Emperor Han Wu of Qin, slightly lost wencai; Tang Zong songzu, slightly inferior; a generation of tianjiao, Genghis Khan, only knew how to bend the bow and shoot the big eagle.
——Mao Zedong, "Qinyuan Spring and Snow"
In Mao Zedong's famous poem "Qinyuan Chun Xue", Genghis Khan is described as a "generation of heavenly pride" (although it appears as a negative contrast) of the Qin Emperor Han Wu and the Tang Emperor Song Zu. In textbooks, Genghis Khan is described as a great hero of the Chinese nation. When did Genghis Khan, as the ancestor of the Mongols, become a hero of the Chinese nation? To answer this question, we must start with two figures in China's modern history, Zhang Taiyan and Yang Du.
Zhang Taiyan and Yang Du
In the last years of the Qing Dynasty, as the Western cannons opened the door of China, China's traditional social order and spiritual order were subjected to a comprehensive and fundamental impact, and people exclaimed that China was facing "a major change that has not occurred in three thousand years". In the field of national construction, people have gradually discovered that the legal system of "fengtian transportation" in the past is no longer effective, and the sovereignty of the country must fall above the universally homogeneous common people. Therefore, the question of "what is Chinese people" is put before people. At a time of great thought, Liang Qichao introduced Western nationalist ideas to China by advocating a new historiography. However, the dispute did not end, and the revolutionaries and constitutionalists (or reformers) adopted different interpretations of the definition of "nation", and Zhang Taiyan and Yang Du could serve as representatives of the two factions.
The revolutionary Zhang Taiyan adopted an essentialist understanding of "nationality", believing that the Han Manchus, Mongolians, Tibetans, and hui belonged to different nationalities. The Manchus, who were rulers at the time, were the focus of their attacks. Zhang Taiyan combined the essentialist concept of nationality with Han cultural centrism and folk sentiment of Pai Manchu, comparing the Manchus to the ancient Rong Di and the dogs, sheep, animals and beasts, and advocating their expulsion from the land of China. He thus demarcated the boundaries of China, "the two counties of Vietnam and Korea, which must be restored; the first division of Burma, is slightly inferior; tibet, Huibu, and Mongolia are allowed to come and go." This Han centrism was accepted by the early revolutionaries, and after joining the revolutionary demands, it was epitomized as the program of the League: "To drive out the Tartars, restore China, establish the Republic of China, and equalize land rights."
Zhang Taiyan is like
Yang Du was once a representative of the constitutionalists, and he held a realistic attitude toward the concept of "nation", advocating the construction of a political nationalism based on political reality and historical composition. He believed that the actual situation in China at that time was that if each ethnic group formed a nation-state, China would split into a number of small countries, which would be annexed one by one by the British, Russian, German, and Japanese powers, and the Han chinese would not be secured. Therefore, China should adopt a constitutional monarchy, using the monarch as a link to maintain the unity of all ethnic groups, and then implement different systems in each ethnic group, so that all ethnic groups can develop to the same level, and finally achieve homogeneous unity. It doesn't matter if the constitutional monarch is full of Han, because the monarch is a state apparatus, and the state apparatus belongs to no ethnic group, which has no influence on the political state.
Yang Du statue
Nation-states and empires
These two different paths of nationality are a psychological divergence that prevailed during the empire's transformation into a modern nation-state. The Ottoman Turkish Empire, which collapsed during World War I, had a similar performance. People of insight at that time also tried to construct the so-called Ottomanism on the basis of imperial territory and race; or on the basis of Islam, to construct pan-Islamism; or to build pan-Turkism on the basis of Turkic ethnic groups. But these efforts have failed. Finally, through the Kemal Revolution, Turkey basically abandoned the non-Turkic regions of the Ottoman Empire and the spiritual pursuit of other Turkic regions, took the road of secularization, and shaped the modern Turks and Turkish territories to the limits of real power. However, the Turks' grand pursuit of the spiritual world has not disappeared, especially after the end of the Cold War, when there was a power vacuum in the territory of the former Soviet Union, and such trends as "neo-Ottomanism" and "neo-Pan-Turkism" have re-emerged, which has been affecting the situation in the world today.
