Interpreting China as a Regional and Global Power

Nationalism and Historical Consciousness in World Politics

B. Dessein

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349496976, 9781137450296
• eBook ISBN: 9781137450302
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection discusses China's contemporary national and international identity as evidenced in its geopolitical impact on the countries in its direct periphery and its functioning in organizations of global governance. This contemporary identity is assessed against the background of the country's Confucian and nationalist history.

Part I

Historical Consciousness

1

Early Chinese Nationalism: The Origins under Manchu Rule¹

Julia Schneider

1. Introduction

This chapter deals with the early development of Chinese nationalism around 1900 and its significant influence on the nationalist selfperceptions of the present-day People’s Republic of China (PRC), despite the Communists’ claim to have broken with the imperial and Republican past. Acceptance of the idea that today’s Chinese nationalism is based on this heritage is essential to understand modern developments in the PRC and the special problems it faces when dealing with its non-Chinese inhabitants in Tibet, Xinjiang and even Inner Mongolia.

In order to retrace the late imperial discourse on nationalism, well-known texts of political thinkers of late imperial times will be reread with special regard to questions of ethnicity. The focus will be less on political-official aspects of nationalism and more on concrete examples with regard to the ethnic and territorial situation in the Qing empire. How did late imperial intellectuals plan to solve the obvious conflict between intended state borders and the theories they favored of the nation-state as culturally and ethnically homogenous?

Many accounts of the history of Chinese nationalism in late imperial times have already been written, all shedding light on different aspects of its history.² This chapter hopes to contribute another crucial puzzle piece to the history of Chinese nationalism by paying special attention to the strategies developed by late imperial Chinese political thinkers to make the multi-ethnic Qing empire commensurate with their image of a homogenous Chinese nation-state. Nationalism in this context is nationalism as discourse, and this discourse represents the first attempt by Chinese thinkers to formulate their concepts of nationalism. Most analyses of Chinese nationalism, however, focus on a time when the nation-state was already in existence, that is, after the abdication of the last Manchu Qing emperor and the foundation of the Republic of China (ROC) in 1911/1912.³

This chapter will retrace the earliest development of Chinese nationalism as discourse and concept-formation, and as a basis for the image of the future nation-state. My focus is on the challenges posed by the contradiction between the multi-ethnic composition of the Qing empire, the territorial blueprint for the imagined future nation-state of early Chinese nationalist thinkers on the one hand, and their ideological ideas of this nation-state as culturally and ethnically homogenous on the other. Ethnicity, territory and assimilative theories are the key aspects under which I analyze early Chinese nationalism discourse. It will become clear that culturalism was indeed an important basis of Chinese nationalism and did not constitute its counterpart; rather, it provided Chinese thinkers with an important strategy for the incorporation of non-Chinese people into the Chinese nation.

James Leibold analyzes the processes linked to nationalism and nation-building after 1912 using a similar approach. He focuses on the ‘frontier question’ (bianjiang wenti) and the ‘national question’ (minzu wenti) and their key role ‘in reconstituting the Qing geo-body as a Sinic-centered, multi-ethnic Zhonghua minzu’ in the ideological battle between the Chinese Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party in Republican times. He introduces the concept of an ‘ “inferior” familiar Other’ (in contrast to the ‘ “superior” alien Other’), which was newly categorized as ‘frontier and minority nationals’.⁴

Although Leibold aims at ‘de-centering the nation’ and demonstrates ‘how the frontier and its indigenous inhabitants were central rather than peripheral’, he does not manage to escape from some of the conceptual limits of the discourse, continuing to call Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet ‘frontier’ regions – although he does not necessarily treat them as such himself.⁵ By using the term frontier and its implication of cultural hybridity, these regions seem to remain marginal zones of transition instead of becoming the focus of attention. The adequacy of the term becomes doubtful if one realizes the immense territorial dimensions of these allegedly frontier regions, and their history further challenges their characterization as ‘frontier’ or ‘border’ regions. An understanding of these regions as ‘peripheral borderlands’ at the ‘margins of empires’ is a label that can only be imagined and constructed from a Chinese proper (and maybe sinological) point of view.⁶

