Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in th ...

yellow race—Hanzu (漢族)—Chow demonstrated that the modern concept of race in China is a product of the narrative construction of Chinese history, based on a lineage discourse facilitated by the appropriation of foreign theories and structures on race and nation.¹⁵ The construction of the homogeneous Chinese identity, Hanzu, incorporated not only the theory of social Darwinism but also Enlightenment ideas into the nativist discourse of nation building by means of localization and alteration. According to Chow, because China’s history is demarcated by dynasties that constitute a nonlinear structure of historical trajectory, Zhang had to establish the Chinese identity by constructing the lineage discourse of the Han people, the descendants of Huangdi, the emperor of the yellow race. This identified the Hanzu, as opposed to the Manchurians, as the legitimate natives of the land.¹⁶

According to Zhang, a strategic way to secure the identity of the Hanzu supported by reformists such as Liang Qichao was to establish a homogenous language system aimed at unifying the people in the nation. Unlike Japan’s linguistic creation, China revised the Chinese writing system known as Hanwen (漢文; the Han language) and Hanzi (漢字; the Han characters). Hanyu (漢語), the Mandarin dialect, evolved as the unifying language.¹⁷ This standardization of identity features through language and historical narrative reconstruction uprooted ethnic and cultural diversity; hence, an essentialized Chinese identity was created. Allen Chun theorized this in his essay “Fuck Chineseness”:

Since the very idea of (a national) identity is new, any notions of culture invoked in this regard, no matter how faithfully they are grounded in the past, have to be constructions by nature. In the end, they conform to a new kind of boundedness in order to create bonds of horizontal solidarity between equal, autonomous individuals constitutive of the empty, homogeneous social space of the nation in ways that could not have existed in a hierarchical, cosmological past.¹⁸