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China's Quest For National Identity
 0801480647, 9780801480645

Table of contents :
Contents
Contributors
Preface
1. In Search of a Theory of National Identity
2. National Identity in Premodern China: Formation and Role Enactment
3. Chinese National Identity and the Strong State: The Late Qing-Republican Crisis
4. Rites or Beliefs? The Construction of a Unified Culture in Late Imperial China
5. Change and Continuity in Chinese Cultural Identity: The Filial Ideal and the Transformation of an Ethic
6. China's Intellectuals in the Deng Era: Loss of Identity with the State
7. China Coast Identities: Regional, National, and Global
8. China as a Third World State: Foreign Policy and Official National Identity
9. China's Multiple Identities in East Asia: China as a Regional Force
10. Whither China's Quest for National Identity?
Index
Books Written under the Auspices of the Center of International Studies Princeton University 1952-1991
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Citation preview

China)s Quest for National Identity

Written under the auspices of the Center ofInternational Studies) Princeton University A list of other Center Publications appears at the back of the book.

CHINA'S QUEST FOR NATIONAL IDENTITY

r+-t ~

Edited by

Lowell Dittmer

~and

~ Samuel S. Kim

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 1993 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1993 by Cornell University Press. First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1993. Second printing 1995. International Standard Book Number o-8014-2785-1 (cloth) International Standard Book Number o-8014-8064-7 (paper) Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 92-27284 Printed in the United States of America

Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book.

§ The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Contents

Contributors Preface 1.

2.

Vll

Xl

In Search of a Theory of National Identity Lowell Dittmer and SamuelS. Kim National Identity in Premodern China: Formation and Role Enactment Michael Ng-Quinn

32

3· Chinese National Identity and the Strong State:

The Late Qing-Republican Crisis Michael H. Hunt

62

4. Rites or Beliefs? The Construction of a Unified

Culture in Late Imperial China James L. Watson

So

5. Change and Continuity in Chinese Cultural Identity:

The Filial Ideal and the Transformation of an Ethic Richard W Wilson

104

6. China's Intellectuals in the Deng Era: Loss of Identity

with the State Merle Goldman) Perry Link) and Su Wei

125

7. China Coast Identities: Regional, National, and Global

Lynn White and Li Cheng

8. China as a Third World State: Foreign Policy and Official National Identity Peter Van Ness

194

vi

Contents

9. China's Multiple Identities in East Asia: China as a

Regional Force Robert A. Scalapino ro. Whither China's Quest for National Identity? SamuelS. Kim and Lowell Dittmer Index

215

237

291

Contributors

LOWELL DnTMER (Ph.D., Chicago) is professor of political science at University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Liu Shao-ch)i and the Chinese Cultural Revolution) China)s Continuous Revolution) Sino-Soviet Normalization and Its International Implications) and other works. SAMUEL S. KIM (Ph.D., Columbia) teaches in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. He is the author of China) the United Nations) and World Order, The Quest for a Just World Order, and other works. He is working on a book about Chinese perspectives on international relations. MERLE GOLDMAN (Ph.D., Harvard) is professor of Chinese history at Boston University. She is the author of Literary Dissent in Communist China) China)s Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent) and a number of edited works. She has completed a book tentatively titled Sprouts ofDemocracy. MICHAEL H. HUNT (Ph.D., Yale) is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His numerous publications range widely in U.S. and Chinese foreign relations. His most recent major works are The Making of a Special Relationship and Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. He is working on the foreign relations of the Chinese Communist party. LI CHENG (Ph.D., Princeton) is assistant professor of government at Hamilton College. He has published articles, especially about the rise of Chinese technocracy, in China Quarterly) Modern China) Asian Survey, World Politics) and elsewhere.

Jntt

Contributors

PERRY LINK (Ph.D., Harvard) is professor of Chinese at Princeton U niversity. He teaches modern Chinese language and literature, history of ideas, and popular culture. He has written and edited several books, most recently Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China's Predicament.

