The wheel of history and minorities’ ‘self-sacrifice’ for the Chinese nation

ABSTRACT

This article offers a theoretical intervention in new and emergent approaches to analysing China’s coercive nation-building policies under Xi Jinping. The author contends that the recent Western framing of CCP policies as genocidal or necropolitical, predicated on notions of settler colonialism and indigeneity, not only strips minority nationalities of their political agency but also prevents them from pursuing anti-colonial self-determination. By delving into the extensive scholarly work within Chinese anthropology, history, and philosophy that contributes to the reconstruction of a retrotopian Chinese nation with non-Han minority groups at its core, this article argues that the ongoing effort to build a revitalised Chinese national community requires more than merely overcoming obstacles related to minority cultures and identities. It entails actively reimagining the role and participation of minorities in ‘self-sacrifice’ for the Chinese national community, implying their voluntary relinquishment of identities and rights in order to align with the Chinese nation.

针对习近平时代的中国，本文以理论干预的方式，为分析其强制性的国家/民族建设政策提供了全新的视角。作者认为，近来西方基于“定居殖民主义/土著性”的二元框架，将中国共产党的民族政策解释为种族灭绝或死亡政治的做法，不仅剥夺了少数民族的政治能动性，而且在不同程度妨碍了后者为反抗殖民主义而做出的自决努力。通过广泛而深入地研究中国的人类学、历史学和哲学著作 – – 这些研究在一定程度上重构了一种以少数民族为核心的、“怀旧乌托邦”式的中华民族 – – 作者认为，近年来中国为实现“中华民族伟大复兴”的努力不仅仅是需要超克少数民族文化和身份认同；还需要重新想象少数民族在中华民族构建过程中所做出的‘自我牺牲’。这种牺牲意味着少数民族在一定程度上放弃自身的身份认同和权利，以满足中华民族复兴的需求。

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese nation
• The wheel of history
• Retrotopia
• Genocide
• Necropolitics
• Settler colonialism
• Minority nationality
• Ethnicity
• Self-sacrifice

关键词:

• 中华民族
• 历史车轮
• 怀旧乌托邦
• 种族屠杀
• 死亡政治
• 定居殖民主义
• 少数民族
• 族群
• 自我牺牲

Introduction: the wheel of history and the minorities it crushed

‘The wheel of history’ (lishi de chelun) is a metaphor popularly used to express the belief that historical progression is inexorable and turning it back means violation of that historical law, but in communist countries such as China, standing in the way of that progress or reversing it would also invite violence from those who subscribe to this ideology. The first use of this metaphor in association with political violence occurred during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76), when the rebels announced their seizure of power in Shanghai in January 1967 by proclaiming: ‘With an irresistible, sweeping force, they are following up this victory and brushing aside the rubbish that stands in the way of the wheel of history.’ They hailed the occasion as ‘a new turning point in our country’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the beginning of a new stage in this revolution’ (Commentator 1969 [1967]: 115–116).

Inspired by this Maoist sense of both historical inevitability and rupture, the Khmer Rouge legitimised its mass killings in Cambodia by asserting, ‘The wheel of history is inexorably turning: he who cannot keep pace with it shall be crushed’ (Locard 2004, 213). Like the Chinese rebels in 1967, the Khmer Rouge proclaimed 1975 to be Cambodia's ‘Year Zero’, marking a radical break from the past (Ers 2011).

In 2022, several western scholars entitled their edited volume Xinjiang Year Zero (Byler, Franceschini, and Loubere 2022). Without specifying a date, these scholars used the term ‘Year Zero’ to refer to China's new ethnic policy introduced in the late 2010s that discriminated against ethnic minorities, particularly Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. Their use of Year Zero, like Ground Zero, is not intended to celebrate the devastation, but rather to mourn it, and to mark the beginning of an era in which the culture and history of minorities are slated for eradication.

The year 2012, in which Xi Jinping was inaugurated as China's supreme leader and proclaimed his ‘Chinese Dream’ of ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’, may in retrospect be seen as one such turning point or Zeitenwende. Its realisation is specified in the 2012 amendment of the CCP constitution as the objective of its ‘second one hundred years’. The ideological elaboration of this turn, christened ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,’ was later enshrined in a CCP Constitutional amendment of 2017. The essence of Xi Thought is to establish two communities: one for China – ‘the community of the Chinese nation’; and the other for humanity as a whole – ‘a community with a shared future for mankind.’ Both concepts feature in the preamble of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Constitution as amended in 2018.

Xi Jinping's ‘Chinese Dream’ of national rejuvenation immediately set the wheel of history rolling towards transformation of China’s multinational polity. Here, the objective became to ‘forge the community consciousness of the Chinese nation,’ a concept first articulated by Xi Jinping in 2014 at the Second Xinjiang Work Forum, when he urged all nationalities to embrace each other as tightly as pomegranate seeds (Leibold 2014). In the same year, ‘Transformation Through Education Training Centres’ (Jiaoyu Zhuanhua Peixun Zhongxin) with barbed-wire perimeters were inaugurated in Xinjiang. Ostensibly intended for alleged religious extremists and terrorists, inmates soon grew to an estimated million Uyghur and other Muslim minorities, who were forced to learn Chinese, study ‘patriotism’ and undergo ‘vocational training’. Inner Mongolia ushered in their Year Zero in 2020 when a misleadingly-titled bilingual education programme implemented in Tibet and Xinjiang in 2017 was extended to six other autonomous regions and provinces. This changed the medium of instruction in minority schools from minority languages to Mandarin Chinese, now redefined as the ‘national common language’ (Atwood 2020; Bulag 2022; Leibold 2021). Parents and teachers in Inner Mongolia protested vehemently against this programme, citing the constitutional right of minorities to mother-tongue education.

This article seeks to understand the nature and consequences of the violence perpetrated against China’s officially recognised ‘minority nationalities’ in pursuance of the ‘Chinese Dream’, or how minorities have been subjected to the new Chinese wheel of history. It also responds to an emergent academic as well as diplomatic paradigm that examines China's ethnic politics through the lens of genocide or necropolitics. This paradigm should be taken seriously because the western academic characterisation of Chinese policy towards Muslim minorities in Xinjiang as genocidal has justified measures aimed at punishing China, leading to more polarised US–China human rights diplomacy (Griffiths 2023). To portray China’s regime as ‘necropolitical’ involves arguing that ‘the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’ (Mbembe 2003, 11). Recent applications of the concept of necropolitics to China include Roche’s (2022) analysis distinguishing two types of death associated with the death of language. Speakers of certain languages or dialects may be murdered by the regime, or they may choose to commit suicide in protest at language oppression. Roche portrays linguistic necropolitics as characteristic of modern polities, either colonial or nationalist, which assume or prioritise uniformity and legibility; and as Mbembe observed, this linguistic necropolitics is selective, with the state deciding who should die first. Leibold and Dorjee (2023) implicitly support this paradigm by documenting the erosion of Tibetan culture and identity as Tibetan children are educated in inland China ‘to be Chinese’. Yan and Vickers (2023) similarly describe a necropolitical China as they trace the shift in Chinese history textbooks from a focus on cultural diversity to a far more singular and homogenising vision of Chinese nationhood that leaves little space for acknowledging minority difference.

