James Leibold

Blogging Alone: China, the Internet, and the Democratic Illusion?

Drawing on recent survey data, digital ethnography and comparative analysis, this article presents a critical re-appraisal of the interactive blogosphere in China and its effects on Chinese social and political life. Focused on the discursive and behaviorist trends of Chinese netizens rather than the ubiquitous information control/resistance paradigm, it argues that the Sinophone blogosphere is producing the same shallow infotainment, pernicious misinformation, and interest-based ghettos that it creates elsewhere in the world, and these more prosaic elements need to be considered alongside the Chinese internets potential for creating new forms of civic activism and socio-political change.

More Than a Category: Han Supremacism on the Chinese Internet

Using the October 2008 slapping incident of historian Yan Chongnian 阎崇年 as a case study, this article attempts to contextualize and critically examine the articulation of Han supremacism on the Chinese internet. It demonstrates how an informal group of non-elite, urban youth are mobilizing the ancient Han ethnonym to challenge the Chinese Communist Partys official policy of multiculturalism, while seeking to promote pride and self-identification with the Han race ( han minzu 汉民族) to the exclusion of the non-Han minorities. In contrast to most of the Anglophone literature on Chinese nationalism, this article seeks to employ “Han” as a “boundary-spanner,” a category that turns our analysis of Chinese national identity formation on its head, side-stepping the “usual suspects” (intellectuals, dissidents and the state itself) and the prominent role of the “foreign other” in Chinese ethnogenesis, and instead probing the unstable plurality of the self/othering process in modern China and the role of the internet in opening up new spaces for non-mainstream identity articulation.

Competing Narratives of Racial Unity in Republican China From the Yellow Emperor to Peking Man

Following Prasenjit Duaras strategy for “de-constructing China,” this article traces the development of several competing narratives of national unity and origin during the formative Republican era (1911-49) of Chinese history. Faced with the difficult task of incorporating the heterogeneous peoples of the Qing empire into the new Chinese nation-state, Han Chinese intellectuals looked backward into their own history for scientific proof of this unitary national imaginary. The article focuses on the tension between, on the one hand, a racial formulation that placed the source of Chinese unity in the “common origin” (tongyuan) of its people and, on the other hand, a more subjective formulation that located this unity in the gradual, evolutionary “melding” (ronghe) of several distinct cultures and races into a new national consciousness. In the process, it highlights the role played by social scientific discourses—as institutionalized in the disciplines of history, archaeology, and ethnology—in the construction of national identity in twentieth-century China.

Performing ethnocultural identity on the Sinophone Internet: testing the limits of minzu

This article explores what happens to the Chinese Party-state’s notion of minzu (nationality, ethnicity or ethno-national identity) in the vastness of cyberspace. The idea that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) comprises 56 distinct yet united minzu groups has encapsulated and circumscribed the performance of ethnocultural diversity in mainland China over the last 60 plus years. In this article, I seek to demonstrate how the Internet helps to loosen the Party-state’s grip on ‘Chineseness’ and its related categories of identity, opening up new spaces for the articulation of a wide range of ethnocultural subject positions that both self-define, mediate and, at times, even transcended minzu-ness. At the same time, however, the fractured and transitory nature of these online congregations renders them largely inconsequential when faced with a powerful and authoritarian Party-state and its robust regime of minzu classification and minzu-based policies inside the PRC.

Han cybernationalism and state territorialization in the People's Republic of China

Han majority nationalism poses a significant yet under-theorized challenge to state sovereignty and territorial integrity in China, especially in the era of the Internet. By shifting our focus from minority secessionist movements on the ground in Xinjiang and Tibet to a group of Han nationalists active in cyberspace, this article probes the friction between three distinct yet interrelated ideologies of spatiality in contemporary China: the processes and practices of state territorialization; counter-narratives and geographies of Han cybernationalism; and the transnational flows of the Sinophone Internet. It argues that the Internet empowers yet ultimately blunts the threat of Han nationalism, rendering it largely impotent when faced with the hegemony of state territorialization.

Xinhai remembered: from Han racial revolution to great revival of the Chinese nation

This article turns three different analytical mirrors onto the Xinhai Revolution – 1911, 1961, 2011 – in order to interrogate its evolving significance in the minds of Chinas Han ethnic and ruling elite. In particular, it seeks to demonstrates the discursive appropriation of the Qing nomadic frontier in the ways in which the 1911 Revolution is remembered and commemorated, exploring both the temporal and spatial dimensions of this appropriation, and how the revolution shifted from a bloody Han racial insurrection against Manchu power and privilege to a heroic celebration of the revival of a multiethnic Chinese nation-state in the face of foreign imperialism and oppression.