MICHAEL NG-QUINN (Ph.D., Harvard) is associate professor of political science at the University of Redlands. He has written on Chinese foreign policy, Deng Xiaoping's political reform, the Chinese military, northeast Asian international relations, and the Hong Kong police. He is working on explaining the perpetuation of the Chinese state. RoBERT A. ScALAPINO (Ph.D., Harvard) is Robson Research Professor of Government Emeritus, former director of the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and editor of Asian Survey. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has written or edited thirty-five books and over three hundred articles dealing with Asian domestic politics and international relations. His most recent book is The Politics ofDevelopment: Perspectives on Twentieth Century Asia.

Su WEI (M.A., UCLA) is a Chinese writer and literary critic who worked at the Institute of Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences from 1986 to 1989. From 1990 to 1992 he was a visiting scholar at Princeton University. He is author of Distant Travellers (fiction), Wordr in the Western Mirror (essays), and numerous other works of fiction and criticism. PETER VAN NESS (Ph.D., Berkeley) is associate professor at the Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver, and a senior research fellow in the department of International Relations at Australian National University. He is author of Revolution and Chinese Foreign Policy and editor of Market Reforms in Socialist Societies: Comparing China and Hungary.

L. WATSON (Ph.D., Berkeley) is Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. His books include Emigration and the Chinese Lineage and the edited volumes Asian

]AMES

and African Systems ofSlavery, Kinship Or;ganization in Late Imperial China, Class and Social Stratification in Post-Revolution China, and Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China.

LYNN WHITE (Ph.D., Berkeley) is teaching at Princeton University in the Woodrow Wilson School, Politics Department, and East Asian Studies

Contributors

ix

Program. He wrote Policies ofChaos: The 01Jjanizational Causes ofViolence in China)s Cultural Revolution and Careers in Shanghai) and edited Political System and Change. He does research often at the Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, where some work on the chapter in this volume was done. He is writing a book about press, tax, and other reforms of the 1970s and 1980s in the People's Republic. RICHARD W. WILSON (Ph.D., Princeton) is professor of political science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. He is author of Learning to Be Chinese) The Moral State) and most recently, Labyrinth: An Essay on the Political Psychology ofChange. He has coedited numerous volumes on modern China.

Preface

The weight of China's long and well-chronicled past has both fascinated and frustrated Western and Chinese observers concerned with what holds Chinese society together and what it means to be Chinese in a changing world. For the study of Chinese national identity, this rich legacy poses a genuine puzzle. On the one hand, that legacy has prepared the Chinese people for an interdependent modern world, providing them with an almost foolproof combination of pragmatic adaptability and bedrock security of identity as Zhongguoren (Chinese people), and resulting in a tremendous economic and intellectual flowering of ethnic Chinese throughout the Asian Pacific region (albeit more outside the People's Republic than within). On the other, this proud country has had enormous trouble finding a comfortable niche as a nation-state in the modern international system. In trying to adjust to the post-Westphalian world of nation-states, China has succumbed to national identity "mood swings," rotating through a series of roles: self-sacrificing member of an international socialist community; self-reliant hermit, completely divorced from both camps in the global system; revolutionary vanguard tribunal on behalf of the global underdogs of the Third World; tacit conservative "partner" of NATO and favored recipient of largesse in the capitalist world system; and so forth. Given the travails of other states, from postrevolutionary France to the new nations of the Third World, we should not be surprised by China's difficulties. Yet China's search for a national identity has been unusually tumultuous, because of the vast gap between capabilities and commitments. We conceived the idea of a study of Chinese national identity while we

