On March 12, China’s legislature officially adopted a policy of ethnic unity, mandating universal teaching of Mandarin as national language and promotion of Han Chinese culture, enforcing the mandates by law, and outlawing minority ethnic activism. The law caps Xi Jinping’s years-long campaign to homogenize China culturally and politically.
The law also charges parents to teach love of the Chinese Communist Party, which points toward a question, of Chinese national identity. The PRC, Communist China, was established as an ideological nation, identified by allegiance to a version of Marxist Leninist Socialism. It ostensibly supplanted the image of an imperial China, ruling over a range of territories and peoples under an Emperor who held a mandate of heaven. Maoist China expressly allowed ethnic minorities their own cultural practices, within the ideological regime of Communism – in the idea that principle, not blood and soil and divine rule, was the proper, modern basis of government.
Of course under Deng Xiao Ping, Mao’s strict version of Communism was essentially renounced in the name of economic growth, driven by wider market economics and corporate autonomy. The CCP re-based its claim to legitimacy on rising prosperity rather than a tyrannically enforced dictum. The binder among peoples would no longer be ideological but material. Now, under Xi, is China an ethnic nation – again?
America, in a certain analogy, also rejected blood and soil nationality. This nation conceived itself in a divorce from the ethnic motherland, citing a creed of personal rights. This founding renounced divinely sanctioned rule as well as political binders of culture, in the name of a principle.
Our principle is not ideological. Though some deem it an ideological Liberal construct, and its basis on rights does correspond to liberal thought, it does not mandate any politicized formula of “Liberalism” such as various factions have codified. The Declaration’s creed, of unalienable rights and government by consent of the governed, is less concrete and more aspirational, making our principle sometimes harder to mobilize for defense, or “enforce” against ambitious operators. But America’s creed is also paradoxical, endorsing the need for government even as it limits government’s purpose to securing our rights. This paradox makes government a tool for the nation, but separates it from national identity. The separation poses an inherent contradiction to totalitarianism, and a damper on ideology as marker of national identity,
China, like the Soviet Union, mistook prescriptive ideology for principle as it overthrew divinely mandated government. When ideology failed, both were left with no principle of any kind to stand on. Russia, as we know, gave way to a strong man, building and trying to legitimize autocratic power with no claim to divine or principled sanction. China’s Communist Party kept hold on power by appealing to economic growth. Now, as economic cycles weaken that CCP claim, Xi apparently needs to reinforce either Communist ardor in its ostensible principles – note the purges of military officers for corruption – or the pre-modern binders of ethnicity, or both. They are not a nation of principle, but one more old world actor seeking a rationale for its Hobbesian self interest.
China is, as generally acknowledged, the primary geopolitical rival to the US. Our analysts lay out a wide range of dangers that they pose, to our manufacturing (they’ve won in many ways on that front), our geopolitical interests, our technological leadership, and more. The threat that goes unremarked is that America is a perpetual experiment, testing whether a nation conceived on an abstract principle, of rights and government by the governed, can endure. If that bedrock principle cannot be realized in a living nation, to the satisfaction of its people, able to outcompete or overcome outside powers, then our base of national legitimacy becomes debased. If China somehow, in their autocratic organizational capacities, can outcompete us to the point where we “lose” the competition, then America as a nation loses its existential point.
The logic of our founding is stronger than that of any rival nation, and the PRC’s wandering claims to legitimacy demonstrate their weakness. Can we organize our tangible efforts, economic, military, political, cultural – to live well by our creed, and project its value? Whether we face China transactionally, as a systemic adversary, or even in certain shared interests, our purpose is to validate our existence as vessel of our founding tenets, a nation of true principle.
Common Conviction 