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The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today . By Kevin Carrico . Oakland : University of California Press , 2017. xiv, 264 pp. ISBN: 9780520295490 (cloth, also available in paper and as e-book).
Book Reviews--China
Kevin Carrico's book The Great Han examines the ideologies of racial nationalism and neotraditionalism expressed in the Han Clothing Movement, which has emerged online and in several Chinese cities since the early 2000s. Members of this movement believe that for thousands of years China was everything that, today, it is not: a unified, orderly land of purity and honesty whose (Han) inhabitants led healthy, purposeful lives under the guidance of wise, benevolent leaders and were capable, both individually and collectively, of superhuman feats and creative genius. China has fallen hard from this state of grace, they say, due not to its pursuit of modernity but to its victimization by a barbarian race--the Manchus--that once subjugated China and that has, since 1978, infiltrated the government with the sole aim of eradicating the Han. Their goal is to transform China by revitalizing Chinese tradition; their means, to wear "Han clothing"--a style that, they claim, remained unchanged from the moment the Yellow Emperor invented clothing until the Qing conquest in 1644--at festivals and rituals, on outings to parks and museums, and, sometimes, as they go about their daily business fixing computers or answering phones.
In Carrico's analysis, this attempt to actualize a utopian vision of past greatness and the conspiracy theorizing that accompanies it are products of the structure...