Abstract
In this article we introduce the concept of soft nationalism through a case-study analysis of short videos by US-born rapper MC Jin (Jin Au-Yeung), who is of Chinese background. Jin's creative output, we argue, with its cross-cultural and grassroots invocations of Chinese identity, ethnicity, tradition, language and belonging, complicates existing theories of nationalism. To address these complications we develop the term ‘soft nationalism’, to describe forms of nationalism that are neither ‘hard’, ‘hot’ and bellicose nor ‘banal’ or ‘everyday’. Like soft power, soft nationalism carries intent but speaks quietly, and is practised everywhere but often found in China, in the context of a recent surge of participatory online nationalism.
Introduction
Theories of nationalism have inspired considerable scholarly debate, which has tended to focus on such things as the dangers posed by nationalism (Zhao, 2000), on contrasts between ‘realist’ and ‘constructivist’ approaches (Calhoun, 2017), ethnic and civic nationalism, and how to identify tipping points in the continuum between benign patriotism and fervent nationalism. A focus on nationalist movements (Spencer and Wollman, 2005) and on state-sponsored expressions of open nationalism has historically tended to overlook what Michael Billig (1995) has described as everyday forms of ‘banal nationalism’.
A notable gap in such debates and definitions of nationalism more generally is that they have tended to take place in a Western frame. Nor are classical theorisations of nationalism well adapted to an era of networked digital media, in which expressions of nationalism are generated by audiences and embedded in online participatory practice. In this article we begin the work of theorising ‘soft nationalism’, which we argue is a generally pervasive and often overlooked form of nationalism that is highly apparent in the Chinese context. ‘Soft nationalism’, we argue, shares some of the characteristics of ‘banal nationalism’ but carries with it open nationalist intent and is frequently produced by online participants. Just as the emergence of nationalism is linked to ‘print capitalism’ and related developments in modernity, so ‘soft nationalism’ is linked to ‘platform capitalism’, and to shifts in the dynamic between audiences and the state, and their capacity to develop interlinked nationalist projects. These projects have ethno-nationalist components that emphasise history, memory, and traditional culture, even as they are embedded in mediatised techno-modernity. Soft nationalism, we argue, does not replace other forms of nationalism but operates through and within them, even as it destabilises classical conceptions of nationalism.
To develop our understanding of soft nationalism we focus on a case study of US-born rapper MC Jin (Jin Au-Yeung; 欧阳靖), who is of Chinese background. Jin's creative output, we argue, with its invocations of Chinese identity, ethnicity, tradition, language and belonging, exemplifies soft nationalism. Operating across borders, such nationalism is not necessarily defined by what Anthony Giddens (1985) has called the ‘bordered power-container’ of the modern state. Given the emphasis on language in nationalism theory, we are also interested in nationalism in bilingual contexts and in the ethno-linguistic aspects of nationalism in a multilingual world.
The article begins by canvassing nationalism in China and the West. We then move on to develop a theoretical framework for understanding soft nationalism, before explaining our methods and analysing our case study. We conclude by suggesting paths for further study, focused on soft nationalism in the West.
Nationalism in China
The recent surge of Chinese nationalism has attracted considerable public commentary and scholarly attention. Media commentators have noted the new assertiveness in Chinese foreign policy since Xi Jinping took office as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), exemplified by ‘the Belt and Road Initiative’, the assertiveness of the ‘going out’ strategy, the emergence of ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy, and the determination of China's tech and culture industries to gain international footholds. This resurgent nationalism has emerged at a moment when digital media is playing an increasingly important role in the construction of Chinese national identity. In 2019 the Chinese government's ‘Study (Xi) Strong Country’ app became the most downloaded mobile phone app in China. Users can study Xi Jinping's thought, watch videos about China's ‘great revolutionary history’, and follow reports about Xi's recent visits to different parts of China (Kuo and Lyons, 2019). ‘Glorious Mission’, a Chinese video game released in 2013 at the height of the 2012–13 dispute between China and Japan over the Diaoyu/SenKaku Islands, invites its players to wage war against Japan. Designed by online game manufacturer, Giant Interactive Group (GIG) the game was jointly developed with the Nanjing Military Area Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) (Mellian, 2014). Earlier games, ‘Resistance War: Landmine Warfare’ and ‘Resistance War: Blood War in Shanghai’, both set during the Japanese invasion of China, invited players to take on the roles of a Chinese soldier attempting to reclaim Chinese territory from the Japanese, and an anti-Japanese hero who undertakes a mission to kill a Japanese military commander.
