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The political scientist Edward Friedman inquires here into the possibilities for nationalism in different moments in modern China. Inspired by Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities ([1989] 1991), in which one of the origins of nationalism is traced to the development of a common literature, an “administrative vernacular,” Friedman discusses literature, language, history, and “mythos” and the way they serve—or fail to serve—to unify the nation. He draws a contrast between the kind of nationalism that Mao-era (1949–1976) China attempted to establish (“Leninist,” anti-imperialist, closed to the outside world, unitary, focused on north China, on Mandarin, and on the ancient autocratic state of Qin) and the post-Mao alternatives that appear to him to be prevalent in the 1990s and today (popular, open to the outside world, focused on south China, on southern dialects, on pluralism and federalism, and on the ancient state of Chu). The complexity of the article derives from the complexity of the phenomena being united by Friedman. Friedman’s striking depiction of Chu culture, a Warring States era (479–220 b.c.e.) state located in what is now Hunan province, in south China, as a symbol from which southern Chinese derive pride and identity may be very much at odds with familiar treatments of China’s history as deriving from a northern “cradle” of civilization around the Yellow river basin to the north. Chu’s culture was quite distinctive and very different from the adjacent cultures now usually considered ancestral to that of China. Southern Chinese have been embracing the recent archaeological excavations of Chu, which demonstrate a clearly flourishing culture just as “advanced” as that in North China. This symbol of a rival antiquity serves as justification for southern pride and resistance to the domination of northern symbols and claims. Moreover, since 1997, this north/south tension has taken on a more aggressive cast as the Communist Party has financed an elaborate archaeological project to date the early historic eras of northern Chinese antiquity, the Xia, Shang, Zhou (Sandai) Chronology Project. Complicating this nativist rivalry even more is the ongoing Three Gorges Dam project, which, if completed , will result in the inundation and permanent loss of numerous ancient 31 EDWARD FRIEDMAN 3 Symbols of Southern Identity Rivaling Unitary Nationalism sites of the southern Dai culture, perhaps older than those chronicled under the Sandai project. One nation, many peoples, with a decidedly troubling future trajectory of intense regional conflict, is the China that we glimpse through Friedman and the China that we confront today where southern intellectuals and Party operatives toast the greatness of China by recalling the superiority of Chu antiquity.—Eds. THE ECLIPSE OF ANTI-IMPERIALIST NATIONALISM The People’s Republic of China in the Mao era (1949–1976) presented itself as the heir of a Han people who had come together millennia earlier in the north China plain of the Yellow river valley, built a great civilization, fought to preserve it, and expanded over the centuries by civilizing barbarian invaders. Mao’s anti-imperialist revolution was the culmination of this Chinese national history. The Museum of History displayed this nationalist history as an ascent from Peking man through an expansionist, amalgamating, and unifying Han culture to the founding of the People’s Republic. An anthropologist of China, Robert Thorp, explained, “The ascendancy of the Communist Party and creation of New China are both understood as the inevitable outcome of China’s historical process. . . . [T]he antiquity and continuity of Chinese culture . . . give China a respectable status. . . . Creating a sense of national cultural identity requires persuading all of the nonHan peoples that they have a stake in the fate of the Han majority. If ethnic groups always place their ‘Chinese’ citizenship behind their own ethnicity, the state will fragment” (Thorp 1992, 18–19). By the 1990s, however, Chinese teachers forced to repeat this story of a singular north China origin to Chinese civilization, which was recapitulated and advanced in Mao’s north China peasant movement, described it as a lie: “An essentially unilinear evolutionary model . . . no longer enjoys universal acceptance in China. . . . [T]he old, hyper-simplistic notion that increasing social complexity during the north China Neolithic period is best explained as an inevitable evolutionary process by which a highly localized early Neolithic Yangshao culture spawned a late Neolithic Longshan culture forming the foundation for the genesis of Chinese Bronze Age civilization is no longer tenable. Most Chinese archaeologists now agree that the late Neolithic and Bronze Age of...

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