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Die Suche erzielte 2 Treffer.

Non-Chinese Peoples in Republican Chinese Historiography: Beasts, Non-Historic Peoples, Homines Sacri article

Julia C. Schneider

Journal of Asian History, Jahrgang 56 (2022), Ausgabe 1-2, Seite 231 - 268

This article analyzes how Chinese thinkers and historians approached non-Chinese peoples as part of their image of the Chinese nation and its history in the first half of the 20th century. How did historical narrative patterns develop and rigidify over time? In late imperial times, anti-Manchu revolutionaries imagined a Chinese nation without non-Chinese peoples, whom they regarded as inhuman beasts. They disagreed with the reformist Liang Qichao, who propagated the idea that non-Chinese peoples would be incorporated in the Chinese nation by assimilation. Although both revolutionaries and reformers believed in a hierarchy of peoples wherein the Chinese were superior, their conclusions differed. Less than two decades later, however, such divided opinions can rarely be found anymore. Instead, Republican historians inevitably used the lens of the assimilation theory in their histories of China. They included non-Chinese peoples within the Chinese self through references to their assimilation but at the same time excluded them as “people without history”, a process that can be explained by Agamben’s theory of “inclusive exclusion” and his concept of the homo sacer. Based on more than a dozen general histories complemented by cultural history and historical essays, this paper reveals the narrative patterns Republican historians applied to non-Chinese peoples’ histories to allow them to imagine the Chinese nation and its history as homogenous.


A Non-Western Colonial Power? The Qing Empire in Postcolonial Discourse research-article

Julia C. Schneider

Journal of Asian History, Jahrgang 54 (2020), Ausgabe 2, Seite 311 - 342

In the last decades, new attention has been given to colonialism as a concept that can also be applied to non-Western empires. In particular, colonialism has been used to describe the diverse systems of conquest rule applied by the Manchu Qing dynasty (1636/1644-1912) in Inner Asia and South China.

This essay provides a conceptual history of how colonialism has been applied in the historiography of non-Western empires, using the Qing empire as a case study. Scholarly works in which Qing rule is conceptualized as colonial are read critically, in tandem with current understandings of global and Qing history as well as of colonial and postcolonial theory and empire studies. Finally, this essay discusses whether the concept of colonialism can be used meaningfully to analyze Qing rule and puts this discussion in relation to a general debate on the spatiality and temporality of colonialism studies and postcolonial theory.

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Current Issue

Issue 1-2 / 2023