Great Han

Abstract

The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today is an ethnographic study of China’s Han Clothing Movement, a racial nationalist and neo-traditionalist group that has emerged in cities across China since 2001. The movement’s stated mission is promoting a purportedly ancient style of ethnic clothing for the Han race, to revitalize tradition and thus revitalize the Han and its nation, China. The first half of the book examines the movement’s origins, tracing its emergence within the cracks and contradictions of Han and Chinese identity. Caught between the boundless and romanticized rhetoric of five millennia of traditional culture and the limiting and disillusioning reality of everyday life in China’s metropolises, the Han Clothing Movement and its images of greatness have arisen as a symptom of these tensions within the national experience. The second half of the book demonstrates how this symptom also provides a fleeting cure. The movement’s cultural products aim to transcend the reality of China to realize an imagined “real China”- a land of rites and etiquette where society and life function flawlessly. These aspirations are unfolded through detailed examinations of movement practices surrounding clothing, ritual, etiquette, and, somewhat less predictably, conspiracy theory and digital photography as steps towards the construction and stabilization of an idealized image of Han glory. In their war on reality, the movement’s fantasy image of Han-ness and Chineseness can only ever be realized fleetingly- identity, The Great Han argues, is a paradoxical self-reproducing system fueled by the very affective tensions produced in its failure.