Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage

Since China participated in the Human Genome Project in the 1990s, implications of the debate surrounding the Homo erectus Peking Man’s ancestorship for nationalism wrapped in scientific jargon have been well comprehended by various segments of the society with ultranationalists and a liberal public opinion as the two extremes contesting each other. This divergence also cuts through the Chinese party-state. The discourse on a pure ancestry, an ancestral home, a natural bond between this ancestor and the environment, and most of all, a narrative that attributes remarkable lineal continuity to physical, mental, intellectual and even moral traits unique to this ancestor and its posterity, support fanatical racial nationalisms.