Panel 40: Building a Chinese Nation-State in 20th Century East Asia

Full Title: Building a Chinese Nation-State in Twentieth-Century East Asia: Postwar Emotions and Transnational Knowledge Production

Chair: Luming Xu, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Panelists

Cruz (Wenhao) Guan, The Ohio State University, “Teaching National Humiliation in Chinese Geography Textbooks and Teacher’s Manuals, 1902-1937”

Luming Xu, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, “Competing Colonialities: Nation-State Building and Nation-Empire Construction of Chinese and Japanese Migration Projects in Manchuria”

Xiaoyan Ren, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, “‘Obstructed Embrace’: the ID Card Institution in Shanghai, 1945–1949”

This panel investigates China’s intellectual endeavors and political practices of nationstate building through the coming into being of emotions, and the production and distribution of knowledge during the first half of the 20th century. Drawing on Fred Myers’ concept of “metasentiment,” which refers to a regulatory emotion within a community that controls individuals’ feelings through education and social discipline, this panel attempts to examine the politics of emotion in twentieth-century China through a variety of lenses. Cruz (Wenhao) Guan’s paper analyzes the role that China’s modern geography textbooks and teacher’s manuals had played in transforming the Qing empire to a Chinese multiethnic nation-state; Luming Xu’s paper investigates the mass migration projects initiated by China and Japan in Manchuria and their relations to the nation-state building efforts of China and nation-empire construction enterprises of Japan; and Xiaoyan Ren’s work explores the contested ID card policy in Shanghai after 1945, focusing on how the institutional and emotive legacy of Japanese occupation impacted the implementation of this policy.

This panel follows the “affective turn” to highlight the role of emotions in China’s nation-state building process. This panel suggests that the emotive dimension of nation-building processes, such as “humiliation” and national trauma, is not only collective subjectivities consisting of individual victims but also products of socio-political contexts of 20th-century East Asia and interactions with colonial discourses on a global scale. By focusing on emotions (such as humiliation, sorrow, and anxiety), this panel will demonstrate how and why China’s “Century of Humiliation” narrative and its identity as a victim of imperialism was socially and historically constructed.

Furthermore, the transnational perspective of this panel contributes to the recent scholarship that aims to understand the shared experiences and conflicts in the post-colonial world. More specifically, this panel examines the cultural communication, competing ideologies, and postwar legacy between China and Japan in the modern era. Thus, these three works emphasize how China’s nation-building projects were closely connected to domestic (China’s traditional geographic knowledge, borderland studies, internal colonization, and population science, the traditional baojia 保甲 system) and transnational (the influence of Japan’s Westernstyle education system, the institutional and emotive legacy of Japanese occupation, the establishment of Manchukuo) features while facing external political/military threats.