Introduction: History, Nostalgia, Heritage and the Chinese State

Debates on the use and abuse of history, memory, nostalgia and heritage have been longstanding in contemporary discussions of China (Feuerwerker 1968; Unger 1993; Duara 1995; Wang 2001; Horner 2009; Macmillan 2009; McGregor 2010). In recent years a growing number of researchers have examined the ways in which history, nostalgia and heritage have been utilised by elites (particularly governmental elites) in the construction of Chinese identities and subjectivities. Literature in this area has often focused on the role of Confucianism in the production of new forms of Confucian identities both as a mode of national and international identity making (in the construction of pan-Asian Chinese subjectivities) and as a form of party political identity making (Yu 1984, 1987; Brook 1997; Ong 1997a, 1997b, 1999; Zurndorfer 1997, 2004; Bell 2008; Barr 2011; Kallio 2011; Johnson 2016). From a different perspective, another group of writers have pointed to the role of humiliation history as a central tool in the construction of new ‘humiliation subjects’ in the present era (see Gries 2004, Broudehoux 2004, Callahan 2010, Macmillan 2010, Wang 2012, Law 2014).