China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Peter Zarrow, University of New South Wales
Chair: Chris Gilmartin, Northeastern University
Discussant: Benjamin Elman, University of California, Los Angeles
The centenary of the reform movement of 1898 (wuxu bianfa) offers an opportunity to reassess its significance. The political firestorm of the summer of 1898 is generally seen as a failure resulting in the Empress Dowager’s coup d’etat. It is also seen as China’s last opportunity to avoid revolution amid the tumultuous domestic and foreign pressures of the late nineteenth century. The purpose of these back-to-back panels, however, is to offer broader perspectives on the movement as a whole, examining its context and background (Part I) and its impact and significance (Part II). The movement promoted institutional and social change, and had profound consequences in the realms of the political, intellectual, and social.
The 1898 reforms have not been subject to scholarly reevaluation in some time. We propose in these two panels to apply new approaches such as cultural studies, postcolonial discourse, and gender theory, as well as to utilize newly available information. Although the nineteenth century has fallen out of historical fashion in American Sinology, the "Hundred Days" of 1898 remains a pivotal moment in the development of modern China. The actual effects of the reform movement, rather than its failures, deserve a closer look at the 100-year mark.
The panels will present the work of scholars from a wide variety of backgrounds. In Part I (context) panelists focus on the some of the movement’s leading players and inner tensions. In Part II (significance) panelists focus on how some of these tensions were played out in subsequent developments. Collectively, we synthesize intellectual, political, and cultural approaches hitherto kept distinct.
Rebecca E. Karl, New York University
By the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century in China, it was a commonplace to encounter in journals frequent reference to the potential or actual ‘enslavement’ of China to the world. Most commonly, the ‘slave’ trope was conjoined to the wangguo or ‘lost country’ trope to produce the locution wangguo nu, or ‘slave of a lost country.’ This phrase, in turn, referred to those who had either perished utterly under the weight of foreign colonialism and imperialism, or as a threat of immanent demise for those who did not act immediately against their situation.
At the same time as the global ‘slave’ trope was gaining widespread usage, the ‘slave’ figure also burst on the journalistic and intellectual scene with the emergence of the late-Qing discourse on women: women were seen and spoken of—by both female and male writers—as ‘slaves’ of the Confucian social system. They came to be seen as either targets and/or agents of individual and, more often, national-cultural liberation. Women’s ‘enslavement’ was thus also often used as both liberatory promise and dire threat of national and social demise.
Many scholars of late-Qing China have noted the convergence at the turn of the century of discourses of nationalism and of gender as an internal Chinese issue of Confucian social structure. This paper intends to re-examine the issue of the convergence of gender and nationalism in turn of the century China by viewing it in a conjunctural global perspective of apparently different discourses. By reading the global ‘slave’ and domestic ‘women’ tropes together, the paper will find a discursive and political space in which to explore the connections between the emergence of non-Western discourses of nation, and the gendering of these discourses within the local as well as the global sphere.
Hsi-yuan Chen, Harvard University
The conceptualization of "religion" lay at the heart of controversies surrounding Confucianism and the nation in the 1890s. Despite numerous academic and political differences, Kang Youwei and his contemporaries shared a concern in defending Confucianism. Yet Confucianism was considered a "teaching" (jiao) by common consensus among literati. Other cultural traditions such as Buddhism, Daoism, and even unorthodox local cults were treated as jiao, though Confucianism was understood as the archetypical jiao. Conservative scholars attacked Kang for his "religious" interpretation of Confucianism and trying to infuse it with "Western teachings," though of course they did so in the name of supporting Confucianism themselves.
A turning point was reached in 1898, however, as henceforth a modern Chinese equivalent to the Western concept of "religion" (zongjiao) was gradually substituted for "teaching." With Christianity as the paradigm for this new concept, Kang on the one hand sought to make Confucianism the "national religion" while on the other hand many intellectuals, reflecting a bias against Christianity, opposed all religions as superstition. They held that their mission of enlightening the people entailed emancipating them from all forms of religion, including in many cases Confucianism.