What is Chinese nationalism? Is nationalism the most effective framework for understanding how pe... more What is Chinese nationalism? Is nationalism the most effective framework for understanding how people in China are making sense of the world today? These are among the questions raised by Allen Carlson in his 2009 article ‘A flawed perspective: the limitations inherent within the study of Chinese nationalism’, which developed a provocative critique of decades of scholarship. Acknowledging the insights of Carlton's questions while disagreeing with his proposed conceptual shift towards national identity construction, I propose a further shift towards national identity deconstruction. In doing so, I combine the political insights of Hong Kong nationalists with the theoretical insights of deconstruction. This shift redirects the study of Chinese nationalism away from an abstract conceptualisation of nationalism to a more precise definition of the phenomena under study, as well as moving the debate on potential impacts away from international relations to consideration of the complex dynamics of China's ethnic politics. New definitions of both nationalism and minzu (of minzu zhuyi) are developed, reconceptualising the phenomena heretofore known as ‘Chinese nationalism’ as external symptoms of underlying tensions between conflicting identity narratives. In conclusion, the practical implications of this reconceptualisation are considered, exploring potential future paths for the People's Republic of China.
Since 2017, it has become increasingly undeniable that crimes against humanity are occurring in t... more Since 2017, it has become increasingly undeniable that crimes against humanity are occurring in the area now known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. This article examines the particular ethical dilemmas posed to China-focused academics by these events. A generation of researchers who began their careers engaging with a “rising power” now face a state openly engaged in genocide. Academics who have come to see their jobs as “understanding” China now face realities beyond comprehension. Speaking honestly is the only dignified option, but it is at the same time also the most difficult path, on account of the Chinese state’s aggressive monitoring of public commentary, control over research access, and extraterritorial harassment of critics. How are research and academic discourse on China impacted by these developments? And what can academics do, or not, to live up to the urgent challenges of this historical moment?
Four decades after radically reinterpreting global relations of knowledge and power, what can Ori... more Four decades after radically reinterpreting global relations of knowledge and power, what can Orientalism tell us about the relationship between Beijing and Hong Kong today? Drawing upon recent studies that critique Said’s exclusive focus on the East-West binary to re-envision Orientalism as one of multiple grammars of identification operating across multiple binaries, this paper expands Said’s knowledge/power framework to analyze academic studies of Hong Kong from today’s metropole, Beijing. I examine three examples of Beijing’s Hong Kong-ology, arguing that each constructs and reproduces the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) colonial mythologies across the Hong Kong–Beijing nexus. The first, a book by Jiang Shigong, argues that the brilliance of One Country, Two Systems proves the superiority of the PRC political system, thereby rendering the maintenance of two systems unnecessary. The second, an article on localism in the official journal of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong ...
In the five years since February 2009, over 100 Tibetan monks have self-immolated in protest of t... more In the five years since February 2009, over 100 Tibetan monks have self-immolated in protest of the Chinese occupation in their lands. Most have died from their wounds. "If Tibetans saw even a sliver of an opportunity to hold demonstrations, then they would not resort to self-immolation," Woeser, the dissident Tibetan poet, has written in The New York Times. The Tibetans she references includes herself: a prominent voice of the Tibetan movement, and one of the few Tibetan authors to write in Chinese, Woeser has been placed under house arrest in and lives under close surveillance. Tibet On Fire is her account of the oppression Tibetans face, and the ideals driving both the self immolators and other Tibetans like herself. Angry and clear, Tibet On Fire is a clarion call for the world to take note.
On 24 July 2012, the Sansha People’s Government was established on an anthropogenic island in the... more On 24 July 2012, the Sansha People’s Government was established on an anthropogenic island in the South China Sea, more than 350 kilometers from the southernmost point of Hainan Province. Sansha is the PRC’s smallest city, occupying roughly ten square kilometers on Woody Island and housing a population of just over a thousand; at the same time, it is also the PRC’s largest city, symbolically laying claim to thousands of kilometers of space in the South China Sea. Alongside the ambitious logistical and military projects to build Sansha into part of China, highlighting an official shift from temporal to territorial nationalism, a corresponding state aesthetic project has consolidated in citizens’ minds a distant island that most will never see. The resulting cultural products portray a new addition of territory as an eternal part of China, while a remote island is constructed as an integral yet also mystical part of the nation-state. Examining artistic portrayals of the island across mediums including film, poetry, and painting, this article critically analyzes newly emerging trends in state and popular nationalism in China today.
by Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, 445–465. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cribb, Robert and ... more by Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, 445–465. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cribb, Robert and Charles A. Coppel. 2009. “AGenocide that Never Was: Explaining the Myth of Anti-Chinese Massacres in Indonesia, 1965-66.” Journal of Genocide Research 11 (4): 447–465. Crouch, Harold. 1978. The Army and Politics in Indonesia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dwyer, Leslie. 2014. “Picturing Violence: Anti-Politics and the Act of Killing.” Critical Asian Studies 46 (1): 183–188. Farid, Hilmar. 2005. “Indonesia’s Original Sin: Mass Killings and Capitalist Expansion, 1965-66.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6 (1): 3–16. Hughes, John. 1967. Indonesian Upheaval. New York: David McKay Company. Kammen, Douglas. 2017. “World Turned Upside Down: Benedict Anderson, Ruth McVey and the ‘Cornell Paper’.” Indonesia 104: 1–26. Kammen, Douglas, and Katherine MacGregor, eds. 2012. The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965-68. Singapore: NUS Press. Knight, G. Roger. 2012. “From Merdeka! To Massacre: The Politics of Sugar in the Early Years of the Indonesian Republic.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 43 (3): 402–421. Melvin, Jess. 2013. “Why Not Genocide? Anti-Chinese Violence in Aceh, 1965-66.” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 32 (3): 63–91. Pohlman, Annie. 2015. Women, Sexual Violence and the Indonesian Killings of 1965-66. New York: Routledge. Scott, Peter Dale. 1985. “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967.” Pacific Affairs 58 (2): 239–264. Sulistyo, Hermawan. 1997. “The Forgotten Years: The Missing History of Indonesia’s Mass Slaughter.” PhD diss., Arizona State University. Sundhaussen, Ulf. 1982. The Road to Power: Indonesian Military Politics, 1945-1967. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.
In late 2015 and early 2016, a low-budget independent film entitled Ten Years unexpectedly topped... more In late 2015 and early 2016, a low-budget independent film entitled Ten Years unexpectedly topped box office sales and provoked widespread discussion in Hong Kong. The film is composed of five fictional narratives from Hong Kong in 2025: false flag violence to force the passage of a national security law; a grocery owner harassed by Red Guard-like youth for using the banned term ‘local’ to describe his locally produced eggs; a taxi driver ostracized for his inability to speak the ‘national language’; and a self-immolator sacrificing herself in front of the British Embassy. These five distinct narratives coalesce around a common theme of anxiety about the political, cultural and social future of Hong Kong within the People’s Republic of China (PRC). How did these fictional scenarios come to dominate discussion on Hong Kong’s future in 2016? The symbols featured in Ten Years are not in any sense arbitrary: importantly, the blending of symbols from the two political spaces of Hong Kong...
Most histories have analyzed China’s 1983 Campaign to Eliminate Spiritual Pollution through the l... more Most histories have analyzed China’s 1983 Campaign to Eliminate Spiritual Pollution through the lens of elite politics. This article proposes a new interpretation of “spiritual pollution,” drawing upon anthropological theories of taboo and pollution to reinterpret the campaign’s role in reform-era culture and identity construction. The early reform era was a time of collapsing social borders that erased the obsessively delineated identities of the previous decades. Within this context, I reinterpret the struggle against spiritual pollution as an attempt to employ taboos to reinstate schematic boundaries in a world suddenly in flux. This process of post-Maoist boundary building particularly focused upon the distinction between “East” and “West,” as well as the distinction between the economic and political realms. The results of the campaign can still be seen today: the construction of a pure official identity based in overcoming Mao-era economic taboos alongside the perpetuation of political and cultural taboos.
How can we as educators address complex and controversial topics in the social sciences without e... more How can we as educators address complex and controversial topics in the social sciences without encouraging simplistic responses and self-reproducing binary oppositions? Drawing upon an ethnographic analysis of a first-year writing seminar on the history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, this article proposes novel approaches to overcome instinctive reactions to contentious topics. Arguing that the experience of controversy produces self-reinforcing binary oppositions that become autopoetically abstracted from the actual topic of discussion, I build upon specific seminar experiences to propose two novel and practical concepts for the pedagogy of controversy: (1) deidentification, which refers to a process of disengagement from the binaries and thus identities that structure and reproduce controversy, and (2) humanisation, which refers to a process of moving beyond abstractions to reidentify with the fundamentally human experience of contentious historical moments. The pedagogy of ...