The reason why the traditional empire is called an empire is that it forms a pattern of difference from the center to the periphery in the ruling order, which inevitably has pluralism in ethnic groups, regions, and cultures. For an empire to survive for a long time, it is not enough to rely solely on the conquest and maintenance of force; it must have a spiritual order of cultural or religious idealism that transcends ethnic and regional differences as a source of legitimacy for its rule. In traditional China, the Huayi order, with the Confucian ideal of tianxia as the basic framework, provided such a spiritual order, and even the Qing Dynasty, ruled by the Manchus, still used this as a structural appearance. Under the imperial ideal, when the imperial order is relatively stable, the national attribute is not very important.
But with the establishment of the Westphalian system, the concept of the nation-state emerged from Europe and stood out in the process of modernization of France and Germany, becoming the mainstream of the modern international order. This was a great shock to the original imperial ideals and order. These simple identity symbols such as ethnicity, region, and language became excellent material for the construction of nationalities, and they were widely involved in the political mobilization of nationalist movements. The differences between the various parts of the empire were magnified, and the tendency to separate became more pronounced. In this way, nationalist ideologies constantly dismembered the body of the empire and dissolved the spirit of the empire. Empires were generally caught up in the tide of nationalism, either actively joining the war (such as the Ottoman Turkish Empire) or passively involved in the war (such as the Qing Empire).
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was called "Sultan of the New Era" by The Economist for his enthusiasm for "neo-Ottomanism"
In the face of shock, the Empire is not helpless. The people under the rule of the Empire showed general mental anxiety in the face of the internal crisis of disintegration and the severe external situation. They tried to find ways to mobilize and integrate the entire population of the empire, generally including political nationalism (such as Ottomanism), pan-culturalism (such as pan-Islamism), pan-racism (such as pan-Turkism), etc., but all were essentially new group constructions. This construction will encounter various dilemmas and will often be difficult to succeed.
For example, to replace the original imperial spiritual order with a new group concept, its legitimacy will be questioned by spiritual relics and cultural conservatism; whether the new group concept can become the public identity of different ethnic groups is a more serious challenge to whether it can be fully accepted by various ethnic groups; the new group concept may go beyond the scope of the empire itself and arouse the suspicion of neighboring countries. In short, compared with the essentialist national construction, the spiritual reconstruction of the empire as a whole is quite difficult, and it is often necessary to rely on existing public resources (such as Yang Du's insistence on constitutional monarchy, that is, he values the role of the monarchy as a link) and the coercive promotion of the government, but it is likely that it still cannot meet the actual domestic mobilization needs, and has to give way to essential nationalism with strong mobilization efficiency.
New Frontier Crisis and Genghis Khan's Mausoleum
The essential nationalism of the revolutionaries is epitomized by anti-Manchuism, that is, "expelling the Tatars and restoring China." Their flag during the Wuchang Uprising was the "Eighteen Star Banner", symbolizing the Eighteen Provinces of The Han Dynasty. But when the Provisional Government of the Republic of China was established in Nanjing, Sun Yat-sen, after realizing that the revolutionary situation had been dominated by the constitutionalists in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, accepted the latter's idea of a "republic of the five nationalities". China's national philosophy seems to have officially expanded from Han nationalism to Chinese nationalism based on the qing dynasty. However, things are not so simple. After the reorganization of the Kuomintang, when Sun Yat-sen systematically expounded his national ideals, although he recognized the Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan, and others as Chinese, "the total number of foreigners was only 10 million." Therefore, most people say that forty million Chinese can be said to be completely Han Chinese." It can be seen that he still regards ethnic minorities as "foreign" ethnic groups, and the Chinese nation he imagines is actually Han national centrism.
