Chinese Intellectuals′ Quest for National Greatness and Nationalistic Writing in the 1990s

Abstract

The end of the Cold War has seen the revival throughout the world of nationalist sentiments and aspirations. In China, the rapid decay of Communist ideology has led the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to emphasize its role as the paramount patriotic force and the guardian of national pride in order to find a new basis of legitimacy to sustain its role. However, nationalist sentiment is not the sole province of the CCP and its propagandists. One truly remarkable phenomenon in the post-Cold War upsurge of Chinese nationalism is that Chinese intellectuals became one of the driving forces. Many well-educated people - social scientists, humanities scholars, writers and other professionals - have given voice to and even become articulators for a rising nationalistic discourse in the 1990s. This nationalistic sentiment contrasts strikingly to the anti-traditionalism that once dominated Chinese intellectual circles in the 1980s, in spite of the fact that some advocates of this new sentiment are the same people who had a “pro-Western complex” and promoted anti-traditionalism earlier. This article seeks to discover what caused such a dramatic shift by examining the relationship between Chinese intellectuals′ quest for national greatness and the emergence of nationalistic writing in the 1990s. It starts with a historical analysis of the development of antitraditionalism, and goes on to investigate the content of nationalistic argument. Then socio-economic, intellectual and personal causes for the rise of nationalistic writing are explored. The conclusion offers a perspective on continued intellectual debate over nationalistic discourse.