The Imaginary Institution of China: Dialectics of Fantasy and Failure in Nationalist Identification, As Seen Through China’S Han Clothing Movement
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The Imaginary Institution of China: Dialectics of Fantasy and Failure in Nationalist Identification, as Seen through China’s Han Clothing Movement A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Kevin Joseph Carrico August 2013 © 2013 Kevin Joseph Carrico The Imaginary Institution of China: Dialectics of Fantasy and Failure in Nationalist Identification, as Seen through China’s Han Clothing Movement Kevin Joseph Carrico, Ph.D. Cornell University 2013 This project is an ethnographic study of the Han Clothing Movement, a newly emerging neo-traditionalist and ethno-nationalist group in contemporary urban China dedicated to promoting purportedly ancient “ethnic clothing” for the previously unmarked majority Han nationality. Based in fieldwork with movement activists in the Pearl River Delta and cities across China, this project asks: why Han Clothing, and why now? The origins of the Han Clothing Movement are traced to the tensions of national identity, wherein a perpetually impassable gap exists between an ever expanding nationalist imaginary and an inherently limited national experience. I contrast the grandiose and romanticized ideals of the Chinese nation as five millennia of tradition promoted in reform-era discourses, representing the nationalist imaginary of China, with the underwhelming and often even disappointing daily lives of movement activists in China’s cities, representing actual experience within the geographic space known as China. The Han Clothing Movement is a symptom of these tensions within national identity, and its cultural products provide fleeting cures for participants. The resulting ethnography examines the experience of Han-ness and Chineseness in light of these tensions, reinterpreting the Han Clothing Movement’s celebration of Han-ness and tradition as expressions of the distance of these elusive ideas from lived experience. The movement’s cultural products, from clothing and reenacted ritual to photography, elaborate conspiracy theories, and reactionary gender politics, are analyzed in turn as steps towards the construction and stabilization of an idealized image of Han Chinese glory which perpetually fascinates participants by right of its unattainability. This project contributes to the emerging field of Critical Han Studies through a detailed ethnographic analysis of the complex relationship of contemporary self-identified Han to the idea of Han-ness, tracing in particular the dilemmas and transformations of this idea amidst the ongoing rapid change in contemporary Chinese society. This project further contributes to a novel understanding of the nation as a perpetually elusive imaginary community, founded in fantasy and reproduced by its own impossibility, reinterpreting national identity as both a fulfilling ideal and a self-reproducing problem paradoxically fueled by the very affective tensions produced in its failure. iv Biographical Sketch Kevin Carrico is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies (2003), where he received a degree in Chinese Studies, as well as Bard College (2002), where he completed his undergraduate studies in Asian Studies, focusing particularly upon the history and culture of post-1949 China. Prior to pursuing his Ph.D. at Cornell University’s Department of Anthropology, Kevin worked as a Chinese-to-English translator in Shanghai. Having completed his Ph.D. in the spring of 2013, he will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for East Asian Studies during the 2013-14 academic year. v Acknowledgements This project was generously funded by Fulbright-Hays’ Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program. Initial fieldwork was also funded by the Cornell University East Asia Program’s Lam Family Travel Grant for South China Research. I am greatly indebted to everyone at the Comparative Literature Section in Sun Yat-sen University’s Chinese Department for facilitating my fieldwork and providing such an intellectually engaging and inspirational environment during my time in China. Thanks in particular to Ai Xiaoming, Ke Qianting, Huang Haitao, and Tracy Chen. My dissertation committee has provided unending support and consistently pushed my thinking in new directions. Since my first year at Cornell, Steven Sangren has been a thoughtful and engaging guide to the worlds of Chinese ethnography and anthropological theory in general, and has had a profound influence upon this study’s direction. Magnus Fiskesjö has also, since my first year at Cornell, been a source of constant inspiration, new perspectives, and seemingly limitless ethnographic knowledge. And Mabel Berezin’s insights into fascism and ritual, nationalism, and cultural sociology in general have greatly enriched this study. In addition to my committee members, I would also like to thank Robin McNeal, whose research on the effects of China’s past in the present has greatly inspired my own work, and Robert Culp, who has been a source of intellectual guidance and support since my undergraduate years. Last but certainly not least, thanks to my family, friends, and my wife. vi Table of Contents Introduction Eternal Apparel 1 Han-ness and Critical Han Studies 2 Nationalism and the Imaginary Community 5 Methodology 7 On the Question of Critical Anthropology 9 Overview 12 Part I: The Imaginary Institution of China Chapter 1 Imaginary Communities: Dialectics of Fantasy and Failure in Nationalist Identification 16 The Elementary Structures of Nationalism: The Nation as Fantasy 20 The Elementary Structures of Nationalism: The Nation as Experience 27 The Elementary Structures of Nationalism: The Nation as a Paradoxical System 34 Conclusion 38 Chapter 2 Between Heaven and Earth: Cycles of Nationalist Imagining and Experience in Modern China 40 Awakening and Dreaming: The Expulsion from Tianxia 41 Revolution and the Republic 45 Maoism and National Proletarianism 50 Reforming the Imaginary Community 64 Part II: Returning to the Era of Han and Tang Chapter 3 Han Trouble and the Ethnic Cure 75 A Brief History of the Han Clothing Movement: Han-ness, Tradition, and the Revitalization of China 75 Han Trouble and the Minority Origins of the Real Han 84 Back to the Past in the Future 94 The Real China 104 The Han Show 111 vii Conclusion 117 Chapter 4 The Personal Origins of Collective Identity 119 Liang 121 Yan 127 Yu 132 Tsin 138 Xia 145 Brother Emperor and the Yellow Emperor® 151 Chapter 5 Reenacting the Land of Rites and Etiquette 164 Eternal Apparel 165 Rediscovering the Land of Rites and Etiquette 180 The Camera Obscura of Nationalist Fantasy 196 Conclusion 208 Chapter 6 The Paranoid Style in Chinese Cultural Politics 210 The Manchurian Candidates 212 The Manchu in the Mirror 221 The Stranger King, Redux 231 Confronting the Manchu 247 Chapter 7 Producing Purity: Reimagining the Traditional Woman 254 Men of Action, Women of Restraint 255 The Nationalist Traffic in Women 264 Protecting Tradition with the Men of the Ladies’ Academy 272 Prince 286 Conclusion The Real China, beyond Han Clothing 293 Visiting a Confucian Academy 293 Jiang Qing’s Confucian Constitutionalism 302 The New Left as Neo-Traditionalism 314 Rebuilding the Past in Wenchuan 330 References 339 1 Introduction Eternal Apparel The Han Clothing Movement (漢服運動) is a neo-traditionalist and ethno-nationalist youth-based movement that has emerged over the past decade in urban China, structured around the idea of revitalizing a recently created yet purportedly ancient style of national clothing for the country’s Han majority. The movement is neo-traditionalist because it is dedicated to promoting a particular vision of tradition, embodied in clothing, ritual, etiquette, and accompanying lifestyles, amidst the rapid social, economic, and cultural change in China’s urban areas. The movement is ethno-nationalist because the tradition that it promotes is “Han,” a term which in official understandings refers to the nation’s majority nationality constituting roughly 92% of its population, but which in movement discourses indicates the sole true and eternal embodiment of authentic Chineseness. And participants characterize the movement as a “clothing movement” because they believe that a supposedly eternal yet now forgotten clothing style labeled as Han Clothing (漢服 or 漢民族服裝) constitutes the cornerstone of this Han culture and thus of true Chineseness. Beginning in 2001 with online sketches of this lost national clothing and the formation of related online forums, the movement has since expanded across China with the establishment of Han Clothing associations in most major cities. From Zhengzhou in the north to Guangzhou in the south, and from Suzhou in the east to Kunming in the west, these associations host frequent gatherings promoting Han Clothing, recreated ritual, and associated neo-traditionalist etiquette, mixed in with a fair amount of cultural-chauvinist and xenophobic rhetoric. Individual participants in these cities, connected through national and local Han-themed forums, gather 2 together two or three weekends a month both to celebrate the movement’s vision of Han-ness and to revitalize this vision as a lost but always essential reality. Analyzing the rapid growth of this invented tradition and the sources of its popularity, my research asks, specifically: why Han Clothing, and why now? Employing participation in movement events and regular close interaction with Han Clothing