The Secret of Sinicization
As concerns spread over China's new ethnic unity law, let's reconsider what it really means to make individuals, cultures, and institutions "Chinese" in Xi Jinping's China.
When China’s new Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law came into effect on July 1, the key word for much of the international news coverage was “sinicization.”
Journalists focused, rightfully, on how the decree would affect the country’s 55 recognized ethnic minorities, diminishing the status of their languages and “forcing them to assimilate into the dominant Han culture.” These are very real threats; but to stop there, to treat Sinicization, in Communist Party parlance, as synonymous with Hanification, is to miss out on a crucial point. That is that, according to influential Party theorists and advisers, even ethnic Han people must be “Sinicized” as well — because it denotes not only the forceful spread of an ethnic identity but a political one.
Xi’s mission to Sinicize is nearly as old as his grip on power. He first unveiled the goal of “Sinicizing religion” (宗教中国化) at a meeting of the United Front Work Department of the Communist Party’s Central Committee in May 2015, kicking off a spree of cross-demolitions that targeted dozens of protestant churches throughout the eastern province of Zhejiang. The campaign accelerated with renewed vigour after the National Conference for Religious Work (全國宗教工作會議) in December 2021. There, Xi declared that “we must adhere to the direction of Sinicization of religion,” and “made the clear demand for the thorough promotion of the Sinicization of religion,” formalizing the goal of Sinicization mission in a list of “Nine Musts” (九個必須) that must be adhered to by all religious groups in the country.
The wave of Sinicization that swept the nation thereafter saw the partial or wholesale demolition of hundreds of mosques, from the deserts of Ningxia to the dusty Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and lush, tropical Yunnan. It has also seen China unilaterally appoint a new bishop in Shanghai, in breach of an agreement that gives the Vatican veto power over the appointment of senior clerics. And at the same time, Beijing also called for the “Sinicization” of Tibetan Buddhism, demanding it become “a promoter and guardian of national unity in the New Era.”
If the sudden need to “Sinicize” a religion that has adapted to embedded itself in Chinese culture over thousands of years — in a region, no less, that Beijing maintains has been a part of China since ancient times — sounds curious, consider the plight of New Confucianism (新儒家). Adherents of the philosophical school, which first arose in Republican China and later found favour among leading Hong Kong intellectuals after 1949, have been denounced as agents of Western influence by hardline intellectuals like Professor Jiang Shigong (強世功) of the Peking University law school. With even ethnic Han Confucianists on PRC territory needing to be Sinicized, it is worth interrogating what exactly the word means in Xi’s China.
“Sinicizing” the Chinese
When Jiang spoke of the foreignness of modern New Confucians, he was gesturing not to the cultural roots of this avowedly Chinese movement, but to its politics, which sought to synthesize Confucianism with Western philosophies such as rationalism and humanism, and to demonstrate how it is compatible with liberalism and democracy. While Jiang’s writing falls outside the realm of the official “Sinicization of religion” campaign, he provides an invaluable insight into the notion — namely, that it is not, at its core, about promoting Chinese culture or language at all.
Jiang, who served a stint with the Central Government’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong and continues to be a top advisor on Hong Kong policy, is a well-known proponent of Carl Schmitt, the German political theorist who helped clear the way for Hitler’s rise to power by providing the legal foundations of the Nazi regime. Schmitt’s belief that all politics rested on the distinction between friend and enemy was formative in Jiang’s views of Chinese politics in general and Hong Kong’s position in particular.
Schmitt wrote that “the political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly… But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger.” And Jiang has been even more upfront about real, material differences between friends and enemies is besides the point: “The crucial questions in politics are not questions of right and wrong but of obedience and disobedience,” according to Jiang. “If you do not submit to political authority, then ‘If I say you’re wrong, you’re wrong — even if you’re right.’”
Therefore, it does not matter that Hong Kong — spared the self-destructive convulsions of twentieth-century China — is in many ways more traditionally Chinese than the mainland. Nor does it matter that the philosophy grounding the Communist Party’s return to civilizational greatness takes its cues from ultra-right nationalism via 1930s Germany. All that matters is that the state possesses the power to make the all-important distinction between “us” and “them” and to compel others to follow it.
