What does “great unity” (da yitong 大一統) mean in today’s China? Thanks to the Fairbank Center and the prompt for this blog, I consulted a Liaowang (瞭望) article (March 4, 2024) that refers to a 2023 symposium on Chinese culture, offering a definition that is attributed to President Xi Jinping (June 2, 2023).

My effort examining the text leads to a few take-aways. Da yitong is, first, about a condition that contains four foundational elements: “indivisibility of national territory,” “stability of the national state,” “cohesiveness of the people of the nation,” and an “uninterrupted continuity of civilization.” All four elements must exist, in the proactive sense that division, disruption, separation, and rupture of land, state, people, and civilization must not (bu ke 不可) be allowed to happen. It is not clear, however, if the elements already exist, how the existence of them, in full or in part, is to be assessed, what the measures and timetable might be if they are yet to be realized. Those specifics appear to be outside the scope of the definition.

Da yitong is, second, about a “nature” (xing 性) of unity (tongyi 統一) rooted in ancient Chinese civilization as it emerged from the Central Plains along the Yellow River. The working of this “nature” can be found in the texts of the classics, the standardization of scripts, measurements, roads, and vehicles and the centralizing institutions of the Qin (221–206 B.C.). To call “unity” a xing (nature) is to recognize it as at once immanent and generative, normative and transformative, an authoring and authorizing attribute in ways analogous to the xing in Neo-Confucian moral philosophy or the class (jieji 階級) xing in Chinese Marxian theories of social class.

Third, thanks to this self-authoring tongyi xing (統一性) that is both ancient and indigenous, the people of China, as an organic community formed through processes of ethnic integration, have been making a history from the first to the last emperors that is about recurrent articulations of political unity. Later rulers of the Yuan (1271–1368), the Ming (1368–1644), and the Qing (1644–1911), despite their origins from either side of the Great Wall and from lines both of nobles and peasants, continued to give institutional substance to unifying ideas first articulated in the classics that placed under the universal king all subjects “under heaven” (tianxia 天下) and all lands within the bounds of the seas. One can and must — and that brings us to the fourth point of my take-aways — therefore write a general history of China from antiquity to the present that documents the actualization of the unifying xing of Chinese civilization over a span of thousands of years and across the space of an entire continent. This general history, in contrast with the Marxian materialistic master narrative of the last century that stressed the universal progression of human societies through stages of socio-economic development, is thus no longer, as it appears to claim Chinese exceptionalism, nearly as indebted to Western-sourced social science theories.

All of the above leads to the fifth of my take-aways, about the synergistic interactions between the unifying xing in civilization and the enabling capacities of political institutions, and the making of China today. China in the 21^st century, by the latest definition of da yitong, is a politically and territorially integrated nation populated by a single ethnic “Chinese” people (Zhonghua minzu 中華民族) that has bundled (ningju 凝聚) all ethnicities (minzu 民族) into a cohesive one. Any differences that remain between the peoples are, indeed, relics of the past. There is room, to be sure, for residual differences to find expression within the ever-intensifying cohesiveness of the Chinese people (Zhonghua minzu 中華民族), provided that the secondary articulations do not compromise the unity and uniformity at a higher level. This is because all peoples of China form a Gemeinschaft (gongtongti 共同體) that shares destiny. The “destinies” (mingyun 命運) of all peoples (minzu 民族) are thus tied to that of the Gemeinschaft that shares, in the empathetic language of President Xi, “bliss or pain, honor or shame, life or death” (xiuqi yugong, rongru yugong, shengsi yugong, mingyun yugong 休戚與共、榮辱與共、生死與共、命運與共).

