Content uploaded by Tom Sear
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Tom Sear on Apr 06, 2023
Content may be subject to copyright.
‘These past two weeks have certainly been strenuous days for me. The President
was suddenly taken violently sick with the inuenza at a time when the whole of
civilization seemed to be in the balance.’1
So wrote Rear Admiral Cary T. Grayson, personal physician to US President
Woodrow Wilson, in a letter to a friend. The seriousness of the president’s illness
was not disclosed to the media; instead, the public were advised he had a cold.2
In April 1919, during the Versailles negotiations, the President of the United
States was struck down with the Spanish Flu. Wilson’s post-viral weakness
may have contributed to the outcome of negotiations with Clemenceau over
reparations and for control of East Asia, both accelerating the likelihood of the
1937–45 war.3 Between January 1918 and December 1920 the pandemic killed
tens of millions around the world. The ocial state-coordinated and popular
commemorative traditions that arose from the First World War in France and
Britain’s Dominions for the military losses of the Great War overshadowed the
centenary of the u epidemic. Historians and epidemiologists noted the anni-
versary, but it did not deeply penetrate popular consciousness or trans-national
state activity.4
By early 2020 an uncanny centenary correlation to the Spanish Flu pandemic
was beginning to emerge. The outbreak in late 2019 of the novel coronavirus
SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the subsequent
rapid, contagious, global spread of the related disease COVID-19 brought the
period of the earlier pandemic back into stark popular focus.
Here I explore, through the PRC-ruling Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP)
incorporation of Western commemorative practices into its own remembrance
forms, the rise and character of shanzhai (山寨) nationalism (中国民族主义)
in China – an intrinsically originless, deconstructionist nationalism that enables
the incorporation of Western technologies at the same time as it rejects Western
inuence.
Investigating the fusion of technological and cultural change in China in the
Armistice and aftermath of the First World War reveals a history of empire which
7 Shanzhai 山寨 nationalism 中国
民族主义
Reexive empires and digital
commemoration in China from Ah
Q to AI
Tom Sear
114 Tom Sear
incorporates the importance of ontologically aware cosmotechnics within the
post-colonial spatial model to explore how power contestation of the twenty-
rst century not only has arisen but is reexively integrated into earlier historical
disruptions. In 1919 China’s response to the aftermath of the Great War inte-
grated the shock of modernism through the principles of Qi and Dao (道 器 合 一)
and the process of shanzhai to express an emergent political consciousness. The
materiality and temporality of telegraphic media and communication technology,
along with the crystallisation of a character, or ‘spirit’, in the New Culture Move-
ment, provided new meaning to traditional conceptions of ‘absence’, ‘presence’
and ‘originless origin’. The promethean moment of 4 May 1919 dened a cen-
tury of constant change in China. On its centenary, in the contemporary era of
the revisionist, vectoralist leadership of Chairman Xi Jinping, a similar process
of change is being undertaken through the adoption of the ‘new’ within a Chi-
nese computational cryptoinfosphere but with the recursive, ironic twist that a
cultural imaginary of memory (and forgetting) is being recongured not through
the events of 4 May 1919 in Beijing, but rather the First World War commemora-
tive social technologies China was resisting – those of the British Empire. This
chapter analyses this reexive nationalism – and distinctly twenty-rst-century
technological structures – to assert a new concept of empire nationalism not just
in the present but how such hegemonic power transferrals have their origin in the
past. In so doing this chapter argues for an increased importance for time as well
as space, technology as well as culture in the aftermath of the First World War.
The uncanny centenary of 1919, COVID-19 and an imagined
planetary community
The practices which the CCP executed in 2020 arose and were adapted from post–
First World War British Empire formulations. The era 1919–20 saw the emer-
gence and codication of commemorative forms like the ‘unknown soldier’ and
the ‘minute’s silence’ accepted across the British Empire. A century later, in the
wake of COVID-19, there was a resurgence of global public memorialisation and
mourning of death, even collective protest and civil disorder.5
In the PRC, the CCP endorsed a new practice during the period of Qingming
in 2020.6 Qingming Jie (清明节) or ‘Tomb Sweeping Day’ falls on fourth or fth
of April each year. In 2020 Qingming was declared a day of mourning, and a
period of three minutes of silence was conducted nationally.7 This rare event was
in remembrance of the loss of life arising from the COVID-19 outbreak. In Bei-
jing, Chairman Xi Jinping stood, head bowed, with the politburo. In Wuhan, the
site of the outbreak, Vice Premier Sun Chunlan led mourners. The ocially man-
dated silence was declared ‘in mourning for martyrs and compatriots who lost
their lives in the COVID-19 pandemic’.8 National moments of silence had been
ocially reserved in China before, for political mourning, such as at the funeral of
Chairman Mao or for earthquake victims in 2008.9 However, in the Xi Jinping era,
silences have become associated with the new Second World War–related annual
tradition of Martyrs’ Day at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.10
Shanzhai
山寨
nationalism
中国民族主义
115
Chinese collective moments of silence, in particular the intensication of
state-centric memory, cultured under the leadership of Chairman Xi Jinping were
adopted from a twentieth century, chiey British diaspora, Western cultural form,
which was rst developed in 1919.11
On 8 May 1919, King George V declared ‘for the brief space of two minutes,
a complete suspension of all our normal activities’. So that ‘in perfect stillness,
the thoughts of every one may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the
Glorious Dead’.12 New industrial technologies, from tanks to poison gas, radi-
cally changed the scale, speed and global impact of warfare between 1914 and
1918. Afterwards, what psychologist Steven D. Brown calls ‘social technologies’
emerged to cope with the trauma. The seemingly timeless commemorative prac-
tices of silence, poppies and poetic odes were invented and globally accepted
between 1919 and 1922.13 Material memorials provided an architecture for the
spatial imaginary of an emergent diasporic, post-colonial nationalism within
empire. Located in the metropole centre, the cenotaph and ‘Unknown Warrior’
were made permanent by November 1920. Tombs of opposing absence, in the
form of the symbolically empty cenotaph, and the anonymous presence of an
Unknown Warrior, provided the foci for an imaginary community of sacrice.
The subsequent annual application of the new social technology of silence during
Armistice Day at 11 a.m. on the 11th month of the year became a ritual for the
temporal integration of the imaginary: becoming the space/time continuity of a
social technology.
The centre-periphery structure of empire was vital to the development of this
social technology of silence. Two men usually share the credit for proposing the
two-minute silence: South African author and politician Sir Percy FitzPatrick and
Australian soldier and journalist Edward Honey. Honey and FitzPatrick grasped
the power that technologies of telesthesia had for a wounded empire emergent
from the First World War.14 Coming from Britain’s colonial periphery, both men
understood the capacity of mediatory suspensions of time and space to create a
unied globalised political imaginary – qualities that made the commemorative
collective silence trope accessible and adaptable across the twentieth century and
beyond.
The simultaneous nationalist, and global diaspora–unifying, qualities of the
social technologies of commemoration, emergent in the aftermath of the First
World War were evident to the leadership of the CCP in recent times. The 2020
CCP COVID-19 three minutes of silence had multiple purposes. A primary func-
tion reected the metropole-periphery structure of empire. The collective, highly
visual act rstly supported internal political CCP messaging within the PRC
itself. The silence was an event integrated into communication media projected
out into the world and then deliberately refracted through global media reactions
and reected back into the PRC. The stillness also demonstrated that China – the
origin of the virus – was back in motion while the rest of the world was still in a
phase of frozen stasis.
The silence also co-opted other features of the 1919 social technology which
processed political aspects of the COVID-19 global pandemic. The rituals of
116 Tom Sear
silence developed in Anglophone countries arising from the First World War carry
with them an ‘economics of sacrice’.15 These rituals took account of the costs
of sacrice: who had paid the highest price, who was in debt to whom and from
whom reparations might be owed.16 In a 2020 global, highly visually mediated
social and economic crisis, the deployment of such commemorative strategies had
multiple political implications.
In Anglophone nations moments of silence are observed annually and adopted
for collective tragedies other than war. Equally, a diversity of nations globally
have also adopted the form on occasions of national trauma, most recently in rela-
tion to terrorist events. The key lineage in the PRC for commemoration was the
collective silence of Mao’s funeral in 1976, an event largely beyond living mem-
ory in 2020 China. The COVID-19 silence lacked the remembrance infrastructure
of the funeral of a revolutionary leader. Without it this instant community van-
ishes. Many photographed in 2020 appeared awkward and confused. Other com-
plexities may have been cultural. As Brown indicates, a ‘commemorative silence
disposes of the dead’.17 If the dead are processed and returned to the past through
silence, then this may be at odds with the ongoing presence of the ‘spirits’ within
traditional Chinese rituals of annual commemoration and presence.
The traditional Chinese conception of ‘spirit’ is, however, itself undergoing
transition in the Xi Jinping era. The 2020 ocial moment of silence in the PRC
was an aural expression of a wider aesthetic and a paradoxical apparatus of an
invisible presence in plain sight. The silence called attention to the public secrecy
of the cryptocractic CCP state.18 While the silence mourned and acknowledged
the sacrice of those who were missing, it also processed their dangerous exiled
spirit back into a sacred state-sanctioned memory. Wuhan whistle-blower Dr Li
Wenliang (李文亮), who was persecuted locally for raising early concern about
SARS-CoV-2 on social media, was converted into an ocial martyr and acknowl-
edged during the silence.19 The silence was a piece of British Empire Armistice
social technology deployed a century later in China, towards a specic objec-
tive. Li Wenliang’s role as SARS-CoV-2 ‘whistle-blower’ was initially disruptive,
but when the pandemic spread, his victimisation by local authorities became an
issue for the CCP. His subsequent recognition in the silence served to repress this
contradiction. Whereas the artice of the Armistice silence ostensibly seeks to
heal and seal a rupture, the CCP used the same technology but instead to arm
a continuity.20 The 2020 PRC silence and martyrdom of Li Wenliang surfaced
Qingming within a surveillance apparatus of continuity that is epistemological:
‘knowing what not to know’. In addition, the deployment of technologies of exile
integrated the ‘so-called hidden rules (qian guize 潜规则)’ of public secrecy with
the spirit of Qingming.21
Digital amnesia, analogue ancestors and social media politics
in an era of cyber sovereignty
The aftermath of the Great War introduced new annual traditions and commemo-
rative ‘days’ to the British diaspora calendar. Chinese culture – in the form of
Qingming – already possessed a central day of commemoration. Qingming is
a time of jì zǔ (祭祖), the sacricial rituals of ancestor worship. Rituals even
more than any religious identity have played a pivotal role in the organization
of China.22 Ancestor praxes infer the presence of an eternal soul. The burning of
paper money is suggestive of ensuring such souls are provided for.23 Qingming
inuences temporal focus and spacetime mapping. The day itself leads Chinese
people to conceptualise the ‘past as in front of them’.24 Qingming is a heterotopic
spacetime. The ritual opens a potential for deviation and social memory activation
and mobilisation which paradoxically – for a day centred around tradition –
may threaten the CCP.
