China from Empire to Nation-State

Hui Wang, Michael Gibbs Hill

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674966963
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

This translation of the Introduction to Wang Hui's Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004) makes part of his four-volume masterwork available to English readers for the first time. A leading public intellectual in China, Wang charts the historical currents that have shaped Chinese modernity from the Song Dynasty to the present day, and along the way challenges the West to rethink some of its most basic assumptions about what it means to be modern. China from Empire to Nation-State exposes oversimplifications and distortions implicit in Western critiques of Chinese history, which long held that China was culturally resistant to modernization, only able to join the community of modern nations when the Qing Empire finally collapsed in 1912. Noting that Western ideas have failed to take into account the diversity of Chinese experience, Wang recovers important strains of premodern thought. Chinese thinkers theorized politics in ways that do not line up neatly with political thought in the West—for example, the notion of a "Heavenly Principle" that governed everything from the ordering of the cosmos to the structure of society and rationality itself. Often dismissed as evidence of imperial China's irredeemably backward culture, many Neo-Confucian concepts reemerged in twentieth-century Chinese political discourse, as thinkers and activists from across the ideological spectrum appealed to ancient precedents and principles in support of their political and cultural agendas. Wang thus enables us to see how many aspects of premodern thought contributed to a distinctly Chinese vision of modernity.

ONE

Two Narratives of China and Their Derivative Forms

Whether explicitly or implicitly, all historical descriptions and analyses concerning China contain two types of narratives about China: a narrative of China as empire, and a narrative of China as nation-state. These two narratives are entangled with a variety of research models often put forward in China studies, including “stimulus and response,” “tradition and modernity,” “imperialism,” and orientations toward local history. These narratives themselves, however, have not gained nearly enough attention in their own right because, to a certain degree, concepts such as “China,” the “Chinese empire,” and the nation-state have already come to be extremely “natural” categories that no longer require special definition. Essential questions remain, however: whether or not China really is an empire or a nation-state, how to understand Chinese identity in and of itself, and how to determine the relationship between China and modernity. In the narrative of China as empire, China is described as a nonmodern, despotic (antidemocratic) political form; as an agrarian (nonurban, noncommercial, and nonindustrial) ecology of production spread out over a vast geographical space; as a multiethnic “imagined community” or “civilization” that relies on cultural identity and identification (and not national and political identity); and as a world system or landmass that sees itself as at the center of a tribute system (and not subject to formal equality or a treaty system). These traits have defined not only the differences between the Chinese empire and early modern European nations and other cultures, but also the vast gulf between China and modernity itself. In contrast, the narrative of China as nation-state holds that, since at least the beginning of the Northern Song dynasty, China already contained a model for national identity, commercial economic relations, a prosperous and diverse urban culture, a highly developed system of administration, a model for social mobility that extended across all social classes, a vibrant popular culture, an extremely long tradition of science and technology accompanied by a secular Confucian worldview, and a form for international relations that spanned great distances. In investigations and descriptions that emphasize these historical phenomena, China provided a model for modernity at the same level as that of early modern Europe. These two narratives, then, stand in opposition to one another even as they complement one another and, working at different angles, transform into other, more subtle, narratives.

