Mandating officially accepted Chinese-ness? Not the first time

[Greg.D.]

Why China should recognize that dissent can be patriotic

 

History suggests that narrowly defining Chinese identity will backfire

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/10/23/why-china-should-recognize-that-dissent-can-be-patriotic/

 

When a group of Hong Kong protesters pulled down a Chinese national flag in Shatin recently, the Beijing mouthpiece China Daily called the protests “anti-China in nature.” Not only was the flag desecration the result of “foreign provocation,” the paper claimed, but even worse, it showed a “lack of patriotism among youngsters in the city.”

 

The Chinese Communist Party rejects the Hong Kong identity of the protesters, which clashes with the strident, uniform nationalism that the party has stoked in recent years. Hong Kong is central to this narrative. While the CCP once relied on violent class struggle to legitimize its authority, in the past three decades the party has increasingly emphasized its role in ending China’s “hundred years of humiliation,” which began when the British defeated China in the First Opium War and took Hong Kong as a colony. Beijing also claims the sole right to determine who is a good and loyal Chinese citizen, casting those with alternative views and complicated identities ― like the current protesters ― as disloyal and dupes of foreign enemies bent on undermining China itself.

 

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In fact, the Chinese Nationalist regime, which the Communists defeated in 1949, used the same basic accusations almost a century ago ― against Chinese Americans. But the experience of Chinese American emigres in China in the 20th century suggests that narrowly defining Chinese identity to exclude Western ideas and values will backfire, alienate loyal members of the society and galvanize resistance.

 

Few people today think of the United States as an immigrant-sending nation. But between 1901 and 1940, thousands of Chinese Americans moved to China in search of the economic and social mobility that drew millions of Europeans to the United States in these same years. Most were the children of merchants, one of the few categories of Chinese allowed into the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act.

 

Birth on U.S. soil gave them American citizenship but little else. Deep and persistent racial discrimination meant that even the most educated Chinese American citizens could rarely find work outside restaurants, laundries and trinket stores. In contrast, China, a failing empire that in 1912 became a struggling republic, appeared to offer them not just a sense of belonging but opportunities unimaginable in the United States. Between 1901 and World War II, between one-third and one-half of all U.S.-born Chinese moved to Asia.

 

But American-born people soon lost the competitive edge of their Western educations. ....... Once Sun signed an agreement with a Soviet representative in 1923, the Guangdong-based Nationalist Party adopted a vocal anti-imperialist agenda and scapegoated many of the province’s foreign-born Chinese, including Chinese Americans, for their alleged Western ties and assumed disloyalty.

 

After Sun’s death, the Nationalist Party succeeded in uniting much of China, and the new government consolidated its power in a way reminiscent of Beijing’s approach today: by defining “Chinese” in narrow, exclusive terms. The Nationalist government claimed authority over Chinese Americans, whom it regarded as solely Chinese citizens, but it simultaneously disparaged their habits, ideas and politics as “foreign.”

 

Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek’s New Life Movement exemplified this approach: Bent on creating disciplined, loyal and submissive citizens, the movement attacked Western individualism and cultural influences, such as dancing and permanent waves, as decadent, degenerate and unpatriotic.

 

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Not coincidentally, between 1946 and 1949, most of the almost 2,000 Chinese Americans who had lived through the Japanese occupation fled China, never to return. Although many feared the Communists, they worried even more about the disappearance of the in-between spaces where they had once lived and thrived. Almost all of those who stayed in Asia after the war settled in Hong Kong, the last in-between space.

 

That literal space ceased to exist in 1997, and over the past decade and a half, Beijing has worked to undermine its figurative counterpart. But whatever happens in the weeks and months to come, the CCP’s attempts to mandate a particular definition of acceptable Chineseness have backfired.

 

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By Charlotte Brooks

Charlotte Brooks is a professor of history at Baruch College, CUNY, and the author of three books on Asian American history, including "American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901-1949."

[danb]

Thanks for posting this article. It is an interesting read. Not aware of the reverse migration of the Chinese back to China during the earlier part of 20th century. Also it is not too clear to me what is China's definifion of "acceptable Chineseness" is. Like I said it was an interesting read for me.