ABSTRACT
With the takeover by communists and the founding of the PRC in 1949 came a new state with a new national doctrine. The unity of the country, which encompassed a single ‘Chinese nation’, was assumed to be achieved through the integration of all revolutionary classes into one United Front of revolutionary struggle. As much as Republicans had used race to promote national unity, communists employed the idea of class to assert the essential unity of the Chinese people in their struggle and consolidation of power. Class struggle, a key principle of Marxism, joined the nationalist discourse of ‘citizen’ and ‘race’ in conceiving the nation as a political community (Fitzgerald 1996: 71). Class became a parameter of belonging to the Chinese socialist nation. It served to establish China’s place in the world as a distinctive ‘class nation’ with a mission to resist oppressor nations.