xtt

Preface

were engaged in our respective investigations of Chinese foreign policy. The need for a central reference point became clear to both of us-a reference point that incorporated not only "national interest" but recurring cultural themes. Much more than foreign policy was involved in the issues we were studying. Our interests converged during a research visit of Samuel Kim to the University of California at Berkeley in June through November 1988, when the MacArthur Group for International Security Studies at Berkeley supported Kim's appointment as a Distinguished Fellow of International Security Studies. Some of the ideas introduced in Chapter 1 had first been worked out by Lowell Dittmer under the auspices of a 198687 research fellowship, for which he thanks the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies of the Smithsonian Institution. The Center for Chinese Studies at Berkeley also contributed to the endeavor. The second stage was inaugurated in a controversial, intellectually stimulating conference convened by the Center oflnternational Studies (CIS) at Princeton University on January 25-27, 1990. Our largest debt is to the CIS, especially to then-director Henry S. Bienen (now dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton). He has been more than a pro forma supporter; he has been, as always, an invaluable intellectual collaborator and an invisible contributor to the volume. Without his assistance, the book would not have been possible. For the financial wherewithal enabling us to hold the conference we are grateful to the Peter B. Lewis Fund of the CIS, and for indispensable logistic support to the helpful and hard-working CIS staff under the skillful administrative guidance of Geraldine Kavanaugh. We express special appreciation not only to our contributors but also to Dru Gladney, Richard Kraus, Steven Levine, and Arthur Waldron for their learned contributions, which are committed to publication elsewhere, and to Jonathan Pollack for his ideas. Finally, the manuscript that eventually resulted from this conference attracted two outstanding anonymous readings. Roger Haydon provided us with editorial advice from time to time. Have we succeeded in setting the study of Chinese national identity on a new and more stable intellectual footing? We believe so, but time will tell. In any event, the project was an intellectually exciting one-a highly successful heuristic enterprise-from which we all learned a great deal. The pinyin system, the official romanization system in the People's Republic of China, has been adopted by the United Nations and other international organizations. It has become the system most universally used

Preface

xiii

in scholarship and journalism in the West. We use pinyin throughout this book, with some familiar exceptions for well-known place names and personal names that would be difficult to recognize in pinyin. Hong Kong, Tibet, and Taipei are retained in preference to Xianggang, Xizang, and Taibei, and Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and Lee Teng-hui are used rather than Sun Zhongshan, Jiang Jieshi, and Li Denghui. LOWELL DITIMER

Berkeley, California SAMUEL S. KIM

Princeton, New Jersey

I

In Search of a Theory of National Identity Lowell Dittmer and SamuelS. l(im

The concept of"national identity," first introduced in the course of the so-called behavioral revolution in political science, has obvious relevance to the problems of development, integration, international relations, and a host of other issues. 1 Yet whereas other terms coined at that time have since sired abundant efforts at conceptual refinement and collateral research, 2 national identity has remained relatively barren. The reasons may derive to some degree from the concept's vagueness. Yet "charisma" and "political culture," at least equally troublesome, have nonetheless spawned a prolific literature. Nor can the concept's peripheral or epiphenomenal status be held responsible; for what could be more central than a nation's identity? The problem, we submit, has had rather more .to do with the term's conceptualization, which did not point us in the direction of interesting research or specify the relevant variables precisely enough to conduct it. Meanwhile, in the "real world" of politics, issues of national identity The authors are grateful to Richard Falk, Yale Ferguson, Michael Ng-Quinn, Susanne H. Rudolph, and Richard Wilson for their valuable comments and suggestions. Lowell Dittmer acknowledges the support of the MacArthur Group for International Security Studies at the University of California at Berkeley for research support; Samuel Kim acknowledges the support of much of his research and writing of this chapter by the Peter B. Lewis Fund of the Center oflnternational Studies, Princeton University. ' · 1 See Leonard Binder et a!., eds., Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). 2"Development," "participation," "distribution," and "integration," have, for example, all produced a vast monographic literature.