While I am in broad sympathy with such characterisations, I believe that such a paradigm shift in scholarship on China's ethnic politics requires critical scrutiny. I will contend that the necropolitical paradigm, despite its potent critique of Chinese sovereign politics, oddly depoliticises Chinese minorities, for it does not actually call for anti-colonial self-determination. Notwithstanding the Chinese regime’s brutality towards minorities, there are also other logics at work; the project of building a ‘rejuvenated’ Chinese national community involves not only eliminating the obstacles constituted by minority cultures and identities (and, in extreme circumstances, actual lives); it also demands that minorities voluntarily relinquish their identities and rights in order to identify with the Chinese nation. Inherent to Chinese necropolitics is therefore the cultivation of minority ‘self-sacrifice’ for the Chinese national community. This notion of minority self-sacrifice epitomises the ideological and emotional labour that the CCP has invested in both communism and nationalism over the past century or so, with heightened intensity today.

The necropolitics of paradigms

Western characterisation of current Chinese ethnic policy as genocide or crimes against humanity represents a paradigm shift that purports to reveal the true objective of the PRC state: to exterminate ethnic minorities as culturally distinctive entities. The accusation is prosecutorial, because the 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as the most heinous crime – the crime of all crimes – and mandates bringing the perpetrators to justice. Under this Convention, national sovereignty is no longer a shield. Given the stakes, it is unsurprising that the Chinese government categorically rejects Western use of the term ‘re-education camps’ – a term evoking memories of Nazi concentration camps, Soviet Gulags, and China’s own Laojiao (Re-education Through Labour) camps for dissidents – for what it prefers to call ‘Vocational Education and Training Centres’ (VETC). These centres, it claims, are dedicated to equipping Xinjiang’s Muslims with the essential skills they need to enjoy the opportunities presented by China’s economic development.

‘Re-education camp’ and ‘VETC’ serve as rival ‘terministic screens’ (Burke 1966), with both sides waging a Gramscian ‘war of position’ (Gramsci 1971) to define the nature of the Chinese regime as revealed in its ethnic policy. In this cognitive warfare regarding the truth in Xinjiang, China blocks independent access to the ‘camps’, while spinning stories of happy and grateful Muslim minorities learning to love China and the Party. Meanwhile, Western observers point to satellite images, census data, and harrowing testimonies of torture and disappearance from Uyghurs and Kazakhs who have fled overseas. These are presented as proofs of China’s ‘genocidal intent.’ In the absence of direct evidence of mass killing in the manner of the Nazi Holocaust or Rwanda’s 1994 massacres, a Critical Genocide Studies perspective has emerged, arguing that genocide may involve the gradual deprivation of a group's identity and vitality via language assimilation and economic exclusion. This perspective on genocide as a process enables Tobin (2022) to turn the Chinese celebration of inter-ethnic ‘fusion’ (ronghe) on its head by arguing that it has led to ‘social death’ of Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang.

Of late, settler colonialism has become a more convenient perspective to frame accounts of Chinese genocide in Xinjiang. Introducing his edited volume, The Xinjiang Emergency, Michael Clarke writes of ‘Colonialism, Settler Colonialism, and the Path to Cultural Genocide in Xinjiang’ (Clarke 2022). This perspective also informs the revised edition of James Millward's Eurasian Crossroads (Millward 2021), the hard-hitting volume Xinjiang Year One (Byler, Franceschini, and Loubere 2022), and a recent article by Joanne Smith Finley (2022). The name of the region, Xinjiang, which literally translates as ‘New Frontier,’ is cited as evidence that the region was once a Uyghur homeland conquered by the Qing in the late nineteenth century, a legacy inherited by the succeeding Republic of China and intensified by the PRC, which settled Han populations in large numbers.

Once thus framed, the ethnic relationship in Xinjiang acquires new imaginaries; in place of the officially sanctioned majority-minority relationship a settler colonialist-indigenous duality pits Han Chinese against Uyghurs and other non-Han peoples. This framing is derived from the writings of Patrick Wolfe who has argued that genocide is intrinsic to settler colonialism as both the intention and consequence of a settler colonial encounter with indigenous peoples that follows a ‘logic of elimination’ (Wolfe 2006). According to this logic, it is indigenous people's land, not their labour, that is valued for capitalist production, leading to their expropriation and physical extinction. This perspective thus sees not only the Chinese regime, but also an entire ethnic group, the Han Chinese in Xinjiang, as settler colonialists who have stolen the land and livelihoods of Uyghurs and other indigenous peoples in the region.

However, while describing the region as having been subject to sustained Han Chinese migration and colonisation may represent an advance in historical accuracy, it may paradoxically also mark a political retreat. Starkly exposing the nature of Xinjiang's relationship with the Chinese state curiously negates the region's official designation as a ‘Uyghur Autonomous Region’, a political entity established as part of China's system of regional autonomy for nationalities. Put differently, this perspective is complicit with the CCP’s drive to hollow out the concept of autonomy, rendering China's constitutional rights for minorities superfluous and not worth fighting for.

As radical as it may sound, genocide against indigenous peoples induced by settler colonialism can be condemned as a crime against humanity, but the remedy for settler colonialism is not always identical to that for colonialism. The notion of settler colonialism with its indigenous discourse seldom calls for the repatriation of the settlers to their original homelands, as their settlement in the new colonies is a fait accompli supported by a whole host of international laws.¹ Indeed, in his survey of indigenism, Thomas Alberts (2015, 96–97) argues that ‘from the 1940s to the 1960s, laws and policies pertaining to indigenous populations were designed to promote assimilation into dominant societies.’ Since then, however, human rights have supplanted anti-colonialism, and indigenous movement recognition has been ‘framed in terms of discrimination against indigenous populations, rather than self-determination for indigenous peoples’. This emphasis on human rights subsequently reconceptualised indigenous self-determination as autonomy within states.

I believe this perspective of indigenous autonomy within states informs the recent adoption of the term ‘indigenous peoples’ to refer to minority nationalities – and as an alternative to ethnic groups – among Western China scholars (Elliott 2015; Visser 2023). Indigenes or indigeneity may be useful for establishing minority entitlement to the land they live on now, but such concepts also carry overtones of authenticity and moral purity, as if these groups are noble savages rudely awakened from their primitive innocence by outsider colonisers. The ‘indigenous’/‘coloniser’ dichotomy can thus not only serve as a barrier to grasping historical nuance and complexity but also lead to obfuscated political commitment. This is evident in the fact that the editors of Xinjiang Year Zero, while adopting the settler colonialism perspective and referring to Uyghurs as an ‘indigenous’ people, do not see Uyghur self-determination in Xinjiang as even a moral objective. They justify their avoidance of the historical name ‘East Turkestan’ by claiming that ‘many of the advocates of East Turkestan appear to be exclusively Uyghur and appeal to a type of right-wing ethno-nationalism rather than an inclusive democratic and decolonial ethos’ (Byler, Franceschini, and Loubere 2022, 12). What emerges from this is a sort of projection of contemporary Western identity politics into Xinjiang. These Western scholars seem to expect Uyghur and other minority victims of Chinese state oppression to take up the role of champions of inclusive decoloniality. In this vision of inter-ethnic solidarity as the highest ideal, it is difficult to imagine any Uyghur political autonomy within Xinjiang, let alone self-determination from China.