Qingming, particularly when associated with recent mourning, has been his-
torically a trigger for political unrest in modern China. The events of 4 June 1989
arose from the death of Hu Yaobang just after Qingming. A prior smaller-scale
Tiananmen protest occurred on Qingming after the death of Premier Zhou Enlai
in 1976. This repeated pattern of behaviour may have triggered the CCP to rst
declare Qingming a national holiday in 2007 and then closely associate it with
the new phenomenon of ocially recognising military martyrdom.25 The ocial
holiday, called Martyrs’ Day, commenced in 2014. The politicisation of the term
‘martyr’ coincided with the two other newly formally ratied commemorations
later in the year associated with the war against Japan.26 As historian Ian Johnson
has observed, China is not immune to the presence of memory in the present. The
Chinese government, Johnson argues, does ‘not just suppress history, it recreates
it to serve the present’.27 Xi Jinping, more than any other leader since the First
World War, has emphasised tradition. The images featured in the ‘China Dream’
advertising campaign hark back to the kitsch clay gurines of centuries-old arts
and crafts.
The internet has played a critical role in accelerating engagement with this new
memorialisation. China is increasingly digital. Seventy one per cent of people use
the internet regularly and own a smartphone. Eighty four per cent of people use
online social networking sites. Ninety four per cent of people aged 18 to 34 own
a smartphone.28
Chinese social media is dominated by two key platforms. Weibo (微博), also
known as Chinese Twitter, has 100 million daily users. WeChat (微信) known as
the ‘Super App’, had an estimated 1 billion active users in 2018 – in China and
within the Chinese diaspora.29
Use of WeChat for social interaction is now so prevalent that traditional prac-
tices like ‘Tomb Sweeping’ – the burning of money and symbolic material goods
and pouring rice wine on graves – are often experienced remotely via video con-
ferencing on the app. Marketplaces for simulated paper objects to burn for rela-
tives to use in heaven now even feature iPads, phone chargers and Wi-Fi routers.
Some cemeteries oer live-streamed remote worship with live crying set at 300
yuan for ten minutes.30
Social media platforms oer a huge arena for inuence and propaganda. Digi-
tal media accelerated the potential threat of politicised memory leading to civil
unrest in China. The CCP have developed coordinated censorship mechanisms in
Shanzhai
山寨
nationalism
中国民族主义
117
118 Tom Sear
response. Despite the perception, censorship of social media in China is not uni-
form, and the regulations continue to evolve. However, it has widely been thought
the Chinese government has been actively involved in ‘astroturng’, that is, the
practice of crowdsourcing what appear to be unsolicited comments to create inu-
ence. Such posts in China have become known as 50c comments because of the
rumour that posters were paid 5 jiao (角) or .08 US cents for each post.
China’s internet and social media are notoriously dicult to research. In a
landmark study published in 2017, a US team proved the existence of these
posts, timing and content and estimated their total volume.31 Their study shows
that digital technologies are central to all these activities. Qingming and Martyrs
Day are the largest target for what many argue are government-inuenced social
media posts.32 It is estimated there are around 750 million social media users
in China, and the study suggests that the Chinese government encouraged at
least 2 million people to post propaganda on social media as though it was real
opinion.
This study presented quantitative evidence that estimates the Chinese gov-
ernment fabricates around 448 million so-called 50c social media comments
every year.
By far the biggest spike of these posts occurs to commemorate those who
sacriced their lives for China on Qingming Day and Martyrs Day. Such posts
010002000 300
04
000
Date (Jan. 2013 − Dec. 2014)
Count of Posts
1. Qingming
festival
(April)
2. China
Dream
(May)
3. Shanshan
riots (July)
4. 3rd plenum
CCP 18th
Congress (Nov.)
5. Two meetings
(Feb.)
6. Urumqi rail
explosion (May)
7. Gov't
forum,
praise
central
subsidy
(Jul.−Aug.)
8. Martyr's
Day
(Oct.)
Figure 7.1 Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Margaret E. Roberts. Time series sample of
43,797 known 50c social media posts, with qualitative summaries of the con-
tent of volume bursts.
Source: (Courtesy of author)
declared: ‘Many revolutionary martyrs fought bravely to create the blessed life
we have today!’ or simply, ‘Respect these heroes.’33
Qingming has historically been a time of protest. The researchers suggest the
massive volume of war commemoration posts are ‘consistent with a strategy
of distraction’. Leaked e-mails from propaganda departments request 50c party
members to ‘promote unity and stability through positive publicity’. King et al.,
argue the strategy of the Chinese government is distraction because the key neces-
sity is to stop discussions with collective action potential.34
More recent CCP events of collective unication draw on much older forms.
China has recently begun to establish new commemorative events around past
conicts of contemporary relevance, using practices apparently learned from
Western war commemoration, merged with existing cultural practices of ancestral
worship and accelerated by digital information activities.
WWI, the WWW and revisionist hegemonic geopolitics
This book explores a centenary moment of Armistice and aftermath for the British
Empire in a period of signicant change. A hundred years ago power was being
negotiated and transferred from Britain to the United States as emergent Asian
powers tested their inuence.35 Similarly, in the present, Indo-Pacic nations are
immersed in a ‘long-term, strategic competition’ which has re-emerged as China
rises to challenge the hegemony of the United States.36
A revisionist contest of power between empires is commensurate with a com-
memorative moment. From 2014 to 2018, while an Anglophone West reected
on the end of the Great War through commemorative rituals established a century
ago, the Chinese government looked forward to the commemoration of an impact
of the Armistice itself: the May Fourth Movement of 1919 and the inception of
the CCP in 1921.37
The era of Chairman Xi Jinping (commencing in November 2012) coincides
roughly with the centenary of the First World War globally. The Xi Jinping era has
seen an emphasis upon memory as a form of state-sponsored national cohesion,
and pivotal memorial ‘days’ in the calendar are commemorated on social media.38
While the historical response in China to the end of the First World War between
1919 and 1923 took forms and symbolism radically dierent than those of the
British Empire, and China struggled against the cultural inuence of the West
in the 1920s, today the politicised memory technologies of the CCP draw on the
memory traditions and cultures the British Empire invented in 1919–20.
Anglophone empire memory practices are being integrated into a new form
of colonial domain emergent in the present day: digital empire. The internet
and social media have transformed political participation within nation states
and empire politics between states. China and the United States are involved in
a geostrategic technology competition.39 Articial Intelligence (AI), quantum
computing and biotech will be central to future national power. Just as there is
Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT) versus Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon
(GAFA), ‘Stack on Stack’ conict will take place over access to hemispherical
data archives for machine learning.40 Whether these digital empires will replace
Shanzhai
山寨
nationalism
中国民族主义
119
120 Tom Sear
nation states in the future is an open question. However, for the moment at least,
the Westphalian system of nation states prevails.41
Over the last 30 years a period of adaptation has evolved geopolitical competi-
tion to a suspension just below the threshold of outright conict. Major revisionist
powers have learnt from the asymmetrical adaptations of conicts and changes
since the end of the Cold War.42 Such changes have witnessed a new understand-
ing of the role of deconstruction, disintegration and non-binary constellations in
historical understanding of empires.
The apex of this period of geopolitical evolution of nation states and insurgent
state-building enterprises was the period 2013–15.43 Coalitions of expeditionary
security and nation-building military in the Middle East from 2001 have provided
a context for the re-examination of empire. As Heather Streets-Salter has pointed
out, the last decade saw a methodological shift in the study of war and empire. The
historiography of empire had previously focussed primarily upon the locations
of and interactions between centre and the periphery, viewing these polarities of
relationship as of primary importance. Such a binary focus not only excluded
more lateral interactions but emphasised discrete national experiences within con-
ned periods. Streets-Salter argues for a ‘conceptualization of modern empires
which is messier, more multilateral than the colony/metropole model allows’.44
I concur with Streets-Salter that the colonies and metropoles, particularly via
diplomacy and the alliance system of the First World War and the armistice pro-
cess, were more connected than we might have imagined and that peoples were
active participants in larger global movements and revolutionary nationalism. To
this reformulation I would like to add three other processes. One is not just the
error of studying empires as discrete units but to stress the importance of exploring
empires in friction and entanglement as change occurs. The second is to explore
how memory in the present and technological change and commemorative prac-
tices have weaponised the historical period 1918–23 as forms of contemporary
nation state–based reexive political mobilisation and censorship. Finally, as
great powers begin to be dened by digital borders and their power is articulated
through porous rewalls and entangled domains, we may need to look to consider
the media archaeology of empires within our methodologies. The telegraph was
just as important to creating connections in the British Empire as the internet is
today to the integration of Chinese metropole with diaspora.
Postcolonial theory has emphasised how hegemony has functioned through
imposition of universals. The Armistice and its aftermath are useful periods to
examine how resistance is also an assertion of a local culture and politics, adapt-
ing specic universalising modernist ideas from the culture of the coloniser.45
The May Fourth Movement in 1919 illustrated this complexity, and the New Cul-
ture Movement revealed this tension. The New Culture Movement of 4 May was
interested in the twin Western Modernist forces of ‘Mr Science’ and ‘Mr Democ-
racy’.46 The work of Streets-Salter is useful in locating these connections on a
global scale which de-emphasises the importance of the metropole and locates
important events occurring at a distant periphery. However, in the case of Beijing,
the emphasis upon space within the post-colonial period may lead us to miss other
forces at work in our present which can be explored through historical examples.
These examples are less about space and more about the technologies which con-
nect space.
Information communication technologies were integral to maintaining a British
empire as they were vital to the events of 4 May in China. Lord Curzon described
British interests of empire as ‘commercial, political, strategical and telegraphic’.47
The network and telegraphic connection was vital to the British hegemony of
empire through space. Curzon made this statement in 1899. In 1919 he was
in charge of the British Foreign Oce when actions at Versailles reverberated
globally.48
Armistice, media archaeology and the topology of empire
telesthesia
The British Empire’s diplomatic and political eorts at Versailles sought to simul-
taneously maintain inuence in China, placate the rising naval power of Japan
and reward that nation for its assistance in the First World War while blunting the
power of the United States in the Asia Pacic as power was transferred. This had
unforeseen circumstances in China.49
A denitive transfer of global power and inuence from Britain to America had
commenced during the Great War. But in 1919 how such a transfer might manifest
itself in the Asia Pacic was far from certain. The lasting representation of this
change is the image Britannia Pacicatrix – a mural by Sigismund Goetze n-
ished in 1919.50 The centrepiece of Britannia Pacicatrix is a handshake between
the United States and Great Britain and her empire. The handshake symbolises
the central exchange of Versailles and the years from 1919 to 1923 – the peace-
ful transition of global hegemonic power from Britain to the United States. The
United States strives forward condently. Britannia’s body language is dident
and defensive, almost untrusting.
