ABSTRACT
This work began by exploring how patriotism has been used since the late 1970s to link economic reform with national unification policy and foreign policy to form an ideological system for legitimating CCP rule. In the period immediately after Tiananmen and in the context of the end of the Cold War, the CCP leadership re-established these linkages in an international situation of ‘economic globalisation and political multipolarity’, arriving at the orthodoxy of Deng Xiaoping Theory and the Three Represents. Given the centrality of patriotism to the post-Tiananmen leadership’s claim to legitimacy, this has considerably strengthened the nationalistic dynamics of the political dispensation inherited by the new leadership of President and CCP General Secretary Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, installed at the Sixteenth Party Congress. This chapter will conclude by examining how the mission to achieve the tasks established by Deng Xiaoping in January 1980 continues to form links between domestic politics, national unification and foreign policy that constrain the ability of China’s new leaders to contribute to the maintenance of a stable international status quo.