The real change occurred during the War of Resistance. While sending troops to China, the Japanese military department also actively formulated a Manchu-Mongolian policy to split China's northern territory. They supported the puppet regime of puppet Manchukuo in the northeast; they established three puppet regimes in central and western Inner Mongolia, and in 1939 they united them to form the "Mongolian-Xinjiang United Autonomous Government", with ambitions pointing directly to Xinjiang. In the field of culture, through institutions such as the Good Neighbor Association and the Xingya Yishu Academy, we cultivate pro-Japanese talents who are proficient in Mongolian, Tibetan Buddhism, Islam and other cultures; we have carried out research on many ethnic groups of the Altaic language family, trying to separate the Manchu and Mongolian Hui (Tibet) from the Central Plains in the historical narrative, and establish a pro-Japanese "pan-Altaic national group" (japanese is also considered a branch of the Altaic language family) in the local area to support these "brother ethnic groups" to carry out national self-determination.
Not only Japan, but many of the great powers at that time had separatist forces that they supported. Japan supported Manchuria and Inner Mongolia; Outer Mongolia had been substantially separated from Russia as early as the Tsarist period, and Xinjiang had become a de facto vassal region of the Soviet Union; Britain, based in India, was eyeing Tibet; Britain, Japan, and other countries talked about the homologous relations between southwest China and Southeast Asia, Burma, Thailand, and other people. The hearts and minds of the people in the border areas are fluctuating, and China is facing another deep border crisis.
The crisis was a wake-up call for Chinese at the time. Before the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Nationalist government's main area of activity was in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River and the southeast coast, and then the Red Army that encircled and suppressed the Long March penetrated deep into the southwest, while the northern frontier remained in a semi-laissez-faire state. After the beginning of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the drastically changed military geographical situation made the southwest and northwest a strategic rear area, and the Nationalist government began to actively promote the construction of the northwest; the Nationalist government moved the capital to Chongqing, and the southwest and northwest also became the focus of the Nationalist government's rule. Only then did the northern frontier and ethnic minorities truly move from imagination to reality, and the "Republic of the Five Nationalities" changed from slogan to practice. In the academic circles, Fu Sinian and Gu Jiegang also realized the huge problem of Han nationalism, actively advocated the concept of the Chinese nation that transcended Han centralism, and put forward the slogan of "the Chinese nation is one". However, for the substantive concept of the Chinese nation, they unconsciously shape it as a certain extension of the Han nationality, such as emphasizing the "descendants of Yanhuang" in the narrative, which may not be recognized by ethnic minorities.
On August 25, 2019, the site of the 80th anniversary of the westward relocation of Genghis Khan's mausoleum to Xinglong Mountain
After Japan instigated the establishment of the "Mongolian-Xinjiang United Autonomous Government" in Inner Mongolia, the army rushed to the tomb of Genghis Khan in Ijinholo. Japan intended to move Chengling to its sphere of influence and use the supreme ancestor worship and spiritual totem of the Mongols to better control the Mongol region. In early 1939, Shakdur Zhabu, the head of the Yikezhao League and chief priest of Chengling, rushed to Chongqing to request the Nationalist government to move Chengling west to safety. In this regard, both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party welcomed it, and specially held ceremonies and wrote sacrifices to sacrifice.
Kuomintang and Communist Party
After receiving the request, the National Government attached great importance to it and made detailed arrangements for the route of the relocation and the escort along the way. From its departure in June 1939 to its arrival at Xinglong Mountain in Gansu on July 1 of the same year, the westward migration of Chengling lasted for a month, and a grand ceremony was held every time it passed through a city. The Shaanxi Provincial Party Department of the Kuomintang also issued a commemorative album entitled "Genghis Khan, Hero of the Chinese Nation," saying that Genghis Khan "can be a great talent for the Chinese nation, and he is only one person after emperors of qin, Han, Wu, and Tang Taizong." Interestingly, when passing through the Yellow Emperor's mausoleum, he also worshiped the Yellow Emperor in the name of "The Yellow Emperor is the common ancestor of my Mongolian and Han dynasties, and today by chance, I intend to go to worship the Yellow Emperor". After arriving at Xinglong Mountain, Chiang Kai-shek personally went to the scene and "paid tribute to the spirit of Genghis Khan, my ancestor of the Yuan Dynasty." From then until 1949, the Nationalist government would send people to the festival every year. When the sacrifice is made, the sacrifice is first made with the ritual set by the government, and then the traditional Mongolian sacrifice is used.