British historians typically see the transfer of power as one of succession, con-
ducted in a handshake between civilisations. As Adam Tooze has pointed out,
this is somewhat attering as it was less a succession than a paradigm shift. In
an era of coronavirus and climate change we are familiar with governance by the
curve, and an intersection on one curve is one key indicator of how the paradigm
shifted.51 Sometime in mid-1916 the combined GDP of the British Empire was
overtaken by that of the United States.52 Two years earlier, in September 1914,
Japan occupied the German concession in the city of Qingdao on the Shandong
Peninsula, China. Japan had been allied with Britain since 1902, declaring war on
Austria-Hungary in 1914, subsequently taking control of Qingdao (Tsingtao) in
China’s Shandong peninsula and helping Britain suppress an uprising in Singa-
pore in 1915.53 Japan leveraged the alliance. In January 1915 Tokyo submitted to
Beijing a list of 21 imperialist demands, provoking outrage amongst students and
the wider Chinese community.
Throughout the war China cultivated relations with the United States, hoping
it might prove a bulwark against the Anglo-Japanese Alliance when peace came.
Shanzhai
山寨
nationalism
中国民族主义
121
122 Tom Sear
Because China had supplied 140,000 labourers to the Western Front this earned
the nation a role in the peace negotiation.54 China was to be disappointed at Ver-
sailles. London, with so many resources tied up in China, and, equally frightened
of a Japan–US conict in Pacic waters, was supportive of Japan. Using its lev-
erage with Britain and President Wilson’s fears of a walkout and of Japanese
naval power, Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George buckled and gave Japan
control of Shandong until 1922. On 3 May, Lù Zhēngxiáng (陸徵祥) the head
of the Chinese delegation in Paris, telegrammed Beijing that the ‘conference was
unprecedentedly authoritarian’ and the delegation ‘denitely could [not] sign’ the
peace treaty.55 That night and for the day after, enraged students held a protest on
4 May 1919 at Tiananmen Gate. It was this moment that was central to a chain of
events that created the Communist Party.56
The historiographical narrative of 4 May has typically positioned events
located in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai as the simultaneous expression
in colonial cultures of the ‘Wilsonian Moment’.57 Recent work has explored the
circulation of ideas within China and across other locations globally, slightly
de-emphasising a unidirectional pulse from centre to periphery.58 Post-colonial
approaches have tended to empathise spatial dimensions, and, indeed, 4 May
involved the construction of Tiananmen Gate as political space.59 Few, however,
have examined the role the technology of the telegraph played in creating politi-
cal time.60
The telegraph from the nineteenth to early twentieth century was critically
important to the hegemonic re-organisation of space.61 Global communications
infrastructure, such as the telegraph, inuenced the shape and agenda of public life
and diplomacy.62 In the period up to 1911 the widespread use of telegrams for polit-
ical nationalist mobilisation in China and Qing administration attempts to suppress
their circulation is well documented.63 While the telegrams of 3 May were a vital
trigger for the 4 May incident, the telegraph was an essential and constant form of
communication to and from Versailles, both before and after the incident itself.64
The fourth of May is frequently represented as a nation-building anti-foreign
movement. Genuine pro-foreign cosmopolitanism65 was evident, in addition to
the more frequently emphasised nationalism which sought to ‘externally preserve
Chinese sovereignty and internally eliminate national traitors’.66 Multiple internal
interests were also in eect. Representatives of China’s warlords (junfa) of the
Guangzhou Military Government were present at Versailles itself and actively
pursued their interests both in France and within China, where they responded to
Paris events via a coordinated armed network. From late April it was a dedicated
telegram communications campaign to and from military governors to organise
events and protests that both escalated and provided a structure of security for
activity around and following 4 May.67
Technical, reproducible media were integral to the mobilisation of bodies and
ideas in protest during the incident of 4 May. At a higher level of abstraction via
the telegraph medium – the incident of 4 May was a mediation of encoded cultural
presences and absences.68 4 May was a dual transcultural technical telegraphic
experience of ‘presence’ and the ‘Nietzsche-Heidegger axis of deconstruction’ of
moral and metaphysical traditions.69 The telegraph enabled telesthesia: percep-
tion at a distance. To theorist and writer McKenzie Wark, ‘modern telesthesia . . .
starts with the telegraph. It is the rst vector that moves information faster than
people or things. It becomes the means via which to organise those movements.’70
However, the milieu of 4 May also saw a transition of representational, literate
forms of semantic meaning through the New Culture Movement. In this way, 4
May contains two key processes for China’s ‘modernisation’ as both a technical
and a symbolic transition within a framework of culture.
The New Culture Movement epitomised this latter form of change. New Culture
was a movement which embraced Western ideas of Marxism, democracy and the
use of vernacular Chinese language in culture.71 New Culture was fundamentally
a literary movement: its enduring literary gure was Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936).
Lu Xun’s intention was ‘wén yǐ zài dào’ (文以载道), ‘literature as a vehicle for
moral message’.72 In 1921 he penned: ‘The True Story of Ah Q’, an allegory of
the 1911 revolution and a metaphorical parody of traditional culture. The central
character of Ah Q has been inuential for a century. So much so, that ‘the spirit of
Ah Q’ remains a cliché.73 Famous for his self-deception and perverse superiority,
Ah Q was a gure embraced as a critical symbol of the Chinese national charac-
ter. The ‘Q’, which is not able to be translated into Chinese, is symbolic of the
ambiguous feelings for Western culture present at the time.74
Techne, spirit and the ontology of hauntological nationalist
lost futures
The gure of Ah Q is known for his ‘problematic modernity’.75 Ah Q is a national
allegory, a ‘meta-ction of a crumbling imperial China drawn into the vortex of
modernity’, where ‘China as a phenomenology of crumbling and dispersal takes
shape through the frenzied but aimless activities of Ah Q as ghost – through its roam-
ing around; its self-negating search for an identity’. It is via Ah Q as the ‘ “real story”
of the nameless ghost of China, seeking in vain its return and reinvention, that the
origin of Chinese modernism surges into being . . . as a radical, nihilistic phenom-
enology of decay, void, dispersal, and, dialectically, as renewal, rebirth, and hope’.76
Ah Q is hauntological. Jacques Derrida’s theory of hauntology is a form of and
play upon ontology and temporality. Derrida argued that while cultural ideas may
seem to have disappeared into history, their spectre remains in the form of spirits
and ghosts.77 Like the technical aspect of the telegraph, inherent to what today
we might name ‘the digital’, ‘teetering at the borderline of absence and presence,
these revenants give rise to a sense of temporal disjuncture as well as ontologi-
cal uncertainty’.78 Hauntology’s greatest proponent is Mark Fisher.79 He writes:
‘What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-rst century is not so much
the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate.’80
Hauntology is oscillatory, as Fisher explains, that which is absent is no longer pre-
sent from the past ‘but which remains eective as a virtuality’. While, ‘the second
sense of hauntology refers to that which . . . has not yet happened, but which is
already eective in the virtual.’81
Shanzhai
山寨
nationalism
中国民族主义
123
124 Tom Sear
Ghosts gured prominently in imagery following the Great War. For Anzac
Day 1925 Australian artist Will Dyson drew a cartoon for Punch of a soldier
returning home to women with the caption suggesting on Anzac Day the spirits
of the nation’s dead return home for leave. For Anzac Day 1927 he produced an
popular image of two ghostly diggers declaring a ‘voice from Anzac’: “Funny
thing Bill – I keep thinking I hear men marching!” ’82 In July 1927 Australian
ocial war artist Will Longsta was present at the unveiling ceremony of the
Menin Gate Memorial, Ypres, Belgium.83 Unable to sleep that night Longsta
returned to the gate and claimed to have had ‘a vision of spirits of the dead ris-
ing out of the soil around him’.84 Upon returning to his London studio Longsta
painted Menin Gate at Midnight (also known as Ghosts of Menin Gate) in a
single session.85
If Australia invented a gurative ‘spirit’ of Anzac after the First World War as
an iconic twentieth-century civic persona,86 Chinese political culture in a parallel
time of political violence enabled the ‘Spirit of Ah Q’.87 The ‘Anzac spirit’ of Gal-
lipoli to convert a military defeat into a moral victory is mirrored in Ah Q. ‘Ah Q
is famous for his “spiritual” victory method’ (精神勝利法) – his ability to trans-
form apparent defeat and humiliation into a symbolic victory by re-narrativising
events in a way that is more favourable to him. A form of Nietzschean ressenti-
ment, Ah Q’s strategy transformed objective weakness into a form of symbolic
strength.88 However, Lu Xun enclosed national deconstruction as his ‘real’ pro-
tagonist. The ‘ “real” story of Ah Q can only be a ghostly invention evoking the
void, not the reality, of its socio-ontological being’, in which the True Story is one
of a ‘ “bedeviled” or “possessed” nature’.89
Ah Q emerges at a specic moment. The era between 1919 and 1922 witnessed
the start of a contemporary Chinese cultural and political consciousness. In
China this national consciousness took the form of Ah Q and generated a cultural
discourse which, as Paul B. Foster argues, has maintained continual relevance
throughout the twentieth century. In 1938 Mao Zedong called Lu Xun ‘China’s
rst-rate sage. Confucius was a sage of feudal society and Lu Xun is a sage of new
China’.90 But paradoxically, the modern ‘new’ of Ah Q represented a phenome-
nology of absence – a spectre – of moral-cultural order of imperial China as ruin.91
From spatial to temporal and cosmotechnical understandings
of empire conict and change
The May Fourth and New Culture Movements were concerned with a new rela-
tionship between technics, Qi (器 tools [literal translation]), and Dao/Tao (道 cos-
mological consciousness). As Yuk Hui argues, in Chinese philosophy, particularly
in Confucianism, the highest standard is expressed as a unication between Qi
and Dao (道 器 合 一). To Yuk Hui they embody a “ ‘moral cosmotechnics”: a
relational thinking of the cosmos, and human beings, where the relation between
the two is mediated by technical beings’.92 The May Fourth Movement concerned
itself with Mr Science and Mr Democracy, wherein technology is integrated into
the category of science. The result is a collapse of Qi and Dao and possibly even
a reverse of the cosmotechnics – of using Qi to create Dao.93 In this way Li Qi
(禮器 vessel of rituals) expresses a Confucian rationalism which incorporated
ghosts into a moral cosmology via ritual – an idea central to the hierarchical
conceptualisation of ancestral rituals within the Confucian governance classic
Zhou Li (周禮 Rites of the Zhou).94 Ah Q bridges these concepts and temporality.
