Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in th ...

Explaining the logic of culture as the medium of identity construction and the unifier of cultural and ethnic groups in China, Chun also highlighted the danger of the homogeneity of identity. In the case of China at the turn of the twentieth century, the desire to free China from its old worldview in order to participate in the process of modernization ended up creating a homogenous consciousness of national identity that subsumed the agency of diverse groups in the country.

Chow did not elaborate, however, the problems spawned by this particular discourse on race and national identity. Manipulating the Western concepts of race and nation building, China’s evolving identity led to the conflation of national, racial, and ethnic representations. As a counterhegemony to the Manchurians, commonly regarded in China as barbarians, instead of segregating them as the racial Other, the Hanzu has evolved as the national identity to subsume the non-Han ethnic groups. This newly constructed discourse of race, formulated beyond physiological traits, has promoted identification by obliterating cultural and linguistic diversity. The creation of a homogenous racial identity, which is tied closely to the specifications of the modern nation and a standard language system, eventually constituted the problematics underlying the modern and contemporary concept of Chineseness.

Sociologist Tan Chee Beng called this essentialist racial category the myth of a “pure Chinese” identity, one that establishes and naturalizes the hierarchy of cultural superiority among various Chinese communities. Tan warned readers about the danger of confusing cultural identity with ethnic and national identifications. Such confusion leads to the treatment and use of Chinese identity as ahistorical, anachronistic, essentialized, and all encompassing by suppressing the reality of its constructedness. The méconnaissance of Chineseness as the essence of national and ethnic identifications displaces or even suppresses the importance of “the consciousness and the subjective experience of the people of Chinese descent.”¹⁹