The necropolitical paradigm (in critique of settler colonialism) prevalent in current academic research is of course not the only way to view China’s ethnic politics. An earlier postcolonial paradigm was also critical of Chinese ethnic policy, but it produced an altogether different imaginary. In fact, I argue that the postcolonial paradigm was responsible for China’s policy shift, which is now criticised as genocide.

Western research on contemporary ethnic politics in the PRC began in the late 1980s and flourished throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Taking as their research subject the binary division between the Han majority and fifty-five minority nationalities and the regional autonomy system associated with the latter, anthropologists, historians, and political scientists investigated the paradox between the dominant Western understanding of China as a homogeneously ‘Chinese’ nation and its formal status as a multinational state comprising fifty-six nationalities.

Following the prevailing modernist school which emphasises the invented or constructed nature of nations and ethnic groups, scholars were fascinated by the role of the Chinese state in classifying – and thereby constructing – China’s minority nationalities in the 1950s (Gladney 1991; 1994; Kaup 2000; Mullaney 2010; Schein 2000). Their research was not intended as a celebration of the civic foundations of Chinese identity discourse; rather, it was part of a wider postcolonial critique of the colonial and communist invention of nations and nationalisms, highlighting how exclusivist ethnic categorisation could often lead to murderous violence. The 1990s saw a flourishing of this paradigm applied to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (Bringa 1993; Slezkine 1994). The dissolution of the Soviet Union and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia were attributed to ‘ethnic particularism’ promoted by their respective regimes. In the Chinese context, it was argued that many of China’s nationalities had been invented by the Communists through their classification scheme, but were simultaneously subject to Chinese ‘internal orientalism’ (Schein 1997) as their homelands were turned into ‘internal colonies’ (Gladney 1998). These processes were seen as producing subaltern consciousness and resistance against the state.

One enduring impact of this body of research was to popularise use of the anthropological term ‘ethnicity’ (translated as zuqun in Chinese) in place of ‘nationality’ (minzu). This ‘rectification of names’ displaced the Communist discourse of ‘nationalities’ with language associated with the Western model of liberal multiculturalism (Pan 2010). Since the 1990s, minzu, the category underpinning the system of regional autonomy that governs 60% of China’s territory, has become illegitimate in western academic eyes. Aspects of this western postcolonial critique, namely its reframing of China as a multiethnic nation rather than a multinational state, found a receptive audience in late-twentieth-century China. It coincided with the anthropologist Fei Xiaotong's 1988 resuscitation of the long-defunct concept Zhonghua minzu (Chinese nation), which quickly entered mainstream Communist discourse. In his Tanner lecture delivered in Hong Kong, Fei presented Zhonghua minzu as a generic term encompassing all people in China, defined as a plural entity comprising 56 nationalities (minzu). Fei’s definition of Zhonghua minzu attempts to turn what is defined (in the PRC constitution) as a multinational state into a single ‘nation’ with ‘ethnic’ diversity, although he did not use the term zuqun. In this view, minority nationalities are no longer joint and equal sovereigns of the Chinese state, but rather integral parts of a singular and sovereign Chinese nation with Han Chinese as its core. By postulating a single community, Fei’s concept of Zhonghua minzu undermines the case for political and territorial autonomy for minority minzu, shifting emphasis instead towards their identification with the Chinese nation.

The confluence of Chinese and Western anthropological reimagination of China as a multiethnic nation has had far-reaching political implications. The revival of the concept of Zhonghua minzu was particularly striking given the CCP’s banishment of the concept as articulated in Chiang Kai-shek’s 1943 tract, China’s Destiny, when they dismissed it as a ‘fascist’ ruse for denying the existence of minority nationalities (Lou 2014). The CCP re-embracement of Zhonghua minzu came amidst tremendous ideological crisis following the disastrous Cultural Revolution and the distintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. In the 1980s and 1990s, China experienced a frenzy of intellectual soul searching involving rival camps: some turning to Western enlightenment thought and condemning Chinese tradition and culture while others investing hope in a revival of Chinese civilisation and nationalism to expunge Maoist revolutionary zealotry. A melding of nationalist enthusiasm for Chinese civilisation with ostensibly progressive elements of Western postmodernism and postcolonialism (positing the incommensurability of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Western’ thought) is exemplified by the work of China’s ‘New Left’ thinkers. In his 1994 mission statement, Wang Hui, the leading New Left figure, wrote: ‘I rejoice that I was born in China since what could be more heartbreaking and also more exhilarating than the glorious revival of a decaying civilisation of which so many generations of people have dreamed?’ (Wang 1994, 21–22; quoted in Davies 2007, 53).

Drawing on Lacanian-Žižekian psychoanalysis, the Chinese political philosopher Wu Guanjun (2014) perceptively argues that Party and intellectuals plunged into a ‘Great Dragon Fantasy’, hailing the Chinese people as descendants of the dragon (long de chuanren). This has fuelled phantasmagorical narratives of past trauma inflicted by Western powers and a consuming desire to expunge the memory of ‘humiliation’. In this nationalist fantasy, Chinese civilisation is not so much a living reality as a lost past – albeit one deemed eminently retrievable. Seen in this light, Fei Xiaotong’s Zhonghua minzu discourse fills the post-Mao and post-Cold War ideological void by offering a new ‘all under heaven’ (tianxia) alternative to the Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states under which China is seen to have suffered. More importantly, it posits a phantasmagorical ‘great unity’ (dayitong) projected back into antiquity, with the former barbarians transformed from invaders of China to minority nationalities, whose shared identity with the Chinese nation is rooted precisely in collective humiliation at the hands of Westerners.

