Rebecca E. Karl is Associate Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China and Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History and co-translator (with Xueping Zhong) of Cai Xiang’s Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949-1966, all also published by Duke University Press. She co-translated and coedited (with Lydia H. Liu and Dorothy Ko) The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory.

Staging the World-CL

By Rebecca E. Karl

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2002 Rebecca E. Karl
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822328520

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION: SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES ON MODERN CHINESE NATIONALISM

Politics is primarily conflict over the existence of a common stage and over the existence and status of those present on it. It must first be established that the stage exists for the use of an interlocutor who can’t see it and who can’t see it for good reason because it doesn’t exist.

This book traces the process through which certain central concepts that came to constitute a discourse of nationalism were produced in China. It concentrates on the late Qing period (1895-1911), when these concepts and indeed the formation of nationalist discourses and understandings were first systematically and systemically explicated and debated. In broadest terms, the study figures the period as a progressively narrowing process of conceptual incorporations, through which a set of unstable historicized formulations that came to define nationalism as an intellectual orientation in the Chinese context was temporarily stabilized. This process is traced from an initially expansive global or internationalist moment of identification (1895-1905) through a gradual reduction to a conceptualization of racial-ethnic revolution in pursuit of state power (1905-1911). The results of this conceptual narrowing helped inform the basic ideological premises for the overthrow of the dynastic system in general-the Qing dynasty in particular-and the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1911.

Specifically, the book’s inquiry focuses on how-during this crucial period of intellectual, social, economic, and political crisis in China and the world-China’s situation at the turn of the twentieth century was conceptually linked to the world around it, and particularly to emergent nationalist and anticolonial movements in the non-Euro-American world of the time. While noting that the specific linkages were ultimately ephemeral, the main premise of the book is that it was a growing Chinese sense of identification with the non-Euro-American world at the turn of the century that initially made the modern world visible as a structured totality. I argue that it was by reference to the conceptual production of this totality, seen as dominantly marked by the ongoing creation of global unevenness in economy, politics, culture, representation, and power, that the basic ideological components of nationalist discourse were incipiently worked out in China. The study analyzes, in an overlapping (rather than linear narrative) structure, the three arenas of concept-formation most evident and most debated in the publicly available journalistic, editorial, and historical literature at the time: newly articulated relationships between global and national space, between revolutionary process and imperialist/nationalist ideology, and between ethnicity, citizenship, and nationality.

The inquiry, rather than concentrating on the turn-of-the-century world “stage” from an accustomed focus on Euro-American-Japanese philosophical and institutional influences on China, shifts perspectives to focus on another, albeit intimately linked, world “stage”: that stage unstably comprised by the first post-Latin American wave of anticolonial and nationalist revolutions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To be sure, the unity of this latter stage-or its very presence-was no more and no less imaginary (that is, no more or less “real” or “unreal”) than the tendentially totalizing one of the Euro-American imagination. Indeed, the inherent impossibility of both stages-the “Western” just as the “non-Western”-is well encapsulated in the citation taken from Jacques Ranciere noted at the top of this chapter: “Politics is primarily conflict over the existence of a common stage and over the existence and status of those present on it. It must first be established that the stage exists for the use of an interlocutor who can’t see it and who can’t see it for good reason because it doesn’t exist.” Taking the “stage” as a global historical and political conceit, then, this study highlights the formation of Chinese discourses of nationalism in relation to the non-Euro-American world. Such a defamiliarizing approach and historical problematization not only complicates the more usual West(Japan)/China confrontation that forms the implicit or explicit paradigm around which inquiries on modern Chinese history are usually organized, but it also allows us to see modernity-of which nationalism is a central (albeit far from exhaustive) expression-as a global material and representational structure, whose tendential unities are underpinned by the expansion of capitalism in its imperialist forms.