These state-aligned assertions of Chinese nationalism frequently involve online participatory practice. For example, the Diaoyu/SenKaku Islands controversy mobilised Chinese netizens against the Japanese government amidst online calls to ‘Declare war’ against Japan. Due to the opacity of Chinese governance, it is unclear as to whether these netizens helped prompt subsequent PRC (People’s Republic of China) military escalation or if popular opinion had been stoked by PRC operatives, though as Peter Gries, Derek Steiger and Wang Tao (2016) argue, it is frequently the case that the CCP, to maintain legitimacy, takes cues from publicly expressed nationalist opinion. Similarly, the ‘Diba expedition’ of 2016 demonstrated the readiness of Chinese netizens such as ‘little pinks’ to engage in ‘hot nationalism’ against Taiwanese netizens and demonstrated how online fan cultures infuse contemporary Chinese online nationalism as part of a shift from ‘cyber nationalism to fan nationalism’ (Liu, 2019a).
The ‘Diba expedition’ is one among many recent manifestations of online Chinese nationalism. Recent discussion has focused on ‘techno-nationalism’ (Luqiu and Kang, 2021; Plantin and de Seta, 2019), the question of whether nationalism is driven from the top down or from the bottom up (Chen et al., 2019), and the integration of popular nationalism with online popular culture and youth culture (Zhao, 2021), in particular ‘fandom nationalism’ (Guo and Yang, 2019; Liao et al., 2022; Liu, 2019a, 2019b; Wu et al., 2019; Zhuang et al., 2023).
These recent manifestations of nationalism build on an established history of Chinese nationalism. In the early twentieth century, the Han majority led movement to overthrow the Manchu minority led Qing dynasty drew in part on an emerging ethnic nationalism (Zhao, 2005) that had its origins in the aftermath of China's defeat by the British in the Opium War of 1840–42 (Zhao, 2000). In the wake of the 1919 May the Fourth Movement, and with the ascendancy of communism as official state ideology in 1949, through the Mao to Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin eras, traditional Chinese culture fell out of favour, ‘feudal legacies’ having been blamed as a reason for China's humiliation at the hands of outside forces (Zhao, 2000: 8). The perception that, since the Opium War of 1840–42, China has been subjected to systematic historical ‘humiliation’ by other nations has become a dominant theme in a resurgent state nationalism, given the decline of communism as state ideology, and is articulated in the trope of ‘the century of national humiliation’ that has become a central feature of state ideology (Callahan, 2004), not least under Xi Jinping. This cultural memory of China's colonial past also finds expression in grassroots nationalism. In the background of the 2012–13 Diaoyu/SenKaku Islands controversy was the Japanese occupation of China, with nationalist demonstrators chiding officials to ‘Never learn from Li Hongzhang again’ (bu ke zai xue Li Hongzhang), a reference to the Chinese official who signed the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki with Japan (Gries et al., 2016: 171). The official antidote to this national ‘humiliation’ is articulated in the counter-narrative of the ‘Chinese dream’ and national rejuvenation, now a signature CCP ideology (Wang, 2014).
While ‘hot’ nationalism in China and its connection to online communities has attracted considerable scholarly interest, less attention has been paid to what we describe as ‘soft nationalism’. This is a form of nationalism that is ‘cool’ rather than ‘hot’, even sometimes linked to subcultural cool, and that we argue is particularly evident in the current Chinese context as well as in the West. Soft nationalism is evident in social media chatter as well as commercial and user-made content such as videos about Chinese food and cooking, Chinese traditional culture such as dance and music, and the Chinese countryside, among other topics, that have significant followings on platforms such as Bilibili, YouTube, Tiktok/Douyin, and Kuaishou. Soft nationalism can also be found in popular culture forms such as the music videos of a diasporic and nationalist Chinese rapper, MC Jin, who is based in the US and whose music videos are the focus of this article. By looking at his work, rap performance, and the ways in which it addresses questions of Chinese language, culture and heritage from the perspective of a second-generation Chinese emigrant, we hope to say something new about how soft nationalism operates in the Chinese context, and to define how soft nationalism is used to express particular forms of ethnic belonging and national identity that are self-consciously adopted in the contexts of resurgent Chinese nationalism, online popular culture, and the short-video form.
Theorising soft nationalism
Since the 1980s, the seminal work of ‘constructivist’ theorists of nationalism such as Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and Eric Hobsbawm, has opened up new arenas in debates about nationalism and brought into focus a contrast between modernist and ethno-historical accounts of nationalism. Nationalism, for Gellner, Hobsbawm, and Anderson, is defined by its modernity. Nations, for Gellner (1983), emerged as a condition of modernity defined by unitary congruence between a given nation and its politics, managed by elites and effacing internal ethnic divisions. Hobsbawm (1990: 9–10) understands the nation as ‘a social entity only insofar as it relates to a certain kind of modern territorial state, the nation-state, and it is pointless to discuss nation and nationalism except insofar as both relate to it’. Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991) famously links the development of nationalism to the development of print capitalism and the ability of citizens to imagine their collective presence. Such nationalism, according to Anderson, is incompatible with ethno-primordial and Marxist understandings of nationalism, since the former lacks historical objectivity and the latter fail to adequately countenance the philosophical thinness of nationalism.
