History And Imagination:the Construction Of Chinese National Identities In Late Qing Dynasty

The dissertation attempts to describe thickly the discursive construction of Chinese national identities in late Qing Dynasty based on the modernist constructionist theory of nation. It can enter into more comprehensive historical sociological research by virtue of a wide range of materials, such as anthologies, diaries, and letters, than some intellectual historical studies which target on the original thoughts of a few Chinese intellectuals. The author demonstrates, by analyzing some famous patriotic cases, that the national consciousness could not emerge in the context of dynasties, and then deconstructs the so-called primordial theory of Chinese nation, relating the conceptions of Yi-Xia and Tianxia to that of universal culture. Therefore the national identity is placed in the context of interactions of Sino-West and taken as the product of some cultural --- rather than political --- traumas, which reflects the dialectic interplay of history and imagination, reconstruction and construction. Chinese scholar-gentry did not construct the West powers as cultural entities corresponding to Zhonghua until the Sino-Japanese War in 1894 which made cultural trauma perceived deeply and generally. It was in the process of embracing modernity against Chinese traditions that the latter were construct as such, that the dichotomy between dark time and light time came into being, and that national shames were extended to personal ones. National identities were looming.The dissertation asserts that persons see the nation primarily from four dimensions, i.e., time, place, people and culture. The distinct Chinese national identities are delineated and characterized with the help of interpreting discursive presentations of the "We-they" boundaries from late Qing to early Republic of China. The consciousness of state rose first out of multiple identities of Tianxia, dynasty and locality, but it was still caught in the territorial, racial and cultural conceptions of state and social Darwinist system of the world, which transformed influentially the focus and direction of the national identities. Powerful state was regarded as the chief arms protecting us from the jungle world. Chinese identified with the strongest and submitted to the rule of the world (the West, the Modernity) so wholeheartedly that time and history was remade and revalued. The sense of historical discontinuity and disorientation brought by the future orientation was prone to lead to the transitions from some forms of utopias to youth radicalisms, from historic relativizing to nihilizing. The nation was constructed not only as nation-state, which paralleled to the emergence of consciousness of state, but also as nation-society, which mirrored the rising of societal conscience. Yet the scholar-gentry imagined that the people were falling apart and had inferior morality, which projected their low collective self-esteem and high self-hatred. The people was seen primarily rather as a consanguineous race than as individual subjects, the latter was manipulated by and subordinated to the bio-politics of the state. The universalist, holist notions of culture were open to the shift from the idea of Chinese-body-and-Chinese-function to the one of Western-body-and-Western-function in the other extreme expanding rapidly after the defeat of 1894, degrading the Central Kingdom from a civilized celestial empire to a barbarian tribe. The doctrine of Chinese-body-and-Western-function was designed to react to it so that China could resist the cultural hegemony of the West and maintain its distinctive national identity. But as the part of Chinese-body was blurred and became empty, the part of Western-function was left without essence. Summarily, Chinese nation was imagined as a racial-blood gigantic community with a historically evolving territory, which rendered the common lineage and historical memory of old empire’s territory the only ties of national integration. The nation secularized and instrumentalized by the state would not inspire profound national passions and thus are less integrative.