Competing Images of Nation: Ethnicity, Territory, and Knowledge

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

The frontiers helped construct empires as well as nations. In the early 20th century, tremendous political changes manifest across Qing China’s ethnic frontiers. With the imperial government’s demise, these regions were subjects to re-territorialization and re-identification, either within the framework of the nascent Republic Chinese nation or beyond. Intellectuals and gentry created diverse frontier knowledge to fulfill their visions of “nation.” This panel aims to examine their frontier conceptualisations and their role in the state and nation by asking: How did these people (Chinese and non-Chinese, locally or in the center) envisage the nature of “nation” through the prism of frontier? What were the sources of their imagination and how did they incorporate indigenous and foreign concepts? How can we understand their arguments in light of their personal, cultural, and political backgrounds?
This panel presents three case studies. The first concerns the Sino-Korean borderland, a disputed territory among China, Korea, and Japan. Nianshen Song introduces how, from 1907-1910, the region was projected by the leading intellectuals of the three countries as an integrated part of their respective “nations.” The second focuses on the Kham region of ethnographic Tibet. Scott Relyea explores the intellectual and political origins of contested visions of Kham between Sichuanese and central government officials from 1910 to 1914. The third shifts to debates among Chinese scholars in two academic disciplines – ethnology and ethnographic sociology. Liping Wang explains how they created different interpretations of ethnicity, thus producing contending models of national imagination during the Republic era.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Nianshen Song, Vassar College

Individual Presentations

• Three Visions of the Manchurian Borderland: Comparing Political Geographies of Naitō Konan, Song Jiaoren, and Sin Ch’aeho - Nianshen Song, Vassar College

• Whose Borderland? Sichuan’s Kham or China’s Kham, 1910-1914 - Scott Relyea, Hamline University

• Disunifying the Nation: Modern Disciplines and Knowledge Transplantation in China, 1912-1949 - Liping Wang, University of Hong Kong

Discussant

• Dan Shao, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign