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Chapter 7 Defining the Nation-State: One Event, Three Stories Bonding the Chinese blood eternally is a historical destiny. —The People’s Daily, June 16, 1997 If Hong Kong is good, the country is good; if the country is good, Hong Kong will be better. —Tung Chee-hwa, Chief Executive, 1997 Say No to China. —The Liberty Times, Taiwan, June 29, 1997 Nationalism is the fruit of idle pens and gullible readers. —Ernest Gellner (1997: 10–11) The handover of Hong Kong strikes different chords in the conscience of the three Chinese societies: the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan, and Hong Kong itself. It raises core issues about the meanings of China and Chinese as well as the relationships between a nation and a state. These issues are particularly sensitive in the post-Cold War era, as national and ethnic identities have stepped forward to become a prime locus of struggle. As a nation struggles for its discursive representation in the globalized mediated culture, the state is its chief authoritative voice, and the media play a central role in constructing political and historical narratives of what Anderson (1983) calls the “imagined communities.” Against this backdrop, the handover of Hong Kong becomes a site and moment for the media in these three societies of the “Cultural China” (Tu, 1991) to discursively contest their visions of China and Chinese. China has been called variably a “nationless state” (Fitzgerald, 1995) or an “empire-state” (Bockman, 1998). It is a civilization defined by a set of cultural practices and shared symbolic resources, often in service of state unity. The definitions of China and Chinese have never been unproblematic. Historically, successive dynasties sustained the unity of the Chinese Empire State, but the 127 criteria for inclusion in it were fluid, ambiguous, and changing constantly. Each dynasty chose its favored attribute—ethnic, geographic, social, or cultural—to attain the goal of state unity. Neither ethnicity nor residency within certain territorial boundaries is sufficient to define what Chinese people are. Today’s PRC continues this historical trajectory by staking its political media discourse on claims of state unity and national sovereignty in the context of rising nationalism. At the historical moment of Hong Kong’s handover, the three Chinese societies in the Cultural China, situated in different systems, ideologies, and historical sentiments in the international political economy, clash in their articulation of the Chinese nation and state as three different, discursive communities . How to define the Chinese state has important bearings on the political legitimacy of the PRC and its claim of sovereignty over Hong Kong and Taiwan. The tension between nation and state is a source of anxiety in Hong Kong and has flared up internal politics in Taiwan. The discursive clash is most likely to occur at what Levi-Strauss (1966: 259) calls “hot moments” that may draw out different symbolic resources to interpret historical events in such a way as to exert critical influences on the dynamics of struggle over political and cultural identities. Therefore, we have to analyze this discursive clash within “the communities of competing producers, of interpreters and critics, of audiences and consumers, and of patrons and other significant actors who become subjects of discourse itself” (Wuthnow, 1989: 16). This discursive struggle has to be placed against another backdrop: the rising nationalism in the PRC, partly bolstered by economic achievements and partly prompted by the perceived need to dispel domestic challenges and to fortify national boundaries against the globalizing forces of free markets and democracy (Snyder and Ballentine, 1997). Nationalism fills the gap left by widespread public disillusionment with Communist ideology in China. Official discourses often pit the national strength of China against the dismemberment of the Soviet Union to prove the “correct” policy of harnessing economic reform as an engine to realize China’s “dream of prosperity and strength.” The “receiving end” of PRC nationalism has very different reactions. As we shall show in this chapter, while the PRC media celebrate the integration of China as a nation-state, Taiwan’s media seek to delink nation from state, and Hong Kong’s media are ambivalent about being incorporated as part of the Beijingdefined Chinese family-nation. In this process, they have all tried to selectively “domesticate” aspects of the handover of Hong Kong to renew their own ideological boundaries. The PRC: Celebration of the Family-Nation The PRC’s media coverage is organized temporally and spatially by a “master frame” (Snow and...

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