With Ah Q, Lu Xun writes a politics of hauntological time, of cultural radicalism
wherein Mao’s permanent revolution is enabled through a new subject of history,
who so enmeshed with the ghostly and old is paradoxically a guide to the new
‘allegorical drama of forgetting, haunting, and mourning’.95
At the same time as the New Culture Movement, during the aftermath of the
First World War, the British Empire also developed metropole/colony-unifying
cultural memory tropes that would shape identity and civic participation for the
next century. Like China these were a mix of the old and new.96 Their peculiar
modernity was a unifying ‘real-time’ quality. The commemorative practices of
the Unknown Soldier, silence, poppies and poetic odes were invented and glob-
ally accepted between 1919 and 1922. Developed to cope with trauma, they have
become forms of participative collective culture which pivot around memory.97
New commemorative rituals were more than ways to link individuals’ suering
and loss to a collective, democratic ideal: they were forms of ‘social technology’.
These commemorative technologies construct inter-subjectivity. ‘Reexive self-
modication’ and ‘new modalities’ of ‘social remembering’ are ‘technologically
mediated’ forms of ‘spectacle where participants are absorbed in their own enact-
ment of empathy and sorrow’.98
Recursion, post-colonial paradox and the cryptosphere
of eternity politics
Innovation in military technologies which mobilised bodies in the First World War
also served metaphorically to integrate the subject within an apparatus of nation-
alism post-war. As Friedrich Kittler armed, paraphrasing Virilio: ‘World War
1 perfected technical storage information.’ These storage media were ‘combined
with early prototypes of transmission media’.99 Equally, commemorative tech-
nologies, invented in aftermath, store an absence. ‘No more arresting emblems of
the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown
Soldiers,’ asserted Anderson. The ‘transmission media’ for post First World War
nationalism was an epistemological projection of the subject onto the void. Who
else could the ‘Unknown’ occupant be but a national body?
Nationalist imagining is connected to religious imagination.100 Nationalism’s
imaginary arose from larger cultural forms which dealt with eternal mystery of the
Other and death’s certainty, as the secular replaced the sacred in Western societies.
In the British Empire the synchronicity of the moment’s silence, for example, was
a kind of telepathically connected empire. These psychic imaginings of empire
invented through 1919–21 have proved remarkably resilient.101 Post-war social
technologies of ‘ghostly national imaginings’102 have proved adaptable, even to
virtual technologies.103
Shanzhai
山寨
nationalism
中国民族主义
125
126 Tom Sear
Chinese culture has a long complex imaginary of ghosts,104 but in 1976 the con-
struction of Chairman Mao's mausoleum as China’s national tomb at Tiananmen
Square replaced looking into the void with viewing the communist materialism of
Mao’s body. More recently, a new form of national, equally hauntological, imagi-
nary is recently emergent in China. Instead of mausoleum, the crypt in the nation-
alist imaginary of the CCP is now increasingly what Hillenbrand has termed the
‘cryptosphere’: a digital participatory, propaganda strategy which aims to ‘create an
emergent social space’ where state secrecy is now ‘every citizen’s business’.105 The
CCP’s recent adoption of sacralised, British Empire–originating commemorative
practices and a Russo–British style veneration for the Second World War is, I argue,
a component of this change. The mystery in this imaginary is not religious, how-
ever, it is a national secret which must be protected in an era of ‘Eternity Politics’.106
Globalisation’s post-truth theatre of apparitions, ‘fake news’, hidden conspir-
acy and mischievous trolls epitomise eternity politics. In the fog of ‘infowar’ a
sense of facticity and historicity fades to impressionist ashes of memory. The
1919 moment of silence on Armistice Day in the British Empire was intended as
a ritual to enable access to the past in the present and process it individually and
collectively, clearing the path to the future. But past, present and future are begin-
ning to blur in the uncanny historical consciousness of contemporary society, and
this has signicant ramications in a world where memory is becoming a critical
determinant of social identication and political action.
Election analysis and Brexit breakdowns in the United Kingdom signalled
these new trends of a politics of temporality. People now dene themselves and
their politics in relation to ‘pastness’ in the present more strongly than any other
measure. People’s relationship to history is becoming a more signicant frame for
the future than class, gender or political party. Nearly 80 per cent of Britons who
believed ‘things were better in the past’ voted to leave the European Union.107 In
non-cosmopolitan ‘backwaters’ a higher proportion supported ‘turning the clock
back to the way Britain was 20–30 years ago’.108 Meanwhile, remnant rituals of
commemoration like Remembrance Day are now deployed on the same digital
technology that may have accelerated the ‘Back to the Future’ Brexit vote.109
Shanzhai: nationalism, noise, signal and the oscillations
of origin
For the arc of the communist twentieth century, in China, nationalist commemora-
tion of China’s 1919 was future looking. Since 1939, 4 May has been recognised
as ‘Youth Day’ (青年节 Qīngnián jié). In 1959 Qīngnián jié was celebrated as part
of the Great Leap Forward.110
In reality, Ah Q and 4 May were always hauntological. Ah Q demonstrates
how 4 May, while a complex, contradictory incorporation of Western modernity
is also shanzhai (山寨).111 Shanzhai is a Chinese neologism – which gained large
currency from 2008 – which refers to fakes, but the ‘genuine fake’.112 Etymo-
logically, the term derives from a ‘mountain stronghold’ where bandits elude
a larger authority in the classical novel Water Margin (水浒传). In the present
shanzhai refers to consumer items which are produced using stolen intellectual
property. Copied mobile phones are the most obvious example of the genre. Phi-
losopher Byung-Chul Han has developed the shanzhai concept as a heuristic for
Chinese traditional thought. To Han, a negativity of ‘decreation’, ‘absence’ and
‘desubstantized’ Being accompanied with an ‘essence which resists transforma-
tion’ is what ‘dominates the Chinese awareness of time and history’.11 3 There is
no identity to a ‘unique event’. Chinese tradition has an alternate perception of
originality than the Western model. Thought is pragmatic, and shanzhai objects
are non-metaphysical with no rst origin.114 The original in classical Chinese aes-
thetics (真跡 zhen ji) – is a trace, via which processuality and continuous change
does not condense in a presence. Rather, Han argues ‘Far Eastern thought begins
with deconstruction’.115 Shanzhai is a form of deconstruction – from the outset,
as a form of Confucian constant – transformation.116 Han suggests ‘Maoism was
itself a kind shanzhai Marxism’, which enables it to mutate without contradiction
into a kind of hyper-capitalism though its continuous hybridity. So, I would sug-
gest, the nationalism (爱国主义) and formation of the CCP that was emergent in
1919–23 was a form of shanzhai nationalism. In literature, shanzhai was evident
in how Western modernism was adopted in characterisation and language via tra-
dition. Ah Q’s identity, focussed on decreation and return to the void, expressed
the notion of the ‘original’ as a form of subjectivity. Equally, Lu Xun’s use of
vernacular Chinese undermined the classical ‘dead literature’ of elites, as it cham-
pioned literature’s traditional semantic function in education and examination.
Communications technology facilitated shanzhai in 1919. The technicity of the
telegraph amplied the shanzhai form of 4 May. The role of the telegraph as a
‘signal trace’ pulsed with the processuality central to the idea of the ‘original’ in
shanzhai conception. The ‘time axis manipulation’ of a telegraph message and the
binary oscillation of an absence/presence state in the signal form, which provided
the trigger of the revolutionary century in the May Fourth Movement, was indica-
tive of a form of Chinese modernity that is accelerationist.117 In addition, the May
Fourth Movement is an original as a trace which both incorporates an integra-
tion of the Confucian rituals of Qi and Dao as unied in a cosmotechnics, which
thereby accommodates the notion of culture across time and space.118
The more recent commemoration of the May Fourth Movement in China
expressed the continuum and expression as a shanzhai (山寨) nationalism
(中国民族主义). The CCP has adopted international memory forms with ‘Chi-
nese characteristics’. Britain and her former Dominions have also experienced
a memory boom since 1990.119 Just as nations of the former British Empire have
recently seen an expansion of memory, so has China, albeit in an ambiguous way.
The commemoration of 4 May has undergone a transformation under Chairman
Xi Jinping. Like the so-called resurgence of Anzac in Australia, even the ritual
of Qingming – largely banned in the Mao era – made a comeback in the 1990s.
Since taking power as Communist Party General Secretary in 2012 and presi-
dent in March 2013, Xi Jinping has accelerated a turn towards tradition. Facili-
tated by Wang Huning, Mr Xi has devised the notion of the ‘China Dream’ (中国
梦).120 Launched just ahead of 4 May 2013, ‘China Dream’ is number three of the
Shanzhai
山寨
nationalism
中国民族主义
127
128 Tom Sear
‘Xi Thought’ mind map.121 The map is a visualisation of ‘Xi Jinping Thought’, the
ideological document launched at the 19th Congress in October 2017.122 ‘China
Dream’ has a complex integration of Chinese history and memory into its for-
mula. As Ian Johnson points out, the ‘role of history in China during the CCP era
is complex, paradoxical. At once integral, and sanitised, erased. Suppressed and
recreated to serve the present’.123
For almost a century, 4 May and Ah Q were a uniquely Chinese take on the
remembrance of the Armistice and aftermath of the Great War. But from 2007,
Lu Xun and Ah Q were gradually removed from school textbooks.124 Lu Xun
has been replaced by other, more foreign memorial forms. Like Russia and the
United Kingdom, the CCP has formally adopted the state-sponsored sacralisa-
tion of the Second World War. Equally, under Xi Jinping, China has adopted the
nihilist populist politics of eternity.125 Now, far from Ah Q’s maudlin modern-
ist individualism, the memory cultures of the CCP resemble the mass participa-
tive memory cultures the British Empire developed between 1919 and 1921, and
the transnational technologies of commemoration which have dominated British
Empire diaspora international memory cultures ever since.
