Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

KEN YOUNG 65
Government responses, however, from Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan were
variable (Gilley et al. 1996). Beijing itself tried to subdue the issue to the
disappointment of overseas nationalists (Gilley 1996; Forney et al. 1996).
Examples and qualifications can be multiplied endlessly. The enthusiasm for China
at the level of rhetoric and sentiment is not troubled by the lack of clarity about
what ‘China’ is, and what ‘Chineseness’ means. But sustained social action is
another matter.
Beyond the very real loyalties that ethnic Chinese feel to their countries, and the
pragmatic recognition that their fates, and those of their children, depend on the
fortunes of the nations to which they now belong, there is the far more serious
difficulty of the maintenance of a unitary ‘Chinese’ cultural identity. In dynastic
China, Chinese identity was much more a cultural or civilisational consciousness
than it was a national identity. It was sustained by the meanings, rituals and symbols
of the Middle Kingdom. The institutions of Imperial China gave coherence to
Chinese culture since they articulated standards according to which people
identified themselves as Chinese (Cohen 1991:114). These have long disappeared
under successive waves of indigenous social movements bearing various
discourses of modernisation, the penultimate, most far-reaching and catastrophic
of which was Mao’s Cultural Revolution. At each stage of reform since the
nineteenth century, governments in China have tried to give definition to the postdynastic
unity of the people they claimed to rule, defining the Chinese successively
in terms of civilisation, then as citizens (liberal Republicans), then as members of
the Chinese race (the Kuomintang), and then, under the Communist Party, as
citizens qualified by social class. None of these attempts succeeded (Fitzgerald
1995:76—85). Today, according to Fitzgerald (1995:103), ‘the relationship between
nation and state is under negotiation in China to an extent that defies all
precedent’. The fear of movements that break from the centre is intense, not only
because of incipient nationalism in Taiwan, but because of the dangers of
fragmentation within China itself (Fitzgerald 1995). Since cultural distinctiveness
may foster separatist claims, the desire to uphold the cultural integrity of China is
very strong. Yet the issue remains unresolved, a thorny problem for China itself. If
this is so in China, what is the basis of the purported solidarity of the overseas
Chinese?
The old unitary symbolic universe has gone, and cannot plausibly be
resurrected, notwithstanding the efforts of wealthy patrons in the Chinese
diaspora. Even in Singapore where Chinese identity is encouraged by the state as
part of its policy of multiracialism (alongside Malay and Indian identities), this statesponsored
Chineseness is not one rooted in community experience or based on
deep historical memory. It is rather a Mandarinization of Chinese culture,
[that emphasises] the high culture or great tradition that all Chinese
Singaporeans putatively shared with their ancestors and their counterparts
in the Chinese diaspora–bypassing its internal contradictions in modern