A sacred place for the Chinese

 people everywhere

 

 

By TOMOYOSHI ISOGAWA/ The Asahi Shimbun GLOBE

In the outskirts of Zhengzhou, Henan Province, stands a stone wall bearing some 3,000 closely carved Chinese characters. It is said these engraved ideograms, each measuring 30 square centimeters, encompass almost all Chinese surnames: Li, Wang, Zhang, Liu, Chen, Yang, Huang and so on.

The wall stands in a corner of a large square in the district of Zhongyuan, the birthplace of the "Yellow Emperor" Huangdi.

Zhongyuan was the heartland of ancient China, and its 70,000 square kilometers now boast huge squares and numerous buildings.

The Yellow Emperor was born there approximately 5,000 years ago, and legend has it that he brought civilization to the area. The archaeological basis for this is unclear, but he appears in the Chinese history book "Records of the Grand Historian" and is regarded as one of the founders of Chinese civilization on par with his contemporary, Emperor Yandi. It is often said that the Chinese people are "the descendants of Huangdi and Yandi."

The carved stone wall allows these descendents to find their own name and confirm their connection to that lineage.

In the next square, rows of yellow flags bear the phrases "same root, same ancestor, same origin" and "peace, intimacy and harmony." In the adjacent square, a festival is held annually on March 3 in the lunar calendar to pay tribute to ancestors. A seated marble figure of Huangdi, measuring around 5 meters in height, looks down on visitors while holding a treasured sword in its right hand. Another effigy is enshrined in a nearby museum.

While temples and other structures on the historical site are said to have undergone repeated restorations since the Han dynasty, the stone wall, marble figure and museum were built in this century.

They have swiftly become a sacred place both for Chinese nationals and ethnic Chinese living abroad. More than 10 percent of the 20,000 participants in last year's festival were ethnic Chinese from overseas, and as many as 100,000 a year are said to travel here from abroad.

"We are focused on gathering the strength of the Chinese people by utilizing our blood ties and fellowship as descendants of Huangdi and Yandi," says Wang Yan, deputy head of the historical site's management committee. In 2010, it was even designated as a "base for teaching patriotism" by an organization for returning Chinese expatriates.

The museum also displays calligraphy by Lian Zhan, the former premier of the Executive Yuan (prime minister) of Taiwan.

"The festival is a program that strengthens the bonds between our people on both shores (China and Taiwan), and promotes national unity at the same time," a museum guide explained.

A project is in the works that will double or even triple the area of the historical site and alter the surrounding townscape, creating a massive cultural zone. Beijing's Tsinghua University formulated the vision, and it is being undertaken as a national project.

Progress is also being made on the upgrade of a historical site closely connected to Yandi. About three hours by long-distance bus from downtown Zhuzhou City in Hunan Province, Yandi's oft-restored mausoleum has an adjacent palace that houses a 10-meter tall stone statue of the emperor. It was built during Jiang Zemin's presidency, when the county was renamed Yanling after Yandi. A large festival has come to be held here every few years by the provincial government.

"More descendants of Huangdi and Yandi are traveling here from around the world to visit their roots and pay tribute to their ancestors," says Liu Qi, head of the mausoleum's management office. "We didn't have enough room to accommodate all of the festival participants, so we built the palace."

ETHNIC REVIVAL AND GREATER CHINA

The Xi Jinping administration, which was inaugurated in autumn 2012, took the slogan of "a grand revival of the Chinese people." This expression has been used since the Jiang Zemin regime in the 1990s, but the subsequent Hu Jintao-led government placed an emphasis on "sustainable development" and a "harmonious society."

Xi's administration was driven by a major political shift to place the "revival" agenda at the fore.

After seeing the successive collapses of socialist dictatorships in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union since 1989, China's Communist Party changed tack to expand its market economy. The dual pillars of economic development and nationalism have taken the place of socialist ideology in bolstering the preservation of its autocratic rule. While the party has encouraged economic growth at a furious pace, it amended its constitution in 2002 to define itself as the "vanguard" of the Chinese people, giving it an additional identity as an ethnic political entity.

However, behind the scenes of this rapid economic development, dissatisfaction has grown among the populace over issues such as widening social inequality and corruption among party and government officials, creating a situation that is far from conducive to a "harmonious society." Furthermore, economic growth has shown signs of slowing in recent years. In the trend its twin pillar of nationalism have become the party's last resorts.

Its exhortations are also being directed beyond mainland China. Li Yuanchao, who was chosen as vice president of the People's Republic of China in March, made the following plea at a gathering of expat Chinese businesspeople in Beijing in January.

"I want our comrades overseas and our people in the homeland to join hands and devote themselves to the dream of building a China that can achieve an ethnic revival."

When talking about the direction of China as a nation, the existence of a "Greater China" that spreads out beyond the mainland cannot be ignored. Since the nation's reform and liberalization, investment from ethnic Chinese-owned conglomerates in Hong Kong, Taiwan and other regions across Southeast Asia served as the precursor for the current wave of investment in China and helped the nation blaze a trail toward economic growth.

Looking back through history for precedents, Chinese living overseas supported political leader Sun Yatsen in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 that deposed the Qing Dynasty. Considering the difficult political and economic obstacles that China currently faces, the assistance of Greater China now seen as more crucial than ever.

Even so, the fellowship of the "Chinese people" will not necessarily be sufficient to bring together those on the mainland and elsewhere who share this identity.

After all, the concept of a "Chinese people" emerged in modern times, and has strong political connotations. After the fall of the Manchu-dominated Qing Dynasty in the Xinhai Revolution, Han Chinese became the dominant ethnic group, and promoted nation-building with different ethnicities in order to keep hold of the country's vast national territory. During the Sino-Japanese War, a movement to group various ethnicities together as the "Chinese people" gained traction. This trend continued after the establishment of the People's Republic of China, and the current government uses the term "Chinese people" to refer to Han People and 55 other officially recognized ethnic minorities.

More than a few members of these ethnic minorities, with their various cultures and religions, feel little affinity with the concept of a Chinese people. There has been a recent spate of suicides by Tibetans in protest against the policies imposed on them by Han Chinese, and there has also been bloody conflict between Uigurs and Han Chinese. With the worship of Huangdi and Yandi as the forefathers of the Han Chinese becoming a social phenomenon, some minorities are opposed to it in the belief that it is destroying the unity among ethnicities. International human rights organizations have also criticized China's oppression of Tibetans and other groups.

Ethnic Chinese overseas are facing a difficult situation as well.

Many conglomerates are investing in the mainland hoping to profit, or to contribute to the development of the ancestral homeland. As China has achieved economic growth and received the world's attention, more and more ethnic Chinese overseas are taking pride in their ancestry.

But many third- or fourth-generation immigrants cannot speak Chinese and feel a stronger sense of belonging to the land where they were born and raised. The chief secretary of an ethnic Chinese organization in the Philippines, which is in disagreement with China over the sovereignty of islands in the South China Sea, stated to Chinese media that "Our generation will work for the benefit of the Philippines."

Many Chinese immigrants fled the country in the first place over disgust at the communist regime, and their rejection of the mainland, where little progress has been made toward democratization, has endured.

Sun Yat-sen once compared Chinese to "grains of sand." Today, utilitarianism and the desire to become a superpower are acting as unifying forces, but if the Chinese economy becomes stagnant or political instability arises, its momentum could ebb away.

On the other hand, the power of ethnic Chinese overseas who operate outside of the Communist Party regime and understand the views and thinking of the international community has the potential to influence China's nation-building and the very nature of its society.

Where is China headed? The quietly developing interaction within the sphere of Greater China provides one possible roadmap.