What is Chinese nationalism? Is nationalism the most effective framework for understanding how pe... more What is Chinese nationalism? Is nationalism the most effective framework for understanding how people in China are making sense of the world today? These are among the questions raised by Allen Carlson in his 2009 article ‘A flawed perspective: the limitations inherent within the study of Chinese nationalism’, which developed a provocative critique of decades of scholarship. Acknowledging the insights of Carlton's questions while disagreeing with his proposed conceptual shift towards national identity construction, I propose a further shift towards national identity deconstruction. In doing so, I combine the political insights of Hong Kong nationalists with the theoretical insights of deconstruction. This shift redirects the study of Chinese nationalism away from an abstract conceptualisation of nationalism to a more precise definition of the phenomena under study, as well as moving the debate on potential impacts away from international relations to consideration of the complex dynamics of China's ethnic politics. New definitions of both nationalism and minzu (of minzu zhuyi) are developed, reconceptualising the phenomena heretofore known as ‘Chinese nationalism’ as external symptoms of underlying tensions between conflicting identity narratives. In conclusion, the practical implications of this reconceptualisation are considered, exploring potential future paths for the People's Republic of China.
Since 2017, it has become increasingly undeniable that crimes against humanity are occurring in t... more Since 2017, it has become increasingly undeniable that crimes against humanity are occurring in the area now known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. This article examines the particular ethical dilemmas posed to China-focused academics by these events. A generation of researchers who began their careers engaging with a “rising power” now face a state openly engaged in genocide. Academics who have come to see their jobs as “understanding” China now face realities beyond comprehension. Speaking honestly is the only dignified option, but it is at the same time also the most difficult path, on account of the Chinese state’s aggressive monitoring of public commentary, control over research access, and extraterritorial harassment of critics. How are research and academic discourse on China impacted by these developments? And what can academics do, or not, to live up to the urgent challenges of this historical moment?
Four decades after radically reinterpreting global relations of knowledge and power, what can Ori... more Four decades after radically reinterpreting global relations of knowledge and power, what can Orientalism tell us about the relationship between Beijing and Hong Kong today? Drawing upon recent studies that critique Said’s exclusive focus on the East-West binary to re-envision Orientalism as one of multiple grammars of identification operating across multiple binaries, this paper expands Said’s knowledge/power framework to analyze academic studies of Hong Kong from today’s metropole, Beijing. I examine three examples of Beijing’s Hong Kong-ology, arguing that each constructs and reproduces the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) colonial mythologies across the Hong Kong–Beijing nexus. The first, a book by Jiang Shigong, argues that the brilliance of One Country, Two Systems proves the superiority of the PRC political system, thereby rendering the maintenance of two systems unnecessary. The second, an article on localism in the official journal of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong ...
In the five years since February 2009, over 100 Tibetan monks have self-immolated in protest of t... more In the five years since February 2009, over 100 Tibetan monks have self-immolated in protest of the Chinese occupation in their lands. Most have died from their wounds. "If Tibetans saw even a sliver of an opportunity to hold demonstrations, then they would not resort to self-immolation," Woeser, the dissident Tibetan poet, has written in The New York Times. The Tibetans she references includes herself: a prominent voice of the Tibetan movement, and one of the few Tibetan authors to write in Chinese, Woeser has been placed under house arrest in and lives under close surveillance. Tibet On Fire is her account of the oppression Tibetans face, and the ideals driving both the self immolators and other Tibetans like herself. Angry and clear, Tibet On Fire is a clarion call for the world to take note.
On 24 July 2012, the Sansha People’s Government was established on an anthropogenic island in the... more On 24 July 2012, the Sansha People’s Government was established on an anthropogenic island in the South China Sea, more than 350 kilometers from the southernmost point of Hainan Province. Sansha is the PRC’s smallest city, occupying roughly ten square kilometers on Woody Island and housing a population of just over a thousand; at the same time, it is also the PRC’s largest city, symbolically laying claim to thousands of kilometers of space in the South China Sea. Alongside the ambitious logistical and military projects to build Sansha into part of China, highlighting an official shift from temporal to territorial nationalism, a corresponding state aesthetic project has consolidated in citizens’ minds a distant island that most will never see. The resulting cultural products portray a new addition of territory as an eternal part of China, while a remote island is constructed as an integral yet also mystical part of the nation-state. Examining artistic portrayals of the island across mediums including film, poetry, and painting, this article critically analyzes newly emerging trends in state and popular nationalism in China today.
by Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, 445–465. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cribb, Robert and ... more by Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, 445–465. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cribb, Robert and Charles A. Coppel. 2009. “AGenocide that Never Was: Explaining the Myth of Anti-Chinese Massacres in Indonesia, 1965-66.” Journal of Genocide Research 11 (4): 447–465. Crouch, Harold. 1978. The Army and Politics in Indonesia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dwyer, Leslie. 2014. “Picturing Violence: Anti-Politics and the Act of Killing.” Critical Asian Studies 46 (1): 183–188. Farid, Hilmar. 2005. “Indonesia’s Original Sin: Mass Killings and Capitalist Expansion, 1965-66.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6 (1): 3–16. Hughes, John. 1967. Indonesian Upheaval. New York: David McKay Company. Kammen, Douglas. 2017. “World Turned Upside Down: Benedict Anderson, Ruth McVey and the ‘Cornell Paper’.” Indonesia 104: 1–26. Kammen, Douglas, and Katherine MacGregor, eds. 2012. The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965-68. Singapore: NUS Press. Knight, G. Roger. 2012. “From Merdeka! To Massacre: The Politics of Sugar in the Early Years of the Indonesian Republic.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 43 (3): 402–421. Melvin, Jess. 2013. “Why Not Genocide? Anti-Chinese Violence in Aceh, 1965-66.” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 32 (3): 63–91. Pohlman, Annie. 2015. Women, Sexual Violence and the Indonesian Killings of 1965-66. New York: Routledge. Scott, Peter Dale. 1985. “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967.” Pacific Affairs 58 (2): 239–264. Sulistyo, Hermawan. 1997. “The Forgotten Years: The Missing History of Indonesia’s Mass Slaughter.” PhD diss., Arizona State University. Sundhaussen, Ulf. 1982. The Road to Power: Indonesian Military Politics, 1945-1967. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.
In late 2015 and early 2016, a low-budget independent film entitled Ten Years unexpectedly topped... more In late 2015 and early 2016, a low-budget independent film entitled Ten Years unexpectedly topped box office sales and provoked widespread discussion in Hong Kong. The film is composed of five fictional narratives from Hong Kong in 2025: false flag violence to force the passage of a national security law; a grocery owner harassed by Red Guard-like youth for using the banned term ‘local’ to describe his locally produced eggs; a taxi driver ostracized for his inability to speak the ‘national language’; and a self-immolator sacrificing herself in front of the British Embassy. These five distinct narratives coalesce around a common theme of anxiety about the political, cultural and social future of Hong Kong within the People’s Republic of China (PRC). How did these fictional scenarios come to dominate discussion on Hong Kong’s future in 2016? The symbols featured in Ten Years are not in any sense arbitrary: importantly, the blending of symbols from the two political spaces of Hong Kong...
Most histories have analyzed China’s 1983 Campaign to Eliminate Spiritual Pollution through the l... more Most histories have analyzed China’s 1983 Campaign to Eliminate Spiritual Pollution through the lens of elite politics. This article proposes a new interpretation of “spiritual pollution,” drawing upon anthropological theories of taboo and pollution to reinterpret the campaign’s role in reform-era culture and identity construction. The early reform era was a time of collapsing social borders that erased the obsessively delineated identities of the previous decades. Within this context, I reinterpret the struggle against spiritual pollution as an attempt to employ taboos to reinstate schematic boundaries in a world suddenly in flux. This process of post-Maoist boundary building particularly focused upon the distinction between “East” and “West,” as well as the distinction between the economic and political realms. The results of the campaign can still be seen today: the construction of a pure official identity based in overcoming Mao-era economic taboos alongside the perpetuation of political and cultural taboos.
How can we as educators address complex and controversial topics in the social sciences without e... more How can we as educators address complex and controversial topics in the social sciences without encouraging simplistic responses and self-reproducing binary oppositions? Drawing upon an ethnographic analysis of a first-year writing seminar on the history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, this article proposes novel approaches to overcome instinctive reactions to contentious topics. Arguing that the experience of controversy produces self-reinforcing binary oppositions that become autopoetically abstracted from the actual topic of discussion, I build upon specific seminar experiences to propose two novel and practical concepts for the pedagogy of controversy: (1) deidentification, which refers to a process of disengagement from the binaries and thus identities that structure and reproduce controversy, and (2) humanisation, which refers to a process of moving beyond abstractions to reidentify with the fundamentally human experience of contentious historical moments. The pedagogy of ...
Uploads
Books by Kevin Carrico
Papers by Kevin Carrico