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"Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism" by Shadi Bartsch explores the thriving study of Greek classics in China and the reasons behind it. Bartsch argues that the belief that the West is shaped by its classical antiquity, similar to how China is shaped by its own, has guided Chinese engagement with the West. The book examines the reception of Western classical antiquity in China, from Jesuit missionaries to modern conservative thinkers, and how it has influenced Chinese intellectual history. Bartsch also discusses the appropriation of ancient texts to challenge the legitimacy of liberal democracy and construct alternative visions of modernity in the context of rising nationalism. The book provides important insights into contemporary Chinese thought and offers a broader framework for analysis and critique. [Extracted from the article]

The rise of nationalism in China in recent decades has grown in part out of a state-sponsored patriotic education project centered on the production of narratives involving the century-long history of China's subjection to foreign imperialism. In the northeast, the regional history of Russian and Japanese colonialism during the first half of the twentieth century has provided abundant materials for this collective commemoration of China's anti-imperialist struggles. A network of commemorative projects undertaken at local, regional, and national levels of the PRC state since the 1980s, including oral histories, monuments, museums, gazetteers, and party histories, has reframed the history of the northeast borderland in terms that legitimize post-Mao nationalist and market reform ideology. This study brings attention to another dimension of these commemorative projects, the translation and republication of Chinese and Japanese historical accounts originally produced in northern Manchuria during the 1920s and 1930s. I argue that the diverse representations of the borderland's history that are included in these accounts, while originally embedded in the colonial institutional contexts of Manchuria, acquired new significance in post-Mao reimaginings of the region's place in defining nationalism and negotiating Sino-Russian relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over a hundred thousand US servicemen were stationed in post–World War II China, resulting in the largest grassroots interactions in Sino-US history. Reexamining this unprecedented encounter in the context of American global military empire, this article investigates the sociocultural tensions caused by GIs' sexual relations with Chinese women between 1945 and 1949. While conservatives maligned "Jeep girls" out of racial and sexual anxieties, liberals and self-identified Jeep girls invoked the language of modernity and patriotism. However, in the wake of the Peking Rape incident in 1946, the once diverse debate quickly ended as nationwide protests raged against American imperialism. In contrast with previous studies highlighting how Communist propaganda led to new anti-American sentiments, this research, by uncovering the complexities of Chinese women's experiences and their stories—which have been muffled or filtered through patriarchal agendas—foregrounds the key role of gendered nationalism in Sino-US relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This address was intended to be and remains about global circulatory processes and the ways that human societies have sought to deploy, control, or regulate these processes. In this essay, I principally consider how nationalist ideologies regulate global circulatory processes. The parallel with the current COVID-19 crisis is evident, and my remarks do suggest some similarities. Although COVID-19 is not the topic I engage here, my theme alerts us to thinking methodologically about largely invisible or inconspicuous modes of circulation and their consequences, less dire but deeply transformative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many historians of China, particularly those based in North America, insist that the Qing dynasty's territorial expansion was imperial and comparable to the imperial expansions of other global empires. Other historians, particularly but not only those based in the People's Republic of China, continue to resist this interpretation. They argue that dynastic expansion in the Ming and Qing periods was simply a form of nation-state building, akin to similar processes in Europe. Rather than rejecting their claims as a product of Chinese nationalism, we argue that the term "empire" should be (re)understood as a global co-production, emerging from multiple intersecting histories and scholarly debates about those histories. Doing so challenges influential definitions of empire that rely on a distinction between empires and nation-states, highlighting their dual presence in both Euro-American and Chinese pasts (and presents). This move demands a rejection of periodizations that suggest that empires ceased to exist following the period of decolonization from 1945 to the 1970s. This opens up new avenues of historical and normative inquiry to acknowledge the modern continuity between empires and nation-states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on archival sources in Britain, Singapore, Malaysia, and the United States, this article explores late-colonial anxieties about the influence of Chinese nationalism in Malaya (and especially among students in Chinese-medium schools) in the lead up to self-government in 1957. It demonstrates that the colonial fear of communism in Malaya was not always synonymous with the fear of cultural influence from "new China" and that the "rise of China" in the mid-1950s was viewed as a challenge to colonially sanctioned programs for "Malayanization." More importantly, in exploring some of the ways in which the colonial state mobilized anti-communist cultural workers from Hong Kong to help counter the perceived threat from China, the article argues that more focus should be placed on the role of colonial agency in shaping "Sinophone" cultural expression in Southeast Asia during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps the first thing to note about a forum on the subject of 1919 in Asia is how awkwardly the spatial frame of "Asia" maps onto the international history of that moment. To be sure, the postwar international conjuncture, which I have elsewhere called the "Wilsonian Moment," had a revolutionary impact across Asia, perhaps more so than in any other world region outside of Europe. As the three preceding essays in this forum note, that year was a waypoint, and sometimes a launching pad, for a rush of novel or renewed revolutionary discourses, connections, and mobilizations in China, India, and Korea, as it was in other parts of Asia and of the world. These were all propelled by the accumulated material and ideological transformations of the years of war, transformation that imbued the moment with revolutionary potential and gave contemporaries a sense that the international order, its power structures and its norms of legitimacy, were uniquely malleable, amenable to concerted action. Indeed, 1919 was a moment in which the very idea of "Asia"—its spaces, the identities they attached to, and the solidarities that ran across and beyond it—was reimagined in ways that at once stitched it together and rent it apart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On China's web, networked actors ranging from state agencies to private Internet users engage in highly active online discourse. Yet as diverse as this discourse may be, political content remains highly regulated, particularly on issues that affect the legitimacy of the ruling party. A prominent issue in this regard has been modern Chinese history, particularly the “national humiliation” that Japan inflicted on China's populace during events like the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. This article asks how the discourse on this particular event is structured on China's web, and what such practices of digital “remembering” can tell us about nationalism in the information age. Combining content analysis and digital tools, the article shows how the mass-media model that the Chinese authorities and various commercial actors apply to the web ultimately reproduces the