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Lowell Dittmer and SamuelS. Kim

seemed eclipsed for the time being by the proselytizing fervor of rival transnational ideologies. At no time, however, has the question of identity seemed more vital than in the 198os, particularly in the former communist bloc states. Despite impressive and sustained improvements in national income, post-Mao China suddenly fell from the status of proud model of self-reliant socialist development to that of impoverished and underdeveloped power (and eager recipient of aid from international donor organizations), lagging far behind not only Japan but the small Confucian newly industrial economies (NIEs) on its periphery. Having overcome this sudden reality shock by a decade of highly successful economic reform, the Chinese Communist party (CCP) leadership turned violently against some of the sequelae of reform at Tiananmen, leaving the nation's future course and identity hanging in the air. The Soviet Union, a nation that had in the late 1970s arrived at "strategic parity" and appeared on the verge of claiming primacy in the superpower rivalry, suddenly became aware of its technological backwardness and economic stagnation and gave way to a crisis of confidence, relinquishing its hold on Eastern Europe and disavowing its old command economy with no feasible alternative at hand. 3 In all these countries the search for national identity has assumed great urgency since the sweeping repudiation of the Marxist-Leninist symbol system that had served to legitimate and unite the region. With the dissolution of the Marxist ideology that formerly cemented their ruling parties, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia began to undergo an unraveling of national identity. Though less directly shaken by these epoch-making developments, even the West has been challenged to redefine old identities or alliances by the lack of any pressing threat to them. The United States has been promoted to the unusual (if perhaps fleeting) role of superpower in a unipolar world. But the issue of national identity is especially relevant to the case of China, given its abiding concern for cultural and political integrity.

National Identity Conceived and Applied A satisfactory definition of "national identity" unfortunately presupposes an answer to the more fundamental question What is identity? 3In the late 198os the USSR was third in GNP, slightly behind Japan, and projected to fall to fourth, behind China as well, by the year 2010. Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, Sources ofChange in the Future Security Environment (Washington, D.C.: Pentagon, April 1988).

In Search of a Theory ofNatwnal Identity

3

Definitions, according to Erasmus, tend to be dangerous; Hegel called them arbitrary, and Wittgenstein said they were impossible. Still, they seem to be a necessary prerequisite to any systematic discussion. In contrast to the tendency of many philosophers to define identity as a logical equation between two distinct entities, as in "A is identical to B," Heidegger derives identity from the "Being" of things, a fundamental characteristic of which is unity within itself, a belonging together. 4 This is not inconsistent with standard lexical definitions, according to which identity is "absolute sameness; individuality," "the state or fact of remaining the same one, as under varying aspects or conditions."S The term continues to inspire erudite disquisitions among philosophers. 6 The concept was first imported from philosophy into the social sciences to deal with the problems of "psychosocial" identity. Erik H. Erikson, a post-Freudian whose own identity is interestingly ambiguous,? needed a term to reunify the "self" psychoanalysts had fragmented into ego, superego, id, object relations, and so forth. According to Erikson, a person's identity grows in the course of the life cycle-or it may degenerate, as in negative identity or identity diffusion. 8 The term quickly gained currency, 4 Martin

Heidegger, Identity and Difference (New York: Harper, 1969 ), p. 25. Ostler, comp., The Little Oxford Dictionary of Current English, 3d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), p. 248; C. L. Barnhart, ed., The American College Dictionary (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 5996See Milton Munitz, ed., Identity and Individuation (New York: New York University Press, 1971); Giuseppina Chiara Moneta, On Identity (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976); Harold Noonan, Objects and Identity (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1980 ), and Personal Identity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989); and Geoffrey Madell, The Identity of the Self(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981). 7 Erikson was born of a German Jewish mother and a Danish father who abandoned his mother before his birth. He was later adopted by a German Jewish pediatrician named Homburger (he improvised the surname Erikson after immigration). Biographers have sometimes accused him of seeking to evade his Jewish origins. See Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence ofModeru Society (New York: Atheneum, 1970); also Paul Roazen, Erik H. Erikson: The Power and Limits of a Vision (New York: Free Press, 1976), pp. 94-99. 8 See Erik H. Erikson, "Ego Development and Historical Change," Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 2 (1946): 359-96; Childhood and Society, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 1963); "The Problem of Ego Identity," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 4 (1956):56-121; "Identity and the Life Cycle: Selected Papers by Erik H. Erikson," Psychological Issues 1 (1959): r- m; The Challenge ofYouth (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor, 1965); "The Concept of Identity in Race Relations," Daedalus 95 (Winter 1966): 145-71; "Identity, Psychosocial," Interuational Encyclopedia ofthe Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1968), 7:61-65; "Identity and Identity Diffusion," in Chad Gordon and Kenneth J. Gergen, eds., The Self in Social Interaction (New York: Wiley, 1968), pp. 197-205; Dimensions of a New Identity (New York: Norton, 1974); Lifo History and the Historical Moment (New York: Norton, 1975); and The Lifo Cycle Completed (New York: Norton, 1982). 5 George

