of civilization, though China is no longer in such a crisis that needs so much hatred for “our common enemies.” Living in modern prosperity, probably comparable to our glorious past, we constantly fear “covetous westerners” vying to sabotage and obstruct our rise. It almost becomes a national aesthetic to portray a “virtuous and civilized Chinese” against “barbarous, jealous, and evil foreigners” because it seems the most effective way to make us Chinese unite.
However, is casting out barbaric foreigners and domestic traitors the only way to rejuvenate the Great Chinese Nation? The Han-dominated view of Chinese civilization seems especially problematic in our pluralistic postmodern world today. If China is exclusively Han, what about the left-outs? What about ethnic minorities, immigrants, overseas Chinese, and mixed-race? Must they all be sinicized into Han to avoid being vilified as “bloody foreigners?” Is being Han the only way to claim for Hua and the civilizational ideal behind it?
As if answering the questions raised above, the government is tightening its control over the linguistic autonomy of ethnic minority regions like Tibet, aiming to further replace the default language of teaching from local languages to Putonghua (the national language based on Beijing dialect). Facing pushbacks like the 2010 Tibetan language protest, netizens were not compassionate as protesters were later stigmatized as “terrorists.” Further, apathetic netizens displayed a condescending, patriarchal attitude as if saying, “those singing and dancing minorities do need our help. Economically, politically, and culturally backward, they ought to be educated, modernized, and finally sinicized.” Moreover, in the 2009 controversy around Shandong University’s study buddies program, the long-held resentment against foreigners’ “super-national treatment” reemerged. African exchange students were under massive cyber violence because they were seen as the modern successors of western colonizers. Their relative well-treatment was depicted as a waste of public resources or an outright “encroachment of Han resources.” Racially stigmatized as “black devils,” Africans in China are also suffering a racialized sexualization where they were depicted as “ravaging our educational resources, having sex with our Chinese girls.”
Apart from casting out “foreigners,” we are also obsessed with purging “domestic traitors,” as in the case of Chloe Zhao. In mass media, we love the game of blaming others for “hurting Chinese people’s feelings,” disregarding right/wrong for honor/humiliation. We are keen to defend China from any form of disgrace, resulting in an atmosphere of populist censorship of any form of criticism, even though they are constructive and beneficial. We criticize analytical works on Chinese society as “giving westerners knives to stab China.” We see any form of criticism as an attempt to subvert the country or sell the motherland for profit. We attack any form of violation that differs from a “Chinese way of doing things.” But what’s the point? We are trapped in an echo chamber of false praises, blind to what’s happening outside.
The question of “what is China” is constantly under the tension between a civilizational ideal encapsulated in “Hua” and a racial understanding in “Han,” though now, with the help of national humiliation discourse, the Han-centric, conservative impulse toward uniformity seem to prevail. However, is not the obsession with an evil foreign Other against a virtuous Han Self a self-racialization and internalized orientalism that repeat what the British did to us in the Opium War? In times of crisis, the national humiliation discourse was legitimately created and disseminated to evoke Han nationalism for the sake of national salvation, but now the circumstances have changed. Brothers and sisters, we have pursued the vision of Han too far that we forgot “civilization” itself means inclusiveness and harmony, as encapsulated in the ancient Hua ideal. Too obsessed with identity politics, we forgot the ancient Confucian proverb, “the virtuous are friendly to each other though they hold different opinions; the mean is hostile to each other when they blindly follow the others.”
This letter is inspired by my professor teaching the course “The Concept of China.” It turned out that Professor Sen, born in India, speaking fluent Chinese, knows China better than I do. Thus, when he explained the national humiliation discourse in class, mimicking the Daoguang Emperor discovering “we are the barbarians!” – these words stroked my heart. So now, my dear fellow countrymen, I would like to present this question to you. What kind of Chinese are we? What kind of China should we build? These are urgent questions, brothers and sisters, because now, with rampant racism, nationalism, and nativism online, a horrifying fact occurred to me:
We have become the barbarians, again.
Yours for our nation’s prosperity and rejuvenation,
A patriot
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Works Cited
Callahan, William. China: The Pessoptimist Nation. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Elliott, Mark. “Hushuo 胡說: The Northern Other and the Naming of the Han Chinese.” Critical Han Studies: the History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority, by Thomas S. Mullaney et al., University of California Press, 2013.
Ge, Zhaoguang, and Michael Hill. What Is China?: Territory, Ethnicity, Culture, and History. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018.
Qin, Amy, and Amy Chang Chien. “In China, a Backlash Against the Chinese-Born Director of ‘Nomadland’.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 Mar. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/world/asia/chloe-zhao-nomadland-china.html.