The discourse on nationalism began with the introduction of Japanese translations of the terms for nationalism from European languages and its subsequent discussion as a political concept in Chinese thinking in the late 19th century. It matured until the early 20th century, when this discourse was in full bloom. When the ideas of nationalism – the basic one being that every nation should have a state – became popular among Chinese intellectuals in the late 19th century, their interest was primarily the result of having witnessed a general and obvious decline of the Qing empire (1636–1912) that they sought to check. This decline was the result of both internal problems – rapid population growth since the second half of the 18th century in combination with natural catastrophes, the disastrous Taiping civil war (1850–1864) and rebellions of Chinese Muslims and Turkish Muslims (1860s–1870s) – and of the aggressions of the Euro-American states and Japan, reflected in the Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860) and the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the ‘unequal treaties’. When Chinese intellectuals learned via Japanese translations of Western works that the Euro-American states saw themselves as nation-states based on a sentiment of national identity of their inhabitants, that is, nation-people, and reflected in their systems of government, their main hope was that nationalism would help the Qing empire to regain power. But how could the empire’s inhabitants become a nation, and how would their nation-state look?

During the first half of the 19th century, Chinese literati, scholar-officials and members of the gentry who had until then been politically marginalized began to gain political influence, first ideologically by publishing essays on statecraft (jingshi), but then also militarily by engaging in the Self-Strengthening Movement (yangwu yundong or ziqiang yundong). The Qing government became especially dependent on their support with regard to military actions against the Taiping and the inner-Qing Muslims. The Chinese gentry obviously felt loyal to the empire and wanted to help it become stronger. Consequently, the ethnic composition of the ruling elite, albeit not of the imperial family and the highest official ranks, changed. Still, the main principles of the Qing emperors’ policies of ethnic differentiation were not altered, and in fact Zaifeng (1883–1951, regency 1908–1911), who acted as Regent for the young Xuantong Emperor (1906–1967, r. 1908–1912), clung to it and thus contributed to the final overturn of the Qing dynasty.⁷ The emperors continued their strategy of ethnic differentiation, installing Manchus and Mongols at the topmost official level and leaving the rest of the official organization and administration as it had been before their conquest. In this way, the emperors (Man. hūwangdi; Chin. huangdi), khans (Mong. khaan), or kings (Tib. rgyal-po) as they were called respectively, had been able to ensure peace in the majority of their territories since the late 17th century.

When Chinese intellectuals became acquainted with the theory of nationalism at the end of the 19th century, they understood that the foundation for nation-building had to be laid on at least two levels: political reforms towards a constitutional monarchy on the official level, and the strengthening of a sentiment of national unity on the popular level. They believed that the metamorphosis of the Qing empire into a nation-state was necessary, even unavoidable, if it wanted to oppose external aggressions and play a major political role in the world.

Early reform-oriented thinkers Kang Youwei (1858–1927), Zhang Taiyan (1868–1936), and Liang Qichao (1873–1929) read sources on nationalism in such a way as to conclude that a multi-ethnic political entity was not suitable for a nation-state. This approach was based on several pre-discursive layers, the most important one being culturalist ideas, based on the concept of All under Heaven. Culturalism puts the Chinese in the cultural center of the world, or at least of East Asia, and assumes that all non-Chinese (barbarians) automatically strive for this culture and can be changed by it.⁸ This changeability was symbolized in the motto ‘use the Xia to change the Yi’ (yong Xia bian Yi), derived from a well-known passage in the philosophical work Mengzi (4th century BCE), indicating that the concept was adopted already in the Warring States period.⁹ In late imperial times, the Xia were interpreted as the Chinese and the Yi as inner-Qing or other non-Chinese.