The CCP's renewed enthusiasm for the Zhonghua minzu concept was marked by the 2002 revision of the CCP Constitution, which redefined the Party as ‘the vanguard both of the Chinese working class and of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation’ (Constitution of the CCP 2002). The Party’s redefinition of its role as vanguard of the Zhonghua minzu immediately authorised intellectual challenge to its own longstanding nationality policies, despite their reiteration in the 2002 CCP constitution: ‘uphold[ing] and promot[ing] relations of equality, unity and mutual assistance among all ethnic groups in the country, uphold[ing] and constantly improve[ing] the system of regional ethnic autonomy, … ’ (ibid.). In fact, a year earlier, Zhu Lun (2001), a political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, had already called for the abolition of zizhi (autonomy), introducing the concept of gongzhi, which he dubbed in English as ‘joitnomy.’ In 2004, Ma Rong (2004), a Peking University sociologist, made a bolder call for ‘depoliticizing’ nationality policy, or reducing the Party-state's support for minority nationalities. The 2008 riots in Lhasa and the 2009 Han-Uyghur violence in Urumqi galvanised Chinese intellectuals to restrict minority rights. This culminated in the radical 2011 proposal by Hu Angang and Hu Lianhe (2011) – respectively a renowned Chinese policy-scholar from Tsinghua University and an official of the CCP United Front Department, the organisation tasked with overseeing religious and ethnic affairs – to introduce a ‘second generation ethnic policy.’ Attributing minority ‘three evils’ of ‘terrorism, splittism, and extremism’ to existing policies, they advocated assimilating minorities into one, shared Chinese national consciousness through ‘interaction, exchange and intermingling’ (‘jiaowang, jiaoliu, jiaorong’).

The CCP adoption of the concept of Zhonghua minzu also reflected the influence on the Chinese nationalist imagination of a certain idea of the USA as a model of nationhood. In Hegelian terms, the strong and wealthy American nation functions as the ‘constitutive obstacle’ challenging the Chinese to construct their own national entity – equally strong and wealthy, or more so. This reflects a conviction that the secret to America’s success lies in its poly-ethnic model with all ethnic groups identifying themselves as Americans and all speaking or aspiring to speak English, the unifying national lingua franca. This is contrasted with the Soviet Union, whose multinational structure, copied by China, is believed to have led to its dissolution. As the Chinese anthropologist Li Xuan observes (2022a), this is an idealised conception of what an American nation ought to be, as opposed to what it actually is. The America that is admired and imagined as a model is not the new multiculturalist American nation that recognises and celebrates ethnic diversity, but rather the long-discredited assimilationist model characterised by the ‘melting pot’ theory.

This yearning to rival American power by forging a singular Chinese identity not only establishes a hierarchy that subordinates the fifty-six minzu (nationalities) by demoting them to zuqun (ethnic groups). The pursuit of hierarchization is also driven by what Ian Hacking (1999) identifies as the logic of social constructionist theory. Portraying something as socially constructed is not meant to betoken acceptance; instead, it implies a protest against the status quo. This logic underpins the Western postcolonial critique of the Communist invention of nationalities, but it also has been appropriated by Chinese policy-scholars to urge the ‘depoliticisation’, or scrapping, of China’s nationalities policy to avert the fate of the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia – seen as having splintered into component nationalities invented by the Communists in the first place. I have elsewhere argued that minority nationalities are now viewed as ‘Frankenstein's monsters,’ creatures of the Communist state that have come to torment their creator (Bulag 2021). Nationalities have thus acquired an entirely different image to that of small and weak minorities deserving affirmative action; they are now viewed as not only ungrateful but also as ‘evil or one of its numerous surrogates’ (Connolly 1991, 64), existentially threatening the Chinese national self. The academic policy discourse and CCP measures against minorities in recent years – disinventing the politically oriented nationalities by transforming them into culturally oriented ethnic groups better to mould them into a single Chinese nation – follow this Frankensteinian logic, with the Party racing to save itself before too late (see also Chen 2023).

China as a stag-hunting ground for minorities?

The CCP project of ‘fusing’ 55 minority nationalities (minzu) into one Chinese nation (minzu) involves both destruction and construction: destruction, because the minority minzu must be transformed into zuqun (‘ethnic groups’), in effect (if not on paper) scrapping or rescinding their constitutionally-granted cultural and political rights; and construction, because Xi Jinping's Chinese Dream envisages restoring past glories by reimagining a utopian and monolithic Chinese national community.

The Chinese nation Xi dreams of rejuvenating has some characteristics of what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘retrotopia,’ a community ‘located in the lost/stolen/abandoned but undead past, instead of being tied to the not-yet-unborn and so inexistent future’ (Bauman 2017, 5). Bauman’s notion of retrotopia is built upon Svetlana Boym’s concept of ‘restorative nostalgia,’ which ‘stresses nostos (home) and attempts a trans-historical reconstruction of the lost home’ in the name of ‘truth and tradition’ (Boym 2007, 13). Nostalgia is strongly associated with right-wing populism, characterised by anti-establishment rhetoric and longing for a time when social order was (supposedly) maintained and ‘the people’ unaffected by immigrants. Such a nostalgic reverie relies on established and unquestionable collective memories of a world divided essentially into us and them (Betz 2021; Brubaker 2020).

In the case of China’s civilizational grandeur, to which the CCP aspires to return, we must inquire what it consists of or implies for national identity. This is an awkward issue for the CCP, which has made its career by rejecting tradition. And the CCP's restorative nostalgia does not posit a return to an unproblematic past. Indeed, Zhonghua minzu is a thoroughly modern concept introduced by Liang Qichao in 1902. Recent etymological studies conducted by Li Xuan (2022b) indicate that the English term ‘Chinese nation’ predated ‘Zhonghua minzu,’ but only referred to the Han Chinese. In the eyes of most early twentieth century (Han) Chinese nationalists, the restoration of China or the Chinese nation was contingent on the expulsion of Manchu rulers seen as foreign invaders.

The establishment of the Republic of China in 1912 as a multinational state of five races (wuzu gonghe) was never recognised by the Chinese Nationalist Party (GMD), especially Sun Yat-sen, later to be revered as ‘the father of the Chinese nation’ (guofu). The passion for a unitary Chinese nation motivated the GMD to overthrow the Republican government and establish a Nationalist (guomin) government in 1928, replacing the five-coloured national flag with one depicting the sun against a blue sky. In China’s Destiny, Chiang Kai-shek (1947) redefined the five races – the sovereigns of the Republican state – as ‘lineages’ (zongzu) of a primordially defined Chinese nation with common ancestors: Yan and Huang. In distancing itself from this ‘fascist’ vision, the CCP declared its new regime established in 1949 a multinational state, its diversity symbolised by the five stars on its red flag. The late twentieth-century reversal of that earlier rejection of Zhonghua minzu thus repositions the CCP as the inheritor of mid-twentieth-century GMD nationalism-cum-fascism, and it requires reordering non-Chinese peoples into Chinese by rewriting China’s National History.

