Nations and Nationalism roundtable discussion on Chinese nationalism and national identity

In 2006, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) homepage briefly featured woodblock prints from Meiji Japan that were part of John Dower and Shigeru Miyagawa’s Visualizing Cultures open course. One print depicted Japanese soldiers decapitating Chinese prisoners during the 1894-1895 First Sino-Japanese War. Dower is the preeminent scholar and critic of both American and Japanese racism and dehumanization during and prior to the Pacific War, and the course explicitly critiqued the ‘race feeling’ that animated wartime Japanese propaganda prints (Dower 2008: 1-2). MIT’s Chinese students were outraged, however, at MIT’s reproduction of the image. Word spread quickly in Chinese cyberspace. Miyagawa’s phone was soon ringing off the hook, and his e-mail account was deluged with hate mail and even death threats (Gleitzman 2006). MIT was forced to temporarily remove the course from their website. Several dozen MIT professors signed a brief letter defending their colleagues and academic freedom, and The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote a piece about the tempest focusing on the hate mail and its threat to open intellectual inquiry. In 2015, a special issue of Positions: Asia Critique included over a dozen essays revisiting the controversy nine years later. Remarkably, only one, by William Callahan, addresses the anti-Japanese nationalism in China that provided the critical context for the students’ rage. Instead, editors Wang Jing and Winnie Wong and most other contributors direct their ire at MIT, its professors and The Chronicle. Wang Jing (2015: 168, 168, 172) repeatedly