The binarism of the ethno-primordial versus modern-constructivist debate was destabilised by the work of Anthony D. Smith (1991), and his argument that the conception of nations always owes something to deep histories of identity – ‘ethnie’ – based in shared names, ancestries, histories, cultural frameworks, and a sense of enduring association with a particular place, that pre-date modern conceptions of nation. Ethnie, for Smith, is not primordial but refers to a set of commonly held beliefs, even mythologies, essential to the formation of successful nations.
A further intervention was Michael Billig's (1995) work on ‘banal nationalism’. Debates about nationalism, Billig argued, were over-concerned with outbursts of virulent nationalism and their accompanying ‘flag waving’. In ‘both popular and academic writing’, he argued, ‘nationalism is associated with those who struggle to create new states or with extreme right-wing politics’. The word ‘nationalism’, as such, tends to understand nationalism as the product of ‘dangerous and powerful passions’, and to ‘locate nationalism on the periphery’, as something that ‘others’ do but not ‘us’ (Billig, 1995: 5). Yet nationalism, as he points out, is an all-pervasive, ‘banal’ part of everyday life, embodied most of all in media and deictic expressions such as ‘we’ and ‘here’: ‘The media of mass communication bring the flag across the contemporary hearth. Daily newspapers and logomanic politicians constantly flag the world of nations’ (1995: 174). The epitome of banal nationalism is the ‘unwaved flag’: ‘The metonymic image of banal nationalism is not a flag which is being consciously waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building’ (Billig, 1995: 8).
Since the 1990s these accounts have been tested and contested by considerable discussion of nationalism that has augmented the narratives and conceptual terrain established by these seminal accounts. This includes discussion that builds on classical accounts (Cox, 2021; Grosby, 2022; Schertzer and Woods, 2022), and that advances them through discussion of ‘everyday nationalism’ (Fox and Miller-Idriss, 2008; Skey and Antonsich, 2017), and discussion of the impact of the internet on nationalism, such as its impact on ‘banal nationalism’ (Szulc, 2017) and the online resurgence of ethnic nationalism (Mihelj and Jiménez-Martínez, 2021).
Largely missing from these accounts, however, with the exception of Anderson's Asia-oriented account, is a conception of the development of nationalism in contexts other than the West.
Our account of soft nationalism, as we begin to theorise it here, augments and in some respects cuts across seminal and recent accounts of nationalism. Soft nationalism has no necessary link to liberation struggles or to conventional political understandings of the nation-state. It is nevertheless powerfully linked to ethnie and historical traditions and mythologies of belonging and identity. While linked to media, in particular online participatory culture, soft nationalism is often produced and consumed asynchronously for and by niche audiences, and does not depend on the near-simultaneous rituals of mass media for its power. Per Smith, ethnie plays an important role in these dynamics. Whereas print capitalism, for Anderson, epitomised the link between modernity and nationalism, platform capitalism has helped recuperate the residual link between nationalism and ethnic tradition.
Of the above theoretical accounts, the closest similarity is with Billig's ‘banal nationalism’. Like banal nationalism, soft nationalism is ambient and mostly goes unremarked. It is a ‘cool’ form of nationalism rather than a ‘hot’ form of nationalism that, in general, has few if any links to liberation struggles, extreme politics, or ‘dangerous and powerful passions’. Unlike banal nationalism, however, soft nationalism carries intent. If, as Billig (1995: 10) compellingly argues, ‘The unwaved flag, which is so forgettable, is at least as important as the memorable moments of flag waving’, then soft nationalism involves flag waving, even if of the gentlest kind, and is all the more powerful for being subtle.
Hot nationalism, for Billig, is dependent on banal nationalism, since it is in everyday commitments and expressions of banal nationalism that the foundations of hot nationalism are laid. Soft nationalism works the other way. It transfers sentiments associated with hot nationalism back into the banal and makes them ordinary, softening them, shedding their rancour and anger, to render them all the more potent in the process of their normalisation. In this respect, soft nationalism shares something with ‘everyday nationhood’, one component of which, according to Jon E. Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idress (2008: 538), involves ‘performing the nation’ and the ‘production of national sensibilities through the ritual enactment of symbols’. Soft nationalism, however, is more active and purposeful than everyday nationhood. Soft nationalism is not only performed but actively seeks an audience, including an audience outside the host nation. Whereas ‘hot’ or hard nationalism involves the performance of a ‘we/they’ dyad, in which the Other is figured as enemy, soft nationalism is above all educative. It aims to enlighten the Other and, if possible, make them an ally.
One thing that soft nationalism shares with all the above accounts is its relationship to power. As Billig (1995: 4) argues, ‘The aura of nationhood always operates within contexts of power.’ Just as ‘hot’ nationalism can be associated with hard, military power, so soft nationalism is associated with ‘soft power’, that is, power exercised through cultural means, even if, contrary to foundational accounts of soft power (Nye, 1990), the soft power generated by soft nationalism is not necessarily connected to any state exercise of power and is generated by participatory social media creators as well as by states. Just as soft power seeks to exert influence at the level of popular culture so soft nationalism is nationalism in a velvet glove, its techniques intermingled with popular culture.
