Self-Determination, Centralisation, and Sovereignty. What The Communist Party of China Learned from Yugoslavia's Dissolution.

This chapter studies how historiographical narratives and political interpretations of the breakup of Yugoslavia were produced by Chinese intellectuals as a way of “using the global to mirror the local.” It places special attention on how the selected publications focused on the concepts of “diversity management,” “ethnicity,” and “self-determination” in constructing their narratives of the “Balkan tragedy,” and most importantly, in presenting them as a cautionary tale for the People’s Republic of China. After surveying the most important historical passages in the Chinese-Yugoslav relation – and their relevance in the broader context of the Cold war and post-Cold war periods – the chapter demonstrates how the intellectual élite of the CPC (including prominent thinkers like Wang Shaoguang or Wang Huning, the latter currently a member of the CPC’s Politburo Standing Committee) has used the Balkan metaphor as a significant element in the rearticulation of the cultural-political agenda of the Party from the 1990s onwards. Criticising Tito’s federal project as a “deviation from Marxism,” emphasising the pernicious effect of an “ethnic” arrangement of the State, or accusing the LCY of having lost the grip on the source of legitimacy, was instrumental to the justification of the post-Tiananmen “centralist” and “nationalist” turn, and – especially after the secession of Kosovo – to the parallel re-conceptualisation of “sovereignty” in opposition to the humanitarian and globalist discourses of the liberal West.