Based on the culturalist world view, other late imperial political thinkers did not question whether the Chinese had to be at the ‘center’ (zhongxindian) of a future nation-state, politically and culturally.¹⁰ This approach was also supported by Western-via-Japanese sources, mainly by the Swiss-German political thinker Johann Kaspar Bluntschli (Chin. Bolunzhili, 1808–1881), who stated that in cases where a nation (Ger. Volk, Chin. guomin) was to be built in a territory inhabited by more than one people (Ger. Nation, Chin. minzu), one dominant ethnicity usually led the others towards nation-building.¹¹ Consequently, the Qing empire could not provide a model with regard to its multi-ethnicaffine politics. Based on Bluntschli’s ideas and on the implications of Chinese culturalism, strategies were developed to make the multi-ethnic empire of Manchu reign into a homogenous nation-state under Chinese rule: it was deemed necessary to ‘assimilate’ (tonghua) the non-Chinese inhabitants of the empire and re-melt them into a unified Chinese nation.¹²

After the downfall of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the ROC in 1911/1912, Chinese thinkers quickly realized that the two concepts – Qing empire and nation-state – were not easily combined: the multi-ethnic Qing empire did not automatically change into a unified and homogenous Chinese nation-state as they had theorized. On the contrary, some of the main challenges for the ROC lay in the fact that Chinese political thinkers and politicians never let go of their territorial image taken from the Qing empire and at the same time clung to the idea of a homogenous nation.

2. Historical background

Chinese nationalism arose and reached maturity in the late period of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1636–1912). The Manchu people, known as Jurchen prior to 1616, originated from a region in Northeast Asia, in Western languages today often called Manchuria, in Chinese (and from a Chinese perspective) simply called ‘Northeast’ (Dongbei). The powerful Jurchen khan Nurhaci (1559–1626, r. 1616–1626) founded the (Later) Jin dynasty in 1616, by which name he referred to his ancestors’ powerful dynasty, the (Earlier) Jin dynasty (1115–1234). In 1636, Nurhaci’s son Hongtaiji (1592–1643, r. 1626–1643) renamed the dynasty Qing.

From the 16th to the 18th century, the Manchus not only established their rule in Mongolia (1593/1691), Tibet (1720) and East Turkestan (Chin. Xinjiang, 1720/1757–1758), but they also conquered China proper (1644–1662) and finally ended the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). The unification of these large regions with Manchuria made the Qing empire a decidedly multi-ethnic enterprise. This was reflected politically in the Manchu emperors’ differentiated approach towards their diverse subjects, ideologically in their acceptance of diverse religious systems, and symbolically in the adoption of the main script languages of the five ethnicities (wu zu) as official scripts (Manchu, Mongol, Chinese, Tibetan, and Uyghur).

The term ‘China proper’ (Zhongguo benbu) refers to those regions more or less congruent with the former Ming territory, which were mainly inhabited by people speaking Chinese languages and largely remained in the Ming administrative system. Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet and East Turkestan were administered according to their local systems. Most people living in China proper would be administratively treated as belonging to the Chinese ethnicity (Hanzu/ren), although on a personal level this identity often was (and is) less important than more local identities.

Before (and for a good while after) the first Chinese nation-state, called Zhonghua minguo (officially translated as Republic of China, ROC, literally meaning ‘Zhonghua nation-state’ or ‘nation-state of central florescence’), was established in 1911, the intellectual idea of Chinese nationalism consisted of an amalgam of several different though often similar ways of imagining a Chinese nation and nation-state. It is thus implied that ‘Chinese nationalism’ of that period is in fact an umbrella term for Chinese nationalisms. Moreover, it is not at all clear how and if these nationalisms were reflected in popular sentiment; it is not my intention here to fill this gap. Liang Qichao hints at an answer in an article he wrote shortly after the long-awaited foundation of the nation-state in 1911/1912. He complains about the lack of n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables, Figures and Maps
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Historical Consciousness
• Part II: China and her Periphery
• Part III: China and the World at Large
• Epilogue
• Index