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Introduction
Much attention has been focused on the recrudescence of Chinese nationalism in the 1990s. The PRC government generally denies, but occasionally defends, the existence of nationalism within China (Xi 1996). Many Chinese scholars acknowledge the phenomenon and debate its impact, with most evincing a positive attitude toward nationalism (Zhang Xudong 1997; Xiao 1997; Sheng 1996; Wen 1996; Li 1995). Outside the PRC, Chinese nationalism is increasingly scrutinized (Zhao 1997; Zhu 1997, Gries 1999). Some hold that it is rational and manageable (Nathan and Ross 1997; Metzger and Myers 1998; Zheng 1999), while others speak in more premonitory tones (Chang 1998; Su 1997; Mosher 2000). All conclude that it is statesponsored, popular, and fills an "ideological vacuum" left by the waning of socialism (see, for example, Oksenberg 1997; Christensen 1996).
The divergent analyses within the discourse of Chinese nationalism have one overarching commonality. They focus on nationalism in the "high politics" or foreign policy of party-state elites (Harris 1997; Wang Gungwu 1996; Chen 1995; Friedman 1997; Whiting 1995). There are as yet few studies of specific ways in which the state bolsters its legitimacy through invoking a deep sense of "Chineseness" among citizens (Ong 1997; Barme 1999; Hansen 1999). This essay analyzes one way in which the state has adapted a body of complex scholarship toward that end. Archaeology, the study of ancient societies and cultures, and paleoanthropology, the study of the human fossil record, have been instruments for the inculcation of nationalism and a response to it in many national settings (Atkinson 1996; Oyuela-Caycedo 1994; Kohl 1998; Meskell 1998; Diaz-Andreu and Champion 1995). Nowhere is this more pronounced than in China, where these disciplines provide the conceptual warp and woof of China's "racial" nationalism. Racial nationalism holds that each of us can trace our identities to a discrete community of biology and culture whose "essence" has been maintained through time. It is distinct from ethnic nationalism only in that it biologizes and extends group identity further by adding a racial component to distinguish the nation more sharply from its neighbors. Where one ethnic group dominates the state, racial nationalism is often ultranationalism or expansionist nationalism (Yack 1996; Connor 1994; Smith 1979, 1981; Oksenberg 1987; Lam Tong 2000).
Late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century Chinese racial nationalists...