In Rescuing History from the Nation (1995), Prasenjit Duara offers a postcolonial critique of Chinese nationalist historiography during the Republican era, condemning its teleological projection of the present into the past. The Chinese nationalist narrative restructured power dynamics in terms of inclusion and exclusion, dominance and marginalisation. According to Duara, the mission of postcolonial historiography is to rescue the fragments, the victims of the capitalised History of the Nation, such as marginalised minorities, provincial autonomy, or transnational religious communities. In general, the postcolonial perspective critiques the colonial tactic of creating categories of otherness to ‘divide and rule’ the colonised, and it envisions a diverse and inclusive community for all. While this may be progressive, postcolonial scholarship tends to overlook the diversity of the forms of colonialism itself. Far from emphasising otherness, Japanese colonialism sought to cultivate ‘“natural” unity in its Asian community through imagined blood and organic ties between Japan and the colonies’ (Park 2000, 193–94). Nor was Western colonialism monolithic, as witnessed by the contrast between dominant British conceptions of empire and what Robert Young terms the ‘paradox of ethnocentric egalitarianism’ at the heart of the French civilising mission:

on the one hand, it was the most progressive of all imperial ideologies, to the extent that it assumed the fundamental equality of all human beings … and considered that however natural or ‘backward’ their state, all native peoples could simultaneously benefit from the uniform imposition of French culture. … On the other hand, this very assumption meant that the French model had the least respect and sympathy for the culture, language and institutions of the people being colonized … (Young 2016, 32).

Both the Japanese and French approaches to their ‘civilising missions’ (perhaps especially the former, with its combination of anti-Westernism and ‘Asianist’ neo-traditionalism) suggest comparisons with the retrotopic Chinese nationalist project and its repositioning of non-Chinese peoples within China’s new national narrative. While the French mission civilisatrice was ostensibly more ‘civic’, and Japan’s premised more explicitly on racial solidarity, both envisaged bringing colonial subjects into ever-fuller communion with their respective imperial nation.

The CCP project of ‘fusing’ minorities into a single Zhonghua minzu implies a similar vision of the imperial nation-state. This is evident in the totalist logic behind Fei Xiaotong’s thesis about the Chinese nation. Fei invokes archaeology to trace China’s origins to an indefinite past, seeking thus to confine all 56 ‘minority nationalities’ within today’s national boundaries as components of a China ‘united in diversity’ (duoyuan yiti). This schema is derived from his concept of chaxu geju, which contrasts Chinese social relations, portrayed as essentially communitarian and constructed through social networking, with those of ‘the West’, represented as individualist and contractual. Fei depicts the Chinese nation as a vast community of ethnic or tribal groups that from antiquity have naturally or unconsciously (zizai de) bonded through their interaction, whether involving trade or war. The Opium War, in his view, began a transformation of these bonds into a ‘conscious’ (zijue de) or intentional community in which all nationalities united against western imperialism. Fei’s account of the Chinese nation is thus both primordialist and modernist, emphasising the nation’s antiquity while attributing its ‘awakening’ to the modern rupture brought about by Western imperialism.

Fei’s vision of ‘unity in diversity’ serves two main purposes. First, it establishes a hierarchy by subordinating the 56 nationalities to his newly imagined Chinese nation. Second, it privileges Han Chinese as the sole agents of consociation. On his interpretation, minorities have no existence or purpose beyond their unconditional contribution to the Han-dominated Chinese nation. Fei’s description of the pre-modern Chinese nation as an unconscious community formed through interaction echoes the structural functionalist theory of Max Gluckman (1940), which placed Whites and colonised natives on the same ‘field.’ In this analysis, conflicts or rifts are viewed as conducive to the integration of the conflicting parties into a new community, regardless of whether they recognise or accept this. Similarly, Fei’s integrationist strategy endows the Han Chinese and their culture with a supernatural capacity to incorporate all Inner Asian conquerors into a greater Chinese nation while excluding Japanese and Western imperialists.

Fei’s Han-centrism conforms to the general ‘sinicization thesis’ in Chinese nationalist and communist historiography, which denies minorities the agency to define China in terms other than monolithically Chinese. In recent years, the Chinese response to the so-called New Qing History (NQH) demonstrates the intensity of this hegemony. NQH is a ‘school of thought’ that emerged in the 1980s among America-based Sinologists, who placed the Qing dynasty in a global historical context, emphasising the ethnic Manchu identity of its rulers, and the importance of studying archival documents in Manchu and Mongolian, in addition to Chinese (Déry 2020). NQH’s emphasis on the Inner Asian identity of the Qing dynasty’s Manchu rulers challenges the culturalist view of pre-modern Chinese as Han-centric, pointing to an alternative ‘imperial’, i.e. multinational, structure anchored in the political heritage of Inner Asia.

What matters for Chinese historians confronted with a modern state inheriting Qing territories triple the size of ‘China proper’ concerns whether or not Manchu imperialism was a ‘Chinese’ project, and thus whether Inner Asian allegiance was to the Manchus in opposition to the Chinese, or to the Manchus as representatives of the Chinese civilisational ideal. What is at stake is nothing less than the constitutional basis of modern China – either as a multinational state whose Inner Asian minorities are entitled to autonomy, or as a unitary nation-state whose ethnic groups must submerge their differences in pursuit of ever-closer union with the Han. Separate ethnic languages, cultures, faiths, or identities have no intrinsic value in the latter view. It is even a crime to insist on these, as NQH does, because this amounts to promoting ‘splittism’ to destroy China – the ulterior motive of Western imperialists (Wong 2021; Zhong 2018). The issue is not so much the historical externality of Inner Asians conquerors as the motivation behind their conquest. The sinicisation thesis underpinning the new Chinese nationalist narrative reflects an extreme confidence in the superiority of Chinese culture, to the extent that the conquest of China by Inner Asians is frequently depicted as an expression of the latter’s admiration for Chinese culture.

Contemporary calls for a ‘rejuvenation’ of the Chinese nation thus posit a retrotopian China whose Inner Asian invaders were drawn like butterflies towards the flame of its exceptional moral virtue. The model or ideal is the classical tributary system, which portrayed barbarians as supplicants to the Chinese ‘Son of Heaven’, offering their local products in exchange for his recognition and beneficence. When Inner Asians invaded China, this arose from an excess of admiration for its peerless civilisation. That civilisation itself, however, lacks what Xi Jinping terms ‘the conquest gene’. Since 2014, Xi has asserted ad nauseam that the Chinese possess the ‘gene’ of peace (Xi 2018 [2014]), in 2017 making this the foundation of his concept of ‘community of shared future for mankind’ when he proclaimed in Geneva that ‘For several millennia, peace has been in our blood and a part of our DNA’ (Xi 2017). Minority nationalism, or resistance to the centripetal attraction of ‘outstanding traditional Chinese culture’, can in this view only be the outcome of mental retardation or malign Western interference.