The 100th anniversary of these events in Chinese history was marked on
4 May 2019. The centenary was commemorated in China within a new, and
highly technological, conception of history and memory. Xi Jinping’s speech
for 4 May 2019 stated, ‘in the new era, Chinese youth should establish their
belief in Marxism, faith in socialism with Chinese characteristics, and the con-
dence of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and the Chinese dream’.126
The inherent ambiguity of 4 May for the current regime meant that centenary
commemorative events were not heavily celebrated on Mainland PRC.127 How-
ever, in the lead up, First World War remembrance activities were examined and
British expertise drawn upon. Based upon reported observances of PRC groups
in the United Kingdom alone, the CCP have been actively learning about Brit-
ish origin commemoration forms and the activities surrounding the centenary of
the First World War.128 To mark the centenary, memory culture experts, such as
Jay Winter, were invited to the Beijing-based academic events associated with
4 May in 2019.129
Processing the ambiguities of 4 May via transnational forms130 arises from
commemorative convergence. The CCP values decennial anniversaries, 1919 and
1949 in particular. However, 2019 was also the 40th anniversary of the Tianan-
men Square Protest of 1989. The students of 1989 had started their protest around
4 May that year and saw themselves as the natural bearers of the ‘Spirit’ of 4
May 1919.131 The 1989 history of Tiananmen Square has been actively repressed
and censored in the PRC.132 Much of the ooding of PRC-based social media with
nationalist messages on commemorative days is to prevent social cohesion erupt-
ing at these moments. Control of the internet and its development since 1989 has
also been haunted by the trajectory of Tiananmen Square.133 For almost 40 years
the gure of the 1989 ghost has haunted the memory interstice of binaries within
the state cryptosphere. A core crypto binary exists, for example, between a spe-
cic demographic of the people who possess a living memory of the Tiananmen
incident and the state that seeks to repress that memory. This reexive bind
between living memory and the state is a kind of allegory for a subtle but impor-
tant change in dening the ‘original’. The shanzhai hauntological has transmuted
through 4 May, and Ah Q has now become the ‘core conceptual metaphor for
public secrecy in China’.134
Centenaries are the focus of Xi Jinping’s leadership: soon after becoming
leader, Xi specied deadlines for meeting each of his ‘Two Centennial Goals’.
China will aim to double its 2010 per capita GDP by 2021, when it celebrates the
100th anniversary of the CCP.135 Second, it will become a ‘fully developed, rich,
and powerful’ nation by the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic in 2049.136
Once again, a century later, the spectre of empire hegemony and competition is
emergent, this time between the United States and China. In the months that Ah
Q was serialised and the CCP formed in late 1921, the rst Naval Conference in
Washington was underway.137
The most striking thing about the subsequent Washington Naval Treaties of
1923, as Kori Schake has observed, was their purpose to ‘prevent Anglo- American
competition’.138 Britain remained the world’s greatest naval power, but its hegem-
ony was evaporating. It was American power which most threatened the empire,
not Japan’s. Churchill stated of the conference that the United States would ‘have
a good chance of becoming the strongest Naval Power in the world and thus
obtaining the complete mastery of the Pacic’.139 At this conference China had
laid out ten proposals for sovereignty: it was not to be. This contest for the naval
power in the Pacic continues a century on.
Liquid modernity: from wetware soft machine photography
to Stack shanzh-AI silicon Deep Fakes
In 1919 a telegram from Paris concerning Qingdao had ignited a revolution. Now
Qingdao on the Shandong peninsula is a location of one of the seven internet
submarine landing cable stations in China where, to seek an isolated internet,
information is managed and controlled via a complex process of deep package
inspection and VPN management.140 In 2019 naval hegemony in the South China
Sea is as much a competition of information as it is of naval power. Maps of an
empire’s naval hegemony are redrawn in children’s movies such as Abominable,
or in National Basketball Association (NBA) TV graphics and tweets as plotted
on charts.141
If the hegemony of empire is the ability to frame the rules of international
engagement and then use those rules to create order amongst other states, the
Armistice and aftermath of 1919–23 did not ultimately create peaceful transition
between British and US hegemony in the Asia-Pacic. The question remains how
will this transition between 2019 and 2023 begin to work itself out between the
United States and China? History, memory and new technological empires will
all play a part.142
Now the mercantile nomos of empires has been replaced by the challenge
of planetary geopolitics of internet Stacks.143 The literature of the Chinese
Shanzhai
山寨
nationalism
中国民族主义
129
130 Tom Sear
cybernetizen is more likely to be that of science-ction than Lu Xun.144 Perhaps,
living in a digital surveillance state, thematically relevant ction might increas-
ingly imitate Blade Runner and its themes of posthuman policing and secrecy.145
The original Blade Runner lm had been set in an aesthetically Pan-Asian-Pacic
US city in November 2019. Produced mid-way during the centenary, Blade Run-
ner 2049, set it in its namesake year, was a sequel to the 1980s original. In 2049
the protagonist’s angst is cryptospherical because the burden is his awareness that
he is fake, and freedom is a choice of self-sacrice uncannily similar to the self-
sacrice valorised in First World War commemoration.
In his 1925 published work ‘On Photography and Related Matters’ (論照相
之類) Lu Xun used the idea of the photograph to represent the technology of
the ‘foreign devils’.146 Most analysts of this text make much of the folk fears of
photography Lu Xun depicts ‘like witchcraft’, stealing ‘a person’s spirit’ and ‘for-
eign devils’ excising Chinese eyeballs, storing them in layers in jars, to transform
them into photographs and wire. But these tropes are used by Lu Xun merely to
introduce the ‘body’ of the text, which more centrally deals with execution, dis-
section and hearts torn out, with ‘menstrual juices and semen’, with ‘blood; excre-
ment and urine’. A ‘body is rent in two’, he writes, becoming a ‘Picture of Two
Selves’.147 The photograph Lu Xun that suggests most represents China is that of a
‘single man: the Peking opera star Mei Lanfang’ playing the character of woman.
‘In China,’ Lu Xun emphatically concludes, ‘the art that is the most noble, most
eternal, and most universal in China is the art of men impersonating women’.148
Lu Xun repeats a version of this phrase three times in the text. Connected with a
capture and storage of photography, which eviscerates, dissects and divides, the
technology of ‘foreign devils’ is akin to the xation on the cuts and gore of Nan-
jing massacre photography commemoration in contemporary China.149 However,
in conclusion, Lu Xun emphasises the pinnacle of Chinese techne to be identity
‘passing’ to an audience.150
Reading Lu Xun’s ‘On Photography’ in 2020, it is impossible not to think of
Turing’s ‘The Imitation Game’ of man/woman/machine – the Turing Test: ‘to consider
the question, “Can machines think?” ’ whereby the ‘object of the game for the inter-
rogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman’.151
The Turing Test conjures the ‘ghost in the machine’ that often inhabits cul-
tural representation of future AI. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the CCP
envisages that the future metric of global planetary power for 2049 will be ‘ “intel-
ligentized” (智能化) warfare, in which AI will be as integral as information tech-
nology has been in today’s “informatized” (信息化) warfare’.152 The Washington
Naval Conferences of 1921–23 were a table-top negotiation concerning naval
power in the Pacic. Geopolitical relations in 2021–23 will involve leveraging AI
in cyber operations negotiations over approaches to AI safety or security (人工智
能安全). China’s AI security concerns are the foundation of strategic future threat
narratives of quantum supremacy and hegemony in computational applications of
cryptography as a ‘mountain fortress’.153 Lu Xun wrote as Britain stood motionless
in a moment of silence on Armistice Day in 1924. Lu Xun foresaw ‘grabism’ in a
storage image which resembled the recursive layered infrastructure of Bratton’s
conception of the Stack:
The use foreign devils had for pickled eyes, of course, lay elsewhere, only
the preparation was inuenced by S City’s pickling of cabbage, which is
sure proof of the saying that China has great power of assimilation over the
West.154
Cabbage or computation, China’s continuous shanzhai adaptation ‘is not the
inwardness of the essence but the outwardness of the tradition or the situation that
drives change onward’.155 The ‘Neo-Confucian belief that “all the myriad things
are within me” ’ and which ‘man is the “spirit of all things” ’156 is an immanence
rather than a Western transcendence.
From social technology and the telegraph to the shanzhai
bre optic ouroboros of data souls
The Versailles Treaty of 1919 divided up borders and calculated a balance sheet
for the costs of war, and technologies of commemoration were formalised across
the British Empire over the next two years. Lu Xun nished his essay on pho-
tography on 11 November 1924.157 At almost precisely that moment in London,
well-known Spiritualist Ada Deane took a photograph of the silent crowd during
the two-minute silence at the newly constructed Cenotaph, the peak of the 1924
Armistice Day ceremony. Deane claimed that, when the over-exposed photograph
was developed, it showed faces of men hovering amidst the crowd, which she said
were the spirits of dead soldiers of the Great War. A few days later, the newspaper
the Daily Sketch exposed the image as fake. Deane had stolen and cut and pasted
the images of the faces of the dead in a crude proto-photoshop manner.158
On 2 May 1919, as telegraphs pulsed from Paris to Beijing two days before
the uprising in China, French poet Paul Valéry published ‘Crisis of the Spirit’ in
English.159 Empires, he wrote, were ‘watching millions of ghosts . . . meditating
on the life and death of truths; for ghosts’. Meanwhile, ‘the exploitation of the
globe, and the general spread of technology, all of which presage a deminutio
capitis for Europe’ led Valéry to ask ‘must these be taken as absolute deci-
sions of fate? Or have we some freedom against this threatening conspiracy of
things?’160
In 2020, reecting on Valéry, Yuk Hui points out, the year marks the centenary
of ‘Crisis of the Spirit’ and of 100 years of crisis.161 The start of this century from
2000 to 2020 is a recursive trace of the previous 100 years, as information wars
disintegrate the borders of nation states just as they seek to close them and as
climate change, coronaviruses and civil disorder start to create an economics of
sacrice and loss requiring instant commemoration.162
Now on the threshold of a new century, where both the ‘West’ and the ‘East’
are entangled within a planetary infosphere of spiralling deconstruction, there has
Shanzhai
山寨
nationalism
中国民族主义
131
132 Tom Sear
been a post-colonial return: a ‘Journey to the West’ of ‘Shanzhai 山寨 Nationalism
中国民族主义’. In empires experiencing crises of diuse causality, conspiracy
theories swarm on social media seeking a monotheist truth of denitive ‘origins’:
whether of a singular ‘Patient Zero’ of zoonotic transmission of SARS-CoV-2,
US or People’s Liberation Army lab-created viruses on the loose, a lone wildre
arsonist or a ‘Deep State’ Galapagos of Gonkai (公开) 5G conspiracy. Return
in eternal politics is a reexive epistemological ‘aesthetic of the original pre-
served through the copying (east) rather than the authenticity of the ruin (west)’.
Shanzhai nationalism in the West expresses itself in the Anglophone sphere as
the recursive paroxysm of stasis as it fails to resolve into one copied form or
another nor acknowledge what is metonymic or metaphoric.163 Equally, China is
not immune in this reexive entanglement. Mimesis is radically integrated within
alterity.164 China may, in pursuing the ‘China Dream’, experience oscillations of
memory and amnesia as itself, a new enthusiastic coloniser of an Other within a
new geopolitical internet hegemony. In such a metanarrative, the CCP and PLA
are in the PRC, perpetually policing the mimesis machine – whether in a Blade
Runner set in 2019 or 2049 – to ensure shanzhai nationalism’s alterity may require
suppressing that very identity which is key to shanzhai reproductive iteration.165
Perhaps the future commemoration of a century of the CCP’s rule in 2049 will be
haunted by a century of Turing’s ‘Imitation Game’ more than the ghost of Ah Q.
