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14 - The Cycle of Inevitability in Imperial and Republican Identities in China

from Part ii - Paradigm Shifts and Turning Points in the Era of Globalization, 1500 to the Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2023

By
Pamela Kyle Crossley
Edited by
Cathie Carmichael ,
Matthew D'Auria  and
Aviel Roshwald
Cathie Carmichael
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Matthew D'Auria
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Aviel Roshwald
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
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Summary

Nationalism rewrites the state. It rewrites authoritarian states as democracies. It rewrites democracies as authoritarian states. Whatever its cause and whatever its ends, it has been central to narratives of state transformation since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, it is not a primeval force, is not ever-residing. It is derivative, and the historian who sorts out the roots and branches of an apparently nationalist phenomenon will discover that it disappears under scrutiny. It is, like centripetal force, an ideation that explicates but is not itself real.

Nationalism is able to rewrite the state because it is the accumulation of manifest internal opposition to an existing regime, based on the premise that the present form misrepresents the nature and interests of a defined population. In any nationalist movement, opposition is redefinition. For such opposition to thrive, it must draw upon established public terms of legitimacy, historical claims, and the credible definition of national solidarity in opposition to its governance.

Keywords

inevitable identitiescontingent identitiesconquestempireMingQingRepublican ChinaPeople’s Republic of ChinaMongoliaXinjiangUighurHui MuslimessentialismWang FuzhiSun Yatsen
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism , pp. 301 - 328
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Bovingdon, Gardner, The Uyghurs: Strangers in their own Land (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).Google Scholar
Bulag, Uradyn E., Nationalism and Hybridity in Mongolia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Cheng, Yinghong, Discourses of Race and Rising China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crossley, Pamela Kyle, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dikotter, Frank. The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Karl, Rebecca E., China’s Revolutions in the Modern World (London: Verso, 2020).Google Scholar
Liebold, James, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and its Indigenes Became Chinese (London: Springer, 2016).Google Scholar
Lipman, Jonathan N. Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Smith, Warren W., Jr., Tibetan Nation: A History of Tibetan Nationalism and Sino-Tibetan Relations (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).Google Scholar

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