Abstract
President Xi Jinping’s China Dream is the ‘renewal of the Chinese nation’ to become a ‘strong and prosperous nation’ (fuqing daguo).1 This chapter will analyse China Dreams as acts of identity articulation to chart China’s (inter)national identity. It analyses China’s ethnic minority policy debates which centre on arguments about whether China should be a multi-ethnic state or a mono-ethnic nation-state. The increasingly contested relationship between ethnicity and nation is central to understanding how China’s leading thinkers articulate who is China and how the answer will either propel or bring an end to China’s rise. The chapter then explores how these different ethnic futures are deeply intertwined with predictions about China’s position in international politics. The China Dream thus becomes a way to chart the future of China’s domestic and international politics and a means to narrate who is China at home and abroad. William A. Callahan2 has shown how Chinese exceptionalism is increasingly popular amongst political elites and public intellectuals in China. The military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq alongside the 2008 financial crisis have led to a perception amongst Chinese thinkers such as Hu Angang3 and Zhang Weiwei4 that the soft power of the United States is declining and China’s is concomitantly rising.
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Notes and references
William A. Callahan (2013) China Dreams: 20 Visions of the Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Hu Angang (2012) Zhongguo 2020: yige xinxing chaoji daguo [China in 2020: A New Type of Superpower] (Zhejiang: Zhejiang renmin chubanshe).
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David Tobin (2011) ‘Competing Communities: Ethnic Unity and Ethnic Boundaries on China’s North-West Frontier’, Inner Asia, 13(1), p. 7.
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Thomas S. Millenary (2011) Coming To Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 135.
Hu Jintao (2009) ‘Hu Jintao zhute Zhongyang zhengzhiju changwu weiyuan huiyi yanjiu buzhi weihu Xinjiang shehui wending gongzuo’, in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Party Commission Ministry of Information (eds), Jiaqiang minzu tuanjie, weihu Xinjiang wending: xuanchuan jiaoyu cailiao yi [Strengthening Ethnic Unity, Protecting Xinjiang Stability: Information Education Materials No.1] (Wulumuqi: Xinjiang People’s Publishing Press).
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Prasenjit Duara (1995) Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (London: University of Chicago Press), p. 4;
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Hu Angang and Hu Lianhe (2011) ‘Di er dai minzu zhengce: cujin minzu jiaorong yiti he fanhua yiti’ (The Second generation of Minzu Policies: Promoting Minzu Fusion and Prosperity in an Organic Whole), Xinjiang Shifan Daxue Xuebao, 5.
Hu Angang and Wen Jun (2004) ‘Minzu diqu quanmian jianshe xiaokang shehui de zhanlue xuanze’ [The Strategic Choice of Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in Ethnic Regions], in Mao Gongning (ed.), Minzu zhengce yanjiu wencong, di san ji (Beijing: Minzu Chubanshe), pp. 406–7.
For example, see State Council (2009) ‘Zhongguo de minzu zhengce yu ge minzu gongtong fanrong fazhan’ [China’s Ethnic Minority Policy and the Common Prosperity of all Ethnic Groups], (Beijing: People’s Publishing Press);
and Pan Jiao (2008) ‘Zuqun jiqi xiangguan gainian zai xifang de liubian’ [Ethnicity and Related Concepts in the Later Developments of the West], in Pan Jiao (ed.), ‘Zhongguo shehui wenhua renleixue’, pp. 83–92.
James Leibold (2007) Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and its Indigenes Became Chinese (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 9–11.
For example, see Eric Schluessel (2007) ‘Bilingual Education and Discontent in Xinjiang’, Central Asian Survey, 26(2), pp. 251–77.
Zhang Haiyang (2008) ‘Jianlun Zhongguohua yu hexie shehui’ [Comments on Sinicisation and a Harmonious Society], in Pan Jiao (ed.), Zhongguo shehui wenhua renleixue, pp. 335–8.
For a quantitative analysis of Han—Uyghur income inequality in Xinjiang, see Calla Wiemer (2004) ‘The Economy of Xinjiang’, in Fred Starr, Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland (London: M.E. Sharpe).
Further discussion in Gardner Bovingdon (2010) Uyghurs: Strangers in their own Land (New York: Columbia).
Shijian Bianji Bu (2008) ‘Bixu bawo minzu wenti de jieji shizhi’ [We Must Grasp the the Class Essence of the Minzu Problem], in Pan Jiao (ed.), Zhongguo shehui wenhua renleixue, p. 220.
Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Party Commission Information Department (eds) (2009) Jiaqiang minzu tuanjie, weihu Xinjiang wending: xuanchuan jiaoyu cailiao yi [Strengthening Ethnic Unity, Protecting Xinjiang Stability: Information Education Materials No.1] (Wulumuqi: Xinjiang People’s Publishing Press), p. 86.
Ming Jie (2012) ‘Tonghua haishi gongtong fanrong fazhan?’ (‘Assimilation or Common Prosperity?’), 20 February 2012. Available at: http://theory.people.com.cn/GB/17106132.html (last accessed 14 January 2014).
For example, see David Shambaugh (2011) ‘Coping with a Conflicted China’, Washington Quarterly, 34(1), p. 24;
Randall Schweller and Pu Xiaoyu (2011) ‘After Unipolarity: China’s Visions of International Order in an Era of US Decline’, International Security, 36(1), p. 44;
William A. Callahan (2010) China: The Pessoptimist Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 1.
Ming Jie (2012) ‘Minzu Yingwen fanyi yingwei minzu’ (‘Minzu Should be Translated into English as Minzu’) 28 August 2012. Available at: http://opinion.huanqiu.com/1152/ 2012–08/3074472.html (last accessed 14 January 2014).
Terry Martin (2001) The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (New York: Cornell University Press), p. 3.
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© 2015 David Tobin
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Tobin, D. (2015). Worrying About Ethnicity: A New Generation of China Dreams?. In: Kerr, D. (eds) China’s Many Dreams. The Nottingham China Policy Institute series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137478979_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137478979_4
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