Historical Traumas, Revolution Participation, and State-building

• In Event: The Legacies of Historical Violence

Abstract

Social conflicts have deep historical roots. The Manchu's conquest of China in the mid-17th century brought massive traumas to the Han Chinese, the major ethnic group in East Asia. Using machine learning to analyze 0.3 million newspaper article titles, I study the impact of the propaganda of historical traumas on revolution participation from 1900 to 1906. Revolutionary propagandists adopted the history of the Manchu government's repressions and Han people's resistance 250 years ago to arouse the anti-Manchu nationalism sentiment. Prefectures with historical traumas responded to the anti-Manchu propaganda more actively and contributed to more revolutionaries. After the revolution, holding the nationalism ideology, revolutionaries strove to establish a modern nation-state by organizing the Kuomintang party, army, and government. These results suggest that the propaganda utilizing historical traumas reshaped political identity and played a crucial role in China's modern state-building.

Author

• Peiyuan Li, University of Colorado Boulder