Secret sharers: Chinese nationalism and the non-western world at the turn of the twentieth century

This dissertation examines late-Qing Chinese intellectual history from a global perspective. It argues that after 1895, what had historically been an assumption by Chinese elites of China as the 'middle kingdom' was thoroughly destabilized. The marginalization of the 'middle kingdom' to the 'far east' (relative to Europe) provided one context for Chinese intellectuals' intitial discovery of the modern world and for their recognition of the complexity of China's situatedness within that world. Yet, only when they became aware that China was but one of many objects of Western ambitions were they forced to acknowledge China's movement from a lone center of the world into a crowded periphery inhabited by precisely those who had once been the objects of their disdain. This crowded periphery, seen from turn-of-the-century Chinese perspective, stands at the center of this project.; I argue that the discovery of global structure and of a secretly shared global space of the "non-West" served both to constrain and open out conceptualizations and solutions to China's internal problems, which came to be articulated in languages of nationalism and modernity. Chapter One examines the formation of a global consciousness at the end of the Qing; Chapter Two takes up the modern transformation in Chinese discourse of "lost countries" (wangguo), specifically analyzing the role of Poland and India. Chapters Three and Four examine the impact of the Hawaiian and Cuban independence movements in 1898 on how Chinese intellectuals and revolutionaries conceived of global space and their own programs of action. Chapters Five and Six discuss the connections between the Philippine revolution of 1899-1901 and the birth of the Chinese revolutionary nationalist discourse; Chapters Seven and Eight explore the reverberations of the Boer War (1899-1902) in Chinese conceptualizations of the relationship between modernity and civilization. Chapter Nine takes up the dissemination of these ideas via textbooks; and Chapter Ten presents an annotated translation of a 1904 Peking Opera that artfully brings the above issues together.