It Should Not Only Be about Nationalism: China’s Pluralistic National Identity and Its Implications for Chinese Foreign Relations

Over the course of the last decade, students of Chinese foreign relations have engaged in an extended, and often rather breathless, debate over the meaning of China’s changing international profile. The question for all those with an interest in Asian security, and the wider international order, has become: what does China want to do with its new-found power? This article rests upon the conviction that national identity, rather than nationalism alone, stands at the centre of such issues. The latter of these two has attracted more attention. However, it tends to lead analysts to only see a narrow bandwidth of identity formation within a country, whereas the former is more inclusive of the potential variety of collective constructs that are in play in a given location. From within such a framework, it is then possible to both examine the production of Chinese collective imaginings and explore the role that they play in framing China’s interaction with the rest of the international system.