This westward migration is of great significance. The first is the significance of the war of resistance, when both the Han and Mongolian tribes attached the history of the Yuan Dynasty's expedition to Japan to current events, portrayed Genghis Khan as a pioneer in the war against Japan, and inspired the two ethnic groups to resist to the end. Secondly, the significance of ethnic integration, the Han and Mongolian ethnic groups jointly respect Genghis Khan, the Yellow Emperor, and the government sacrifices and Mongolian rituals have appeared successively, all showing the National Government's attempt to knead the concept of the "Chinese nation" and dominate the process of national integration. The Nationalist government posthumously posthumously honored Genghis Khan as "Emperor Wu of Qin and Emperor Taizong of Tang" and designated him "Yuan Taizu", reflecting the deep-rooted view of history in the Central Plains.
When the Chengling westward migration procession passed through Yan'an, the Communist Party also arranged a grand greeting and sacrifice activity, "Yan'an party, government, military, and civilian academic circles, I would like to pay tribute to the spirit of Genghis Khan, the ancestor of the Shengwu Emperor Yuan Taizu." After that, the Mongolian Culture Promotion Association was established in the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region, the Genghis Khan Memorial Hall and the Mongolian Culture Exhibition Room were established in Yan'an, and the Genghis Khan Grand Festival was held twice a year in spring and summer, and Mao Zedong and Zhu De both presided over the sacrifice.
On June 29, 1939, Mao Zedong led people of all ethnic groups and all walks of life to pay tribute to the coffin of Genghis Khan passing through Yan'an
In the Communist Party's sacrifice words, there are also the concepts of the Chinese nation such as "the Chinese nation" and "Mongolian Yuan Taizu" that proceed from the historical concept of the Han nationality, but compared with the "matchmaking" of the Han and Mongolian nationalities by the National Government, the Communist Party's sacrifice words more recognize the relative independence of the two ethnic groups, "(for the Japanese army invading China) Han and Mongolian nationalities, all have a thorn in the eye", "Han has Han traitors, and there are blind thieves"; it also expresses the common goal of the people of all ethnic groups, "equality and freedom, common purpose, although the road is difficult, care about efforts"; it also gives Genghis Khan a world significance, "Mengyuan Taizu, Heroes of the World". All this shows that the Ideology of the Communist Party is different from that of the Kuomintang (the Right). Before the founding of the People's Republic of China, in order to win the support of ethnic minorities, the Communist Party supported the "right to self-determination" of ethnic minorities under tyranny, and portrayed the Kuomintang as a Han chauvinist image that exploited and squeezed ethnic minorities. This is a policy choice influenced by Stalin's national theory and combined with China's reality.
The policy of the Communist Party is that there should be equality and autonomy among all ethnic groups in the country, that the Han and ethnic minorities are different ethnic groups under the Chinese nation (no longer emphasizing "one"); at the same time, using the theory of class struggle to open up ethnic differences, the Han ruling class represented by Chiang Kai-shek does not represent the Han nationality, but represents the big bourgeoisie, and the Communist Party leads the working people of all ethnic groups to overthrow the ruling class of the Han nationality. Thus the nations attained complete equality under a common class, and their common aim was to complete the democratic revolution, overthrow the ruling class and establish people's power. Such a class theory can be extended to the whole world, giving its cause the significance and possibility of a world revolution.
The history of the construction of the Chinese nation is a rather complex process, and the above is only a simple generalization. However, the history of the evolution of the concept of nationality in it does form the basis of the current situation of the Chinese nation today. Today, when the concept of class is slowly fading, what kind of spiritual force can be used to unite and unify the various nationalities with regional autonomy is a major challenge to China's ethnic theory and policy.
*This article is adapted from Shi Zhan's "Hub - Three Thousand Years of China"
Hub: 3,000 Years of China
Author: Shi Zhan
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