Revival of anti-Manchu Discourses in the Chinese Internet Popular Culture

Tingchun Wang, The University of Texas at Austin

On Chinese social media, such as Bilibili, a newly emerging anti-Qing and anti-Manchu—the ruling ethnic minority in the Qing dynasty—discourse has gradually surfaced. It has served not only as a renewed lens for criticizing Qing-based cultural products but also as a force for constructing Chinese national identity. In this paper, I will analyze why anti-Qing discourse appears on Chinese social media and categorize the different threads of anti-Manchu discourse as follows: Han cultural nationalism, anti-nepotism, and anti-Westernism. I will examine three cases to explore how different ideologemes converge and diverge: the controversy over the historical war film Peng Hu, the criticism of Manchurian celebrities, and the Hanfu (Han Chinese costume) movement. I situate this anti-Manchu discourse within the post–Reform and Opening historical period. On the one hand, increasing disbelief in the ideology of development has produced anguish over inequality; however, this frustration cannot be easily channeled through classical Marxist vocabulary in the post-revolutionary era. On the other hand, as Sino–U.S. tensions heighten, anti-Western sentiment can transform into a search for traitors and scapegoats. Similar to what Mouffe and Laclau describe as populism, anti-Manchu discourse functions through a “chain of equivalence,” linking disparate demands together and constructing a common enemy. It reflects national identitarian anxieties over culture, race, and ethnicity at the intersection of a changing political and social environment.

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 Presented in Session 48. Collective Identity, Memory, and Nostalgia