China became wholly obsessed with race, ethnicity, and identity politics to a degree not yet realized in the present-day West; although thanks to the Theorists, we are well on the way. I believe that obsession was fomented specifically by the Communist Party, in order to provide a social environment which could be exploited for their own rise to power, and that their continued “forcing” of racial and ethnic identity politics into all aspects of society allows them to maintain their power today. If I am correct, then unless we can rid ourselves of our own unhealthy obsession with identity politics, I don’t see any other outcome than that we will also slip, first gradually and then all at once, into the same sort of racially-conceived authoritarian dystopic nightmare.

My personal area of interest lies in Formosan affairs. Perhaps better known to most as Taiwan, Formosa is the main island of the territory currently occupied by the Republic of China government-in-exile (not to be confused with the Communist-led People’s Republic of China, commonly known as China). As someone born and raised in the US, it is hard to ignore the parallels between our histories. Formosan history is replete with the twists and turns of colonization, rebellion, and the ongoing battle for independence; or, now that there is some semblance of an “independent” Formosa, the battle for how it should be recognized and governed. Many volumes have been written on Formosan history, and the interested reader is encouraged to explore this history more deeply. For our purposes, it is enough to note the following: Formosa has been partially occupied by various European and Asian empires throughout its modern history, beginning with the Dutch in 1624; the vast majority of its inhabitants’ ancestral lines migrated from present-day Southeast China (Amoy [Xiamen] and environs), also in the 17th century; and it has been under (Republic of) Chinese occupation since 1945.

Understanding Formosa therefore requires, among other things, a deep understanding of China and the language used to discuss all things China-related. As a frequent reader of New Discourses, I could not help but recognize that time and again, there is striking similarity between the language used and events that unfolded in China over the past few centuries, and the modern Western language of Critical Social Justice as we watch current events unfold before our eyes. I have a sneaking suspicion, which if I were an academic or a scholar might be called a working hypothesis (I am reluctant to use the word “theory,” for obvious reasons), that the modern phenomenon of “Social Justice” is not in fact modern, and that it occurred in China in a very similar fashion around a hundred years ago. The eventual result of an obsession with racial and ethnic differences in late 19th—early 20th century China, perhaps unsurprisingly to readers of ND, is the seemingly monolithic Chinese Communist Party, with its near-absolute control over the lives of 1.4 billion peasant subjects. I suspect that we might learn something useful regarding our own situation by understanding the evolution from Chinese “Critical Social Justice” to Chinese Communism more clearly. Specifically, although I am not an expert by any means, I imagine that viewing our current social ills as they occurred in a different time and place may add some clarity that we miss when we are “in the mix” ourselves. In this post, I explain briefly some of the “leads,” which I think might be good places to start looking.

Critical East-Asian Theory is already well underway in academia; books and papers abound. From what (little) I have read thereof, this literature uses the same familiar tactics employed with regards to other “identity categories,” and applies them to the Chinese (or more accurately, Han) category to explain the power dynamics of present-day East Asia. These works provide clear and detailed accounts of how Chineseness (or Han-ness) supposedly forms the basis of power in East Asia. However, while I am not a “professional,” my own takeaway based on a passing knowledge of not only Western literature (including “Critical Han Theory”), but also Chinese literature and a more than a decade of “lived experience” on “Chinese” Formosa, is slightly different. In particular, Critical Han Theorists, despite the depth and breadth of information they present, fail to reflect on how those seeking power in China around the turn of the 20th century used exactly the same tactics employed today by Western “Theorists” to obtain it. That is, by positioning themselves as anti-Chinese-supremacists, the actual Chinese supremacists successfully fomented a society-wide obsession with race and ethnicity (zu or minzu, which the Communists typically translate as “Nationality” in English, explained below), which was then used to manufacture demand for complete and total social control by the general public.

In other words, while Western academics are only now looking at China with their Critical lens, I believe China beat them to the punch. China became wholly obsessed with race, ethnicity, and identity politics to a degree not yet realized in the present-day West; although thanks to the Theorists, we are well on the way. I believe that obsession was fomented specifically by the Communist Party, in order to provide a social environment which could be exploited for their own rise to power, and that their continued “forcing” of racial and ethnic identity politics into all aspects of society allows them to maintain their power today. If I am correct, then unless we can rid ourselves of our own unhealthy obsession with identity politics, I don’t see any other outcome than that we will also slip, first gradually and then all at once, into the same sort of racially-conceived authoritarian dystopic nightmare.

Recorded Chinese history is voluminous, and largely unknown in the West. We hear claims of China’s much-touted “5,000 year history,” and Chinese people themselves view this history as part of an “unbroken history of the Chinese race [zu].” These stories are almost entirely modern fictions, but they have come to form the cornerstone of present-day Chinese identity politics. Even a cursory inspection of Chinese history reveals that no such “unbroken 5,000 year history” presents. Much as the European Kings of the Middle Ages, so too the Emperors of the East Asia were highly variable in their beliefs, practices, cultures, languages, identities, geographies, and so on. In general, so long as an Emperor maintained power, the precise ethnic and racial composition of the peasantry was of little concern, if it was considered at all. And yet, despite millennia of war and conquest between groups that were alternately divided along political, regional, linguistic, or any other axes we can imagine, the vast majority^[1] of people in China today consider themselves as part of a single ethno-racial group, the Han.

This is the first point of similarity. In 21st century Western Critical Theory (WCT), we are told that America is a White nation, founded in and maintained by Whiteness. In what we might call “Eastern Critical Theory” (ECT), which had become clearly articulated by the 19th and early 20th centuries, China came to be seen as a Han nation, founded in and maintained by Han-ness [Hanzu]. Of course, much like Whiteness, contemporary notions of Han-ness were largely ahistorical, and would have been unrecognizable in any prior era. Also, much like Whiteness, the ideas were built around a kernel of truth, in that Han-ness (along with a variety of other identifying categories) was used for political gain at times throughout Chinese history. The Communists took these partial truths and created a grand narrative, which was then leveraged as a political tool in the struggle for “equality [minzu pengdeng].” (Note that the Communists did not need to invent a new word like equity to capture their meaning; they were explicitly Marxist.) Ultimately, this new idea of Han-ness was weaponized for consolidation of power against both “non-Han” and Han alike, a process that we see ongoing in the West today.

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