China

by Harrison, Henrietta

• ISBN13: 9780340741344
• ISBN10: 0340741341
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-08-31
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

With Chinese nationalism a vital ingredient of both the domestic politics of the People's Republic of China and its international relations, this book explores how China came to be a nation, arguing that from early times China had all the features of a nation state- a common language, culture, and bureaucracy- and that China as it exists today was invented through the construction of a modern state. The book describes the attitudes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Chinese towards identity and ethnicity and how these factors affected the structure of the state. The Chinese efforts to build a modern nation state that could resist the Western imperial powers are also documented as are the efforts in the twentieth century to spread nationalism from the cities into rural China. The book argues that China has not been an exception to the process of the invention of nations. Instead, its differences arise from the complexities of the relationship between nationalism and imperialism. Moreover, the role of imperialism was not limited to Western empires: the Manchu Qing empire played quite as significant a role in the construction of the modern Chinese nation state as did imported European ideologies. Henrietta Harrison is Professor of History at Harvard University. With Chinese nationalism a vital ingredient of both the domestic politics of the People's Republic of China and its international relations, this book explores how China came to be a nation, arguing that from early times China had all the features of a nation state- a common language, culture, and bureaucracy- and that China as it exists today was invented through the construction of a modern state. The book describes the attitudes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Chinese towards identity and ethnicity and how these factors affected the structure of the state. The Chinese efforts to build a modern nation state that could resist the Western imperial powers are also documented as are the efforts in the twentieth century to spread nationalism from the cities into rural China. The book argues that China has not been an exception to the process of the invention of nations. Instead, its differences arise from the complexities of the relationship between nationalism and imperialism. Moreover, the role of imperialism was not limited to Western empires: the Manchu Qing empire played quite as significant a role in the construction of the modern Chinese nation state as did imported European ideologies. With Chinese nationalism a vital ingredient of both the domestic politics of the People's Republic of China and its international relations, this book explores how China came to be a nation, arguing that from early times China had all the features of a nation state- a common language, culture, and bureaucracy- and that China as it exists today was invented through the construction of a modern state.

Author Biography

Henrietta Harrison is Professor of History at Harvard University.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	vii
General editor's preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Chronology	xii
A map of China	xiv
Introduction	1	(8)
Part I Pre-modern Chinese identity
A common culture	9	(24)
Structures of the Chinese state	10	(10)
The interaction of elite and popular culture	20	(13)
The Manchu empire	33	(22)
The Qing as a non-Han dynasty	33	(11)
The Han and the universal empire	44	(11)
Part II Constructing a modern nation
The world of nation states	55	(33)
Changing models of foreign affairs	55	(15)
The new modernisers and the origins of nationalism	70	(7)
The Boxer Uprising	77	(11)
The creation of modern nationalism	88	(44)
Education	89	(12)
Nationalism and revolutionary thought	101	(10)
Newspapers and the growth of public opinion	111	(7)
The army	118	(14)
Ethnicity and modernity in the 1911 Revolution	132	(18)
The Han nation	132	(7)
National identity and the non-Han peoples	139	(5)
The five-nation republic	144	(6)
Nation, modernity and class	150	(19)
Clothing and etiquette	153	(5)
Time	158	(3)
Women as citizens	161	(8)
Part III Nationalism and imperialism
The growth of nationalism as an ideology	169	(21)
Student nationalism: the May 4th Movement of 1919	170	(6)
Working-class nationalism: the May 30th Movement of 1925	176	(8)
The growth of the Nationalist party	184	(6)
Nationalism and the party state	190	(17)
The rise of the party state	190	(10)
Spreading a modern national culture	200	(3)
The limits of Nationalist party rule	203	(4)
War, nationalism and identity	207	(19)
Responses to Japanese aggression	207	(8)
The outbreak of war and the rhetoric of national unity	215	(4)
The convergence of popular and modern nationalism	219	(7)
State-building and nation-building	226	(25)
Depicting a Communist China	226	(11)
Defining the nation	237	(14)
Part IV Chinese national identity today
The emergence of alternative nationalisms	251	(18)
Politicised nationalism	252	(5)
Redefinitions	257	(7)
The end of empire?	264	(5)
Bibliography	269	(8)
Index	277

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