Notes
1 Sarah Fling, “Spanish Inuenza in the President’s Neighborhood,” The White
House Historical Society, October 2, 2019, https://www.whitehousehistory.org/
spanish-inuenza-in-the-presidents-neighborhood.
2 Ibid.
3 John M. Barry, The Great Inuenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
(New York: Penguin Books, 2005).
4 Anonymous, “Mind-Boggling,” The Economist, November 10, 2018, 60–61.
5 “Breaking News, World News & Multimedia,” New York Times, 2020, accessed June
1. https://www.nytimes.com.
6 “China Pays ‘Virtual’ Respects to Ancestors,” BBC World, April 4, 2020, accessed
May 27. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-52157455.
7 Stephen McDonell, “China Stops for Three Minutes to Remember the Dead,”
@BBCWorld, www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-china-52161087/coronavirus-
china-stops-for-three-minutes-to-remember-the-dead; “China Pauses to Honour Those
Killed by COVID-19,” @SBSNews, www.sbs.com.au/news/china-pauses-to-honour-
those-killed-by-covid-19.
8 Cao Desheng, “Top Leaders Mourn Virus’ Victims,” China Daily, April 6, 2020, www.
chinadailyhk.com/article/126767?showpdf=true.
9 James L. Watson and Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, Death Ritual in Late Imperial and
Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 270; Edoarda Masi,
China Winter: Workers, Mandarins, and the Purge of the Gang of Four, 1st ed. (New
York: Dutton, 1982), 98; David Biello, “In China: A Moment of Silence to Mourn
Quake Victims,” Scientic American, May 19, 2008, www.scienticamerican.com/
article/in-china-a-moment-of-sile/; Madelein Schreiber, “Silence China Quake Vic-
tims,” 2008, accessed April 14, 2020, http://noosphere.princeton.edu/china.silence.
quake.html.
10 “China Honors Martyrs with Moment of Silence at Tian’anmen Square,” CGTN, Sep-
tember 29, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc3HwvW_5cc&list=PLJeut_81i6Ku
XnX_Zw-i–wAHd7e2hAx4&index=3.
11 Tom Sear, “This Remembrance Day, Digital Commemoration Makes It Impos-
sible to Forget,” The Conversation, November 9, 2016, http://theconversation.
com/this-remembrance-day-digital-commemoration-makes-it-impossible-to-for-
get-65560.
12 R. I. George, “The Glorious Dead,” Times, November 7, 1919; Edward Honey, “Five
Minutes Silence,” The Evening News, May 8, 1919; Adrian Gregory, The Silence of
Memory: Armistice Day, 1919–1946 (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994).
13 Steven D. Brown, “Two Minutes of Silence: Social Technologies of Pub-
lic Commemoration,” Theory and Psychology 22, no. 2 (2012): 234–52,
doi:10.1177/0959354311429031.
14 George, “The Glorious Dead”; Honey, “Five Minutes Silence”; Gregory, The Silence
of Memory.
15 Gregory, The Silence of Memory.
16 Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 112–51.
17 Brown, “Two Minutes of Silence,” 234–52.
18 Margaret Hillenbrand, Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contempo-
rary China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Margaret Hillenbrand, “Sell-
ing the Cryptosphere in China,” Cultural Studies 34, no. 4 (October 2019): 625–55, doi
:10.1080/09502386.2019.1671470.
19 Badiucao 巴丢草 (@badiucao), “#LiWenliang the Whistle Blower Doc Who Post
About the #Coronavirus #Outbreak in China Passed Away Just Now,” Twitter, Feb-
ruary 6, 2020, 9:57 a.m., https://twitter.com/badiucao/status/1225433402788040
705?s=20; Bill Bostock, “China Declared Whistleblower Doctor Li Wenliang a
‘Martyr’ Following a Local Campaign to Silence Him for Speaking Out About the
Coronavirus,” BIAUS, April 3, 2020, www.businessinsider.com.au/coronavirus-
china-li-wenliang-whistleblower-doctor-martyr-2020-4.
20 Stephan Feuchtwang and Michael Rowlands, Civilisation Recast: Theoretical and
Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); David Wen-
grow, “Review of Civilisation Recast: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives,” Antiq-
uity 94 (2020): 275–77, doi:10.15184/aqy.2019.226.2020.
21 Hillenbrand, Negative Exposures.
22 Ian Johnson, “China’s Great Awakening: How the People’s Republic Got Religion,”
Foreign Aairs 96, no. 2 (2017): 83–95.
23 Paulin Batairwa Kubuya, Meaning and Controversy Within Chinese Ancestor Religion
(Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 148–49.
24 H. Li and Y. Cao, “Time Will Tell: Temporal Landmarks Inuence Metaphorical Asso-
ciations Between Space and Time,” Cognitive Linguistics 29, no. 4 (2018): 677–701,
doi:10.1515/cog-2017-0043.
25 Antonia Finnane, “Sweeping Graves,” Inside Story: International, April 7, 2020,
https://insidestory.org.au/sweeping-graves/.
26 Andrea Chen, “First National Martyrs’ Day Remembers Those Who Sacriced for
China,” South China Morning Post, September 30, 2014, www.scmp.com/news/china/
article/1604473/rst-national-martyrs-day-remembers-those-who-sacriced-china;
I. Johnson, “In Creating ‘Martyrs’ Day,’ China Promotes a Vision of the Past,” New
York Times, September 29, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/09/30/world/asia/in-creat-
ing-martyrs-day-china-promotes-a-vision-of-the-past.html.
27 I. Johnson, “China’s Memory Manipulators,” The Guardian, June 8, 2016, www.the-
guardian.com/world/2016/jun/08/chinas-memory-manipulators; Johnson, “China’s
Great Awakening.”
Shanzhai
山寨
nationalism
中国民族主义
133
134 Tom Sear
28 Jacob Pouster, “China Outpaces India in Internet Access, Smartphone Ownership,”
Pew Research Center, March 16, 2017, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/16/
china-outpaces-india-in-internet-access-smartphone-ownership/.
29 Nicole Jao, “WeChat Now Has Over 1 Billion Active Monthly Users Worldwide ·
TechNode,” Technodechina, March 5, 2018, https://technode.com/2018/03/05/wechat-
1-billion-users/.
30 Zhihua Liu, “Qingming Festival Traditions Go Digital in China,” asiaone.com,
April 3, 2015, www.asiaone.com/asia/qingming-festival-traditions-go-digital-china;
“Ancient Chinese Tomb Festival Goes Hi-Tech,” BBC World, April 4, 2017, www.
bbc.com/news/world-asia-39487437; Wei Cang, “App Oers Live Streaming of Tomb
Sweeping Service,” asiaone.com, March 31, 2017, www.asiaone.com/asia/app-oers-
live-streaming-tomb-sweeping-service; “China Pays ‘Virtual’ Respects to Ancestors,”
BBC World.
31 Zhihua Liu, “Qingming Festival Traditions”; “Ancient Chinese Tomb Festival,” BBC-
World; Cang, “App Oers Live Streaming”; “China Pays ‘Virtual’ Respects to Ances-
tors,” BBCWorld.
32 Q. N. Jasonqng, “Blocked on Weibo,” Tumblr, June 4, 2014, https://blockedonweibo.
tumblr.com/ & https://web.archive.org/web/20200524085008/https://blockedonweibo.
tumblr.com/.
33 Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts, “How the Chinese Government
Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument,”
American Political Science Review 111, no. 3 (July 27, 2017): 484–501, doi:10.1017/
S0003055417000144.
34 Ibid.
35 Kori N. Schake, Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
36 Jim Mattis, “Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of
America,” January 20, 2018, https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-
National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf.
37 Great Britain and Foreign Oce and The National Archives (UK), Foreign Oce Files
for China. 1919–1929: Kuomintang, CCP and the Third International, 1910–1933
(Marlborough, England: Adam Matthew Digital, 2013); Tony Saich and Bingzhang
Yang, The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party: Documents and Analysis
(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).
38 Johnson, “China’s Memory Manipulators.”
39 Brendan Thomas-Noone, “Mapping the Third Oset: Australia, the United States and
Future War in the Indo-Pacic – United States Studies Centre,” @USSC, 2017, www.
ussc.edu.au/analysis/mapping-the-third-oset-australia-the-united-states-and-future-
war-in-the-indo-pacic.
40 Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2015).
41 Stephane Beaulac, “The Westphalian Model in Dening International Law: Challeng-
ing the Myth,” Australian Journal of Legal History 8, no. 2 (2004): 181–213.
42 David Kilcullen, “David Kilcullen Discusses,” C-SPAN, March 10, 2020, //www.c-
span.org/video/?470042-1/david-kilcullen-discusses-the-dragons-snakes.
43 D. Kilcullen, Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror (Carl-
ton, VIC, Australia: Australia Black Inc., 2016); an imprint of Schwartz Publishing
Pty Ltd.
44 H. Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism
in an Era of Global Conict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
45 McKenzie Wark and Petar Jandrić, “New Knowledge for a New Planet: Critical Peda-
gogy for the Anthropocene,” Open Review of Educational Research 3, no. 1 (2016):
148–78. doi:10.1080/23265507.2016.1217165.
46 Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 65; Alan Hudson, “Mr Science and
Mr Democracy: The Pursuit of Modernity in China,” City 12, no. 2 (2008): 161–70,
doi:10.1080/13604810802167002.
47 Hamid Molwana, “Roots of War: The Long Road to Intervention,” in Triumph of
the Image: The Media’s War in the Persian Gulf: A Global Perspective, ed. Hamid
Molwana, George Gerbner, and Herbert I. Schiller (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1992), 36.
48 Molwana, “Roots of War,” 36; Great Britain and Foreign Oce, Foreign Oce Files
for China.
49 Schake, Safe Passage.
50 Michael J. K. Walsh and Andrekos Varnava, “Introduction: ‘Britannia Pacicatrix’:
Imagining a Post-Armistice Empire Through British Art,” in After the Armistice:
Empire, Endgame and Aftermath, ed. M. Walsh, A. Varnava and Margaret Hutchison
(London: Routledge, 2021).
51 Holly Buck, “The Tragic Omissions of Governance by Curve,” Strelka, May 15, 2020,
https://strelkamag.com/en/article/the-tragic-omissions-of-governance-by-curve.
52 J. Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global
Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 13.