No doubt, this view of modernity, as tendential unity held together by a capitalism purportedly emanating from a central point, could confirm a familiar normative picture of the modern world in a staged diachronic temporal hierarchy of difference and spatial distance from the putative center of Euro-America (that centered unity usually called “the West”). In other words, it could yield that very diachronic “staging” of modernity that forms a core content of Euro-American-centered ideologies of modernization, which normatively represent History as universal, teleological, and as hegemonically foreclosed by Euro-American trajectories. However, my focus on the historical formation of a non-Euro-American consciousness of globality from the Chinese perspective is intended to bring into view a recognition of modernity that leads to a different staging of the world-that is, a staging that makes visible a world of synchronic temporality emphasizing historical identification and spatial proximity. In China’s case, this latter staging of the world was expressed as an immanence of global transformation: an immanence recognized and performed in and through the non-Euro-American world. Uncovering the modalities through which this immanent synchronicity-with both its possibilities and constraints -was produced and incorporated into Chinese intellectual practice at the turn of the twentieth century is the primary topic and intellectual strategy of this study.

On this view, the formation of Chinese nationalism-understood here primarily as a historically specific process of concept-formation and intellectual reorientation-can only appear as part of a global historical problematic, where “historical problematic” is understood as a theoretical entity, which, in Fredric Jameson’s words, “must be grasped in a different way from the traditional representational or philosophical one.” In conceptualizing the problem in this manner, this book represents an attempt to think through early-twentieth-century nationalism generally and Chinese nationalism particularly by linking them-as historical problematics and as material historicities-to a properly productive global moment. As such, if we take seriously, as historian Zheng Zengqun has noted, that “when the world entered China, China entered the world,” then one crucial step toward understanding the full contours of the historical crisis precipitated by the irruption and incorporation of the world into Chinese consciousness by the late Qing period, is to recognize the truly global nature of the world that “entered,” by centrally including within it-as did Chinese intellectuals at the time-non-Euro-American-Japanese histories and concerns. Such a recognition not only allows a theoretical break from the narrow confines of historiographical emphasis on the West-Japan/China dyad that dominates narratives of China’s “struggle with modernity,” but it allows us to figure the late Qing Chinese “struggle” as one not with (or against) but completely of modernity.

The analysis hence engages two intimately linked realms of inquiry: a historical and a theoretical one. Historically, it foregrounds repressed aspects of the early-twentieth-century development of Chinese nationalism by reading texts written from 1895 to 1911 within the context of global modernity, as the latter was produced, illumined, and recognized through the most visible spaces of unevenness in the modern world: its imperialized and colonialized places. Theoretically, the book proposes that this historical focus becomes available only when modern Chinese experiences and recognitions of modernity and nationalism are neither assimilated into dominating Euro-American perspectives nor rooted in reified local-place identifications and/or in notions of continuous traditional, dynastic, or statist-defined bounded national space. Such a focus is thus also available only when statism and nationalism, as historical topoi and processes, are separated.

As such, the book also takes up several well-entrenched historiographical paradigms in the China field as well as in current theorizations of nationalism. These include recent critiques of nation that conflate nationalism with nation-statism (state-building) by establishing an axiomatic functional narrative relationship between the two; state-centered approaches to Chinese nationalism, which lead to a fundamental neglect of the broader sources and inspirations for Chinese nationalist imaginings and conceptual formation; and the concept of a global structure whose encompassing totality is assumed to be exhausted by a “West” (plus Japan)/ China dyad that purports to define “the world.” The remainder of this introduction establishes the theoretical points and historical background through which the particular topics taken up in detail in the ensuing chapters have been rethought.

Recognizing a Historical Problematic: The World and China

Ernst Gellner long ago observed that “it is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way around.” While the simple causality suggested in this observation cannot be taken at face value, Gellner’s point is nevertheless a useful reminder that any analysis of the coming into being of the “nation” (understood by Gellner as the nation-state) must be rooted in the emergence of nationalism as a historical problematic. In exploring the posing of the historical problematic of nationalism in China at the turn of the twentieth century, this study posits that the particular nationalism of China must be seen as part of the general global problematic in which it was embedded, lest the inquiry become trapped in a rhetoric of exclusivity and pure authenticity or become merely a catalog of the reactive replication in China of globally existing institutional forms and ideologies. This is precisely how Chinese intellectuals viewed the problem, beginning from the traumatic Chinese defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 up through the Republican revolution of 1911. For it was during this crucial extended historical moment that nationalism as a historical topos, systematic discursive formation, and systemic intellectual practice emerged as a way to reconceptualize internal and global relationships; it was also during this period that the emerging concepts that were to comprise nationalism in the Chinese context were in most urgent and debated flux.

