ABSTRACT
This chapter explores, through the People’s Republic of China-ruling Chinese Communist Party’s incorporation of Western commemorative practices into its own remembrance forms, the rise and character of Shanzhai nationalism in China – an intrinsically originless, deconstructionist nationalism that enables the incorporation of Western technologies at the same time as it rejects Western influence. On its centenary, in the contemporary era of the revisionist, vectoralist leadership of Chairman Xi Jinping, a similar process of change is being undertaken through the adoption of the ‘new’ within a Chinese computational cryptoinfosphere but with the recursive, ironic twist that a cultural imaginary of memory is being reconfigured not through the events of 4 May 1919 in Beijing, but rather the First World War commemorative social technologies China was resisting. The chapter analyses this reflexive nationalism to assert a new concept of empire nationalism not just in the present but how such hegemonic power transferrals have their origin in the past.
