1st Edition

Construction of Chinese Nationalism in the Early 21st Century Domestic Sources and International Implications

Edited By Suisheng Zhao Copyright 2014

    Chinese nationalism is powered by a narrative of China's century of shame and humiliation in the hands of imperialist powers and calls for the Chinese government to redeem the past humiliations and take back all "lost territories." The continuing surge of Chinese nationalism in the early 21st century therefore has fed a roiling sense of anxiety in many political capitals about whether a virulent nationalism has emerged to make China’s rise anything but peaceful. This book addresses this anxiety by examining the domestic sources and foreign policy implications of Chinese nationalism in the early 21st century.

    It is divided into three parts. Part I is an overview of the scholarly debate about if the rise of Chinese nationalism has driven China’s foreign policy in a more irrational and inflexible direction in the first one and half decades of the 21st century. Part II analyzes the construction of Chinese nationalism by a variety of domestic forces, including the communist state, the angry youth (fen qing), liberal intellectuals, and ethnic groups. Part III explores whether Chinese nationalism is affirmative, assertive, or aggressive through the case studies of China’s maritime territorial disputes with Japan in the East China Sea and with several Southeast Asian countries in the South China Sea, the border controversy over the ancient Koguryo with Korea, and the cross-Taiwan Strait relations.

    This book was based on articles published in the Journal of Contemporary China.

    Part I: Debating Chinese Nationalism in the early 21st Century  1. Chinese nationalism and its political and social origins  2. Foreign Policy Implications of Chinese Nationalism Revisited: The Strident Turn  3. Reclassifying Chinese Nationalism: The Geopolitik Turn  4. Nationalism, Internationalism and Chinese Foreign Policy  Part II: Domestic Sources of Chinese Nationalism: State, Society, and Ethnicity  5. Gaming, Nationalism, and Ideological Work in Contemporary China: Online Games Based on the Resistance War to Japan  6. Fen Qings (Angry Youth) in Contemporary China  7. Nationalism and Democratization in Contemporary China  8. From the Language of Class to the Rhetoric of Development: Discourses of ‘Nationality’ and ‘Ethnicity’ in China  9. Sovereignty, Ethnicity, and Culture: The Tibetan Issue in an Institutionalist Perspective  Part III: External Implications of Chinese Nationalism: Case Studies of China’s territorial disputes  10. China’s Assertiveness in the South China Sea  11. History, Chinese Nationalism and the Emerging Sino-Japanese Conflict  12. Domestic Politics, National Identity, and International Conflict: The Case of the Koguryo Controversy  13. Constructing Peace in the Taiwan Strait: A Constructivist Analysis of the Changing Dynamics of Identities and Nationalisms

    Biography

    Suisheng Zhao is Professor and Director of the Center for China-US Cooperation at Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, senior fellow at Chahar Institute and founding editor of the Journal of Contemporary China.