'Class', 'Race' and Language Imagining China and the Discourse on the Category 'Han' in the Writing of Marxist Revolutionary Qu Qiubai (1899-1935)

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). Narrating the history of the cultural hegemony of the “Han” in Asia and criticizing the assimilation policy (tonghua), 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