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particularly with reference to the possibility of an identity "crisis." In Erikson's theory, different forms of crisis occur at successive epigenetic stages in the life cycle. The first and most fateful crisis occurs in late p~b~.;sce.n~e-early adultho9d, wheq 11 cqngeries of pivotal questions tend to converge-concerning choice of occupation, marital status and mate, lifestyle, and so on. Erikson never defines "crisis" explicitly, but his usage seems to coincide more with the Chinese [weiji] than with the English (or German, Krise) usage; for the Chinese term includes not only danger [weixian] but an opportunity [fihui] to be seized. It is also consistent with that ofJiirgen Habermas, for whom "crisis" defines the limit beyond which a system can no longer resolve its problems without losing its identity. 9 According to Erikson, identity "connotes both a persistent sameness within oneself (self-sameness) and a persistent sharing of some kind of essential character with others." 10 Erikson's definition is consistent with the implications of those cited earlier, but he goes on to supplement those in three respects: First, a person's solution to the riddle of identity has significant implications for subsequent psychological development, because without a successful resolution, further progress is somehow stunted. Second, personal identity has cultural resonance. This is true not only in the sense that the culture embodies the repertoire of possible identities available at any given time but also in the sense that the particular resolution selected may sometimes, as in the "great man phenomenon," reverberate throughout the culture. Erikson has made the latter case for Martin Luther, Mohandas Gandhi, and Adolf Hitler, among others. 11 Third, an identity is defined not in psychological terms, but as a relationship between self and others-and may hence be applied to any entity, individual or collective. A collective identity thus may be said to have its own organizational needs and developmental propensities (if not a "life cycle," pace Oswald Spengler) beyond its function as a conceptual umbrella for its members. It is a logical corollary of the concept of personal identity: just as the self is defined in terms of its relationship to other selves, the group is defined in terms of its relationship to other groups. Some of these collectivities are mere conceptual categories to which members feel no particular sense of belonging, such as left-handed people, or people in a particular zip code or 9Jiirgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1973). IOErikson, "The Problem of Ego Identity," in Maurice R. Stein et al., Identity and Anxiety (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960), p. 30. I I Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Norton, 1958); Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins ofMilitant Nonviolence (New York: Norton, 1969), and "The Legend of Hitler's Childhood," in Childhood and Society, pp. 326-59.