Soft nationalism, we argue, while found everywhere, is particular evident in the Chinese context, where it is based in the Chinese soft cultural tradition, in particular Confucianism and Taoism, emphasising ethical-based culture, and self-positioning and appreciating one's own nation from a cultural perspective. Relevant here is China's multicultural context, whereby soft nationalism can promote shared cultural consciousness across ethnic groups, and by particularising ethnic experience and tradition in the context of the nation and its Confucian and Taoist ethics, can build cohesion. Soft nationalism in China, too, has emerged in the context of China's ‘going out’ strategy (Jihua and Ocón, 2023). While the ‘going out’ strategy has roots in China's foreign policy and soft nationalism doesn’t necessarily have any origins in or relationship to state power, both seek to project soft power and build positive sentiment towards China and Chinese culture. As Jack Linchuan Qiu (2006: 125) has argued: nationalism is central to China's online discourse and the evolving political identity of Chinese internet users.… [T]o many of today's Chinese netizens, allegiance to the nation takes priority over other identities, ideologies and political actions. Nationalism, in this broad sense, underlies almost all political discussion in China's cyberspace due to the withering away of communism, the need of the authorities to maintain social cohesion, and the lack of alternatives created by the censorship regime.
These storytelling practices are collective, whereby stories about nation are told piecemeal across broad constituencies, their parts knitted together by processes of collective remembering, knowing, and myth-making that reach back to a mythic past and ancient, pre-modern histories of ethnicity and language. These stories encompass vernacular forms of slang, forms of dress, forms of music and art, that together make up origin stories. These practices, mostly based in the dissemination of short user-made videos, involve food, drink, landscape, smell, sight, sound, and the particular rituals associated with them; the smell of rice cooking; the sight and sound of wok hei (wok breath); the ritualised storytelling of the shadow puppet show; the mythologised landscape of particular rivers and mountain ranges; the meanings disseminated in short videos of totemic animals such as pandas; or the style of pagodas in particular areas. Such storytelling practices frequently seek to imbue nationalism with youth-oriented counter-cultural ‘cool’, and to weave nationalist projects into popular culture.
There is considerable overlap between user-participatory production and official production in this soft nationalism, which is in contrast to the forms of nationalism canvassed in recent accounts of ‘techno-nationalism’ and ‘fandom nationalism’ in China (Guo and Yang, 2019; Liao et al., 2022; Liu, 2019a, 2019b; Luqiu and Kang, 2021; Plantin and de Seta, 2019; Wu et al., 2019; Zhuang et al., 2023), which focus on either state-driven online nationalism or outbursts of ‘hot’ nationalism. Manifestations of soft nationalism include, for example: short videos about Chinese landscape and food, such as the atmospheric food and cooking videos of Liziqi (李子柒), who has 17.4 million subscribers on YouTube; how-to videos on traditional Chinese ink brush painting on short-video platform Kuaishou; short videos about Chinese tea culture on Tencent Video; or video clips of the annual Spring Festival Gala produced by CCTV and shown on Weibo. The blurb for the latter quotes the lyrics of a song sung by one performer that evoke the ‘Chinese dream’: ‘We come to meet our dreams, work hard and look forward to it, and climb over to make the next second more exciting.’ @宫俊Simon sang the young people's yearning for a better future and the courage to pursue their dreams with a song ‘Welcome to Dream’. May we take dreams as horses, live up to our youth, and embrace a future with infinite possibilities!
Our case study, based on the music videos of Chinese rapper MC Jin, has been chosen not because it offers a comprehensive or universal insight into these transmedia storytelling practices but because it is a prominent and complex node in the network of such storytelling. As a US-based rapper of Chinese ethnicity, the contexts in which Jin's music is produced mix a US cultural form, rap music, with soft nationalist practices that reproduce Chinese tradition in a US and Chinese context, given his popularity in mainland China. As the son of an emigrant family, MC Jin speaks for a Chinese nationalism he doesn’t closely belong to but was able to join, as a popular hip-hop star. His storytelling practices are in this sense enacted at a remove, and are aspirational, as well as being based in family memory. This complex positionality complicates and highlights Jin's soft nationalism, which is fervent in its longing for homeland yet also defensive of diasporic Chinese identity, thus emphasising the question about shared culture at the heart of soft nationalism: how are we to belong together?
While soft nationalism can be expressed in many mediums, from traditional print media, to broadcast television, to short videos, we focus on MC Jin's music videos here because of the complexities of his diasporic cultural positioning. Notably, while MC Jin's videos focus almost unwaveringly on identity and nationalism, they contain little hard nationalism or fervent flag waving. Their nationalism is instead quietly insistent, based in memory, nostalgia, and critiques of language, food and other markers of identity. Before analysing his work we first locate it in the context of US and Chinese rap music.
