Kevin Carrico's book The Great Han investigates participants of the Han clothing movement and critiques their ideology. Carrico's ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in 2010 and 2011 in several cities with active movement organizations. The movement began in the early 2000s, and its active participants were “young and fairly educated professionals, with a roughly 1:1 proportion of men and women” (p. 40). They utilized internet forums and urban performances of Han dresses to promote their ethno-nationalists beliefs.
Carrico does not focus on the movement or its social context but on the psychology and values of its participants. The book's main theoretical concern is to explain – with a framework inspired by Jacques Lacan, Niklas Luhmann and Peter Sloterdijk – why participants embrace a blatantly racist form of neotraditionalist ethno-nationalism. Chapter one outlines a typical participant's beliefs in nationalism, race and tradition. Chapter two interprets the movement as an attempt to ethnicize the Han ethnic group through dress and to construct a rich culture for the group's collective identity. Chapter three analyses four participants’ personal profiles. Carrico links together their anxiety, their marginal social positions and their embrace of ethno-nationalism. Chapter four interprets the participants’ strategic use of dress, public rituals and photography as an attempt to enhance the materiality of their unreal fantasy of Han ethnicism. Chapter five elaborates how participants, in denial of logic or facts, construct the Manchus as the contemporary enemy of the Han ethnic group. Chapter six explores how a “ladies’ academy” operates as a patriarchal and heteronormative institution. In chapter seven, Carrico adopts his framework to examine four other social or intellectual movements in China that promote similar neotraditional nationalisms to the Han clothing movement.
I find Carrico's critique of the ideologies of the Han clothing movement to be largely valid and relevant. Chapter six is especially pertinent for its intersectional scope. I also find the book's ethnography of participants to be rich, timely and useful. The Han clothing movement is one of the most high-profile social movements in contemporary China. Yet scholars neglect it for its seemingly frivolous focus on dress and its extreme political incorrectness. This ethnography fills an important research gap.
Unfortunately, the theoretical framework of this book does not enhance this ethnographic material. I wish that Carrico had adhered to the frameworks he implicitly adopts for each chapter. They include whiteness studies (chapter two), new social movement theory (chapter three), performance theory (chapter four), framing theory (chapter five), feminist and queer theories (chapter six), and critical race theory and critiques of ethno-nationalism (all chapters). Instead, he puts forward an unelaborated framework for the book and straitjackets all analyses with it.
There are four problems with the framework. Firstly, the three theories of the framework do not match, and Carrico does not justify their combination – the “theory section” of this book contains only a dozen pages (pp. 13–15, 19–29). The combining of Luhmannian autopoiesis and Sloterdijkian spherology may be acceptable – it will probably involve a spatialization of Luhmann's systems theory. But Lacan's psychoanalytic theory hardly matches with systems theory and spherology. Luhmann is a canonical figure in relational sociology and Sloterdijk develops a relational philosophy. Lacanian psychoanalysis, at least in the way that Carrico adopts it, is decidedly substantialist.
Secondly, engagement between Carrico's framework and theories of nationalism is too limited given his ambition of establishing a new explanation of nationalism. For example, Carrico's specifying of the “elementary structures of nationalism” as mainly affective would require a discussion of how his framework connects to current theories on ethno-nationalism (p. 19).
Thirdly, it is meta-theoretically and methodologically problematic to directly apply abstract grand theories to ethnographic data. Luhmann's autopoiesis is supposed to explain all structures with staying power; Lacanian psychoanalysis is supposed to explain all individuals; Sloterdijk's concept of “sphere” is devised to describe all human practices. The success of applying them to the Han clothing movement does not theoretically prove much aside from the fact that the movement is composed of individuals, human practices and structures.
Fourthly, Carrico's framework is supposed to replace Anderson's “imagined communities” thesis and to be globally generalizable. Yet by the concluding chapter, it looks like the framework is specially tailored for analysing neotraditional nationalism in contemporary China. Perhaps he does not mean that. I can imagine how the framework can be used to explain post-truth Americans and Europeans in the past few years, for example. But if Carrico's framework is meant to be globally generalizable, a serious problem emerges. The framework actually implies that most nationalists and patriots are ethno-nationalists. This is a big and unsubstantiated claim.
These four problems negatively affect the book's empirical analyses. For example, except that in chapter six, the analyses are organized around the proof that movement participants’ actions and beliefs are self-deconstructing and self-reproducing. The aim is to show that they are autopoietic and that there is a gap between imagination and reality. But from a relational sociological viewpoint and a Lacanian one, being self-reproductive or desiring fantasies is not special. Both an ethno-nationalist and a liberal multiculturalist can be described in this way.
Carrico suggests that he wishes to offer “a considerably more complex picture” than portraying the movement as “a fairly extreme nationalist group” (pp. 16–17). However, there is very little discussion on the sociocultural context of Chinese national dress, or of the varieties of Chinese nationalism. Carrico tends to over-state the constructedness of Han clothing (e.g. p. 37). Numerous Chinese citizens, as audiences of popular culture, are already familiar with images of historical dresses in television drama, animation and video games. Meanwhile, readers unfamiliar with China may get the impression from this book that ethno-nationalism represents Chinese nationalism. But in reality, contemporary ethno-nationalists (whose imaginary enemies are Japanese and Americans instead of Manchus), state nationalists, liberal patriotic citizens and Little Pinks are far more numerous. They embrace very different nationalist beliefs. Many of them regard Han clothing activists as lunatics. Likewise, there is insufficient description of internal differentiation within the Han clothing movement. For example, there is a large cultural nationalist wing in addition to the ethno-nationalist wing in the movement. Its lineage can be traced from influential core activists such as Tianyazaixiaolou in the mid-2000s to the “female celestials’ faction” (xiannüdang) in the late 2010s.
As a study on ethnic dress or an ethnography of Chinese ethno-nationalists, this book is very valuable. But its contribution to the theorization of nationalism and the understanding of Chinese nationalism is questionable.
