Disunifying the Nation: Ethnicity and Knowledge Transplantation in China, 1900-1930

Abstract

China in the early 20th century, like other post-imperial states, faced the challenge of creating a nation encompassing different social groups and parochial cultures. How to identify different ethnic groups living in the borderlands and generate nation-wide social cohesion became the most essential question binding the different intellectual communities. Conversations and debates flourished in public media, creating an interactive intellectual space sustained by the prospering printing capitalism. Yet, the circulation of nationalist discourses in China was not conductive to the unification of the nation, or even the unification of the intellectuals. Quite contrary, nationalism, conveyed through modern academic disciplines, tended to become a Assuring mechanism fracturing the social body. It split the social interests of the middle class intellectuals and eventually partitioned them. This paper illustrates why nationalism is potentially such a disunifying force. It focuses on the evolution of two disciplines, i.e. ethnology and the ethnographic sociology. Both of them were undertaken to map out the ethnic composition in the frontier regions. The transplantations of these two disciplines, one from continental Europe and the other from the Anglo-American tradition, followed disparate paths and resulted in different modes of indigenization.