53 Schake, Safe Passage, 225.
54 Guoqi Xu, Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Guoqi Xu, Asia and the Great War:
A Shared History, 1st ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
55 Jianlang Wang, Unequal Treaties and China, vol. 1 (Honolulu: Silkroad Press,
2016), 53.
56 Tooze, The Deluge, 327–28; Mitter, A Bitter Revolution, 3.
57 Erez Manela, Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins
of Anticolonial Nationalism (Cary, NC: Oxford University Press, 2007); Shakhar
Rahav, “Beyond Beijing: May Fourth as a National and International Movement,”
Journal of Modern Chinese History 13, no. 2 (2019): 325–31, doi:10.1080/17535654
.2019.1688982.
58 Rahav, “Beyond Beijing.”
59 N. K. Lee, “How Is a Political Public Space Made? – The Birth of Tiananmen Square
and the May Fourth Movement,” Political Geography 28, no. 1 (2009): 32–43,
doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2008.05.003.
60 When this chapter was presented in November 2018, there was little scholarly dis-
cussion of the role of the telegraph in these events. Since that time, GUO Shuanglin
(Renmin University) has explored source material in his presentation “Telegraphy and
Political Time: Understanding the May Fourth Incident in 1919,” Global May Fourth,
CGC 10th Anniversary, Beijing Center, Columbia University, May 14, 2019, www.
youtube.com/watch?v=bJJurn7Df40.
61 James W. Carey, A Cultural Approach to Communication (New York: Routledge,
2008); Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1990).
62 Ralph Schroeder, Neus Rotger, Diana Roig-Sanz, and Marta Puxan-Oliva, “Historiciz-
ing Media, Globalizing Media Research: Infrastructures, Publics, and Everyday Life,”
Journal of Global History 14, no. 3 (2019): 437–53, doi:10.1017/S1740022819000202.
William J. Phalen, How the Telegraph Changed the World (Jeerson, NC: McFar-
land & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2014); Simone M. Müller, Wiring the World: The
Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2016).
63 Yongming Zhou, Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political
Participation in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
Shanzhai
山寨
nationalism
中国民族主义
135
136 Tom Sear
64 Wang, Unequal Treaties and China.
65 Jarkko Haapanen, “Chinese People and the Others: Notes on Contemporary Chinese
Nationalism and the May Fourth Movement,” Journal of China and International
Relations (JCIR) 7, no. 1 (2019): 1–20.
66 Chen Zhongping, “The May Fourth Movement and Provincial Warlords: A Reexami-
nation,” Modern China 37, no. 2 (2011): 135–69, doi:10.1177/0097700410391964.
67 Ibid.
68 Robin Boast, The Machine in the Ghost: Digitality and its Consequences (London:
Reaktion Books Ltd., 2017), 182, 89.
69 Ranjan Ghosh and Ethan Kleinberg, Presence: Philosophy, History and Cultural The-
ory for the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 27.
70 Wark and Jandrić, “New Knowledge for a New Planet.”
71 Mitter, A Bitter Revolution; Jinhuan Dai, “Culture,” in Afterlives of Chinese Commu-
nism: Political Concepts from Mao To Xi, ed. Christian P. Sorace, Ivan Franceschini,
and Nicholas Loubere (Acton, Australia: ANU Press, Verso, 2019), 49.
72 Martin Weizong Huang, “ ‘The Inescapable Predicament: The Narrator and His
Discourse’ in the True Story of Ah Q,” Modern China 16, no. 4 (1990): 430–49,
doi:10.1177/009770049001600403.
73 Paul B. Foster, “Ah Q Genealogy: Ah Q, Miss Ah Q, National Character and the Con-
struction of the Ah Q Discourse,” Asian Studies Review 28, no. 3 (2004): 243–66,
doi:10.1080/103782042000291088.
74 Ibid., 243.
75 Gloria Davies, “The Problematic Modernity of Ah Q,” Chinese Literature: Essays,
Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 13 (1991): 57–76, doi:10.2307/495053.
76 Xudong Zhang, “The Will to Allegory and the Origin of Chinese Modernism: Reread-
ing Lu Xun’s Ah Q – The Real Story,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modern-
isms, ed. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
173–201, esp. 183, 201.
77 Jacques Derrida, “Specters of Marx,” New Left Review 205 (1994): 31–58; Francis
Fukuyama, Have We Reached the End of History (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corpora-
tion, 1989).
78 L. Perrott, “Time Is Out of Joint: The Transmedial Hauntology of David Bowie,”
Celebrity Studies 10, no. 1 (2019): 119–39, doi:10.1080/19392397.2018.1559125.
79 Mark Fisher, “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly 66, no. 1 (2012): 16–24,
doi:10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16; Mark Fisher, “The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofu-
turism and Hauntology,” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5,
no. 2 (2013): 42–55, doi:10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.03; Mark Fisher, Ghosts of
My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester, UK: Zero
Books, 2014).
80 Fisher, “What Is Hauntology?”
81 Ibid., 24; Perrott, “Time Is Out of Joint.”
82 K. S. Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Carlton,
VIC: Melbourne University Publishing, 2005), 277.
83 Inglis, Sacred Places, 273; Australian War Memorial (AWM), “Menin Gate at
Midnight,” @AWMemorial, accessed June 4, 2020, www.awm.gov.au/collection/
ART09807/.
84 “Menin Gate at Midnight,” @AWMemorial, www.awm.gov.au/collection/ART09807/.
85 Inglis, Sacred Places, 274; AWM, accessed June 4, 2020.
86 “Anzac Spirit | The Australian War Memorial,” @AWMemorial, accessed May 27,
2020, www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/anzac/spirit.
87 Gloria Davies, Lu Xun’s Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2013).
88 Wang Hui, “Intuition, Repetition, and Revolution: Six Moments in the Life of Ah
Q,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures, ed. Carlos Rojas and
Andrea Bachner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
89 Xudong Zhang, “The Will to Allegory and the Origin of Chinese Modernism: Reread-
ing Lu Xun’s Ah Q – The Real Story,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Mod-
ernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), 173–201.
90 Paul B. Foster, Ah Q Archaeology: Lu Xun, Ah Q, Ah Q Progeny and the National
Character Discourse in Twentieth Century China (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2006), 246.
91 Zhang, “The Will to Allegory and the Origin of Chinese Modernism,” 182–83.
92 Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics
(Falmouth: Urbanomic Media Ltd., 2016), 65.
93 Ibid., 158.
94 Ibid., 29, 109–10.
95 Zhang, “The Will to Allegory and the Origin of Chinese Modernism,” 183.
96 Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medi-
evalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2007).
97 Sear, “This Remembrance Day.”
98 Brown, “Two Minutes of Silence.”
99 F. Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays, ed. John Johnston
(Amsterdam: GB Arts International, 1997), 122.
100 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections On the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, rev ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 9–10.
101 Bruce Scates, Rae Frances, Keir Reeves, Frank Bongiorno, Martin Crotty, Gareth
Knapman, Graham Seal, Annette Becker, Andrew Reeves, Tim Soutphommasane,
Kevin Blackburn, Stephen J. Clarke, Peter Stanley, Andrew Hoskins, Jay Winter, Carl
Bridge, Laura James, Rebecca Wheatley, Leah Riches, Alexandra McCosker, and
Simon Sleight, “Anzac Day at Home and Abroad: Towards a History of Austral-
ia’s National Day,” History Compass 10, no. 7 (2012): 523–36, doi:10.1111/j.1478-
0542.2012.00862.x; Inglis, Sacred Places.
102 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 9.
103 Tom Sear, “Dawn Servers: Anzac Day 2015 and Hyper‐Connective Commemora-
tion,” in War Memory and Commeration ( Memory Studies: Global Constellations), ed.
Brad West (Routledge, 2016), www.unsworks.unsw.edu.au/primo_library/libweb/
action/dlDisplay.do?vid=UNSWORKS&docId=unsworks_modsunsworks_
44440.
104 John Williams, “Superstition,” in Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Con-
cepts from Mao To Xi, ed. Christian P. Sorace, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Lou-
bere (Acton Australian Capital Territory, Australia: ANU Press, Verso, 2019), 271.
105 Hillenbrand, “Selling the Cryptosphere in China.”
106 Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (London: Vin-
tage Digital, 2018).
107 BEST, “Brexit Britain: British Election Study Insights from the post-EU Referendum
Wave of the BES Internet Panel – The British Election Study,” British Election Study,
June 10, 2016, accessed June 2, 2020, www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-resources/
brexit-britain-british-election-study-insights-from-the-post-eu-referendum-wave-of-
the-bes-internet-panel/#.XtZA_sARW73.
108 Will Jennings and Gerry Stoker, “The Bifurcation of Politics: Two Englands,” Politi-
cal Quarterly 87, no. 3 (2016): 372–82, doi:10.1111/1467-923X.12228.
Shanzhai
山寨
nationalism
中国民族主义
137
138 Tom Sear
109 Carole Cadwalladr, “Facebook’s Role in Brexit – and the Threat to Democracy,” Ted
Talks, April 16, 2019, www.ted.com/talks/carole_cadwalladr_facebook_s_role_in_
brexit_and_the_threat_to_democracy.
110 Mitter, A Bitter Revolution, 198–99.
111 Ibid.
112 Bruce Sterling, “New Shanzhai 山寨 (shanzhai),” Wired, August 24, 2018, www.wired.
com/beyond-the-beyond/2018/08/new-shanzhai-山寨-shanzhai/; Andrew Chubb,
“China’s Shanzhai Culture: ‘Grabism’ and the Politics of Hybridity,” Journal of Con-
temporary China 24, no. 92 (2015): 260–79, doi:10.1080/10670564.2014.932159.
113 Byung-Chul Han, Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2017), location 46–47.
114 Gregory Jones-Katz, “Where Is Deconstruction Today? On Jacques Derrida’s ‘The-
ory and Practice’ and Byung-Chul Han’s ‘Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese’,”
2019, Los Angeles Review of Books, May 8, 2018, https://lareviewofbooks.org/
article/where-is-deconstruction-today-on-jacques-derridas-theory-and-practice-and-
byung-chul-hans-shanzhai-deconstruction-in-chinese/.
115 Han, Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese.
116 Ibid., 24; M. Wenning, “Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese,” Philosophy East and
West 64, no. 1 (January 2014): 264–66.
117 Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems; Sybille Krämer, “The Cultural Tech-
niques of Time Axis Manipulation: On Friedrich Kittler’s Conception of Media,” The-
ory, Culture & Society 23, no. 7–8 (2006): 93–109, doi:10.1177/0263276406069885;
Kate Maddalena and Jeremy Packer, “The Digital Body: Telegraphy as Discourse
Network,” Theory, Culture & Society 32, no. 1 (2015): 93–117, doi:10.1177/
0263276413520620.
118 Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China; Carey, A Cultural Approach to
Communication, 1983.