In a recent series of essays for HK01, Jiang notes that the Hong Kong cultural elites he earlier chided as too Westernized to grasp the profundity of Xi Jinping’s speeches had, in fact, retained Confucian rites, feudal hierarchies, and a classical language largely lost on the mainland. Paradoxically, they are both too Western and too Chinese. And it is actually the latter — an enduring sense of attachment to “cultural China” but not “political China” — that is even more dangerous to the Communist Party, for it represents what Jiang refers to as the ceding of “cultural leadership” (文化領導權):
The cultural regeneration system of Hong Kong’s core values remains unchanged, meaning that Hong Kong holds “cultural leadership” (or “soft power”) over the regeneration of legitimacy, thus giving rise to the problem of the “legitimacy” of the Central Government’s exercise of legal power in Hong Kong. This raises the question of the “legitimacy” of the Central Authorities’ exercise of legal power in Hong Kong. This “cultural leadership,” which revolves around “legitimacy,” has constantly challenged the legitimacy of the Central Government’s exercise of sovereignty in Hong Kong, which has led to cultural and political divisions within Hong Kong, and even the emergence of separatist ideas of “Hong Kong independence.”
Giving Hongkongers the space to articulate their identities as both Hong Kong and Chinese people, in other words, was a mistake that must not be repeated.
In 2004, the same year Jiang began his placement at the Central Government Liaison Office, hundreds of professionals and academics in the Special Administrative Region signed the “Hong Kong Core Values Declaration” (香港核心價值宣言). Published in newspapers citywide, the declaration called for the defence of Hong Kong’s threatened core values: liberty, democracy, human rights, rule of law, fairness, social justice, peace and compassion, integrity and transparency, plurality, respect for individuals, and upholding professionalism.
Local authorities never adopted the values in any official capacity, but they did spark a debate that lasted years. In the days after its release, elected officials in the Legislative Council discussed a motion on the statement, and the executive weighed in as well. Secretary for Constitutional Affairs Stephen Lam responded: “Hong Kong’s core values are not the preserve of the Government or any political organization. They represent the beliefs of Hong Kong people, and they underpin our way of life.”
For Jiang, this was a dangerous distinction. In his 2010 volume China’s Hong Kong: Political and Cultural Perspectives (中國香港：政治與文化的視野), he decried “the problems arising from the separation of politics and morality in the modern Western political tradition,” reiterating his understanding of Schmittian theory that there is no moral right or wrong beyond obedience and disobedience, friend or enemy. Wielding ultimate political and economic power over Hong Kong’s institutions was not enough: to truly complete the handover, Beijing needed to rule its hearts and minds, as well.
“Our understanding of sovereignty is often based on a legal perspective,” Jiang wrote, “while neglecting the fact that from a cultural perspective, sovereignty also means having the supreme power to decide on matters of truth and even religious values.”
What We Talk About When We Talk About Sinicization
In this way, the English language is ill-prepared to deal with the subtle yet meaningful distinctions in forms of “Sinicization” reflected in Chinese.
Historically, the process by which newly conquered peripheral populations were compelled to adopt the cultural norms of the Han Chinese heartland has been referred to as “Hanification” (漢化) or, occasionally, “Hua-ification” (華化). In the context of Hong Kong, the imposition of authoritarian Communist Party-style rule is variously known as “mainlandisation” (大陸化) or “reddening” (赤化).
In English, however, these all are often folded into “Sinicization” with the same corrosive reductionism we see when the concepts of ethnic Chinese huaren (華人) and PRC citizens Zhongguoren (中國人) are used interchangeably in the West, unconsciously lending rhetorical weight both to Beijing’s claims to represent the interests of diasporic communities and xenophobes’ belief that these communities should be eyed with suspicion as potential fifth-columnists.
When we talk about the Sinicization in China today (that is, 中國化), we are referring not just to the imposition of a Han-centric cultural identity but also that of a very particular political identity — one that is sold as inherently and timelessly Chinese but is, in fact, particular to the PRC under its current leadership.