Around the world, political battle lines are drawn along differing views of nationality. For some, nationality is a matter of citizenship — by birth or migration — of a geographically defined state. Others have a cultural view of membership of a nation as the product of shared practices or values. Ethno-nationalists link nationality to common history, ethnicity or race.
As Gregory Lee shows, this debate has gripped the world’s most populous country for more than a century, with rulers wavering between a geographic, cultural and racial definition of national identity since the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912. Lee writes: “The essential task of China’s rulers over the past century has been to advance and consolidate the construction of a Chinese nation-state.”
Late 19th-century nationalists appealed to racial ideas to define the nation — a conception that often excluded the then rulers, the Manchu Qing dynasty, as well as Tibetans and other people who were part of their empire. In theory, since 1949 China’s Communist party has endorsed a multicultural view of the nation, with 56 official ethnic groups, each with their own language and culture, but all equally Chinese. In practice, officials have tried to promote the language and culture of the Han majority.