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Reading from a postcolonial perspective the historical experience of a French educational establishment for Chinese youth in the 1920s – the Institut franco-chinois de Lyon – this article highlights the coincidence between the inscription of China in global modernity and the spread of a Chinese national imaginary. It questions the discursive connection between the Western colonial project of a 'civilising mission', applied here to the scientific education of a new Chinese elite and, in this context, the shaping of a peculiar Chinese national subject. This article understands this institution as a utopian synecdoche of China, being dressed simultaneously in the clothes of Chinese-ness and those of (Western) modernity. In this training school, where students endeavoured to become intellectuals and scientists fashioned by the methods, values and epistemologies of the French academic realm, in this place where students became familiar with 'modern' leisure and sports like football, tennis, cinema, snooker and so on, between those walls where students had to learn how to behave as 'civilised/westernised' modern men and women, China as a cultural, ethnic and national identity referent was, paradoxically, constantly mentioned in the discourse of both the students and the initiators of this educational institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the discursive peregrinations of the 'Han' category in the writings of the Chinese revolutionary, theoretician and activist Qu Qiubai. In the papers he wrote at the beginning of the 1930s dealing with the questions of language and writing, the author made singular use of the concept 'Han' to talk about the language/writing of the 'Han' (Hanzi, Hanyu) as a racial or ethnic group (Hanzu). Qu elaborated a discourse which articulated and mobilized, sometimes in a contradictory manner, the 'Han' category both as a 'race' and as a social class. Going beyond the race/class dialectic, I will try to show that these texts question the territorial, cultural and ethnic boundaries of 'China' and its homogeneity. Following this argument, this paper demonstrates how Qu's attempt to define 'Chinese language(s)' helps us to elucidate the complex articulation between China as a discursive and spatial category, the 'Han' category, and the other nationalities in the Chinese space. By questioning the homogeneity of the linguistic identity of China, using the word zhongguohua, Qu Qiubai unveiled an unstable and fragile imaginary relative to China and its so-called majority ethnic group, the Han. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]