Chinese Inventions: The Compass, Gunpowder, …and Critical Social Justice?

Critical East-Asian Theory is already well underway in academia; books and papers abound. From what (little) I have read thereof, this literature uses the same familiar tactics employed with regards to other “identity categories,” and applies them to the Chinese (or more accurately, Han) category to explain the power dynamics of present-day East Asia. These works provide clear and detailed accounts of how Chineseness (or Han-ness) supposedly forms the basis of power in East Asia. However, while I am not a “professional,” my own takeaway based on a passing knowledge of not only Western literature (including “Critical Han Theory”), but also Chinese literature and a more than a decade of “lived experience” on “Chinese” Formosa, is slightly different. In particular, Critical Han Theorists, despite the depth and breadth of information they present, fail to reflect on how those seeking power in China around the turn of the 20th century used exactly the same tactics employed today by Western “Theorists” to obtain it. That is, by positioning themselves as anti-Chinese-supremacists, the actual Chinese supremacists successfully fomented a society-wide obsession with race and ethnicity (zu or minzu, which the Communists typically translate as “Nationality” in English, explained below), which was then used to manufacture demand for complete and total social control by the general public.

In other words, while Western academics are only now looking at China with their Critical lens, I believe China beat them to the punch. China became wholly obsessed with race, ethnicity, and identity politics to a degree not yet realized in the present-day West; although thanks to the Theorists, we are well on the way. I believe that obsession was fomented specifically by the Communist Party, in order to provide a social environment which could be exploited for their own rise to power, and that their continued “forcing” of racial and ethnic identity politics into all aspects of society allows them to maintain their power today. If I am correct, then unless we can rid ourselves of our own unhealthy obsession with identity politics, I don’t see any other outcome than that we will also slip, first gradually and then all at once, into the same sort of racially-conceived authoritarian dystopic nightmare.