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5

tax bracket (although such groups may have significance for pollsters or direct-mail advertisers). There are also ascriptive groups that do inspire emotional attachment, such as those based on kinship, ethnoreligious origin, or minority nationality. Still others are "achieved" groups, which have to be joined and actively participated in, such as the Rotary Club, the Parent-Teachers Association, or the Communist Youth League. To underscore an admitted tautology, whether these collectivities are ascribed or achieved, they are focal points of identification to the extent that members "identify" with them; they become "reference groups" useful in defining the self ("I am a Rotarian"; "I am an Irish Catholic"; "I am a southpaw''). Why a person chooses to identify with one set of reference groups (or identifies with them intensely) rather than another set is, in a society in which such options are voluntary, a matter of ambition, mutual interests, even unconscious needs or fantasies (becoming a Madonna groupie or joining Earth First, the Jewish Defense League, or the American Nazi party). It would of course be misleading to draw a direct analogy between personal and national identity-to anthropomorphize the nation-stateyet to assume that like other collective units a nation has a distinctive identity does not seem altogether farfetched. Indeed, to claim otherwise entails assuming that every decision is made fresh, on "facts," without consideration for enduring interests (for the very concept of "interests" presupposes an identifiable entity to which they can be attributed)_l2 Erikson opined that the concept was indeed applicable to nations: "In nations, too, my concepts would lead me to concentrate on the conditions which heighten or endanger a national sense of identity rather than a static national character."I3 Yet defining national identity is more problematic than defining individ"ual or collective identity. It is sometimes defined, by logical extension, simply as the largest and most inclusive form of collective identity. There is, however, the complication that inclusion within the nation is not entirely voluntary-one cannot always exit without penalty (as the examples of Philip Nolan, Edward Everett Hale's "man without a country," and the current plight of the people of Hong Kong show), and in some cases one 12 National identity may be educed from the geophysical attributes of the nation-state, as in Zbigniew Brzezinski, Game Plan: A Geostrategic Framework for the Conduct of the US-Soviet Contest (Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1986). Although this process facilitates a systematic, longterm analysis of national interests, it uses a reductionist idea of national identity. 13 Erikson, "Identity and Identity Diffusion," in Gordon and Gergen, Self in Sociallnteraetion (seen. 8), p. 198.

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also has precious little "voice"l4 (witness the fate of China's democracy activists since Tiananmen, as perceptively described in Chapter 6, by Goldman, Link, and Su). A nation is not merely a megacollectivity; it is a "nation-state," defined only partly by the dimensions of the group, partly also by the group's subordination to sovereign authority. Whereas our own definition of national identity synthesizes both elements of the compound noun nation-state, most others tend to emphasize one or the other. The classic definition offered by Sidney Verba and Lucian Pye in the concluding volume of the Social Science Research Council series on comparative politics, for example, stresses the latter: national identity is the "set of individuals who fall within the decision-making scope of the state."l5 Accordingly, determining national identity becomes determining who is included and who is excluded by the national boundaries, however the state chooses to draw them. To be sure, boundaries may be social as well as physical, as there may be tourists, guest workers, even whole populations of alienated ethnic minorities (blacks in the ante-bellum South or the "homelands" of contemporary South Mrica; Jews, homosexuals, communists, and Gypsies in the Third Reich), who are categorically excluded from a nation even though they are within its physical boundaries. In the case of expansionist powers or irredenta (often the distinction is unclear, as in the People's Republic of China's claims against the Spratley Islands or Hitler's on the Saarland or the Polish Corridor), the state may lay claim to areas beyond its current physical boundaries. In Verba's words, "If some members of the populace do not consider themselves as appropriately falling within the domain of the government or, conversely, feel that some other group not within that domain falls within it, one can talk of an identity problem." 16 According to the Pye-Verba conceptualization, then, a nation's identity is normally circumscribed by its boundaries, whose dimensions tend to coincide with such objective criteria as common language, ethnic or racial origin, and political culture; but in the last analysis, boundaries are arbitrarily determined by the sovereign state carving out a precarious identity by force and guile in a competitive international environment. Given the crucial importance of boundaries, an identity crisis occurs when those boundaries blur, or are challenged at the margin. As Pye puts it, "In the I4See Albert 0. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). I5Sidney Verba, "Sequences and Development," in Binder, Crises and Sequences (seen. r), pp. 283-316. 16 Ibid., p. 299.