The opposition between the empire narrative and the nation-state narrative is a derivative product of narratives of European nationalism; this opposition is also an important theme in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European theories of politics and economics. In the next section I will provide a more detailed analysis of these issues. First, however, I will discuss how these two narratives of China appear in various ways in China studies. Most readers will be familiar with a historical narrative shared by Chinese Marxist scholars and John K. Fairbank’s “stimulus–response” model. In these narratives, researchers working from various perspectives interpret the changes that began with the Opium Wars as a historical process in which the Chinese empire transforms into a nation-state (i.e., the transformation of traditional society to modern society), thus placing the relationship between empire and nation-state into a temporal order. The combination of elements such as arguments about historical evolution based on the transformation of modes of production, imperialism, and theories of national self-determination form the better part of the framework of historical narratives provided by Marxist-Leninist scholars. Within this framework, Marxist scholars condemn various aspects of European nationalism and imperialism, including political domination, military encroachment, economic exploitation, and the capitalist division of labor on a global scale. At the same time, however, these scholars also see capitalism’s eradication of traditional values and social relations as a necessary process of historical development and a universal model for development found in all human history. Marxists link the achievements of modernity (national independence, industrialization, and popular sovereignty) with colonized peoples’ awakening, struggle, self-liberation, and labor-centered practices of daily life (including advances in technology and development of knowledge based on improvements in the methods of production), applying a historical dialectic in which resistance against external encroachment and struggles against internal oppression become a process in which historical agency is generated. Marxist scholars treat the relationship between East and West as a historical relationship between colonizer and colonized, but focus their narrative not on the West but on capitalism as a distinct phase of a universal history. At the same time, they work to uncover the sprouts of capitalism within Chinese history.¹ Within the framework of class analysis, Marxists use the categories of autocracy and the small-scale peasant economy to interpret large-scale unified governance and internal colonialism, confirming the existence of elements of capitalism internal to Chinese society. Diverging from Marxist frameworks of transformation of modes of production and class analysis, John K. Fairbank’s “stimulus–response” model (and “hinterland–littoral” and other models), Max Weber’s analyses of Confucianism, and Joseph R. Levenson’s sketches from intellectual history on the conflict between history, values, sentiment, and rationality all tend to see China as a relatively self-contained civilization with distinct culture, values, and institutions. According to this line of argument, because of the lack of internal forces for capitalism, the process of modernization for Chinese civilization—no matter how exquisite or beautiful it might have been—began within a discourse that emerged from its confrontation with European civilization.² According to the logic of these “theories of civilizational difference” or “culturalism” that developed in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Western modernity and Chinese civilization stand in a certain kind of tension with and opposition to one another, and it is only by changing Chinese tradition that it will be possible to bring China into the modern world. These modes of analysis, then, can all be classified in terms of an opposition between tradition and modernity. For example, Fairbank’s discussion of the predicament faced by China in the late Qing makes a strong distinction between cultural nationalism and political nationalism. On the one hand, so-called cultural nationalism emerges from the political relations of a diverse empire, where the empire must appeal to a universal culture to serve as a basis for identity in a diverse society. On the other hand, so-called political nationalism is the product of the nation-state and capitalism. It demands that political national identity serve as a condition for the legitimacy of the nation-state; only the latter type of nationalism can form the basis for the modern sovereign state and its political culture (a culture of citizenship and a democratic system). These two historical narratives share some very obvious assumptions: traditional China (especially Qing-dynasty society) is seen as a Confucian, autocratic, agrarian society, marked by the prominence of the patriarchal clan system and the tribute system, unable to produce the political culture, social institutions, modes of production, and diplomatic/trade relations that drove the development of early modern capitalism. Modern China, therefore, was produced by the challenges presented by European capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, or modernity, and Chinese society was produced by responses to these stimuli. For both schools of thought, the Opium Wars symbolize China’s painful encounter with the challenge presented by Western civilization and serve as a milestone in the birth of Chinese modernity.