Background and methods
Rap music in mainland China has experienced a unique evolution path, in which rap works are routinely combined with important national events, folk customs such as ‘Hanfu’ costumery, or Chinese cuisine, traditions such as opera or kung fu, and have become a carrier of the ‘China-chic’ wave. Through this process the themes of Chinese rap works have changed from ‘underground’ elements such as drugs, violence and sex to highlighting cultural images of the Yangtze River, the Yellow River, the dragon and other representations of ‘Han nationality’, aimed at promoting China's achievements since the Reform and opening-up policy of 1978. Furthermore, events such as the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics promote the creation and spread of rap works. Thus rap music in mainland China took a quite different path compared to the West: from ‘deviant culture’ to a relatively neutral ‘youth culture’ presented in the media, and now the ‘national narrative’ encouraged by the government (Chen, 2013; Luo and Ming, 2020).
In this section of the article we analyse MC Jin and his works to illustrate the integration of soft nationalism and a popular culture figure. Our choice of MC Jin is motivated by his complex positionality as a diasporic working-class Chinese in the US who uses rap performance as a medium to assert his cultural identity, participating in a famous Chinese rap show, The Rap of China, and becoming increasingly nationalistic as his work gained a stronger reputation in China. Through his career MC Jin has not only demonstrated the transition from user-participatory production to official production, but also from deviant subculturalist to a narrator of national identity.
Born in Miami in 1982, MC Jin is a second-generation Hong Kong immigrant. Similar to the situation of the children of many low-income Chinese immigrant families, his teenage years were spent working as a kitchen helper and food delivery worker at Chinese restaurants. The strictures of marginalised immigrant life coupled with urban monotony together sparked MC Jin's interest in the rap music popular among the African-American community when he was very young, and his early performances attracted attention because of the rarity of Asian performers in amateur competitions and because on occasion he used Cantonese for his lyrics. The turning point in his transition from amateur rap fan to professional singer was the rap contest ‘Freestyle Friday’ on the 2002 African-American entertainment television show 106 & Park. He defeated African-American contestants for seven consecutive weeks and made it onto the show's celebrity list. He subsequently signed with the Ruff Ryders hip-hop music label in the United States, becoming the first Chinese rapper to be signed by a major American record label.
After mixed success in the US with his first few albums, in 2008 his record company flew MC Jin to Hong Kong, where his 2008 album ABC achieved gold record status. His subsequent career in China paralleled the transformation of Chinese rap from its ‘underground’ performance period to the ‘platform era’, and the transformation and integration of rapper identity from deviant culture to mainstream popular culture. In 2017 he participated in the mainland TV show The Rap of China in disguise, under the guise of ‘hip-hop man’, to promote Chinese nationality, language and customs, and revitalise the chivalrous spirit of Chinese rap. The popularity of the program cemented Jin's success as a mainland celebrity, interviewed and paid attention to by mainstream media, including an interview with CGTV (China Global Television Network, CCTV’s English-language channel for the world), which emphasised the role of hip-hop in promoting social harmony. Given the status of the Central Radio and Television Corporation (CMG) in the Chinese mainland media administrative system, this interview can be seen as a tacit approval and even support for the affirmation and further commercialisation of rap in the highest echelons of Chinese government.
To demonstrate soft nationalism in the work of MC Jin we analyse a selection of music videos from across his career, as published on Western and Chinese social media platforms. MC Jin has been chosen as an artist to analyse because his diasporic background complicates his national belonging and forms a basis for a critique of nationalist identity in his work. This includes a critique of the link between language and national identity. MC Jin's career trajectory from amateur US rapper to popular stardom in mainland China provides a basis for discussion of the translocal nature of soft nationalism, while his appearance on CGTV indicates how artist-led expressions of soft nationalism can integrate with official soft power agendas. MC Jin has also been chosen because his work is widely published across the spectrum of popular Western and Chinese short-video platforms from YouTube to Bilibili, a platform which has a highly concentrated audience of young people. The most popular MC Jin video on Bilibili has been played nearly 4 million times. Meanwhile, 3.35 million followers of MC Jin can be found on Weibo, which is the most favoured platform for Chinese music stars. The most popular MC Jin video on YouTube has been played over 900,000 times. These platforms and the short-video form, as noted above, have become a dominant form of social media and, because of their popularity, are primary vehicles for the expression of soft nationalism.
Also relevant here is Jin’s audience, which has changed as his singing career continues to develop. In his early career, his audience consisted mainly of Asians, particularly Hong Kong emigrants to the United States, and African Americans. During the pandemic, the audience for works such as ‘Stop the Hatred’ won the approval of a broader audience who oppose violence, and was no longer limited to Asians or Afrian Americans. His mainland Chinese audience consists mainly of local followers of his participation in televised rap competitions.
