Dissidents, not just the state, deploy racial categories in Chinese politics.

Evidence

Besides student demonstrations, even opponents to the regime have occasionally been eager to deploy racial categories of analysis as a unifying concept against the threat of “Western culture.” To take but one example, Yuan Hongbing, a lawyer at Beijing University who was briefly detained in February 1994 and has become a well-known figure in the public dissident movement, recently called for a “new heroicism” in order to save “the fate of the race” and for a “totalitarian” regime which would “fuse the weak, ignorant and selfish individuals of the race into a powerful whole.” According to Yuan, only purification through blood and fire would provide a solution to China’s problems: “on the battlefield of racial competition the most moving clarion call is the concept of racial superiority… Only the fresh blood of others can prove the strength of one race” (Barme, 1995). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3356

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of race as a rhetorical weapon available to both state and opposition, echoing how nationalists of any political stripe can racialize the enemy — relevant to the reader’s work on sacrifice and sacrifice-adjacent ideologies of blood purification.
• QUESTION: The ‘purification through blood and fire’ rhetoric from a dissident intellectual is striking — worth chasing how racial ultranationalism appears across the Chinese political spectrum, not just in official Han-centrism.