Guest editorial The empire strikes back? China's new racial sovereignty Keywords: China Nationalism Sovereignty Racism International relations “In the best of Chinese traditions, generations of overseas Chinese never forget their home country, their origins, or the blood of the Chinese nation flowing in their veins” (Xi, 2014, p. 69). It is often argued that the territoriality of China's ancient empire was flexible and defined along cultural lines. The Middle Kingdom was constructed not only through conquest and suzerainty but also through cultural practices that enabled Chinese scholars to draw and claim the “borders of Chinese civilization” (Howland, 1996). Things changed in the 19th and 20th centuries as the sovereignty of the Chinese state adapted to external demands and became infused with nationalist rationales. However, civilizational myths and ambitions held sway, and have permeated the social construc- tion of the country's “imagined community” up to our present day. Today, the People's Republic of China positions itself as a guardian of Westphalian sovereignty and a proponent of a problematical norm of inter-national “non-interference” (Gonzalez-Vicente, 2015). Yet the prevalence of differentiated “zoning technologies” within the PRC (Ong, 2004), the “graded rings of sovereignty” employed to claim and flexibly manage Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan (Sow, 2013), and the resolve to annex the South China Sea indicate that issues of territoriality and sovereignty are not as settled or discrete as the official discourse may suggest. At the same time, Chinese ethno-nationalism remains marred by a racial essentialism that portrays “the Han as a pure biological entity” (Dik€ otter, 2015, p. 78), and that inevitably precludes many of those who inhabit within China's variegated borders from belonging to the imagined community. In this piece I argue that these understandings of the postcolo- nial nation, operating against a backdrop of rising economic and political power, have translated in a series of alarming interven- tions that I characterize as ‘extraterritorial racial sovereignty’. This form of sovereignty draws upon an assemblage of imperial, civilizational and racist understandings of “Chineseness”, 1 and has been mobilized by the Chinese government to intervene beyond state borders. Crucially, racial sovereignty is espoused with geographical markers and notions such as that of a “Greater China” and with ideas of a cultural and diasporic identity that ostensibly dissociate the nation from territory. However, these ideas have been operationalized by the state in order to circumvent territorial constraints and expand its disciplinary power, hence pro- ducing new forms of state spatiality that assist in the consolidation of territorial claims and the policing of dissent. Whereas the idea of “Greater China” e which includes in most interpretations the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and overseas Chinese com- munities e is best understood as a contingent and ambiguous discourse (Callahan, 2004), the Chinese government has in recent times used it as an actual site of intervention, ultimately projecting an ambition to operate both in a territorially discrete realm and an extraterritorial and racially-bounded dimension. Three examples are used to illustrate this trend: the abduction in Thailand and Hong Kong of book publishers critical of the Chinese government; the extradition of Taiwanese citizens from Kenya to China; and the Chinese government's claim to protect Malaysian citizens of Chinese descent. The first of these cases has gathered significant attention, as the disappearance of the booksellers signaled an escalation in China's recent campaign against dissent. A total of five publishers of gossipy books about Chinese leaders vanished to later reappear in the custody of PRC authorities confessing to a series of crimes that were unrelated to their publishing activities. Foreign media, rights groups and close relatives took such confessions with skep- ticism, suggesting that they had likely been forced and staged (The Guardian, 2016). Most prominent were the cases of Gui Minhai, a Swedish citizen, and Lee Bo, British. Gui disappeared in Thailand, while Lee was abducted in Hong Kong, both beyond the jurisdiction of PRC law enforcers. What is remarkable about these cases is how PRC authorities justified e while not openly acknowledging e the extraterritorial detentions of non-Chinese nationals. China's Foreign Minister contended that Lee's Chinese descent and the fact that he resided in Hong Kong made him “first and foremost a Chinese citizen” (South China Morning Post, 2016). Soon after his detention, Lee appeared on China's Phoenix TV to express his inten- tion to give up British citizenship. In an almost synchronized move, Gui published a letter where he requested the Swedish government not to intervene in his case, claiming he truly felt Chinese and “[his] roots [were] still in China” (Reuters, 2016). Both declarations, com- ing from mouth and pen of long-time dissidents, seemed to project the Chinese government's notion of citizenship rather than the identity or interests of the detainees. The second case involves not just racial paradigms but also geopolitical motivations e which can in turn be analyzed against 1 There is a distinction in Chinese language between “zhongguoren” (中国人e a Chinese national) and “huaren” (华人e a person of Chinese ethnicity). This editorial focuses on the PRC's intent to govern over non-Chinese citizens of Chinese descent. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo Political Geography 59 (2017) 139e141 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2016.11.001 0962-6298/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.