Another sinosphere roundup presently, but I wanted to highlight James Leibold’s illuminating essay on Han racial nationalism in China, focusing on the response to Lu Jiamin’s Wolf Totem book of a few years back.
The odd thing about this that Wolf Totem, which sold around twenty million copies, was itself crypto fascist in tone, arguing that the sedentary and conservative Han Chinese need the occasional invigorating irruption of barbarians from the northern frontiers to wake their ideas up and provide a spot of racial refreshment. Twentieth century European racial nationalists used to argue pretty much the same about the Germans. Overall, it’s a kind of “pan Aryan” vision of China and its constituent peoples.
As such, a major backlash to this has come from Han racial essentialists, who :
seek to demonstrate the scrounging and uncivilized nature of nomadic culture and how the repeated invasion of nomadic races sidetracked Han civilization from its natural path of progression. In this author’s own essentialized reading of history, Song China is depicted as the mainstream of human development and the world’s most advanced civilization, possessing 85% of global wealth and placing the Han on the doorstep of capitalism.
In other words, Han civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement, for ever under threat from the jealous hordes without the wall. Liebold notes that this is the most extreje exporession of the Hanist movement in China: most confine themselves to ardent patriotism and dressing up in traditional costume. The extreme elements tend to congregate on the Hanwang bulletin board, which:
boasts a thousand daily postings and over one hundred thousand registered members, making its community only slightly smaller than the leading White nationalist portal Stormfront.
A hundred thousand is a drop in the bucket in China. But it’s worth noting that by contrast, Charter 08 got 10,000 signatories in a year, many of them from outside the country. It all points back to Qin Hui’s comment on Charter ’08: that the circumstances of life in China don’t of themselves make the case for constitutional democracy self evident and that it has to be argued for and won from within the country.
UPDATE: here’s some heavy duty Han nationalism. Assuming you can get that far, note the similarity between “tartar culture”, as described, and “multiculturalism” as described by our own monoculturalists.
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