119 Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the
20th Century (n.p.: Yale University Press, 2008); Jenny Macleod, “The Fall and Rise
of Anzac Day: 1965 and 1990 Compared,” War & Society 20, no. 1 (2002): 149–68,
doi:10.1179/072924702791201935; Daniel Todman, The Great War: Myth and Mem-
ory (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2005).
120 Lutgard Lams, “Examining Strategic Narratives in Chinese Ocial Discourse
Under Xi Jinping,” Journal of Chinese Political Science 23, no. 3 (2018): 387–411,
doi:10.1007/s11366-018-9529-8; Ane Bislev, “The Chinese Dream: Imagining
China,” Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 8, no. 4 (2015): 585–
95, doi:10.1007/s40647-015-0099-2.
121 Xi Xinping, “TE_ximindmap.pdf,” The Economist, 2020, accessed May 21, 2020,
https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/les/pdfs/TE_ximindmap.pdf; “Mind-
Boggling,” The Economist, 60–61; Kirsty Needham, “ ‘Consciously Mystifying’: Xi
Jinping Thought Mapped for the Masses,” The Sydney Morning Herald, October 19,
2018, www.smh.com.au/world/asia/consciously-mystifying-xi-jinping-thought-
mapped-for-the-masses-20181018-p50aln.html.
122 Jinping Xi, The Governance of China, 1st ed. (Governance of China. Beijing: Foreign
Languages Press, 2014); John Garrick and Yan Bennett, “Xi Jinping Thought,” China
Perspectives 1, no. 2 (2018): 99–105.
123 Johnson, “China’s Memory Manipulators”; Johnson, “In Creating ‘Martyrs’ Day.”
124 Liz Carter, “China’s War on Deep Thinking,” The Atlantic, September 5, 2013,
accessed May 30, 2020, www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/09/chinas-war-
on-deep-thinking/279384/.
125 Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom.
126 Bang Xiao, “Xi Jinping Celebrates 1919 Students Protests While Sidestepping Tian-
anmen Massacre,” ABC News, April 30, 2019, www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-30/
xi-jinping-100-years-since-student-protests-in-china/11059206.
127 Q. Edward Wang, “The May Fourth Movement: A Centennial Anniversary-Editor’s
Introduction,” Chinese Studies in History: The May Fourth Movement of 1919:
A Centennial Anniversary 52, no. 3–4: 183–87, doi:10.1080/00094633.2019.167
5438.
128 Paul Huddie, “@TomSear Indeed & they Have Been Coming to the UK to Learn.
I Taught a Local & Central Gov Delegation in 2016 #China,” Twitter (tweet),
April 26, 2017, https://twitter.com/PaulHuddie/status/857118295446695938?s=20.
129 Aimee Fox-Godden and David G. Morgan-Owen, “Conference Report: Commemo-
rating the Centenary of the First World War,” Defence – In – Depth, February 28,
2017, https://defenceindepth.co/2017/02/28/conference-report-commemoratin,g-the-
centenary-of-the-rst-world-war/.
130 Helen B. McCartney and David G. Morgan-Owen, “Commemorating the Centenary
of the First World War: National and Trans-National Perspectives,” War & Society 36,
no. 4 (2017): 235–38, doi:10.1080/07292473.2017.1384136.
131 Wang, “The May Fourth Movement.”
132 Bang Xiao, “ ‘Consternation, Fear and Disbelief’: Chinese Soldier Remembers Tian-
anmen Square Massacre,” ABC News, June 1, 2019, www.abc.net.au/news/2019-
06-02/tiananmen-square-massacre-30-year-anniversary/11163332; Louisa Lim, The
People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2014).
133 James Griths, The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alterna-
tive Version of the Internet (London: Zed Books, 2019).
134 Hillenbrand, Negative Exposures; Margaret Hillenbrand, “Remaking Tank Man,
in China,” Journal of Visual Culture 16, no. 2 (2017): 127–66, doi:10.1177/
1470412917703154.
135 Philippe Le Corre, “China: Xi Jinping’s 2021 Countdown,” Carnegie Endow-
ment for International Peace, December 18, 2017, https://carnegieendowment.
org/2017/12/18/china-xi-jinping-s-2021-countdown-pub-75100.
136 Shannon Tiezzi, “Why 2020 Is a Make-or-Break Year for China,” The Diplomat,
February 13, 2014, https://thediplomat.com/2015/02/why-2020-is-a-make-or-break-
year-for-china/; Robert Lawrence Kuhn, “Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream,” The New
York Times, June 4, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/opinion/global/xi-jinpings-
chinese-dream.html; CCP 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20150502113010if_/
http://paper.people.com.cn/rmrb/html/2014-05/28/nw.D110000renmrb_
20140528_1-01.htm.
137 Mitter, A Bitter Revolution, 138; Schake, Safe Passage, 238.
138 Schake, Safe Passage, 237.
139 Ibid.
140 Griths, The Great Firewall of China; Tom Sear, “网络主权 (wangluo zhuquan) and
Multipolar Data Sovereignties in an Era of Cosmotechnic Conict A Critical Geopoli-
tics of Data? Territories, Topologies, Atmospherics?” August 29, 2018, www.youtube.
com/watch?v=YK3pyVMXcbQ; Tom Sear and James Griths, “Password123 Pod-
cast: James Griths,” 2019, https://soundcloud.com/unsw-canberra-podcasts/s1e1.
141 Paul S. Lieber, “Rethinking Communication Inuence from a Strategic Communica-
tion Approach,” NSI, January 2020, https://nsiteam.com/rethinking-communication-
inuence-from-a-strategic-communication-approach/; Paul S. Lieber, “Strategic
Communication,” JSOU Quick Look, February 2020, https://jsou.libguides.com/
ld.php?content_id=52541507.
142 Tom Sear, “Dawn Servers: Anzac Day 2015 and Hyper‐Connective Commemo-
ration,” in War Memory and Commemoration, ed. Brad West (n.p.: Routledge,
Shanzhai
山寨
nationalism
中国民族主义
139
140 Tom Sear
2016), 66–88, www.unsworks.unsw.edu.au/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.
do?vid=UNSWORKS&docId=unsworks_modsunsworks_44440; Tom Sear, “Uncanny
Valleys and Anzac Avatars: Scaling a Postdigital Gallipoli,” in Beyond Gallipoli: New
Perspectives on ANZAC, ed. Frances R. Scates (Victoria, Australia: Monash University
Press, 2016), 55–82, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/fapi/datastream/unsworks:44110/
bin5e1185fd-daf1-4f54-a89b-79512f11a218?view=true; Tom Sear, “#Anzac: Cloud
Commemoration and the Centenary of the First World War,” August 24, 2017, www.
youtube.com/watch?v=RoUOn_j1qcY; Tom Sear, “ ‘The True Story of Ah Q’: British
Decline, American Power, the Rise of Chinese Nationalism 1918–1923 – YouTube,”
November 29, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqUKtAEAhLo.
143 Bratton, The Stack.
144 Song Mingwei, “Representations of the Invisible: Chinese Science Fiction in the
Twenty-First Century,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures, ed.
Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
145 Denis Villeneuve, “Blade Runner 2049,” IMBd, October 6, 2017, www.imdb.com/
title/tt1856101/.
146 Lu Xun, Jottings Under Lamplight (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2017).
147 Ibid., 265.
148 Ibid., 269.
149 Hillenbrand, Negative Exposures, 45–89.
150 Benjamin Bratton, “Benjamin Bratton. Design, Philosophy and A.I. 2016,” Septem-
ber 26, 2016, accessed June 3, 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TIUVeOO5tk.
151 A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (1950):
433–60.
152 Elsa B. Kania, “Battleeld Singularity: Articial Intelligence, Military Revolution,
and China’s Future Military Power,” Center for a New American Security, Novem-
ber 28, 2017, 12, www.cnas.org/publications/reports/battleeld-singularity-articial-
intelligence-military-revolution-and-chinas-future-military-power; Elsa B. Kania
and Andrew Imbrie, “AI Safety, Security, and Stability Among Great Powers Options,
Challenges, and Lessons Learned for Pragmatic Engagement,” Center for Security
and Emerging Technology, December 2019, https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/
uploads/AI-Safety-Security-and-Stability-Among-the-Great-Powers.pdf.
153 Kania and Imbrie, “AI Safety, Security, and Stability”; Jon R. Lindsay, “Demystify-
ing the Quantum Threat: Infrastructure, Institutions, and Intelligence Advantage,”
Security Studies 29, no. 2 (2020): 335–61, doi:10.1080/09636412.2020.1722853.
154 Xun, Jottings Under Lamplight, 262.
155 Han, Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese.
156 Xun, Jottings Under Lamplight, 263–64.
157 Ibid., 269.
158 Martyn Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography (Carlton,
Victoria: Melbourne University Publishing, 2006), 128–30; Brown, “Two Minutes of
Silence,” 234–35.
159 Paul Valéry, ‘The Crisis of the Spirit’ was written at the request of John Middleton
Murry. ‘La Crise de l’esprit’ originally appeared in English, in two parts, in The
Athenaeum (London), April 11 and May 2, 1919. The French text was published the
same year in the August number of La Nouvelle Revue Française (From History and
Politics, trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews, vol. 10, 23–36).
160 Valéry, “La Crise de l’esprit,” https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Mind.
161 Yuk Hui, “One Hundred Years of Crisis,” E – ux 108 (April 2020), www.e-ux.com/
journal/108/326411/one-hundred-years-of-crisis/.
162 Tom Sear, “Bushres Are ‘Australia’s War’ and That Means We Need a Bat-
tle Plan,” ABC News, February 6, 2020, www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-07/
australia-bushres-adf-operation-bushre-assist/11931704; Tom Sear, “Xenowar
Dreams of Itself,” Digital War, July 23, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1057/s42984-020-
00019-6; Sear and Griths, “Password123 Podcast: James Griths.”
163 McKenzie Wark, “Byung-Chul Han: Shanzhai Theory,” Verso (blog), March 25,
2019, www.versobooks.com/blogs/4283-byung-chul-han-shanzhai-theory; bunnie,
“From Gongkai to Open Source,” Bunnies: Studios (bunnie’s blog), 2014, www.bun-
niestudios.com/blog/?p=4297; bunnie, “The $12 ‘Gongkai’ Phone,” Bunnies: Studios
(bunnie’s blog), 2014, accessed June 1, 2020, www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_
id=3107; Cheng’en Wu, Journey to the West, ed. W. J. F. Jenner, 2nd ed. (Beijing:
Foreign Languages Press and Distributed by China International Book Trading Corp.,
1990).
164 Michael T. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New
York: Routledge, 1993).
165 Bratton, ”Benjamin Bratton.”
Shanzhai
山寨
nationalism
中国民族主义
141