I am reminded, as the Liaowang (瞭望) article links “destiny,” “people,” and “great unity,” that Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), in China’s Destiny (Zhongguo zhi mingyun 中國之命運, Chongqing, 1943) released during the Sino-Japanese war in WWII, had formulated something comparable. Chiang Kai-shek, building on Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), called for the “great unity” (da yitong) of an ethnic “Chinese” people, inclusive of all descendants of the Yellow Emperor and the peoples of the borderlands (i.e. Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet). Such a people, according to Chiang, shared their Chineseness thanks to multiple millennia of internal migrations and intermarriages. As heirs to the teachings of ancient sage kings since the Three Dynasties (c. 2070 B.C.–c.256 B.C.), members of this people shared common history, language, culture, and habitat. They became a “Chinese” people and rightful masters of a modern Chinese nation-state with inalienable rights to territorial integrity, sovereign autonomy, self-governance, and economic prosperity. Chiang’s Chinese people, to be sure, would unite only to come under the centralized command of a single leader (i.e. Chiang), a single political party (i.e. the Chinese Nationalist Party), and a unified doctrine (i.e. the “Three Principles of the People”). Nationalist construction of “Chinese people” thus associated “Chineseness” with birth and inheritance. Almost at the same time, Mao, in “On New Democracy” (1940), identified a “people” of China that came into being through a cultural awakening of proletarian socio-economic consciousness. In the context of China’s civil war in the 1940s, China’s Destiny, with its advancement of a Chinese people, functioned, indeed, both as an alternative and a rejection of a Communist construction of the people of China.

The Nationalist deployment of “great unity” in the 1940s powered two political goals: a demand that the Chinese Communist Party give up on its revolution, and a call for all Chinese people, especially young males, to join a century-long anti-imperial war and resistance against external enemies. Despite how the present formulation echoes that of the past, circumstances between the two points in time have changed dramatically. There are no more debates about civil conflicts or issues of governance and authority. Nor is the state, as it did under the Nationalists, fumbling to gain control over data or population. Socialist China in the 21^st century, on claiming the achievement of national wealth and power, claims confidence in the superiority of the nation’s culture and polity. In contrast, the Nationalists in the 1940s operated in the shadow of a century of “national humiliation” (guochi 國恥) (1842–1943); threats of defeat and demise haunted its leadership, as evidenced in Chiang Kai-shek’s diaries. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists invested heavily, in the end, in the construction of a unified Chinese people (Zhonghua minzu 中華民族), mobilizing its members and militarizing its collective resources to deliver specific agendas. So much has changed in all circumstances between then and now. What are the political goals — and why — one might ask, that drive the connections of “people,” “destiny,” and “great unity” in today’s China that resonate so readily with the formulation of the 1940s?
 
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My research in recent years has turned my attention to the Chinese maritime: to the coast, the sea, the islands, the oceans, and the remaking of “Chineseness” as more people moved across watery spaces in modern times. From corners of the earth such as these, “great unity” (da yitong) picks up resonances of a different sort.

In the case of Taiwan, the term, thanks to its vestigial connections with the pre-1949 Nationalist regime on the Chinese mainland, is not without circulation in the second half of the 20^th century. However, whether associated with the Zheng rulers after the fall of the Ming, Qing literati after the 1895 cessation of the island to Japan, or the post-1949 Nationalist government, it played out against a backdrop of political exile, lost homeland, truncated lives, dislocated families, broken ties, colonized peoples, and dispossessed heritage. “Great unity” functioned often as an inheritance of loss, a reminder of division, and a visceral imagination about an elsewhere of foreclosed possibility. Still, as a resource, it supported in textbooks and official rhetoric an orientation towards the Central Plains, an invocation of the “kingly way” (wang dao 王道) of the sage kings of the Confucian classics as ascribed to the Nationalists, and a self-assigned mission for “all under heaven” (tianxia) to denounce the “hegemonic way” (ba dao 霸道) of the Communists. This construct legitimized the imposition of martial law in Taiwan and the primacy of forceful measures of recovery of the mainland. By the last decades of the 20^th century “great unity,” even as nostalgia, came to be dismissed, however, alongside the closedness and authoritarianism of the Nationalists at the height of the Cold War.