With the expansion of Europe and its political-economic system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the gentry, intellectuals, and political figures in China and other Asian countries launched self-strengthening movements modeled on the West while they continuously sought out sources of identity from within their own society. This transformation also gave rise to efforts to find modernity within China (or Asian societies). In the early twentieth century, for example, some intellectuals attempted to break down the East (China)/West binary to create a set of narratives about Chinese or Asian modernity that were independent from narratives of Western modernity. Eastern and Western Cultures and their Philosophies (Zhongxi wenhua ji qi zhexue) by Liang Shuming (1893–1928), which laid out a model for the evolution of Western, Chinese, and Indian societies, is one example of how European ideas of modernity (such as the concept of historical evolution) and the discourse on civilizational differences might be combined into a new narrative of world history.³ This trend was not unidirectional, however: amid the tides of national liberation, Western intellectuals who were deeply troubled by Eurocentrism and the history of European colonialism began to rethink their standards about history and worked to change Eurocentric narratives of “world history.” In this sense, the call to “discover history in China” is the product of a two-tiered process: on one level, it is a theme and direction continuously pushed forward by the process of Chinese intellectuals and historians from other Asian countries working to establish their own identity and agency. On another level, it is also the product of Western scholars’ (especially the Fairbank school’s) self-criticism. For these reasons, a book on the topic of “discovering history in China” won the sympathy and praise of a great many Chinese scholars as soon as it was translated into Chinese.⁴ In the field of historical studies, however, efforts to “discover history in China” had already taken on substantial force and complexity well before the self-criticisms of the Fairbank school emerged in the 1970s. From 1894 on, Japan defeated China’s navy and the forces of the eastward-expanding Czarist Russian Empire, beginning the expansion of its sphere of influence to continental East Asia and to Southeast Asia. As Japan fought with major Western powers for control of the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and continental East Asia, the creation of a new framework for world history and strategic perspective became an important direction in Japanese fields of knowledge. The Kyoto School, represented by outstanding historians such as Naitō Konan (1866–1934) and Miyazaki Ichisada (1901–1995), opened a unique field of research on the history of East Asia. They constructed a Sinocentric East Asian region as a historical universe that contained unique dynamics of and trajectories toward modernity. Naitō’s famous thesis about the “Tang-Song transformation” argued that the Tang and Song periods underwent massive changes that involved the collapse of the system of hereditary aristocracy. This turn of events marked the beginning of a new era for the history of China and East Asia.⁵ Working along the lines of this argument, a number of scholars have conducted detailed investigations and broad, synthetic analyses to discover a number of social and cultural characteristics of an “East Asian modern age”: the dissolution of the system of hereditary aristocracy and the formation of a folk culture (including the rural landlord system); the development of long-distance trade and the formation of an awareness of the existence of multiple nationalities, two developments with world-historical significance; a state structure buttressed by the power of the imperial throne, a well-developed bureaucratic system, and a new military system; the rise of urban economies and cultures; and the development of a secular Confucianism and “national ideology” that complemented the aforementioned developments.⁶ The Song dynasty is seen as a model Chinese dynasty, an early nation-state defined by a clear sense of national identity, a “more Chinese” (that is, more Confucian) China. These elements are used to create a framework that defines Song politics in terms of a state organized around a system of centralized administration (junxian zhidu) or an early nation-state that is markedly different than the Han- and Tang-dynasty imperial models (as well as the models of the Yuan and Qing). In the temporal framework of “antiquity–middle ages–early modern,” a narrative of a modern age in “East Asia” is thus established, centered on the Song dynasty in the tenth century, fourteenth-century Korea, and seventeenth-century Tokugawa Japan. The category of “East Asia,” characterized by Confucian culture and the early nation-state, is expansive enough to include China, the Korean peninsula, and other regions. According to this narrative, the “East Asian modern age” is independent from the historical phenomena of the early modern West and occurs parallel to, if not sooner than, the process of modernization in Europe. This hypothesis of an “East Asian modern age” is a product of competition with or resistance to Eurocentric “world history.” Even in new narratives of world history from contemporary times, we can still see derivative forms of this narrative: in narratives of Asian capitalism based on a framework of a tribute system with China at the center;⁷ in narratives of the capitalist world system that focus on fourteenth- to eighteenth-century China and its silver-based economy;⁸ and in notions of “Asia” that developed from a combination of the two preceding narratives. All three of these narratives may be seen as further developments of the “East Asian modern age” thesis.

At its core, the Kyoto School’s narrative of East Asian modernity was established within a framework that competed with Western modernity. For the express purpose of overturning and breaking up European frameworks of “world history,” the Kyoto School used an analysis of “nationalism” to argue that the tenth and eleventh centuries marked the beginning of early modernity in East Asia. Combining a strategic worldview with deep historical insight, these imperial historians created a “history of East Asia” within a new framework for world history. This attempt to overturn Western narratives of modernity, however, was simply an Asian version of those narratives because within this new narrative, the empire/nation-state binary established by nineteenth-century European political economy still occupies the position of “metahistory.” In scholarship produced by the Kyoto School, the concept of East Asia is not merely a geographical concept; it also includes a way of understanding social forms, political institutions, cultural identity, and relations between ethnic and national groups, as well as a method for placing this understanding into a temporal framework of antiquity–middle ages–early modern. This concept of East Asia, therefore, contained an experiment that attempted to perform parallel comparisons and differentiations by applying criteria of what constituted modernity against varying historical and geographical conditions—that is, an experiment to combine the categories of East Asia and modernity. These methodological issues are very clearly present in the writings of Naitō and Miyazaki. Whether in terms of criteria or chronology, their definition of “East Asia” is extremely similar to that of the concept of “the West” defined in histories of early modern Europe. In this respect, it is useful to compare their concept of East Asia with the formation of ideas about the early modern West. Harold J. Berman has analyzed the relationship between the concept of the West and modernity as follows:

