Written by Zeng Ee Liew.
Image credit: P1099180 by Studio Incendo/ Flickr, license: CC BY 2.0.
The term ‘colonial nostalgia’, or ?? (lian zhi), has appeared more and more since the 2000s in the discourse used by Mainland China to describe the politicians or activists who advocate for democracy or even independence in both Taiwan and Hong Kong. Very often, those democracy or independence activists will be described as ‘traitors’ who still harbour lingering love or affection and pander to the former Western or Japanese colonial power and fail to show full patriotic love to the motherland. The use of such discourse can be seen from the lens of a broader effort by the Chinese government to delegitimise those pro-democracy activists, which will be explored further in this article.
China’s Construction of Chinese Identity
To understand how China uses the discourse of colonial nostalgia to delegitimise the pro-democracy and pro-independence activists, we first need to understand how China constructs what it means to be Chinese. China’s construction of what it means to be “Chinese” relies on two elements, defining “Chineseness” through biological descent and physical appearances and the notion of national humiliation. Under the first element, the Chinese term minzu (??), often translated to as “nationality” in nationalist narratives, is based on a group of people clearly defined by their imagined shared blood ties, kinship and descent, and one is “Chinese by virtue of one’s blood”. This means whether you want it or not, as long as you fulfil the racialised identity, you will be Chinese. The Chinese leadership has frequently evoked this to talk about China’s relationship with Taiwan and Hong Kong, where Taiwanese and Hong Kong compatriots share a blood connection with the compatriots from Mainland China. An example would be when Xi Jinping said that “compatriots on both sides of the straits share a connection of blood and are all one family.”
The second element is what scholars normally call “100 years of national humiliation” or “century of national humiliation” (bainian guochi, ????), which is crucial in trying to understand Chinese identity. This discourse of the “century of national humiliation” is “a continuously reworked narrative about the national past central to the contested and evolving meaning of being ‘Chinese’ today.” The key narrative in the century of humiliation was “foreign imperialism encouraged by domestic corruption”. Official narratives usually include key events such as the burning of the Old Summer Palace by Franco-British forces, the defeat in the Sino-Japanese war that led to the loss of Taiwan to the Japanese, events that fit into the narrative of how invasion by foreign imperialists and collaboration by domestic corrupt regimes led to the loss of sovereignty and territory. These two main narratives form the basis for constructing a “Chinese identity” by China.
Thus, for China, the people in Taiwan and Hong Kong are Chinese whatsoever. However, according to some scholars, efforts by the Japanese in Taiwan and the British in Hong Kong during colonial times to erase this Chinese identity have sowed the seeds of “colonial nostalgia” in both places. The Japanisation movement in Taiwan and colonial education have “polluted” the people there, causing them to harbour nostalgia towards their former colonial masters. According to China, this has led to a phenomenon of colonial nostalgia and the praising of colonial history in both Hong Kong and Taiwan by downplaying the colonial nature of Japanese rule in Taiwan or openly displaying colonial symbols in Hong Kong. The Chinese government has thus used these signs of colonial nostalgia as discourses to delegitimise the promotion of pro-democracy or pro-independence ideologies in both Taiwan and Hong Kong.
China’s delegitimisation strategies
To delegitimise the development of such separate identity in both Taiwan and Hong Kong that is distinct from the Chinese identity that China seeks to promote, China often argues that the emergence of a separate “Taiwanese identity” or “Hong Kong identity” is just a result of “colonial nostalgia”, and that those identities have no real grounding in reality. Politicians in Taiwan who have expressed support for Taiwanese independence and a local Taiwanese identity have often been labelled as people who praise Japanese colonisation, forgetting their Chinese roots and misinterpreting their own identity. The same narrative has been used to describe the rise of localist identity among the people in Hong Kong. Chinese scholars argue that such a localist identity resulted from nostalgia towards colonial Hong Kong, leading to an inability to accept Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty. Thus, the localist identity formed under such a situation is a misrepresentation of their own identity. By arguing that local identity formation in Hong Kong and Taiwan is partly due to ‘colonial nostalgia’, China is framing those who identify themselves exclusively as “Hong Konger” or “Taiwanese” as people who have misrepresented their identity. Thus, China is using language to deny their identity, arguing that it is artificial. China can also be seen here as co-opting the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan as “one big Chinese family”, whether they agree with this sentiment. This also serves to delegitimise the pro-democracy or pro-independence activists and politicians in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as many of them often argue for their cause by evoking their distinct identity from China as a justification for their demands.
Colonial nostalgia has also been described as a form of “virus” or “disease” that must be removed from Hong Kong and Taiwan society. In an opinion piece for the pro-China China Times newspaper, colonial nostalgia has been described as a form of “dementia” that must be completely rooted out from Hong Kong and Taiwan society. Using languages such as “virus” or “disease” to describe the phenomenon of colonial nostalgia has the effect of naturalising political judgements using the language of biology, framing those activists and politicians as manifestations of a toxic disorder within the Greater China nation. It also evokes the notion that those people with colonial nostalgia are the “domestic corruption” within China that seeks to destroy the great Chinese nation. Using the language of biology also encompasses those protesters as problems that would need to be dealt with immediately by the state’s immune system.
China’s Solution to Colonial Nostalgia
To China, the origins of the localist identity in both Hong Kong and Taiwan can be partly attributed to the “colonial nostalgia” of the population. Therefore, the solution to removing this sentiment of “colonial nostalgia” should be strengthening Chinese identity within the population. Opinion piece writers on pro-China outlets have argued that the only solution to the “culture of colonial nostalgia” is to consolidate patriotic education and instil Chinese nationalism. Therefore, the successful implementation of patriotic education will produce a next generation that loves and associates themselves with the “motherland”.
Beijing’s understanding and approach to answering the calls for independence in Taiwan and the calls for more democracy in Hong Kong are not based on an actual grasp of the underlying dynamics of politics and identity in those areas but is about overlooking those precise dynamics, and the imposition of a new type of narrative that can be controlled by the authorities in Beijing. For the authorities or pundits in Beijing, the core cause of the pro-independence and pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and Taiwan is a lack of “patriotic education”, and in Hong Kong, where China directly influences policy-making, their solution to this is to instil more patriotic education in Hong Kong. The focus on “national education” or “patriotic education” as a solution to the problem of colonial nostalgia also orientalises the subject as uneducated individuals who do not know what is best for them, and it is only by educating them that we can correct their mistakes, thereby serving as a way to delegitimise the pro-democracy activists.
This article has highlighted China’s unwillingness to deal with the demands of the pro-independence and pro-democracy forces in Hong Kong and Taiwan. This was shown in China’s focus on patriotic education as the means to solve this problem. Rather than understanding and acknowledging the demands from the pro-democracy and pro-independence groups in Taiwan and Hong Kong, China would use the discourse of colonial nostalgia to delegitimise them and impose on them what they think is the solution to their interpretation of the problem.
Zeng Ee Liew is a PhD student at the Department of Politics, University of Surrey. His current research projects look into the pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong and Taiwan, specifically the diplomatic agency behind those movements. His research interests lie in the East Asian region, specifically Hong Kong, Taiwan and China.
This article was published as part of a special issue on Taiwan in Transition.
