Reenacting the Land of Rites and Etiquette

“Reenacting the Land of Rites and Etiquette” develops a close ethnographic analysis of three primary Han Clothing Movement media: ethnic clothing, ritual, and photography. Each is deployed to overcome the challenges described in the preceding chapters and thereby stabilize the Great Han imaginary in the material world. Tracing the application of these three media in movement activities, each medium is found to enact growing abstraction from participants’ living environments towards the fleeting realization of their ideal images. Eternal Han tradition thus ironically finds its most stable embodiment via the most modern of technologies: the cell-phone camera, which combines the materiality of clothing with the framing capabilities of the ritual space. Participants digitally capture their ideal moments of self-representation, with all contradictory elements safely edited away, for time immemorial, under the legitimizing rubric of tradition.

Imaginary Communities

“Imaginary Communities” examines the concept of the nation within Han Clothing Movement discourses to develop a new theory of nationalism. The analyses are based in the question: if nations are imagined communities, how exactly are they imagined? Beginning from a dialogue with a movement enthusiast in Shenzhen, in which he presents the unexpected proposition that “today’s China is not the real China,” this chapter combines Anderson’s materialist approach with Smith’s ethnosymbolic approach to the nation to reinterpret imagined communities, structured around mundane, repetitive rituals and homogenous, empty time, as imaginary communities, structured around larger than life fantasies which illusorily incorporate individuals through the narrative of national identity. This concept of imaginary communities is thenfounded in the distinction between the nation as an ideal, which I call the fantastic national imaginary, and the nation as reality, characterized by mundane and disappointing experience. Insofar as the solution to the failure of national identity is sought in the source of this dilemma, namely the larger than life national fantasy, the nation is analyzed herein as a self-reproducing system, perpetuated over time precisely in its failure.

The Personal Origins of Collective Identity

“The Personal Origins of Collective Identity” presents life stories of individual movement participants, demonstrating that the collective identity and ideals of the Han Clothing Movement are cultural products of and responses to personal desires emergent within the challenges of reality. This chapter presents four detailed case studies of participants’ disenchanting everyday experiences in cities across China, alongside their re-creations within the movement overcoming their distance from the “great Han.” Analyses of these process highlight how personal aspirations and dilemmas are expressed and imaginarily resolved through individuals’ reinvention via movement fantasies of a coherent, glorious, and eternal majority identity. “Personal Origins” concludes with the discussion of a particularly self-mythologizing branch of the movement that is broadly derided by other branches, arguing that this derision is precisely a product of this particular branch’s rendering the personal desires inherent within the movement too explicitly.

Han Trouble and the Ethnic Cure

“Han Trouble” builds upon the analysis of the nation in “Imaginary Communities” to further deconstruct the concepts of “the Han” and “tradition” central to Han Clothing Movement discourses. The movement’s emergence since 2001 is analyzed in relation to the conventional framework of ethnic relations and representation in China, wherein minorities are represented as “primitive” and “closer to nature” with their ethnic clothing, customs, and culture, while the Han majority is represented as “default” and “unmarked.” This binary creates “Han Trouble,” the boredom of the unmarked, to which the movement responds with a reimagining of Han identity thatironically draws heavily upon fetishized representations of minority identity, in a process that I call ethnicization. The movement’s deployment of tradition, based in a nostalgic vision of past security, stability, and certainty, is similarly an inverted product of the uncertainty and uncontrollability of contemporary life. The Han Clothing Movement and its participants are thus perpetually caught between their ideals and their polar opposites, aiming nevertheless to transcend imperfect reality via the ideal of identity.

Conclusion

“Neo-Traditionalism in China Today” expands the analytical framework developed in this study of the Han Clothing Movement to interpret a series of distinct yet conceptually related neo-traditionalisms and nationalisms in China today. The re-emergence of traditional education in the Chinese classics through Confucian academies is examined as a mystical response to the crisis in the contemporary educational system. The promotion of Confucian constitutionalism imagines an indigenous, yet logically flawed, alternative to the globalization of democracy. The rise of New Leftist thought, meanwhile, seeks answers in a cleansed Maoist “revolutionary tradition.” Concluding with a discussion of ethnic clothing and photography emerging from the rubble of the Wenchuan earthquake, this conclusion provides a basis for reflecting upon the Han Clothing Movement and its identity reconstructions as one example of broader trends in society today, seeking answers to the dilemmas of the present in an imagined past.

Producing Purity

“Producing Purity” examines the sole acknowledged split within the homogenizing image of the Han Clothing Movement: the distinction between male and female. This divide produces drastically divergent gender roles, forcing women into outdated, normalizing images of purity, chastity, and loyalty, while rationalizing corresponding misogynistic male fantasies of domination as “culture” and “tradition.” Building upon research in a traditionalist “Ladies’ Academy” dedicated to transforming modern city women into proper and traditional “ladies,” this chapter analyses the implications of the movement’s simultaneously constraining and fulfilling identity visions for its future. In seeking a solution to the dilemmas of identity in the source of these dilemmas, the Han Clothing Movement’s solutions can only, in the end, generate further and deeper dilemmas.

The Manchu in the Mirror

“The Manchu in the Mirror” examines the extremely elaborate network of conspiracy theories promoted by Han Clothing Movement participants to explain the disillusionment of the present: the distinction between the real, actually existing China and their image of “the real China.” According to movement enthusiasts, the formerly powerful Manchus who ruled over China in the Qing Dynasty continue to exercise power in the present, and are portrayed within movement conspiracy theories as dedicated to exterminating the Han majority and destroying China. Unravelling these paranoid theories of minority domination and majority persecution, conspiracy theory and identity are shown to be two sides of the same coin, with conspiracy theory serving as the final narrative guarantor of the processes of identity stabilization described in the preceding chapters.

Introduction

This introduction unfolds each of the keywords in the title The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today through dialogue with a Han Clothing Movement participant. The conflicted nature of nationalism, caught between the ideal of China and the reality of China, is introduced through the movement’s construction of an imagined “real China.” The contentious issues of race and racism in contemporary China are introduced through a participant’s commentaries on Africans and Tibetans. And the idea of tradition, central to the Han Clothing Movement and broader trends in Chinese society, is introduced as an imaginaryinversion of the disillusioning present. Drawing upon these dialogues with a movement participant, this introduction furthermore articulates the concept of critical anthropology, seeking to understand movement participants’ desires while refusing to endorse the outcomes of these desires. Finally, this introduction provides a general overview of the book’s theoretical framework combining Lacan’s analysis of the imaginary and subjectivity with Luhmann’s analysis of social systems and Sloterdijk’s framework of immunizing spheres.