As a historical culture, a civilization, the West is to be distinguished not only from the East but also from “pre-Western” cultures to which it “returned” in various periods of “renaissance.” … The West, from this perspective, is not Greece and Rome and Israel but the peoples of Western Europe turning to the Greek and Roman and Hebrew texts for inspiration, and transforming those texts in ways that would have astonished their authors. Nor, of course, is Islam part of the West, although there were strong Arabic influences on Western philosophy and science, especially in the period with which this study is concerned.⁹

In his discourse of the “Western legal tradition,” Berman links “the West” with “peoples of Western Europe”; these “peoples of Western Europe” refer to England, Hungary, Denmark, Sicily, and others in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (i.e., the High Middle Ages). Their conflict with the Roman Catholic Church resulted in new urban, secular legal systems grounded in the political rule of royal courts. During this period, countries faithful to the Eastern Orthodox Church such as Russia and Greece, as well as areas such as Muslim-controlled Spain, were largely excluded from “the West.” As a legal historian, Berman draws a close relation between “the West” and the “modern” by focusing on “the West,” the “nation,” and “secular power” and its legal system—in other words, by focusing on the same historical factors that are directly related to the modern nation-states that later developed:

Modern times—not only modern legal institutions and modern legal values but also the modern state, the modern church, modern philosophy, the modern university, modern literature, and much else that is modern—have their origin in the period 1050–1150 and not before.¹⁰

The Kyoto School uses a very similar framework to elaborate an “East Asian modern age”: in this narrative, modern political, legal, and cultural traditions emerge when a politically unified, multinational empire gives rise to an early modern state (a state with a mature system of centralized administration), early modern religion (secular Confucianism), early modern philosophy (Song-dynasty neo-Confucianism [lixue, “studies of moral principles” or moral philosophy]), an early modern educational system (the civil service examination system), and many other developments. All of these systematic transformations are then placed on an evolutionary timeline. In chronological terms, according to the Kyoto School narrative, these developments are almost completely parallel with early modern Europe.

The empire/nation-state narrative framework has also produced a variety of supplementary narratives, but none have shaken the basic structure and criteria of judgment in this framework. Marxist scholarship, American economic-social history, and contemporary cultural studies have all focused on topics such as the sprouts of capitalism in the late Ming and the economy and urban culture of the Jiangnan region, arguing from various perspectives that the seventeenth century was a key period in which early modernity in China came to a premature end. Differences between their individual positions can often be traced to varying understandings of European modernity or the origins of capitalism. Working much in the same vein as the Kyoto School’s discussions of the “capitalist” tendencies of Song-dynasty economy, politics, and culture, these narratives seek to uncover the forces of modernity held within Chinese history. Narratives of the “sprouts of capitalism” in the Ming and Qing dynasties contain an unspoken assumption: within Chinese society, there exists a path of capitalist development similar to that of Europe. The premature demise of this early modernity (early capitalism, an era of early maritime activity, early urban culture) can then be traced to the feudal nature of Chinese society, and especially to the external factors of the seventeenth-century Manchu invasion and subsequent establishment of the Qing dynasty. Even so, it has been argued that elements of these “sprouts of capitalism” in the economic domain and “enlightenment thought” (qimeng sixiang) in the cultural domain were not completely eliminated, but remained latent within China under Qing imperial rule and responded to external challenges ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Translator’s Introduction
• China from Empire to Nation-State
• 1. Two Narratives of China and Their Derivative Forms
• 2. The Empire/Nation-State Binary and European “World History”
• 3. Heavenly Principle/Universal Principle and History
• 4. China’s Modern Identity and the Transformation of Empire
• Notes
• Index