Cognitive Resonance

Bibliographic Data: Zarrow, Peter. After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885-1924. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Main Argument:

The Revolution of 1911 replaced a monarchical system with a republic. The republic was heavily flavored with the taste of military dictatorship and soon fell into warlordism, but the ideal of republicanism continued to motivate intellectuals and activists. At the same time, the range of beliefs that had surrounded the emperorship survived the revolution: the need for enlightened rulers, the power of sageness, the paternalistic responsibilities of the educated classes, and a moralized cosmology. The 1911 Revolution could not have happened unless large numbers of people were prepared to accept an emperor-less world, but it did not only overthrow entrenched views: it built on them as well. […] The fall of the last dynasty, the Qing, represented the collapse not just of a single dynasty but of the entire imperial system, though this was not clear to all in the immediate wake of the revolution. The whole cultural edifice of the imperial system declined together, including: first, the coercive powers of the imperial court vis-a-vis local society; second, the civil service examination system that recruited the bureaucracy and reaffirmed the cultural capital of the gentry; and third, the immense system of classical (sacred) learning upon which the exams were based. (viii-ix)

Historiographical Engagement: Schwartz, etc

( Nationalism, republicanism, empire )
Critical assessment: Sentence fragments: many. I think Zarrow is pretty much correct in what he says; my brain is too full to venture much more than that, tbh.

Further reading: Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power; Karl, Staging the World; Hevia, English Lessons; Liu, Clash of Empires; Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales

Bibliographic Data: Fan, Fa-Ti. British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Main Argument: This book "attempts to explain how Western (especially British) naturalists in China and their Chinese 'associates' explored, studied, and represented China's natural world in both local and global contexts" (2), employing the concept of "contact zone" or "borderlands" to "denote the intersecting zone between the temporal and spatial trajectories of peoples of different geographic origins, cultures, and histories" (3).

Historiographical Engagement:  Empire theorists and historians, naturalists, historians of science

( British naturalists in Qing China )

Critical assessment: I wish this book were longer and went into more detail, and that some of my favorite books on the same general topic, such as Hevia's English Lessons, had been around for him to reference and dialogue with when he was writing. That said, it's excellent, both for the dimensions it illuminates and for his insistence that reading the process of empire as entirely one-sided is incorrect.

Further reading: Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons; James Hevia, The Imperial Security State

Meta notes: No man is an empire, entire of itself.

Bibliographic Data: Rogaski, Ruth. Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Main Argument: "…this study considers the century-long process of how health and disease emerged as a discursive center of Chinese deficiency under conditions of imperialism and traces specific projects of 'awakening' the Chinese nation, race, and body to a state of corporal modernity" (3). This emergence of 'hygienic modernity' was a central part of China's experience of imperialism.

( Hygienic modernity in Tianjin )

Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples

Throughout the twentieth century, weisheng became an instrumental discourse informing the Chinese elite’s vision of a modern ideal, a vehicle through which they hoped state, society, and the individual would be transformed. As grasped by Meiji bureaucrats, late Qing reformers, and Guomindang modernizers, weisheng centered concerns of national sovereignty, institutional discipline, and government administration on the site of the body. In an uncanny way, the single modern Chinese term weisheng encompasses what Foucault called “ biopower,” a series of techniques through which the state undertakes the administration of life, and “governmentality,” the idea that individuals internalize disciplinary regimes and thus harmonize their own behaviors with the goals of the state. (300)

She concludes that the discourse of Western superiority and Chinese deficiency was centered around weisheng, and notes that Japan played an important mediating role in the elite Chinese adoption of modernity.

Critical assessment: This is an excellent and influential book, for good reason. I particularly like the way she refuses to de-emphasize violence, and the ways in which she points out the unevenness of regimes of colonial control and the adoption/contestation of different aspects of modernity.

Further reading: Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice; Larissa Heinrich, The Afterlife of Images

Meta notes: If biopower is the way we live now, why can't the United States compel its citizens to get their childhood vaccinations?

