Towards the “Great Rejuvenation”: State Nationalism, Shifting Identities, and Foreign Policy Choices in Contemporary China

The chapter explores the intimate relationship between the changing domestic strategies employed by the Chinese government to safeguard political consensus and national cohesion, the evolving official narrative related to China’s perceptions and self-perceptions in the global arena, and its shifting attitude in the diplomatic realm. Accordingly, the analysis is firstly devoted to acquainting the reader with the notion of nationalism from a theoretical standpoint, by recalling the scholarly debate on its roots, variants, and outcomes from an IR perspective, as well as the unique features pertaining to China’s own representation of such a concept. The subsequent section looks at the pivotal turning points in the historical process of inception, diffusion, and metamorphosis of the Chinese political discourse on nationalism, with the aim of scrutinizing the key features entailed in its three fundamental waves: the nascent stage culminated in two revolutions between 1911 and 1949, the post-Cold War era characterized by the ascendance of state-led patriotism as an antidote to the dismissal of the official ideology, and the ongoing phase marked by an unprecedented confluence of “top-down” and “bottom-up” nationalist appeals. Finally, the concluding paragraph investigates the consequences stemming from the aforementioned phenomena in the field of China’s foreign policy, with a focus on the case-study provided by the recent deterioration in Sino-Japanese ties.