Elsewhere and in communities across the Chinese diaspora, “great unity” plays out in the domain of popular imagination as, for example, in the pages of martial arts romance by the writer Jin Yong (1924–2018). Jin’s fictions, produced in Hong Kong in the 1950s, sold hundreds of millions of copies in the following decades across the Chinese mainland and Chinese-speaking communities in East and Southeast Asia. They supplied materials for films, TV series, and countless remakes in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese mainland. They sparked, at no lesser an institution than Peking University, academic debates about Jin’s place in modern Chinese literature. Their consumption, before the age of computer games, triggered concerns from educators about adolescent addiction.

Jin’s fictions, in the old-style genre of novel in chapters, go against the critical realism of the New Literature associated with the May Fourth Movement. They feature romanticized heroes of rivers and lakes capable of fantastic skills. Faithful to accepted norms about women and brotherhood, they make larger-than-life differences as icons of loyalty and justice in fictionalized historical moments. Jin’s tall-walking sword-wielding protagonists roam an imaginary geography of the Central Plains plus the exoticized terrains — steppes, deserts, mountains, and seas — of greater China, pursuing never-ending solo missions in fights against injustice. The eclectic plots of the novels range from treasure hunt, murder mystery, entangled love, fate-changing secrets, to conspiracy, betrayal, revenge and redemption, all stitched together in the end into a big picture of someone’s great enterprise of empire building.

Jin works with narrative techniques such as foregrounding, pairing, contrasts, parallels, variations, asides, and layering that are readily accessible to readers of The Dream of the Red Chamber or The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Trooping across the pages are emperors and nobles as well as beggars, monks, nuns, priests, guards, gangsters, eunuchs, fanatics, etc., freely lifted out of historical texts and readily corresponding to dramatized stereotypes in popular operas. Some of Jin’s fictions contain veiled critiques of contemporary events and political characters on the Chinese mainland, exposing the corruption of absolute power and the hypocrisy of factional feuds albeit set among figures of the rivers and the lakes. Others accentuate issues of race and social labeling as factors in human tragedy.

Implicit in the tales of Jin’s martial heroes are questions echoing concerns about the people and aspirations towards da yitong that function as an orienting paradigm. Thanks to those aspirations, Jin’s knights-errant throw themselves into action across the Central Plains, if only to find disillusionment. Products of the Cold War in British Hong Kong, Jin’s heroes speak from a position of double marginality: as outsiders vis-à-vis the Communist mainland to the north, and as subaltern in Chinese voices vis-à-vis Hong Kong’s Oxbridge-accented modern-educated elite. Martial arts novels take their readers, via old poems and classics, on imaginary tours to a lost and fractured Chinese world beyond the colonial present. That world, as The Romance of Three Kingdoms frames it, is timed by the rise and fall of successive dynasties in cycles of unity and disunity. The fates and the fortune of the land and the people — of the vastness between heaven and earth in the verses of a solitary young poet Mao Zedong (1893–1976) — are nonetheless determined by the arms of the military rather than the swords of flying heroes. In the end Jin’s heroes, should they survive the final scenes, find their place in withdrawal back to the margins and the peripheries: into the words of Zhuangzi and The Book of Changes, into Buddhist chants in mountain temples, into rhymed verses singing the east-flowing Yangzi below the Red Cliff in the words of Su Dongpo (1037–1101). Da yitong in popular culture, in short, frames fictional characters on imaginary journeys as marginal players in dynastic games, who make little differences in the end.
 
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To place da yitong on the agenda as an operational goal in today’s China is to engage with symbolic resources widely shared in time and space in multiple spheres across cultural China. As a projected image, da yitong has been painted on the Chinese cultural canvas more than once. To paint over that canvas today with a particular variation of that theme, the cultural and propaganda arms of the Chinese state appear to have mounted cultural campaigns to achieve that goal.