The influential philosopher Tingyang Zhao (2021) has proposed the Chinese concept of tianxia as a superior alternative to the United Nations system based on the Westphalian principle of nation-states. Tianxia, Zhao argues, offers all peoples the prospect of communion with an open, welcoming and warm-hearted China; this is what is meant by the Chinese Dream. If Xi's ‘community of shared destiny for mankind’ seems rather abstract, Zhao’s theology of China presents the nation itself as a microcosmic model of a global, Sino-centric order of tianxia. As the nation that uniquely aligns with the dictates of Heaven or Tian (peitian), China is ‘numinous’ (shenxing zhongguo), possessing an ineffable power to awe and attract conquerors. Such a China is, for Zhao, an open and unbounded realm with ‘no outside.’ This numinous China produces what he calls a ‘whirlwind’ that attracts ambitious men from near and far. To describe the Inner Asian invasions of China, he invokes the proverbial image of ‘stag hunting in the Central Plains’ (zhulu zhongyuan)² – perhaps a more generous (and poetic) spatial metaphor than Gluckman’s ‘field’ of interaction. The enigmatic allusion to stag-hunting on the Central Plains, symbolising ‘barbarian’ incursions into China for plunder, evokes a retrotopia reminiscent of the ancient Zhou dynasty, which existed from 1046 BC to 256 BC.

Zhao's nationalist theology is thus thoroughly necropolitical, but he attributes the death of minority cultures not to the Chinese state, but to self-sacrifice by minorities themselves, fatally attracted by China’s cultural superiority. For him, it is not death but ‘becoming,’ a positive transformation involving triumph over non-Chinese ways of being. China, in this vision, has the characteristics of a femme fatale, luring its admirers into a fatal trap. None of China’s invaders, Zhao writes with supreme self-confidence, were ever able to leave, and were all assimilated into Chinese culture. He identifies Chinese characters (Hanzi) as crucial in bestowing upon numinous China ‘such evocative power and universal appeal’ (Ibid. 132).³

This Chinese narrative giving minorities agency over their own cultural death needs to be taken seriously. It underpins the official theory articulated by Pan Yue, the newly appointed Chinese commissioner for state ethnic affairs, who has openly endorsed the assimilationist policy (Glasserman 2023). In an article published on the eve of his appointment (Pan 2021), outlining his vision of minorities’ place in the Chinese nation, Pan makes clear that minority self-sacrifice is a national imperative. In this regard, Pan has moved beyond a national theology that sees China’s nation-formation in terms of an inevitable process of minorities being drawn towards an implicitly superior Han culture.

Although his retrotopia also harks back to ancient China, unlike Fei, who constructs an ancient Chinese world system on the basis of a structural-functional anthropological (and archaeological) thesis, or Zhao, who endows China with a capacity to fatally attract barbarians, Pan argues that China and the Chinese were actually non-Chinese creations. To substantiate this argument, he refers to the period of wuhu luanhua (‘Five foreign tribes disrupting China’) between 300 and 600 AD, a chaotic interval between the Eastern Han and Sui dynasties that saw the creation of multiple states by non-Han Chinese peoples in what is now north China. Rejecting the conventional Chinese historiographical depiction of the era as the ultimate ‘barbarian’ dystopia, Pan Yue identifies it as the moment of the birth of the Han Chinese and, by extension, the Chinese nation. He argues that all invading barbarians appropriated ‘Han’ as an ethnonym in their attempts to restore the great Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD). Thus, these northern dynasties reified the Han, endowing it with a greater symbolic significance than the contemporary southern dynasties established by Han Chinese. In this narrative, Sinicization (Hanhua, Hanification) is no longer a Han Chinese imposition on barbarians, but rather an instance of cultural appropriation by barbarians due to their admiration of Han culture.

Comparing this process to the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire during the same period, Pan argues that the invaders of China and Rome had divergent conceptions of history. Whereas European barbarians desired ethnic segregation (zuqun geli) in order to divide up the world (guafen tianxia), the five Chinese barbarian tribes desired ‘ethnic fusion’ (zuqun ronghe) in order to create a ‘world become one’ (hunyi tianxia), that is, the unification of all races under Heaven. Significantly, Pan Yue rebrands ‘wuhu luanhua’ as ‘wuhu ruhua’, replacing the term luan (乱, denoting chaos or disruption) with ru (入, meaning ‘enter’). There is an unconsciously ironic echo here of the 1982 Chinese attack on Japan’s Ministry of Education for requiring history textbooks to replace references to Japan’s ‘invasion’ (侵略) of Northern China with the euphemism ‘advanced into’ (進出) (Pyle 1983). Pan’s use of ‘ru’ (入) means not ‘qin-ru’ (侵入, invaded) but ‘rong-ru’ (融入), or fusion with China, driven by a desire to become Han. In an act of Orwellian doublethink, China’s state commissioner of ethnic affairs, with the alteration of a single word, thus portrays minorities becoming Han Chinese not through forced assimilation by the Party but of their own volition. Moreover, under his pen, barbarians-cum-minorities have become the actual originators of the Han Chinese.

This narrative superficially resembles the tales of mimicry or racial impersonation that are frequently pilloried in postcolonial critiques of attempts by colonisers to make conquered natives to think and act like them. For Bhabha (1994), mimicry becomes a strategic tool used by subalterns to display hollow subservience to colonial authority in order to parody or ridicule it. But such irony or critique is entirely lacking in the theorising of Fei Xioatong, Pan Yue or Zhao Tingyang. For them, minorities’ mimicry simply denotes minorities’ overwhelming desire to become Chinese. It is a manifestation of their cultural death drive, whose destructive force is directed not at the Chinese nation but at themselves. And for the Chinese nation, that death drive is an invigorating force, since the oblivion of minority identity implies rebirth into a new Chinese life. In the context of the CCP’s fervent embrace of ‘outstanding traditional Chinese culture,’ this willing abandonment of cultural distinctiveness also conforms to the Confucian ethical injunction that the individual, as a ‘small self’ (xiaowo), should sacrifice himself for the benefit of the collective ‘great self’ (dawo) (Barbalet 2014; Yan 2021).

Inner Mongolia as a self-sacrificial exemplar for the Chinese nation

China’s newly revived national-cum-civilizational model must be evaluated within the context of China's communist necropolitics. Class will ‘wither’ first, followed by the state, the instrument of class dominance, and nations will persist until humanity enters communism, where cultural and ethnic identity lose their significance. Following this ‘historical law’, the history of communism in China and elsewhere is one of active homicide; millions of class enemies have been murdered or crushed under the wheel of history. However, instead of destroying the state as planned, minority nationalities became the next target for eradication. The PRC history began with a demand that traditional leaders voluntarily relinquish their leadership positions in exchange for their physical survival. Refusal would result in punishment, as it did during the military conquest of the Yi people in 1956–1958 and the Tibetans in 1958–1959. Even loyally communist minorities were not exempt. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, as tensions between China and the Soviet Union with its ally the Mongolian People’s Republic increased, the Chinese government eliminated the Mongolian leadership of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, resulting in an ethnic pogrom which I have termed ‘politicide’ (Bulag 2010; Cheng, Bulag, and Selden 2023). Aside from the numerous actual deaths involved, politicide denotes the act of denying communities the opportunity to realise aspirations for self-determination, thereby eradicating their political and national existence. The tragedy of the Inner Mongolian politicide stemmed from the targeting of the CCP's own political categories, personnel, and institutions; and from the Party’s renunciation of the principles of minority autonomy enshrined in the Chinese Constitution.

