4 - From Self-Determination to Secessio”: What the Chinese Communist Party Learned from Kosovo

This paper intends to explore how historiographical narratives and political interpretations of the breakup of Yugoslavia – and more specifically of its final chapter between Kosovo and Serbia - were produced by and circulated within the Chinese Communist Party as a way of “using the global to mirror the local”. Selected publications on the Balkan tragedy will be presented and analyzed through the conceptual lenses of “diversity management”, “ethnicity”, and “self-determination”, and their importance as a cautionary tale for the People’s Republic of China will be highlighted.
I will try to demonstrate how the intellectual élite of the CCP (including prominent thinkers like Wang Shaoguang or Wang Huning, the latter currently a member of the Politburo) have used the Balkan metaphor as a significant element in the rearticulation of both the domestic and international agenda of the Party from the 1990s onward. On the one hand, pointing at the consequences of Tito’s failed federal project as a “deviation from Marxism”, emphasizing the pernicious effect of an “ethnic” arrangement of the State, was instrumental to the justification of the post-Tiananmen “centralist” and “nationalist” turn. On the other – as particularly visible in the production on Kosovo – denouncing “self-determination” as an instrumental concept manipulated by foreign powers to infringe national sovereignties, emerged as a relevant passage in the Chinese articulation of a counter-discourse to the humanitarian and globalist narratives of the “liberal West”.