Julia C. Schneider (Cork) - Who belongs to the Chinese nation?
Channel: Nathan Hill
Date: 2021-10-01

This lecture analyses the formation of the theory of Chinese assimilative power in the first half of the twentieth century, bringing the intimate relation between Chinese historiography and nationalism to the fore. The cohesion between nationalist agendas and constructions of history is particularly revealed in general histories, in which non-Chinese peoples were constructed as “people without history” and at the same time integrated into the Chinese nation by means of Agamben’s “inclusive exclusion.” By studying more than a dozen general histories, I show how non-Chinese peoples were marginalised by republican Chinese historians who ultimately imagined the Chinese nation and its history as homogenous. A pattern reveals itself that explains how the assimilation theory became to be applied in historiography and why this theory has been crucial for Chinese nation-building.

Julia C. Schneider is Lecturer in Chinese history at the Department of Asian Studies at University College Cork. She holds a joint PhD in Sinology from Ghent and Göttingen Universities and an MA in Classical Sinology from Heidelberg University. From 2014 to 2019, she was Assistant Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies, Göttingen University. Her book Nation and Ethnicity, published in 2017 by Brill, won the Foundation Council Award of Göttingen University. Her research interests are historiography, history of ideas, and ethnohistory in Qing and Republican times as well as Jurchen and Manchu studies. She has published in journals such as Journal of Asian History and Global Intellectual History.