very logic of “imagined communities” that makes reconciliation of historical disputes in East Asia so protracted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1993, in response to the international Human Genome Project pioneered by the United States, the Chinese government began to sponsor national projects in conjunction with the international effort. The result of this scientific endeavor confirmed international geneticists’ conclusions regarding a very recent “African origin” of all modern humans, or Homo sapiens. This scientific development confronted the longstanding nationalist belief that the “Chinese” had lived in “China” as an independent human group since Homo erectus, represented by the 700,000-year-old Peking Man. By examining the still pervasive political uses of a presumed prehistoric ancestor of the people as well as the controversy sparked by the scientific challenge that has provoked public discussions, this article identifies a potent racial discourse in contemporary Chinese nationalism and connects it to a broader international context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article employs the history of Confucianism in modern Japan to critique current scholarship on the resurgence of Confucianism in contemporary China. It argues that current scholarship employs modernist formulations of Confucianism that originated in Japan's twentieth-century confrontation with Republican China, without understanding the inherent nationalist applications of these formulations. Current scholarly approaches to Confucianism trace a history through Japanese-influenced U.S. scholars of the mid-twentieth century like Robert Bellah to Japanese imperialist and Chinese Republican nationalist scholarship of the early twentieth century. This scholarship employed new individualistic and modernist visions of religion and philosophy to isolate fields of “Confucian values” or “Confucian philosophy” apart from the realities of social practice and tradition, transforming Confucianism into a purely intellectualized “empty box” ripe to be filled with cultural nationalist content. This article contends that current scholarship, by continuing this modernist approach, may unwittingly facilitate similar nationalist exploitations of Confucianism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to spark a conversation about shifting conceptualizations of disaster under modernizing states. It employs case studies of two major disasters, the North China Famine of 1876–79 and the Yellow River flood of 1938–47, to map changes and continuities in Chinese responses to disaster. State approaches to the late-Qing famine both drew on a millennium of Chinese thinking about disaster causation and anticipated new issues that would become increasingly important in twentieth-century China. The catastrophic Yellow River flood occurred when China's Nationalist government deliberately breached a major dike in a desperate attempt to “use water instead of soldiers” to slow the brutal Japanese invasion. The Nationalist state's technologization of disaster, its rejection of cosmological interpretations of calamity, and its depiction of flood victims as heroes sacrificing for the nation mark departures from late-imperial responses to disaster, but foreshadow features of the devastating Mao-era Great Leap Famine of 1958–62. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The expeditions of foreign explorers and archaeologists along China's borderlands during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have long been a lightning rod for debates over cultural sovereignty, imperialism, and nationalism. This study attempts to move beyond such cultural and moral glosses by placing the expeditions of Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin to the northwestern province of Xinjiang back into the domestic geopolitical context of the Nanjing Decade (1927–37). Newly available archival material demonstrates how the discourse of cultural sovereignty, far from sabotaging such expeditions, instead became the handmaiden of domestic geopolitical competitors who attempted to turn Stein and Hedin into exploitable resources for their own agendas. The logistical pragmatism revealed in these sources relegates principled nationalist intellectuals and their imperialist targets to the background, and shows how a new approach to a familiar topic can help paint a fuller portrait of some of the most contested episodes of transnational cultural interactions throughout Eurasia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The nationalist struggle to bring about the end of colonial rule in India, and the Republican and communist struggles to arrest and reverse the humiliation and the “carve-up” of China by foreign powers, were both closely allied to the struggle to become modern. Indeed, the two goals were usually seen to be so closely related as to be indistinguishable: a people had to start becoming modern if they were ever to be free of foreign domination, and they had to gain sovereignty and state power in order to undertake the laborious but necessary task of building a strong, prosperous, and modern nation. Thus in India, as in China, political movements from the latter nineteenth century sought to found a sovereign nation free from domination by a Western power or powers, and also sought to make this putative nation and its people “modern,” both as a necessary means towards the nationalist end and as an end in itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 2003, the dispute over the history of the ancient kingdom of Koguryŏ (37 bce, trad.-668 ce), located in Manchuria and northern Korea, has been one of the hottest issues between China and Korea. The debate seems to have fueled a new nationalistic or Sinocentric historiography of the ancient Chinese northeast. A ninth century BCE poem called “Hanyi” in the Classic of Poetry [Shijing] has been the cause of a far older history dispute. Whereas Chinese scholars have generally understood Han as a Zhou feudal state ruled by a Ji-surnamed scion of the Zhou Dynasty (1045–256 bce), most Korean scholars have linked the polity with Old Chosŏn (n.d.-108 bce), the earliest known state in Korean history. However, by comparing the “Hanyi” with several bronze inscriptions with similar contents, this study seeks to re-read the “Hanyi” from a perspective that transcends the dichotomy of Chinese history versus Korean history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay argues that to adequately answer the question its title poses, anthropological approaches to national and transnational China(s) must be grounded in the history of Qing imperial expansion. To this end, it compares and explores the connections between three examples of the “sojourn work” that has gone into making mobile, multiethnic populations abroad into Overseas Chinese. The first example deals with recent official attempts to project the People's Republic of China's multiethnic vision of Chinese-ness beyond its national borders. The second highlights the importance of the early Chinese nation-state in the making of Overseas Chinese community in Southeast Asia in the first decades of the twentieth century. The final case foregrounds the late imperial routes of nascent Chinese nationalism to argue that, in contrast to much of the current rhetoric on the Chinese “diaspora,” national and transnational modes of Chinese community emerged together from the ruins of the Qing empire. Together the three examples point to the need to question the usual ways scholars have conceptualized (Overseas) Chinese-ness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the belief systems of Chinese youth and their attitudes toward the state. Youth in China are generally described as having an internationalist outlook, being pragmatic and materialistic, and embracing nationalism, patriotism, and altruism. The post-1980s attributes of generations of Chinese youth are discussed. The article suggests that contemporary youth are not an immediate threat to China's regime in 2009 and that they believe that China will overtake the United States as the leading superpower. Anniversaries of events and protests in China that concern the political leadership such as the 1919 May Fourth Movement are mentioned. The reason why Chinese youth join the Communist Party is also mentioned.

