PAN Tongren
Various studies on political identity reveal a concern with the fundamentalquestion of “how citizens identify with their rulers”. In the works of Marx and Engels, political identity is a manifestation of the consolidation of the ideology of the ruling class. Lenin stressed that the process of class consciousness formation is also the process of forming political identity. According to Mao Zedong, the political identity of the masses is manifested in different ways of participating in or supporting revolutionary activities in different ways. In Western academic history, Freud was the first to study the mechanism of human identity, and American scholar Rosenberg was the first to use the concept of “political identity”. Most Western scholars believe that political identity is closely related to the legitimacy of the political system. In the theoretical field, scholars mainly focus on such areas as “what are thetypes of political identity”, “what factors affect the generation of political identity”, “what are the observation perspectives of political identity”, “the overall status of contemporary Chinese citizens' political identities and the political identity of all social strata” and other areas of research. In the process of continuous evolution and extension, the concept of “political identity” has formed a conceptual spectrum that include “national identity”, “political party identity”, “cultural identity”, “ideological and political education identity” and other related categories.