By the same token, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities suggests that the establishment of a sense of temporal simultaneity was integral to the formation of an imagined community of the nation. The seemingly accidental nature of this temporal apprehension leads Anderson to posit that nationalism became a function of this temporal order; nationalism, or what really amounts to nation-statism in Anderson’s narrative, then congealed this temporality into state form, a form that, once invented, became available for adoption by disparate peoples around the globe in modern times. Partha Chatterjee, in his exploration into the cultural dimensions of nationalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India, has contested this modular model of political-territorial nationalism by re-injecting a “native” imaginary into the historical process. As Chatterjee states, “The most powerful and the most creative results of the nationalist imaginations in Asia and Africa are posited not on an identity but rather on a difference with the ‘modular’ forms of the national society propagated by the modern West.”

Chatterjee’s rejection of nationalism as purely state form is helpful. However, his binary of identity and difference establishes a false historical dichotomy between what is “external” and what is “internal,” because of his designation of “native” imaginings as emanating from some culturally defined notion of authentic experience (pure internality). To avoid both traps-that is, the reduction of nationalism to temporal statism (or state-form) and the positing of a historical culturalist internality-I wish to repose both Anderson’s accidental temporal proposition and Chatterjee’s culturalist challenge to ask: what happens when the purportedly coincidental temporal nature of “events” comes to be spatially understood? That is, what happens when historical-spatial logic comes to explain the seemingly arbitrary temporal unity and coincidence of disparate events? And, what happens when those events, that temporality, and that spatiality are understood not merely as statist or culturalist but as global historical issues? Once these questions are asked the space of “national” imagining can no longer be confined to an a priori state-defined space, and the emergence of a national imaginary can no longer be understood as a process necessarily bounded by the overlap among a unique language, culture, state, or territory, or yet by a purely internalist logic. Indeed, the imaginary process must be opened up in a number of different and perhaps even contradictory directions.

This study is most concerned with the simultaneous growth of nationalism and a global historical logic in China, through which the seemingly arbitrary co-temporality of events around the world and in China came to be seen as held together by their shared contemporary historical relationship in and to global modernity. Yet, in much of the secondary literature, the problem of Chinese nationalism is discussed either in terms of a confrontation with and selective absorption of Western (and Japanese) philosophical knowledges and political forms into programs for transforming China-that is, as a functional mobilization of set doctrines; or in terms of a confrontation and grappling with China’s past traditions and legacies-that is, as a continuation or rejection of past forms and knowledges. Both conceptualizations are partial at best.

On the relationship of past to present, there can be no doubt that China’s past, or rather the reinterpretations of that past in light of China’s new crises, was of fundamental significance to the ways in which the contemporary moment was viewed. By the same token, it seems unreasonable to assume that Chinese were any more imprisoned by their past than any other people might be. In this light, the historiographical argument over continuity and discontinuity is a red herring. On the relationship of Euro-America-Japan to China, undeniably, there was an urgency produced by the demonstrably great power of Euro-America-Japan in China, an urgency, as many scholars have noted, that grew after the 1895 Sino-Japanese War into a persistent tendency among many Chinese to unfavorably compare China’s contemporary situation with the national unifications and historical trajectories of the world’s powers. These latter intellectual and political urgencies are without a doubt the most obviously visible part of the historical record, a visibility that, in large part, derives from the immediate presence in China of Euro-Americans and Japanese, and from their direct roles through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century as violent invaders, instructors, advisers, administrators, builders of modern factories, hospitals, schools, and so on. The visibility of Euro-America-Japan is both symptom and consequence of the ongoing restructuring of the late-nineteenth-century world by capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, wherein the realities of global power and what appears as a “natural” historical diachrony all lend an unquestioned truth-value to the historiographical centrality accorded to them in the modern history of China. In short, as tangible bearers of modernization in and perpetrators of violence against China, the insistent presence of Euro-America-Japan is hard, and indeed unnecessary, to contest.

Continues…
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