ABSTRACT
Chinese nationalism, as with the concept of nationalism in general, is contested and problematic. Since the post-Mao Chinese leadership embraced economic reforms and opening-up as their new national guiding principles at the end of the 1970s, China scholars and commentators increasingly have characterized Chinese society as nationalistic. The ‘evidence’ of excessive nationalist sentiments became readily available in the 1990s, when Chinese nationalist passions were captured by international media and affected the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) foreign relations, in particular in the military stand-offs between China and the USA over Taiwan in 1995–96, and after the USA’s ‘accidental’ bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. The heightening of nationalist tensions continued into the beginning of the new millennium. First, in 2001 a US spy plane collided with a Chinese jet fighter, triggering a wave of angry protests among Chinese citizens. Furthermore, the Japanese Prime Minister’s visits to the Yasukuni shrine commemorating the fallen Japanese soldiers, and the Japanese authorities’ approval of school textbooks playing down the role of Japan in war crimes during the Sino–Japanese war (1937–45) generated an outbreak of official and popular discontent in China. The question of war memories continues to be a bone of contention in Sino–Japanese relations. As I finish this chapter in February 2012, Nagoya and Nanjing, two twin cities in Japan and China, interrupted their special relations after the mayor of the Japanese city questioned whether the Nanjing massacre had ever taken place. This is far from a full list of Chinese nationalist outbreaks in the last two decades, but it gives one an indication of the profound role that nationalism plays in Chinese politics.