Our analysis of MC Jin's work is based in multimodal content analysis that brings together qualitative content analysis of the lyrics and visual imagery of eight music videos purposively selected mainly from the first phase of Jin's career, which has had four main phases: his early US career (2001–7), his ‘return to Hong Kong’ (2008–12), his return to US (2012–17), and mainland Chinese success as the ‘Godfather of Chinese hip-hop’ (2017 onwards). We place a particular emphasis on the first phase of Jin's career when expressions of displacement, identity and national belonging were most strongly emphasised. Each video has been chosen on the basis of its salience in demonstrating an aspect of the gentle but insistent ‘flag waving’ that expresses soft nationalism, which in Jin's work often involves a sophisticated reflection on the nature of language, memory, identity and belonging that is ultimately endorsed under the rubric of Chineseness. The eight music videos chosen are ‘Learn Chinese’ (2004), ‘ABC’ (2007), ‘1997’ (2007), ‘Hong Kong Superstar’ (2007), ‘Yum Dom Cha’ (2007), ‘Homecoming Jin’ (2011), ‘Chinese New Year’ (2014), and ‘Stop the Hatred’ (2022).
Authenticating national culture: a dualistic Chineseness
A central focus of MC Jin's work is the question of cultural authenticity, which is foregrounded in his constant questioning, in his music videos, of what it means to be Chinese. Soft nationalism, in these videos, manifests as an emphasis on Chinese language, culture and, in particular, food, which is a central but often overlooked aspect of nationalism (Ichijo and Ranta, 2022), and which we understand as pivotal in expressions of soft nationalism. A further sub-question is whether Chinese cultural identity remains authentic in diasporic contexts. In Jin's early work, these issues are articulated through a focus on memory and the idea of return to China, understood as the site of origin of his true self.
Soft nationalism, here, is linked to language acquisition, as articulated in songs such as ‘Learn Chinese’ (2004). ‘Learn Chinese’ mounts a particularly strong challenge to accepted notions of diasporic Chinese identity. In the opening scene, Jin is depicted as a food delivery worker, delivering Chinese food to the home of a group of Black American men. Instead of delivering the food, Jin drops it on the porch and assumes his identity as an American-born Chinese rapper. The openly stated meaning in the song is that Americans, including Black Americans, must ‘learn Chinese’, that is, learn about Chinese language and culture, as emphasised by the song's backing refrain ‘ya gonna learn Chinese’, which is followed after several repeats by ‘ya gonna be Chinese’. Jin's arrival as a rapper who unequivocally demands to be taken seriously is, in the song, presented as a metaphor for America, and potentially the world, to take Chineseness, and potentially China itself, seriously. Yet, this Chineseness is dualistic, combining American culture and, in particular, Black American popular culture, with Chinese culture. Jin's dance style and the arrangement of the song and its delivery, including its lyrics, are heavily indebted to Black rap.
The soft nationalism of the video is further encoded in its insistence that, despite its Black American cultural references and use of the rap genre, Jin's Chinese identity trumps all else. Much of the video is shot in Chinatown settings, replete with stereotypes of Chinese-American culture, which the video appears to simultaneously critique and valorise. For example, several scenes take place in Chinese restaurant kitchens, overseen by the presence of Chinese gangster figures, with the gaze of the camera lingering on the food – dumplings, chicken wings – as emblematic of Chinese culture. There is a double edge to the camera's gaze, given that dumplings and chicken wings, along with the pork fried rice mentioned in the song, are Western clichés of Chinese culinary culture.
A central theme of the video is its assertion of the legitimacy of Chinese masculinity in the context of Black hypermasculinity. This includes the performance of mastery over women. Ayeesha, the song’s featured female co-vocalist, plays a secondary role, singing mostly back-ups, joined by a chorus of other women. Women, here, are accessories and are acted on rather than having agency of their own. With its mentions of Bruce Lee, depictions of kung fu classes, and mention of the debt of America to its Chinese immigrants (who he sings should use trains ‘for free’ since, ‘we built the railroads’), the song is above all a claim for Chinese people to play a greater role in the construction of American popular culture: ‘I ain’t ya 50 Cent, I ain’t ya Enimem, I ain’t ya Jigga Man, I’m a Chinaman’. As such, the song represents the claims of Chinese culture on American culture. Chinese culture, here, consistent with the song's demand that Americans ‘learn Chinese’, demands a central place in the construction of US popular culture, granted legitimacy and authenticity beyond the stereotypes through which it is generally framed, and Jin presents himself as a pioneer of that process determined to shoulder his way into the US hip-hop scene as the ‘first Chinese rapper’.