Bibliographic Data: Jones, Andrew F. Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Main Argument: "This book is a historical enquiry into the development of this discourse [of development] in the Chinese literary and media culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly as refracted through and subject to criqitue in the work of Lu Xun and many of his contemporaries" (3). "Development" is "a way of knowing, narrating, and attempting to manage processes of radical historical change" although "the term is haunted by its own semantic instability" (ibid). Jones notes that devleopmentalism has become the sovereign logic of China (and of other countries), with ruinous consequences; thus the book also "initiates a genealogical critique of developmental thinking by tracing its origins in the translation of evolutionary biology into Chinese letters in the late nineteenth century…and suggesting how it gave rise to new narrative forms, lent its structure to the historical imagination, and tragically limited ideological horizons" (4). Moreover, Chinese intellectuals were not doing this in isolation; it was part of global process in which evolutionary thinking "was translated and assimilated to local discourse throughout East Asia and a host of other locales" (5).

Historiographical Engagement: Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power; Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China; Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice; Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern; Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern

( Might there still be someone who hasn't eaten human flesh? Save the children. )

Critical assessment: This is an excellent book that makes some very complex arguments, complex enough that these notes most assuredly do not capture all of what Jones is saying. I think the fact that there is no conclusion as such is very much on point--in its own way, this book is a critique of the present as much as of the past. "'Might there still be someone who hasn't eaten human flesh? Save the children.'"

Further reading: Miriam Hansen, "Vernacular Modernism"

Meta notes: Evolution has no preordained goal, and extinction is the fate of all species.

Bibliographic Data: Wong, R. Bin. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Main Argument: Wong argues convincingly that scholars must seek "to generate the elements of well-grounded comparative history that can identify issues in European as well as non-European history, contribute to projects in world history, and create a new basis for building social theories to replace the great nineteenth-century efforts limited in large measure to European foundations" (ix), and that one way to do this is to incorporate thoroughly into scholarship the historical perspectives, experiences and paradigms of non-Western places. Accordingly, Wong analyzes a thousand years of Chinese history on its own terms and puts it in conversation with broadly similar examples of European history in the same period. In the end it becomes clear that differences are more salient than similarities, but only after similarities have been established through comparison--focusing on differences qua differences yields the sort of meaningless statements that, as one of the people in our class discussion commented, "Europe is different from China, China is different from apples, apples are different from hand grenades, and hand grenades are different from Dwinelle Hall." Yes, and?

( The limits of Europe )

Critical assessment: This is a brilliantly analyzed and argued book, and if it gets a little dry at times, Wong succeeds to a greater extent than most economic historians I've read in not ignoring the violence that haunts history--he has an entire chapter comparing the French and Chinese Revolutions with each other, for instance. Let me be frank: as our class discussions around this book made clear, there are some people who just don't believe in comparative history, or at least in doing comparative history as we can now, and this book will not please them. To his credit, however, Wong anticipates that reaction, remarking in his introduction that "Noting items not addressed or inadequately treated matters, I think, only when such absences undermine the arguments or qualify the evidence presented" (8). It should surprise no one, methinks, that I'm with Wong on both the necessity and the value of comparative history, and I think he succeeds brilliantly at the task he sets out for himself, particularly when he reads European examples according to Chinese criteria and destabilizes our received understandings. He's particularly good on the comparative European and Chinese economies and state formations--a lot of what he said led me to rethink things I knew about Europe from 1 CE forward, particularly in the medieval era.

Further reading: Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State; Joseph Fletcher Jr., "The Heyday of the Ch'ing Order in Mongolia, Sinkiang, and Tibet"; Edward Friedman, "Reconstructing China's National Identity", Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation; Philip Kuhn, "Local Self-Government under the Republic"; Kenneth Pomeranz, From Core to Hinterland, "Protecting Goddess, Dangerous Woman"; Mary Rankin, Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China; Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, A.D. 990-1990

Meta notes: Europe isn't everything. Those of us in Asian studies and similar disciplines know that; now we just have to sell everyone else on that fact.