A peculiar “sameness”

Perry wrote:

“Although “identity” is not familiar in Chinese, the term “alienation” has been widely used in the 1980s to describe basically the opposite idea – namely, a sense of difference between oneself and an ideology or a group. ”

……but the identity that links Chinese and their state is not the willing or congenial sense of sameness of the sort one normally feels as part of a family, religious group, or social club. It is a sense of being bounded in an unequal relationship to something quite “other” than oneself, something like the identity shared by vassal and lord.