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The Chinese Unitary Multinational State: A Normative Reappraisal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 October 2019

Hugo El Kholi
Hugo El Kholi*
Affiliation:
Philosophy Department, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai Campus, Guangdong Province, People’s Republic of China
*
*Corresponding author. Email: hugo.elkholi@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article provides a normative analysis of the rationale behind the creation of the Chinese unitary multinational state. Far from being irrelevant in the face of the well-known aversion of scientific socialism for normative thinking, such analysis illuminates the Chinese Communist Party’s long-standing commitment to the unitary multinational state as the best response to the national question. It shows that the Party’s leadership, in a conscious effort to adapt Stalin’s theory of nationality to Chinese revolutionary praxis, substantially revised the standard conception of national self-determination. Relying on its own materialist logic, it made participation in the struggle against alienation the normative basis to justify granting ethnic minorities special rights of regional autonomy under a common state. The creation of the Chinese unitary multinational state appears in this light as a normatively coherent attempt to guarantee that all ethnic groups that contributed to national liberation benefit equally from their imprescriptible right to collective self-determination.

Keywords

national self-determinationtheory of nationalityrevolutionary praxisMarxism with Chinese characteristicsminzuethnopolitics
Type
Article
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 47 , Issue 6 , November 2019 , pp. 1067 - 1082
Copyright
© Association for the Study of Nationalities 2019

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