Soft nationalism in China: The case of Hanfu style

The issue of nationalism has long attracted scholarly attention, focused primarily on the relationship between nationalism and modernity, and ‘hot’ and top-down forms of nationalism. In this article, we focus on what we call ‘soft nationalism’, which is a softly spoken yet highly affective and passionate form of ‘ground up’ nationalism frequently found in online participatory practice. Soft nationalism, we argue, is especially prevalent in China, in the context of a recent resurgence of Chinese nationalism. The article investigates the phenomenon of Han minzu fuzhuang or Hanfu , whereby participants dress in the imagined aristocratic style of pre-Manchurian, Han dynasty China and post images of themselves to social media. While previous accounts have tended to understand Hanfu style through the lens of anti-Manchurian, pro-Han nationalism, through interviews with 23 Hanfu enthusiasts, we show that participants understand Hanfu style in complex, nuanced ways consistent with the practice of soft nationalism. Hanfu emerges as an affective practice based in a quietly spoken yet assertive nationalism that has been, to an extent, de-ethnicised and domesticated as it is accommodated within wider state nationalist agendas, oriented less to internal ethnic rivalries than to the problem of outside influence.