Jin's ‘ABC’ (2007) takes its expression of soft nationalism a step further. The video is set in ‘Chinatownland’ and its imagery is primarily nostalgic, contrasting imagery of life as an American-born Chinese, which is depicted via montages of Chinatown, with montages of childhood photos many of which appear to have been taken in Hong Kong. The explicit question asked by the song is ‘who are you?’ and the implicit question is ‘who am I?’ The unstated premise of the song is that true, authentic identity is likely to be found in, and must be negotiated with, the past, understood as a place of cultural origin. The Chinatown of the video is, by contrast, presented as something more contingent, a make-do place. Identity here, framed through the lens of soft nationalism, is to do with the specific rituals of being Chinese in China; by using his childhood photos Jin positions himself as a true Hong Konger, as someone displaced, who can only know himself by reconnecting to his past. Jin, born in 1982, here takes on the mantle of a child born abroad before the Sino-British negotiations in 1984 that led to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, and the video depicts everyday experiences such as daily shopping and dialogue with his grandparents and parents in Hong Kong, and uses family warmth to dissipate the impact of historical events. The everyday, here, provides material for a pointed statement about national identity and belonging, which is conclusively linked to place.
An unequivocal yet softly expressed link between place, memory and ethnic identity, is also found in the video for Jin's ‘1997’ (2007), which opens with a montage of shots of Hong Kong airport as experienced by a typical traveller, followed by footage of car travel from the airport to the central city. 1997, of course, is the year of the handover of Hong Kong from the British to the Chinese government and much of the video consists of period footage from that era intercut with present-day footage, to evoke a contrast between old and new, pre-handover and post-handover. The ‘new’ Hong Kong is, paradoxically, dominated by signage for upmarket Western brands (Louis Vuitton, Cartier), and high-end architecture, and is understood as having lost some of its authenticity, despite the handover. Hong Kong, here, has become something of a theme park, as is emphasised by a shot of Disneyland, yet the closing sequence contains a message that ‘I love Hong Kong’. No view is implied on the politics of the handover; the overall effect is of having taken a vacation to a family homeland and place of origin that is one and the same as China. The song is, as such, a homage that understands Hong Kong as without politics or contention when it comes to the question of its Chinese identity; its significance and the soft nationalism of the song is linked to Hong Kong's status as a diasporic homeland that one must travel to in order to experience true belonging.
In ‘HK Superstar’ (2007), this focus on place and Hong Kong is linked to celebrity and the Bruce Lee mythology. In the song's video Jin and a Bruce Lee doll travel to Hong Kong together and visit its everyday sites such as malls and cafes. Jin is here positioning himself as a potential superstar alongside Lee, even if, in the video, he is still busking on the streets of Hong Kong. Lee, on the other hand, is American-born but a source of fame for Hong Kong and (alongside Daniel Wu, who also features in the video) is one of its internationally recognised superstars who have helped put Hong Kong on the international cultural map. The video thus foregrounds the authenticity of the non-Chinese-born superstar while foregrounding the status and meaning of Hong Kong and Chinese culture on the international stage, which Jin here is seeking self-consciously to elevate by positioning himself as the next Chinese-American superstar, who, like Lee, can naturally integrate with and contribute to local culture, despite his American birthplace.
In ‘Yum Dom Cha’ (2007), Jin plays the part of a waiter, serving food to white customers in a Yum Cha restaurant. The video is prefaced with titles announcing he is playing the role of ‘ABC Jin in Yum Dom Cha!!’. ‘ABC’, here, signifies his status as an American-born Chinese who is living in a white country. The lyrics, sung in Cantonese, and video, are pedagogical, and express soft nationalism through their focus on explaining each dish and its significance to westerners in the evident hope that they will understand Chinese food less as fast food and more as an expression of Chinese culture. The take on Chinese culture, however, is soft in the sense that it is light-hearted and witty, interspersed with jokes about having to wait for a table, the amount of MSG in the food, and quarrelling to be first to pay the bill.
‘Homecoming’ (2011), the title song of MC Jin's final album from his Hong Kong period, also emphasises his self-consciously staged ‘return’ to Hong Kong as an origin site for Chinese identity. The video for the song features a Hong Kong identity card (the permit for Hong Kong and Macao residents to travel to and from the mainland is also known as the ‘Home Return Permit’, which literally reflects the meaning of returning to the hometown and belonging), and the song uses the metaphor of trees and roots to illustrate Jin's relationship with Hong Kong. Soft nationalism, here, is linked to landscape and nature, and to language. Jin's work through this period is sung mainly in Cantonese. In this song, as in songs such as ‘ABC’, Jin responds to the accusation ‘Bamboo Lance’ (a Cantonese metaphor for people born abroad who lack requisite Chinese cultural identity), by using the Cantonese expression ‘Zhu Sheng’, which plays down the nationality debate in a self-deprecating way, asking the question ‘How can a piece of paper for a birth certificate represent cultural identity and belonging?’ Belonging, here, goes far beyond citizenship papers and involves heritage, understood as something that, far beyond the formalities of citizenship cards, is inviolable, yet doesn’t need to be loudly stated, with the song's rapping sitting lightly within its calypso beat.