In Search of a Theory ofNational Identity

7

process of political development an identity crisis occurs when a community finds that what it had once unquestionably accepted as the physical and psychological definitions of its collective self are no longer acceptable under new historic conditions. In order for the political system to achieve a new level of performance ... it is necessary for the participants in the system to redefine who they are and how they are different from all other political and social systems."l7 Accordingly Pye identifies four "fundamental forms" of national identity crisis, based on territory, class, ethnicity/nationality, and historical/cultural exclusiveness.l 8 Though he disarmingly admits right after proposing it that he can think of no case in which "class" provides a basis for nationally exclusive identification, class does, of course, provide a basis for status rankings within a nation (even perhaps second-class citizenship in extreme cases, such as the homeless population). 19 Class could also be the basis for identification transcending the nation-state, although that has not yet happened decisively anywhere. 20 The other three are indeed typical criteria for inclusion in the nation-state. 1 7Lucian

W. Pye, "Identity and the Political Culture," in Binder, Crises and Sequences, pp.

II0-11.

Ibid., pp. 101-34. Both Benjamin Disraeli and Richard Nixon were sufficiently exercised by this problem to refer to "two nations" -reflecting a form of national identity crisis-and to propose radical changes in the welfare system. See Charles A. Valentine, Culture and Poverty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); and Daniel P. Moynihan, ed., On Understanding Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1969). 20 0f course the most famous instance is identification with the international working class, on which Karl Marx and his disciples capitalized. But the Second Communist International notoriously failed to mobilize this identification during World War I, and since that time it has been subverted by allegiance to one or another nation-state (either the host country or Moscow on behalf of the Left). Richard Kraus shows how this identification has been undermined in proletarian China itself on behalf of modernization and reform. See Richard C. Kraus, "China's Identity as a Proletarian State" (Paper presented at the Conference on China's Quest tor National Identity, January 25-27, 1990, Princeton University). Political development theorists allude to the importance of identification with the international middle class, particularly in connection with the "international demonstration effect." See William Bloom, Personal Identity, National Identity and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 ), pp. 105-27. Student antiwar movements, or ecology movements, may, for instance, articulate an international midclle-class ethic. Greenpeace, whose membership has doubled every two to three years since 1980, pursues transnational strategies for bringing about ecological well-being on the whole planet. Whether either of these class-based identities manages to supplant the nation-state as a focus of loyalty remains to be seen. According to a comprehensive cross-national survey conducted for "Images of the World in the Year 2000," the elimination of national boundaries and the serting up of a world government were among the five least popular alternatives related to peace (from a list of twenty-five). See Aleksandra Jasinska-Kania, "National Identity and Image of World Society: The Polish Case," International Social Science ]ournal34 (1982): 93-m. 18

19

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The Pye-Verba definition is not only coherent but simple to use, and empirical cases of identity problems of the type to which it refers are not lacking. According to one major empirical study, nationalist and ethnic conflict accounted for some 70 percent of r6o significant disputes with a probability of culminating in large-scale violence. 21 Thus postwar Italy experienced something of an identity crisis over the fate of Trieste, for example, and the difficulties in Cyprus, Francophone Canada, and Northern Ireland are notorious. Most common are cases of inconsistency among criteria for inclusion, as in the case when a significant compatriot population resides in an adjoining territory. Ernest Gellner speculates that there may be as many as eight hundred irredentist movements in the contemporary world. 22 The People's Republic of China (PRC) has had territorial disputes with practically every one of its contiguous neighbors. In view of the difficulties posed by inconsistent criteria for inclusion within national boundaries, new states might rationally be expected to move early in their developmental sequence to rectify any glaring discrepancies. "Since the resolution of the identity crisis is so fundamental to the very establishment of the nation in the first instance, it is usually a crisis that occurs early in the sequence of developmental crises," as Pye puts it. 23 Only a few countries have retained their geographic identities over the course of their existence, while the rest have made some territorial realignments; but adjustments are usually made early and, once made, tend to remain surprisingly stable, as interests become vested in their maintenance. 24 Jeffrey Herbst points out that despite the widely recognized arbitrariness of the Mrican "national" boundaries established by European colonialists, for example, there has not been "one significant boundary change in Mrica since the dawn of the independence era in the late I950S, and not one separatist movement has succeeded in establishing a new state."25 Indeed, sovereignty for Mrican leaders may be said to have become a sword with which to prevent internal secessionist threats and a shield with which to 21 Steven Rosen, ed., A Survey of World Conflicts (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Center for International Studies, 1969). 22 Ernest Gellner,Nations and Nationalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 4445·

