I been a bit remiss in not linking earlier to this interesting post over at The China Beat: "Sheep in Wolves' Clothing? The Book the Han Nationalists Love to Hate.  James Leibold, a historian from La Trobe University, offers an interpretation of Lu Jiamin's (pen name: Jiang Rong) book, Wolf Totem (I blogged about it back in 2005).  Leibold draws out the debates that have emerged since the book's publication, especially among certain Chinese nationalists.  It seems that the contrast of Han versus Mongolian culture in the book has inspired some Han Chinese to articulate an ethno-nationalist response.  Leibod writes:

In particular, a small but increasingly vocal group of Han racial
nationalists view Lü’s book as a sort of nomadic version of the
“Protocols of the Elders of Zion”: a secret plot to handover power and
authority in China to the Mongols, Manchus and other nomadic
minorities, thereby undermining and eventually destroying the inherent
superiority and centrality of the Han race and its 5000 year-old
civilization.

Arguing that Han is more than an empty or meaningless category, the
Hanists seek to revitalize “Han” culture and identity while redirecting
patriotic anger towards the lurking “enemy within.” The “Han revivalist
movement” (汉民族复兴运动) is a broad church, so to speak, attracting Chinese
youth with a wide variety of interests and needs; yet the online
campaign against Wolf Totem reveals some of the more extreme elements of this movement.

Read the whole thing…

To some degree this is not surprising.  Societies, like China's currently, that are undergoing rapid and culturally destabilizing economic and social change, often produce ethno-nationalist movements.  In the face of dizzying transformation, security and stability are sought in recreations of a glorious past, one that is shared by an in-group defined by "blood."  Such thinking is, by definition, exclusionary, drawing lines between "us" and "them" (the "them" in this case being not only foreigners but also other ethnic groups within China).  The danger, of course, is that cultural exclusion could become political persecution.  Let's hope that's not China's future.

From a Chinese philosophy point of view, an obvious point needs to be made here: Confucianism, which I assume Hanists will claim as part of their particular ethnic inheritance, would reject the moral significance of ethnic distinctions.  To be "Han" does not guarantee a person moral accomplishment and, conversely, moral accomplishment is open to anyone, Han or non-Han, who enacts Duty according to Ritual to move toward Humanity.  Han are, in and of themselves, no better morally then any other group.  Moral goodness, for Confucians, is performative, not existential; that is, one cannot claim moral goodness as an essential feature of one's ethnicity, but can only create moral accomplishment through appropriate interactions with others.

Philosopher's argue about the universality of Confucian ethics.  I believe that the central ideas not only can be extended to people in different cultural contexts but actually reflect ethical assumptions that already exist in many different cultural contexts. The recent work of Roger Ames is interesting in this regard.  Thus, Confucianism has a universal quality to it.  And such universalism works against the particularlist cultural appropriations of ethno- nationalists.  Confucianism is certainly a great historical creation of Chinese people, but it does not endow Han Chinese with a special ethnically-based claim to moral superiority.  That point has to be kept in mind, preemptively, as racialized Han nationalism grows stronger.

And notice the emergence of critical Han studies (scroll down for a link to another piece by Leibold), which pushes against the facile distortions of the ethno-nationalists….