‘Chinese New Year’ (2014), a song from the period when Jin returned to the US after his Hong Kong sojourn, is sung mainly in English and strikes a sombre tone by linking diasporic Chinese dentity to the sacrifices made by his parents when they emigrated from Hong Kong to America. The primary contrast in the song is between what Jin's parents left behind and their early struggles to make a new life, and how this led to opportunities for Jin, including the opportunity to become a successful musician. This success, in turn, is a result of him being able to draw on his Chinese background, understood as a wellspring of identity. Like all the songs examined here, ‘Chinese New Year’, consistent with soft nationalism more generally, is educative, intended to enlighten its audience about the virtues of Chinese culture and identity. Here, as in much of Jin's corpus, Hong Kong sits within an ideology of the ‘homeland’, founded in ethno-nationalism and yet articulated through nostalgia, memory and a notion of belonging to an imagined community that has since been lost, and that is now evoked not via the print media at the centre of Anderson's theories of nation, but via digital imaginings and by gently waving the flag of an idealised past.
‘Stop the Hatred’ (2021), a collaboration with Wyclef Jean, addresses anti-Chinese racism in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Again, the contrast is between Chinese and US culture, and the long history of anti-Chinese racism in the US. Chinese culture, here, is depicted as an essential resource that enables the identity of the ordinary Chinese-Americans depicted through the video, many of whom hold faded photos of previous generations of their family, to emphasise the collective stories of their immigration and ongoing lives in the US in the face of white racism. By collaborating with Jean, who is Black, MC Jin emphasises how this history of racism is itself part of US white culture, as emphasised by footage of civil rights demonstrations included in the video, and yet how the background of Chinese immigrants is an essential and distinctive resource in the make-up of the US as well as Chinese identity. Through the pandemic Jin also recorded videos aimed at then-President Trump, funded rewards in the search for murderers who committed crimes against Asians, and was referred to as a ‘Chinese light’ and a ‘music preacher’ in the comments thread of the ‘Stop the Hatred’ video. In these respects, just as the lyrics for ‘Stop the Hatred’ emphasise the transformation of identity into action, so Jin's soft nationalism seeks to abrogate the white nationalism of anti-immigrant sentiment and anti-Chinese racism. Notable here is the contrast between Jean and MC Jin’s soft nationalism, embedded in assertions of Chinese-American identity, and the strident racism, with its undercurrents of ‘hot’ white nationalism, that they seek to counter. Soft nationalism, here, functions as an antidote to racialised hard nationalism.
Conclusion
Soft nationalism, as we have described it, recuperates ethno-nationalism within a digital environment, consistent with a general resurgence of ethno-nationalism facilitated by online media (Mihelj and Jiménez-Martínez, 2021). At the same time, soft nationalism has characteristics of banal nationalism and everyday nationalism, since soft nationalism is an ambient form of nationalism that frequently passes unnoticed. Soft nationalism, however, involves the active promotion of nationalist sentiment. Unlike hot nationalism, it is not intended to inflame passions and does not seek to sharpen divides between the ‘we’ of the nation and the ‘they’ of the non-nation, but to educate and persuade the Other, and to soften divides, even as it insists that its authentic voice be heard on its own terms. Soft nationalism, like ethno-nationalism, is founded in language and cultural tradition, and in the ideology of the ‘homeland’, understood as an authentic place of essential belonging and identity, absence from which is experienced as loss.
The work of MC Jin, as we have argued, encapsulates soft nationalism. Through his music videos, Jin seeks to educate Americans about the presence of Chinese identity and its immutable ethno-history, associated with the homeland of Hong Kong and, ultimately, mainland China. The ways of life that Jin's work associates with this identity are not simply deeply felt but are immutable, woven into the fabric of his Chineseness, irrespective of his American upbringing. Language, here, is central to identity; others must literally ‘learn Chinese’, understood as learning about Chinese tradition and culture, in order to understand and accept the reality of Chinese presence.
Based on a single case study, this article cannot hope to encompass all the subtleties and effects of soft nationalism as it pervades popular culture and online culture in particular. MC Jin's videos, produced within the context of his music career, are not typical of the user-generated content where much soft nationalism is expressed. Nor is soft nationalism merely a Chinese phenomenon. Much work remains to be done in understanding, theorising, and documenting soft nationalism in China and well beyond. This will no doubt include analysis of the current cultural-nostalgic turn in Chinese and Western short-video culture, with its self-conscious emphasis on ‘traditional’ food, music, dance, and dress, such as, in the Chinese context, the present vogue for quasi-traditional ‘Hanfu’ costume. This article, we hope, opens up possibilities for thinking about a pervasive social phenomena that is having a profound effect on the ways in which people around the world understand their identities.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