The violence and death associated with communism and nation-building in China raise fundamental questions regarding the essence of the Chinese state. In his book On Sacrifice, philosopher Moshe Halbertal (2012) asserts that members of a political community must engage in self-sacrifice or martyrdom for the political order. ‘Origin narratives of states and political or religious communities,’ Halbertal writes, ‘sometimes refer to heroic sacrifices performed by the founding generation. Future generations are assumed to be burdened with the onus of that early sacrifice, which demands loyalty, since betraying it means retroactively stripping the sacrifice of meaning’ (2012, 90). This is an especially pertinent argument for nationalism. ‘No more arresting emblems of the modem culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers’, according to Anderson (1991, 9). National identity is powerfully validated through narratives of heroic sacrifice for the sake of the nation, and the attendant obligation on the living to honour the martyrs for the national cause.

Mao Zedong was an expert at using sacrifice to reinforce identity with and loyalty to the Chinese nation and the CCP. In his political report to the CCP’s Seventh National Congress on 24 April 1945, Mao (1945) stated, ‘Thousands upon thousands of martyrs have heroically laid down their lives for the people; let us hold their banner high and march ahead along the path crimson with their blood!’ Mourning the deceased became Mao’s revolutionary modus operandi for generating what Lifton (1967) calls ‘death guilt,’ or survivor's ‘guilt over survival priority,’ i.e. the survivor’s mingled guilt and gratitude to those who have secured his survival. The indebtedness to the blood of martyrs has also been repeatedly emphasised by Xi Jinping to legitimise the CCP rule of China, as exemplified by his speech at the CCP's 95th anniversary celebration (Xi 2017): ‘History has told us that, the path taken by China, the Chinese people, and the Chinese nation over the past 95 years has been paved with the blood, sweat, and tears of the CCP and the Chinese people.’

As is evident, the Chinese nation as conceptualised by the CCP is not a social contract-based civic community; rather, it is a primordial community founded on bloody self-sacrifice. In his Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change, Peter Berger refers to the mythical dimensions in the modern quest for development (in both its capitalist and socialist incarnations) and revolution. Like the Great Pyramids at Cholula, Mexico, which followed the theory that ‘If the gods were not regularly fed with human blood, the universe would fall apart’ (1976, 3), modern development and revolution also devour millions of people, all in the name of a ‘better life’ for future generations. Halbertal argues that ‘the connection between self-sacrifice and violence is established through a dangerous yet common reversal between two claims: since it is the mark of the good that it deserves sacrifice, the reverse must be true, too – namely, that sacrifice makes something into a good’ (2012, 69). Similarly, the supreme testimony to the virtue of the Chinese nation is the sacrifice of its heroic martyrs; and it is precisely the debt owed to their self-sacrifice that mandates further self-sacrifice by Chinese citizens today. This logic of sacrifice underpins the violence directed at minorities, whose culture and identities are considered antithetical to the Chinese nation. Destroying their cultures and identities and transforming them from dangerous nationalities into lovable, unthreatening ethnic groups has become a new form of revolutionary virtue – one central to the ‘people’s war on terror’ portrayed as essential for revitalising the Chinese nation. This existential struggle necessitates bloodletting and sacrifice both within and without: the self-sacrifice of ‘the people’ and the annihilation of their enemies are two sides of the same coin.

To understand this logic of sacrifice, we must also situate it within the Chinese tianxia rationale and communist organisational principle that inform CCP imaginings of the Chinese nation. The tianxia imaginary sees the Chinese nation as embodying a centre-periphery hierarchy, with the Chinese core consummated or validated only through the submission of peripheralised peoples; barbarians must thus be civilised and fissiparous nationalities become innocuous ‘ethnicities’ in order for them to become Chinese. In CCP organisational culture, a party member is expected to exemplify the virtue of rebelling against his or her own tradition and identity in order to embrace an entirely new outlook. On acquiring Party membership, he or she acquires a new mother, the Party, and is forever indebted to the Party for bestowing a new political life. In a Communist permutation of the Confucian virtue of filial piety, the Party requires constant devotion and gratitude from its member-children. As Yeh (2013) and Sorace (2021) demonstrate, this principle has been extended to encompass the entire population, Han and non-Han alike. According to Sorace, ‘gratitude points beyond culture to the vertical structure of political sovereignty’ (2021, 36; see also Yan and Vickers 2023).

The hierarchically-ordered Chinese political system requires exemplary leadership. With respect to minority nationalities, minority cadres are expected to fulfil this exemplary function. Chinese leaders have long upheld the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region as a ‘model autonomous region’ (mofan zizhi qu), not for its exemplary ‘autonomy’, but as a model of minzu tuanjie, denoting both inter-nationality friendship and national unity, though always biased towards the latter (Bulag 2002). A slippery concept, in evoking friendship, minzu tuanjie seems to prescribe respect for diversity, but when deployed to urge unity, it can mandate the opposite. Emphasising the imperative of unity requires a model autonomous region to renounce all ethnic particularism.

In 2020, the nature of the virtues that Inner Mongolia was expected to exemplify shifted, as the Central policy mandated that this model autonomous region lead the implementation of the so-called bilingual language policy in local schools, which entailed replacing Mongolian with the ‘National Common Language’, or Mandarin Chinese (Atwood 2020; Leibold 2021). On 8 February 2021, the Standing Committee of the People's Congress of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region sent a public letter to all deputies in Inner Mongolia urging them to implement the Mandarin programme (Nei Menggu 2021). As Party members or state employees, Mongol cadres and government workers were enjoined not to oppose the policy. As Communists, they must embrace the Chinese nation by educating their children in Chinese, i.e. by abandoning the Mongolian language, the hallmark of their ethnic identity.

After two weeks of protest, and under duress, most Mongols complied with this order. In March 2021, the Inner Mongolia Party Committee honoured two Mongolian exemplars for their efforts to learn and use the National Common Language: famous vocalist Jinhua and deputy party secretary and president of the Inner Mongolia Teachers University, Altansang. Their awards and certificates – hailing them as Beijiang Kaimo (Northern Borderland Model) – were presented by the Inner Mongolia Party's Propaganda chief Bai Yugang and United Front chief Duan Zhiqiang, two Mongols who had adopted Chinese names and effectively passed as Chinese (Nmgnews 2021).

As these Mongol elites celebrated their self-sacrifice or self-castration for the Chinese nation, others were punished. Director of the Region's Education Bureau, Goa, and Governor of Inner Mongolia, Bu Xiaolin, daughter-in-law of the region's founder Ulanhu, were among those who lost their positions. Even Baatar, the Mongolian commissioner of Chinese State Ethnic Affairs, was fired and this position given to a Han Chinese for the very first time in the history of the PRC.

Unprecedented in the history of Inner Mongolia, or perhaps, the whole of China, were the suicides committed by eleven Mongols during and after the protests, although the identities of only two people were made public: Surnaa, a young woman who worked for the Alasha League Party Committee, and Ulaan, a middle school principal. Only Surnaa is known to have written a suicide note, which her spouse made public. There, Surnaa, a young cadre, explained why she chose to commit suicide.