In 1944, a rebellion in China's northwestern Xinjiang Province prompted Chiang Kai-shek to send his most trusted lieutenant, Zhang Zhizhong, to negotiate with the rebels and to attempt to consolidate Nationalist China's hold over the perennially restive frontier province. Zhang's innovative adaptation of tested Soviet models of minority representation tapped into and reinterpreted a long tradition of established cultural paradigms for digesting and representing the internal "other" within China. The most visible and widely disseminated projects that Zhang sponsored in the waning days of Nationalist China represent a determined eleventh-hour propaganda attempt to integrate the seldom-seen Central Asian frontier into the greater conception of a unified Chinese republic. This effort also marks one of the earliest instances of the Chinese state attempting to employ mass propaganda media to disseminate—among a large and diverse audience—a modified version of established modes of ethnic representation previously in currency only among a limited subsection of elite and official society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one about the histories of capitalism in China and South Asia, a paper on British imperial concerns about the impact of Chinese nationalism in Malaya, and a critique of Eurocentric histories of capitalism.

Examines the role of paleoanthropology in the development of racial nationalism in China. Hypothesis on human evolution; Role of valorized antiquity in the construction of nationalist myths; Creation of the Chinese school of archaeology and its influence to nationalism.

Describes how the Japanese Residents' Association (JRA) of Shanghai responded to events at the time of Japanese aggression against China. Origins and early work of the Shanghai JRA; Responses to Chinese nationalism and rifts within the Japanese community; Overview of the World War II situation in Shanghai.

Discusses the national identity transformations of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Myth on the national character of PRC; Southern resistance to the myth; Effect of the closed-door policy to PRC's science and technology; Nationalism as a consequence of historical contestation; Conflict between North China and South China.