Excellent piece, excellent analysis.
Where are all the China anthropologists, who should all be dissecting this?
By the way, I wonder if Xi’s wrongheaded and dangerous idea that culture is somehow “genetic”, located in the “DNA” of “his” people, is part of this current repackaging effort, in some way. Mr. Xi has pronounced on “cultural DNA” recently, and I made a note of it in an article on the uses and misuses of aDNA (DNA from ancient remains), which I believe will come out soon. The rapidly growing field of aDNA studies is highly interesting but also plagued by all sorts of misunderstandings. In Mr Xi’s case it seems both ethnocentric and ultranationalist: his pronouncements suggest that he sees his nation as a living organism, which of course it never was and never could be — except in somebody’s propaganda fantasy.
Magnus FIskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>