The Field of the State in Chinese History - Sponsored by the AAS China Inner Asia Council (CIAC)

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract

Following the rejection of simple state/society binaries, scholars of China’s late imperial and modern history have made great strides in depicting the functions of the state at various levels. Institutional studies and works on central court affairs or high party politics have been joined by recent scholarship on the everyday interactions of subjects and bureaucrats with the state and the complicated ways in which state power was negotiated at every level of the Chinese polity. This has led to a more complex vision of what the state is and does. The major achievement of this work has been to overturn the simplistic and sometimes Orientalist portrayals of the Chinese state that still command some attention outside of the field. But today the field faces a new dilemma: with such diligent attention paid to detail at each level, how can scholars build a larger and more synthetic portrayal of the evolution of the state and its structures? This roundtable gathers historians whose work spans the Ming to the twentieth century. Participants will explore what the “field” of the state means in Chinese history today. We will review previous, recent, and future directions for scholarship on how the study of large-scale state structures may be productively placed in conversation with work on everyday and local life in Chinese history. We will also explore how recent studies of the Chinese state at the local level can be related to work on early modern Eurasian states, and on the legacies of the imperial for the modern Chinese state. Dykstra will speak on the growth of the local state over the late imperial and modern period and its impact on the overall dimensions of state institutions; Szonyi on how late imperial subjects negotiated within state institutions; Wong on shifts in the framing character of state institutions and their repercussions for defining the relationship between state actors and subjects from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, and Nedostup on the relationship of local and transnational non-state actors to modern state capacity and sovereignty.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Michael Szonyi, Harvard University

Discussants

• Maura Dykstra, California Institute of Technology

• Rebecca Nedostup, Brown University

• Michael Szonyi, Harvard University

• Bin Wong, University of California, Los Angeles