\'National Rejuvenation\'? Or Chinese Fascism?

BEIJING - In the Chongwenmen area of China's capital, a major shopping district near Beijing Railway Station that heaves with consumers every evening, a giant electronic screen stretches across the top of a road exhorting shoppers to work toward the great “rejuvenation of the Chinese people.” It glows red and yellow in the night sky, the colors of the national flag.

It's scenes like this that explain why some Chinese and foreign scholars are wondering if the seeds of a fascist-style ideology lie in the ground here, or are already sprouting.

After all, the concept of national rejuvenation was rooted in extreme nationalism and fascist thinking in the last century, when both Hitler and Mussolini espoused citizens' duty to recover an ancient strength and glory. And there is a Chinese precedent: Before the Communist takeover in 1949, the Nationalist leader, Chiang Kaishek, had a “China Revival Society,” led by “Blue Shirts,” modeled on Mussolini's Blac k Shirts.

An extreme thesis? Certainly, it calls for robust debate. In my latest column, I explore whether what is happening in today's China can be seen as fascism and the limitations of that term.

According to a report on Tencent, one of China's biggest Web platforms, the concept of “great rejuvenation” (“weida fuxing,”) began in 1997 after the 15th National Congress of the Communist Party. (The 18th congress begins next week.) “Great national rejuvenation” replaced a phrase that sounds milder in Chinese, “zhenxing zhonghua,” or “national revival,” the Topics Today post said.

By now the idea is widely used in official rhetoric. Recently, a researcher at the National Development and Reform Commission, Yang Yiyong, provoked broad online debate when he announced that China had achieved 62 percent of its planned “national rejuvenation.” (China's netizens are a critical bunch and many poured scorn on the attempt to quantify such a conce pt.)

For Wang Lixiong, a Beijing-based writer and scholar, the strongly nationalist trend in China today is a cause for concern.

An expert on Tibet and Xinjiang, Mr. Wang believes the official emphasis on nationalism is veering into something more disturbing - a kind of racism, as the majority Han people who dominate government struggle to control the two restive autonomous regions, he said in an interview via Skype in Beijing.

“Internally, we're seeing racism towards the Tibetans and in Xinjiang, and externally, I feel that now we're not necessarily quite there yet, but the signs are already there, a kind of expansionism and nationalism is becoming dominant in China's external relations,” Mr. Wang said.

He described a trip he took, from Golmud in Qinghai province, to Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region.

“Recently I drove from Golmud to Lhasa and there were 17 police checks, and they separated out the Han and the Tibetans, wh o was allowed to pass, who wasn't allowed into Lhasa,” he said. The Han were allowed to travel on while Tibetans were generally not. “So the racism is very clear,” he said.

The Chinese government, for its part, strongly argues that it has worked hard to modernize Tibet and Xinjiang and spread economic progress, and that it operates policies that give advantages to ethnic minorities, including easier access to university education or allowing them to have more children.