The end of the Cold War has seen the revival throughout the world of nationalist sentiments and aspirations. In China, the rapid decay of Communist ideology has led the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to emphasize its role as the paramount patriotic force and the guardian of national pride in order to find a new basis of legitimacy to sustain its role. However, nationalist sentiment is not the sole province of the CCP and its propagandists. One truly remarkable phenomenon in the post-Cold War upsurge of Chinese nationalism is that Chinese intellectuals became one of the driving forces. Many well-educated people - social scientists, humanities scholars, writers and other professionals - have given voice to and even become articulators for a rising nationalistic discourse in the 1990s. This nationalistic sentiment contrasts strikingly to the anti-traditionalism that once dominated Chinese intellectual circles in the 1980s, in spite of the fact that some advocates of this new sentiment are the same people who had a “pro-Western complex” and promoted anti-traditionalism earlier. This article seeks to discover what caused such a dramatic shift by examining the relationship between Chinese intellectuals′ quest for national greatness and the emergence of nationalistic writing in the 1990s. It starts with a historical analysis of the development of antitraditionalism, and goes on to investigate the content of nationalistic argument. Then socio-economic, intellectual and personal causes for the rise of nationalistic writing are explored. The conclusion offers a perspective on continued intellectual debate over nationalistic discourse.

In mid–June 1989, just a couple of weeks after the Tiananmen protests were brought to a halt, a small unit of Peoples Liberation Army soldiers occupied the headquarters of the Stone Group Corporation, then Chinas premier electronics company. The troops were accompanied by a working group composed of Beijing Municipal Communist Party and government officials, who were sent to investigate charges that Stone employees had participated in the crushed student protest movement. Just days before their arrival, three of Stones senior management, including its President, Wan Runnan, had fled China. Wan was one of 21 black hands named by the Communist leadership as having orchestrated the protests.

Central-provincial relations are an old issue which have plagued successive Chinese leaderships both before and after 1949. Indeed the spatial dimension, with its ramifications regarding power distribution and the complications around policy formulation and implementation, has been a perennial issue of concern in comparative politics. This old interest has been, in recent years, intensified by incessant central-provincial conflicts since reform, to the extent that the integration of the Chinese state has been called into question.

In recent years, sinologists and leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have come to view “endemic” corruption as the “Achilles′ heel” of Deng Xiaoping's reforms. Corruption, they assert, has weakened the Party and threatens to push it into a “life and death” crisis of legitimacy. Such views accord with a conventional wisdom that treats corruption as the episodic and catastrophic variable in a punctuated equilibrium model. In this construct, although it may generate political discontent and mass alienation, corruption lies dormant most of the time and only becomes politically significant when both the stakes involved and the number of officials engaged in corruption reach extraordinary levels, and the regime fails to bring corruption under control, at which point it becomes a factor in mobilizing anti-government agitation.3 Without such crises, corruption's tangible political consequences remain quite limited or at least latent.

The Chinese government has, in the last 20 years, devoted enormous political resources and effort to revamping its legal system. The resultant legal reforms, part of the government′s programme of political institutionalization, have been the subject of intense scholarly interest in the West. One of these legal reforms was the Administration Litigation Law (ALL), passed in April 1989 and implemented in October 1990. The theoretical significance of this law can hardly be exaggerated because, if fully enforced, it would afford Chinese citizens an important legal instrument with which to defend themselves against the abuse of state power by government agencies and officials. Like other legal reforms, the ALL has attracted the attention of both Chinese and Western legal scholars. However, most early studies do not offer in-depth empirical analysis of the implementation of the law, its effects on China′s administrative practices and its political implications. A possible exception was a 1992 study by a group of Chinese scholars who used polling data to assess the public perception of the ALL and relied on two case studies to investigate how the law was implemented at the grassroots level. Nevertheless, the 1992 study has its limitations. Apart from the issue of the reliability of polling in China, it contains no national data on the implementation of the law; nor does it provide an in-depth analysis of sample court cases that went to trial according to the provisions of the ALL. Furthermore, it covers only a very brief period following the implementation of the law and relies on insufficient data, especially at the national level. Other works on the ALL suffer from similar problems, as lack of empirical data apparently restricted their authors mostly to a historical review of the evolution of administrative litigation in China, an analysis of the legal provisions of the ALL and speculation about its effectiveness.

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