Chinese Nationalism in the Global Era by Hughes Christopher R

Author:Hughes, Christopher R. [Hughes, Christopher R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Ideologies, General, Social Science, Ethnic Studies
ISBN: 9780415182652
Google: lXopbBZl5MEC
Amazon: 0415182654
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-01-15T22:50:54+00:00

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Globalisation and its discontents

While there have been winners as the CCP leadership has embraced globalisation, the departure from the planned economy has also eroded the security provided for workers in the state sector and imposed new demands on those who have traditionally been seen as the guardians of ideological orthodoxy, such as ‘intellectuals’ and educators. The discussion of the emerging CCP orthodoxy that this has generated has undoubtedly become more pluralistic due to the creation of new outlets for expression, such as a more commercialised publishing industry and the Internet. Yet it is Party orthodoxy that remains the main subject of such discussion and thus determines its permissible limits.

Mainstream Chinese social scientists find it useful to understand the increasingly pluralistic debate over fundamental issues of ideology as structured around a discourse between various schools of thought, such as the ‘Right’ and the ‘Left’ (Ma and Li u1998), and more recently ‘neo-authoritarianism’, ‘liberalism’ and the ‘New Left’ (Xiao 2003). Any classification of those taking part in this debate according to such categories should be undertaken with caution, however, given that such labels are deployed as strategies within Chinese political discourse. What can be demonstrated, though, is that the CCP’s post-Tiananmen emphasis on patriotism requires that nearly all such schools strive to achieve legitimacy by appropriating the nationalistic goals established by the CCP. It is not surprising, therefore, that a vast number of themes have been associated with the ‘new nationalism’ of the 1990s. However, rather than reduce such schools to a single ideology called nationalism, the significance of nationalist discourse has to be understood by looking at the divergent political strategies that are being pursued.

Nationalism as political strategy

One such strategy is to use certain themes to promote the rise of the new political and economic elite, which the CCP leadership sees as central to the success of building

‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. This strategy can be seen in what is probably the first monograph to undertake an explicit discussion of the relationship of ‘nationalism’

(minzu zhuyi) to policy-making under ‘reform and opening’, namely the 1994 book Viewing China Through the Third Eye (1994), by Wang Shan, a deputy director of the Beijing Opera Academy. In the range of constituencies attempting to influence the post-Tiananmen ideological consensus, the views in this work come closest to the wholesale departure from socialism in favour of the elitist authoritarianism supported by the

‘princelings’. It has, in fact, been claimed that the work was sponsored by Chen Yuan and Pan Yue, the sons of Party elders Chen Yun and Liu Huaqing, commander of the PLA Navy.

Globalisation and its discontents 71

A central theme of the Third Eye is the fear that the movement away from central planning and public ownership could lead to social disintegration, a topic that was being widely discussed after the events of 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this respect, Wang is openly critical of both Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin for failing to respond effectively to the weakening of the state generated by ‘reform and opening’.

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