23 Pye, "Identity," in Binder, Crises and Sequences, p. 124. Whether a national identity crisis is limited to the early phases of development is of course an empirical question, investigated, in the Chinese case, in the following chapters. 24Dankwart A. Rustow, A World of Nations: Problems of Political Modernization (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1967), p. 22. 25Jeffrey Herbst, "The Creation and Maintenance of National Boundaries in Mrica," International Organization 43 (Summer 1989): 675-76.

In Search of a Theory ofNational!dentity

9

ward off supranational threats so as to strengthen the weak national identities inherited by their respective states. The question of identity typically arises early not only because the basic dimensions of a nation's existence are at stake but because identifYing the membership of the nation-state is a necessary prerequisite for persuading that membership to pay taxes, fight for their country, and so forth. In short, Verba says, "Identity ... directly affects the institutionalization of legitimacy, and legitimacy in turn affects penetration." As Anne Norton puts it in her thoughtful discussion, "The recognition of qualities that distinguish the polity from all others entails the propagation of abstract principles against which the conduct of the regime and constitution of the nation may henceforth be measured. The qualities definitive of the nation are abstracted from it and made objective. The citizens, having before them an objective principle of nationality, may therefore determine whether the regime, or the regime's actions, are appropriate to the nation. This is the beginning of legitimacy."26 Indeed, according to Habermas, a legitimacy crisis "is directly an identity crisis." Similarly, Gellner argues that nationalism "is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones." Somewhat more cautiously, Ernst Haas deems national identity a necessary but not sufficient condition for legitimacy: "Legitimate authority under conditions of mass politics is tied up with successful nationalism; when the national identity is in doubt, one prop supporting legitimacy is knocked away." 27 Thus any new nation may naturally be expected to proceed expeditiously to survey its borders, conduct a census of the citizenry, dispatch a border guard and other representatives of the government to the far-flung corners of the realm, establish transportation and communication channels, promote a common language and educational curriculum, and otherwise consolidate its domain. If contradictions among the criteria for inclusion tend to generate identity crises, then those nation-states with few or no contradictions might be supposed to have relatively "secure" national identities. Yet a superficial survey of the contemporary international system demonstrates that such 26 Verba, "Sequences," p. 3n; Anne Norton, Reflections on Political Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 55-56. 27Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, p. 46-an assertion on which we reserve judgment: certainly a crisis of legitimacy may imply a crisis of national identity, but a crisis of identity need not imply a crisis of legitimacy, as our later discussion of subtypes of crises will show. Gellner, Nations and Nationalisms, p. 1; Ernst Haas, "What Is Nationalism and Why Should We Study It?" International Owanization 40 (Summer 1986): 707-44.

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Lowell Dittmer and Samuel S. Kim

states are indeed rare. To take for example the two criteria physical boundaries and ethnic/national group membership, Walker Connor found in a survey of 132 nation-states extant in 1971 that in only 12 (9.1 percent) did the two criteria fully coincide, while another 50 (37.9 percent) did at least have one major ethnic group that constituted more than three-quarters of the population. Of the remaining 70 states, 31 (23.5 percent) had a majority ethnic group accounting for only between one-half and three-quarters of the population, while in 39 (29.5 percent) the largest single ethnic community formed less than one-half of the total population. In other words, a majority (53 percent) of those contemporary nation-states had very large minority populations. 28 Another pair of inclusion criteria to look at are physical boundaries and linguistic communities. The number of languages, not counting dialects, is estimated at around eight thousand. In most parts of the world, linguistic communities are either too large or too small to coincide with easily defensible or administrable national boundaries. In only two dozen or so countries do linguistic and national boundaries roughly coincide. In no less than half the countries of the world, less than 70 percent of the population speak the same language. Iflinguistic compatibility indeed provid