In the production of films and dramas, for example, the new da yitong has engineered a reversal in the conventional assignments of praise and blame of the king versus the hegemon. Historical characters such as Qin Shihuang, Cao Cao, Genghis Khan, or Zhu Yuanzhang, all prominent tyrants, come on screen in recent times as paragons of the higher virtue of unification. In the remake of drama with Hong Kong or Taiwan source materials, it is just as notable that with a shift in accent and emphasis, the products tell a somewhat different story that inevitably draw attention to the encompassing capacities of the (materially and technologically superior) mainland over the (dilapidated and increasingly dispirited) offshore offshoots. In the production of cultural exhibitions, thousands of museums feature artifacts and visual performances that argue for the formation of a unifying Chinese people with a distinctively Chinese civilization that has been converging across disparate geographical regions from antiquity to the present.

If the productions of films, TV series, and museum exhibitions, conditioned by infrastructural support and measured for success by mass viewership, lend themselves to the organizational input of the state, readings in reflective settings tell a different story. To use the unpredictable past as a contemporary resource as in the case of da yitong is to deal with all its dimensions, silenced and pronounced, including the remembered in its multiple layers and the residual as dispersed across variegated spaces. How well does the capacity of the state reach into such domains of reading and thinking to frame the script, one might ask? 

Tang poems — lines such as “The bright moon of the Qin; passes of the Han” — invoke centuries of imperial grandeur. The next lines point to soldiers lost on their missions of conquest. To savor the grandeur and to harness the imagery in the first lines for the new da yitong is also to implicate the empire in the wanton loss of ordinary lives. Similarly, to use the Book of Poetry to advance da yitong is to invite attention to the full classical canon, which in turn invites questions about the proper ordering of “all under heaven” (tianxia), the object of the unifying (yitong 體用) action. To search for da yitong in the classics is also to come upon da tong (大同), a utopian version of “great unity” with equally ancient classical textual articulations, that addresses matters of ethics and metaphysics in its long interpretive history. What is to be done, indeed, about issues of universal relevance if da yitong in China today is built around a particularistic exceptionalism of the Chinese people and their civilization? 

An idea, as the historian Joseph Levenson (1920–1969) writes, is both an answer to a question and a rejection of its alternatives. To answer the question: “What does ‘great unity’ (da yitong) mean in today’s China?” we should consider both the question for which it supplies an answer and the alternatives which it rejects.

For the question: “What does ‘great unity’ mean in today’s China?” President Xi has offered, from his position as the top leader of an emerging global superpower, an answer that describes a condition and an aspiration. “Da yitong” in this version, as I understand it, is at once immanent and generative. It fuses the nation’s future to its cultural past while authorizing practices that legitimize the present. Multiple versions of “da yitong” had been mounted in the domains of culture and politics since the collapse of the Qing. Some of these, advanced from a position of political weakness at a time of acute national crisis, spoke of aspirations for power and unity that did not exist. Others, advanced from places of colonial marginality, invoked a cultural homeland that existed only in fiction. Fragments of these variants — and lessons from those pasts — continue to exist in living memories via symbols and artifacts across the Chinese-speaking world.

Why privilege “da yitong” and the issue of unification in Mainland China today when circumstances have changed so dramatically, both in comparison with the past and with places elsewhere? What does this remake of a historical play, about the normative claims and grandeur of an everlasting Han/Chinese-centered empire, intend to accomplish? As the new version gets produced in multimedia with multicolored technology, it is complemented, unlike the black-and-white originals, by concerted allocations of enhanced resources, critical deployment of state capacities in globalized infrastructures, and with a reconstituted cast of power and wealth. How might the new production fall upon its audiences, targeted or otherwise, both at home and elsewhere — audiences carrying memories and understanding about disparate narratives and embodied lessons that had been transmitted, in full or in part, across generations, regimes, spaces, and communities? How might the new production make meaning as it endeavors to reinscribe unifying significance over layers of culture and politics across uneven terrains?