Nationalism

This article develops the concept of meritocratic nationalism to unpack the online backlash against a Tibetan cyberstar, Tenzing Tsondu (Ding Zhen) and the perceived state involvement in his promotion. Meritocratic nationalism not only embeds ideals of individual achievement, education attainment, and productivity within narratives of national identity and regime legitimacy, but also sustains structural inequalities through racialized and gendered assumptions about who is capable of merit and whose success is ‘deserved’. First, critics frame state media’s endorsement of Ding Zhen as a betrayal to the meritocratic ideal the state is supposed to safeguard and a humiliation to the so-called ‘ordinary men’. However, this does not lead to a critique of meritocratic legitimacy itself but rather its reaffirmation. Secondly, the reproduction of a Han-centric and masculine-coded ideal of merit is integral to the construction of majority male victimhood, which denies and normalizes structural violence. Thirdly, we note the multifaceted representation of the international in the backlash, where users deploy the figure of ‘white American men’ as fellow victims of ‘political correctness’ to animate a racialized imagination of shared majoritarian grievance. The article contributes to nationalism studies and broader debates on meritocracy, racism, and the grievance politics of ethnic majority men.      

How can postcolonial critique address the use and abuse of the anti-colonial in contemporary reactionary and ultranationalist projects in the Global Easts and South? Building on the literature on amalgams of authoritarianism, social conservatism, and racial nationalism beyond the Western core, especially the emergent scholarship on the rise of the digital far right, I reflect on the ways in which postcolonial critique can help us think about the multifaceted relationships between postcolonial identity and the global right. First, postcolonial nationalism is a prevalent strategy employed by authoritarian and conservative actors who mobilize subaltern identity in a US/Western dominated world to legitimate reactionary politics. Secondly, while illiberal movements that appropriate the anti-colonial rhetoric purport to challenge the moral geography underpinning the liberal international order, they reproduce its essentializing, hierarchical, and racialized logics in reversing its value judgement. Thirdly, the rise of the digital far right in the Global Easts and South provides a particularly productive lens through which to explore the transnationality of contemporary formulations of racism, anti-feminism, Islamophobia, and the “culture war” discourses. I conclude by suggesting that attending to the role of postcolonial nationalism in global reactionary movements has wider implications for both postcolonial critique and the study of right-wing politics in general, including in the Western core.

This article examines how affective narratives of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese social media reinforce and challenge established scripts of national identity, political legitimacy, and international geopolitical imaginary. Taking theoretical insights from the scholarship on trauma, disaster nationalism, and politics of emotions, I structure the analysis of social media posts from state media and private accounts around three emotional registers: grief as a crucial site of control and contestation during the initial stage of the outbreak; gandong (being moved in a positive way) associated with stories of heroic sacrifices, national unity, and mundane ‘heart-warming’ moments; and enmity in narratives of power struggles and ideological competition between China and ‘the West’, especially the United States. While state media has sought to transform the crisis into resources for strengthening national belonging and regime legitimacy through a digital reworking of the long-standing repertoire of disaster nationalism, alternative articulations of grief, rage, and vernacular memory that refuse to be incorporated into the ‘correct collective memory’ of a nationalised tragedy have persisted in digital space. Furthermore, the article explicates the ways in which popular narratives affectively reinscribe dominant ideas about the (inter)national community: such as the historical imagination of a continuous nationhood rising from disasters and humiliation, positive energy, and a dichotomous view of the international order characterised by Western hegemony and Chinese victimhood. The geopolitical narratives of the pandemic build on and exacerbate binary oppositions between China and ‘the West’ in the global imaginary, which are co-constructed through discursive practices on both sides in mutually reinforcing ways. The lens of emotion allows us to attend to the resonances and dissonances between official and popular narrativisations of the disaster without assuming a one-way determinate relationship between the two.

The idea of the nation has been considered to have delivered political modernity from its native Europe to the rest of the world. The same applies, though more implicitly, to those paradoxes inherent to the nationalist ideology – that between universalism and national particularity and that between liberal nationalism and imperialism. This article seeks to complicate these theses by looking at the interpretations of nationalism, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism provided by Liang Qichao, one of the most influential Chinese intellectuals in early twentieth century, during his exile in Japan when increasingly exposed to the encounter between worlds. This reading also engages with the wider debates on modernity/modernities in non-Western societies through showing that neither the “consumers of modernity” approach nor the “creative adaptations” approach can be easily applied here. I argue that the various tensions, contingencies and historical situatedness in Liang’s accounts of the nation-state structure represent and constitute the paradox of the structure itself. They also shed light on contemporary debates about the limits of our political imagination in the misnamed “global politics” beyond the false opposition between nationalism and cosmopolitanism.