MCLC: Political Recognition and National Identity panel

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Guangyi Li <frankfirepku at gmail.com>
Subject: Political Recognition and National Identity panel
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Dear All,
I'm Guangyi Li, PhD candidate of Chinese literature and culture at UCLA. I
and some scholars have organized a panel for this year's AAS conference.
This panel is already accepted. Unfortunately, two panelists quit for
personal reasons, and we have to recruit new members to keep our panel on
the list. Would you please take a look at the panel abstract below,
consider if you would like to join, and kindly spread this call for paper
to anyone you think may take part in our panel? Your help is greatly
appreciated.

Best,
Guangyi

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PANEL: From Empire to Republic: The Making of Modern Chinese Political
Recognition and National Identity

 
This panel focuses on the changing discourses on political identity in the
Qing Empire. Bearing an interdisciplinary initiative, we investigate the
formation and the fall of Qing as a multi-ethnic Empire, trying to provide
new perspectives in understanding the historical and intellectual
foundation of modern Chinese discourses on ethnicity and citizenship.
Panelists find it problematic to simplify Qing’s rule either as a process
of Sinification or Manchurian colonization. Instead, we propose to
understand Qing’s approach of governance as a reflexive process. Qing’s
discourses of state-building, governance and its imagination of
world-order were adaptive through its interaction with both different
ethnic groups within China and foreign empires and nations, particularly
the Western colonial powers. By presenting such an interactive process, we
also intend to shed a light on the historical origin of the ethnic issues
as well as the imagination of a national identity in contemporary China.
Ang Yang’s work looks at the Qing Emperor’s  1912 Abdication Edict and
calls attention to “Mukden Consensus,” which he argues is the foundation
of the multi-ethnic empire known as Qing. Qi An’s anthropological work
investigates in the similar issue by looking at the triangular relations
between Miao, Manchu and Han migrants in the early Qing. Sam Zhiguang
Yin’s paper takes the discussion to another angle and looks at the Qing’s
attempt to cooperate with the Western colonialists by translating modern
international law. Guangyi Li’s work follows this path and explores how
late Qing Chinese utopians address ethnicity, race, and nation in their
imaginations of an ideal world.

 
 
Yellow Peril or Yellow Revival: Ethnicity, Race and Nation in Late Qing
Chinese Utopianism (1902-1911)
Guangyi Li, Ph.D. Candidate of Chinese Literature and Culture, Department
of Asian
Languages and Cultures, UCLA

 
This paper explores how late Qing Chinese utopians address ethnicity,
race, and nation in their imaginations of an ideal world. Political
utopianism, through Liang Qichao and other intellectuals’ effort,
flourished in late Qing Chinese thought and gave an impetus to the Xinhai
Revolution. Preoccupied with China’s predicament in the west-centered
world, late Qing Chinese utopians were often committed to designs of an
ideal world order characterized by China’s revival. Such utopian thinking,
as this paper reveals, was heavily conditioned by their diverse ideas
about ethnicity (Han, Manchu, Mongolian, etc.), race (yellow, white,
black, brown, and so forth), and nation (ethno-nation and nation-state).
This paper begins with a brief review of the ethnic and racial issues that
plagued the Qing Empire since its foundation, particularly after the Opium
Wars. In the major part, key texts, such as Book of Great Unity (1902) and
New Era (1908), are placed under critical scrutiny. Special attention is
paid to the resistance to and/or reconstruction of western racism and
nationalism, as well as Japan’s intermediary role.

 
Legislating the Self: The Concept of Modern Individual and its Spread via
the Translaiton of Modern International Law in the 19th Century China
Dr. Zhiguang Yin, Assistant Professor, Zayed University, Dubai, UAE
 

This paper will elaborate that the idea of the modern individual, which
suggests an indivisible subject of legal and economic rights and social
responsibilities, first appears in the Chinese context in the translation
of modern international law in 1864. It exists as an analytical category
in various legal and political writings and translations. Through the
political and intellectual interaction between China and the West,
especially Europe, the idea of the individual generally acquires a richer
semantic connotation and forms an equivalent with the Chinese word “geren”
roughly in 1901. My theoretical intention is also to demonstrate that it
is not possible to truly understand the dynamic of the construction of the
modern individual without contextualizing it in the intellectual
introduction and translation of modern West political concepts for the
purpose of nation-building and modern social construction. Although modern
Western political concepts especially ideas such as state sovereignty,
international law and other related notions had already been introduced in
China through either Western missionaries or merchants and diplomats in
the mid-19th century, the systematic efforts of learning and
conceptualizing these ideas among intellectuals began roughly around 1898.
In order to understand the reception of individualism in China one must
discuss the attempt to construct modern individual by revolutionary
intellectuals and reformists.