We in Alasha League have a small population, and the Mongols are even fewer, so we cannot get united. The petition we wrote and signed with fingerprints was suppressed even before it was sent out of the banner. They applied pressure in various ways. The pressure on our Mongolian staff was indescribable. Maybe we are stupid or cowardly, but please stop cursing us. We use our lives to prove that we have tried hard. (Smglnc 2020)

It is evident from her suicide note that this 33-year-old Mongolian Party official experienced pressure from both her Mongol and Han Party superiors and the Mongolian populace. Her Party superiors demanded that Mongol cadres support the curriculum reform restricting the use of the Mongolian language, while the Mongol populace condemned their compatriots in leadership positions for being either too stupid or cowardly to oppose the policy. Surnaa, a petty Party official, was caught between the hammer and the anvil, and seeing no way out, she chose to die, using her life to demonstrate to both the Party and the Mongols that she had tried but failed. Surnaa committed suicide after completing her last duty as a member of the officially recognised Mongolian nationality by composing her suicide note in Mongolian, her mother tongue, and the official language of the Mongolian nationality.

It is difficult to characterise Surnaa's passing. Given that her death was a suicide, it would be morally perilous to interpret it as a self-sacrifice for the Chinese nation. She has not been made a martyr for the defence of the Mongolian nationality, either, at least in public. Nobody outside of her immediate family and acquaintances knows where she was interred, and indeed her passing cannot be publicly mourned. She was one of the tragic individuals crushed by the Chinese national wheel of history, that much is certain.

Conclusion

In recent years, western scholars and politicians have been alarmed at the scale of violence unleashed by the Chinese government (supported by the Chinese scholarly community at large) against borderland minorities such as the Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Mongols, and have criticised the Chinese anti-minority policies as genocidal. As minorities become the focal point of an intensified human rights dispute between the West and China that threatens to re-ignite the Cold War globally, this article has argued for an alternative to both Chinese and Western emergent perspectives and positions, which, for all their polarisations, are complicit in abandoning the multinational model of China underpinned by its system of regional autonomy for minority nationalities. Western moral support for inter-ethnic inclusivity, which diagnoses genocide as stemming from ‘difference,’ frequently borders on agreement with Chinese assimilationism or more recent ‘fusionism’. The current Western focus on settler colonialism as underpinning Chinese genocide and redefinition of minorities as ‘indigenous people’ have not led to calls for minority self-determination; it echoes an earlier postcolonial critique of Chinese communist multinational politics and promotion of Western style multiculturalism, a proposition adopted by the CCP to ‘depoliticise’ its nationality policies.

Irony must not be lost that what has been blamed as genocide is largely the result of the CCP transformation of the Communist multinational China into a singular Chinese nation. In this article, I have contended that the Chinese nation, whose rejuvenation is the CCP's objective for its ‘second hundred years,’ is simultaneously a utopian future and a retrotopia. By redefining its position as ‘the vanguard of the Chinese nation,’ the CCP is attempting to transform a Party-State into a Party-Nation. Since the beginning of Xi's reign, the stakes have expanded to include not only the restoration of China's historical grandeur, but also the reshaping of the world into a Han Chinese-centered ‘community of shared future’ modelled after the hierarchical, civilizational model of tianxia. Such a Chinese neo-civilizational perspective not only marginalises minorities but also presupposes minority centripetal devotion to or admiration of the Chinese civilisation-cum-nation. This retrotopian vision has had far-reaching consequences for China's fifty-five officially recognised minority nationalities, for it sees no intrinsic value in minorities apart from their ‘fusion’ through a self-sacrificial death drive into the Chinese nation.

The forcefulness of the new Chinese ethnic policy must also be appreciated as part of the CCP’s own struggle for survival. The multinational polity the CCP instituted in 1949 which successfully established sovereignty over China’s borderland regions and their non-Han inhabitants, has of late been reinterpreted as a threat to China’s national sovereignty. Following the Western social constructionist critique of Third World and Communist nationalism and ethnicity, the CCP has begun to see minority nationalities as constructed or invented by communist social engineering only to find that they have grown out of control. The new CCP ethnic policy has thus taken on an urgency that the survival of the CCP and the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation is contingent on the extent to which the Frankenstein’s monster, as it were, can be brought back into China’s national laboratory and its threat neutralised while recycling what remains to enrich the newly imagined retrotopian Chinese nation.

‘The world is experiencing profound changes unseen in a century’ (bainian wei you zhi bianju) (Mahoney 2022). This has become, since December 2017, a new Xi catchphrase used to stress both the scale of global transformation, and China’s role as its driving force. ‘In bianju, both “danger” (wei) and “opportunity” (ji) coexist,’ explains the editorial introducing a 2019 special issue, ‘Changes Unseen in a Century and China's Response,’ of the Chinese journal Economic Herald. ‘It brings great opportunities for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. This is a significant conclusion reached by the Party Central Committee, led by Xi Jinping, after conducting an in-depth analysis of global trends’ (Jingji Daobao Bianjibu 2019).

We have already witnessed the consequence of Xi and the CCP’s ‘significant conclusion’ regarding the place of minorities in the Chinese Dream. It is perhaps best captured by the following Chinese aphorism which has become popular in recent years: ‘The greatest tragedy of the Chinese people is that they have just been run over by the wheel of history (lishi de chelun), and before they have time to get up, they find that history is turning backwards again.’

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Edward Vickers for his constructive comments which have proven essential for the shape and direction this article has taken. I am also grateful to Mark Selden and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Uradyn E. Bulag

Uradyn E. Bulag is Professor of social anthropology at University of Cambridge. He is the co-editor of the journal Inner Asia. Author of Nationalism and Hybridity in Mongolia (1998), The Mongols at China's Edge (2002), and Collaborative Nationalism (2010), his research interests include comparative settler colonialism and imperialism; ethnicity and nationalism; socialist/post-socialist political forms and imagination; international relations. His latest book is the co-authored A Chinese Rebel beyond the Great Wall: The Cultural Revolution and Ethnic Pogrom in Inner Mongolia (2023).

Notes

1 A rare exception is the 1962 mass repatriation of French settlers in Algeria, the so-called ‘pieds noirs’, back to France. I am grateful to Edward Vickers for this information. The Algerian case differs from those in North America, Australasia, the Amazon or elsewhere where white settlers confronted predominantly hunter-gatherer communities and justified their occupation of the land by the principle of terra nullius in international law.

2 Zhao’s idea has certainly seduced some pliable minds who apply it as ‘a heuristic for worldwide relations in higher education and knowledge’ (Yang, Marginson, and Xu 2022).

3 As an attempt to legitimize Mandarin as the sole national language, this failed to explain why, after almost 3,000 years of stag hunting in the Central Plains, non-Chinese languages still persist and require eradication to make room for Mandarin.