Nationalism on Lease: Recasting Borrowed Aesthetics in Modern China

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  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Comparative-Historical Roundtable 5

Abstract

How do borrowed cultural forms become catalysts for national projects? This paper examines how Western and Japanese artistic techniques, particularly oil painting and academic realism, were transformed into driving forces of modern Chinese nationalism across two dramatically different political regimes, the Republican period, 1910s to 1940s, and the early People’s Republic of China, 1949 to 1976. Rather than treating national culture as rooted in indigenous tradition, the paper argues that borrowed aesthetic ideas were institutionalized and mobilized as engines of nationalist transformation. Through processes of institutional embedding, discursive reframing, and pedagogical standardization, foreign artistic practices were converted into tools that actively shaped how the nation was imagined, disciplined, and politically organized. By comparing the Republican and socialist eras, the paper shows both path dependency in artistic infrastructure and significant epistemic shifts in how realism was understood and mobilized. The analysis contributes to sociological debates on nationalism by demonstrating how states and cultural institutions transform borrowed cultural ideas into catalytic forces of national identity formation.

Author

• Zian He, University of California-San Diego