The Language of Nation-State Building in Late Qing China
The Language of Nation-State Building in Late Qing China

Author: Qing Cao

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-01-31

Total Pages: 147

ISBN-13: 1000832716

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The Language of Nation-State Building in Late Qing China investigates the linguistic and intellectual roots of China’s modern transformation by presenting a systematic study of the interplay between language innovation and socio-political upheavals in the final decade of the Qing Dynasty. This book examines the formations, internal tensions, and promotion of such macroconcepts as ‘nation people’ (guomin 国民), nation (minzu 民族), society (qun 群), state (guojia 国家) and revolution (gemin 革命) as novel ideas borrowed from Europe but mediated through Meiji Japan. Using corpus-based discourse analysis of the full-text corpus (4.2 million words) of the two most influential periodicals, Xinmin Congbao (新民丛报) and Minbao (民报), this book scrutinises the multi-faceted formulations of these concepts and their impact. It underscores the adaptation and appropriation of European post-enlightenment values to the socio-political conditions of late Qing society. The analysis centres on the epic debate (1905-7) between these two periodicals that offered two distinctive visions of future China. Comparable to the great eighteenth-century debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine on the French Revolution, the Chinese debate has hitherto attracted little scholarly attention outside China. Yet it not only turned the tidal wave of public opinion against the Manchu monarchy and contributed to its downfall in 1911; it has also given rise to a radical undercurrent of intellectual thinking whose ramifications have been keenly felt throughout twentieth-century China. This book represents the first study in English on this press debate that contributes significantly to the intellectual foundation of modern China. This book will be useful and relevant to academics, postgraduate students and final year undergraduate students in the field of Chinese studies, and anyone interested in the role of language in shaping modern intellectual history.

Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860–1960
Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860–1960

Author: Gina Anne Tam

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-03-05

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 110847828X

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Analyzes how fangyan (local Chinese languages or dialects) were central to the creation of modern Chinese nationalism.

A Passion for Facts
A Passion for Facts

Author: Tong Lam

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2011-10-29

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0520267869

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“This fascinating book is a fundamental contribution to the global history of social science. Tong Lam demonstrates how Chinese reformers struggled to build a modern society on a foundation of facts and statistics. Their ambitions were no mere dream, but were made real in a prodigious social survey movement which aimed as much to enlighten peasants as to inform administrators.” —Theodore Porter, author of Trust in Numbers “Lam’s approach is highly original. A Passion for Facts presents an impressive host of new material from Chinese and American archives that challenges interpretations of China and Chinese exceptionalism or independent development. Lam makes a compelling argument that the techniques developed in the early twentieth century and refined over several decades have been critical to state-building in China.” —James L. Hevia, author of English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth Century China “Lam supersedes the current ‘China-centered approach’ and the earlier framework that explained ‘modern China’ in light of global colonialism. He illuminates how the search for ‘facts’ empowered modern Chinese to reimagine their social and political realities in a global colonial context.” —Benjamin A. Elman, Chair, East Asian Studies Department, Princeton University

Discourse, Rhetoric and Shifting Political Behaviour in China
Discourse, Rhetoric and Shifting Political Behaviour in China

Author: Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-02

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1000964302

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Using political discourse analysis, this book examines the extent to which the salient approaches of previous leadership generations have translated into present day policies shepherded in by Xi Jinping. On the strategic political level, the book includes comparisons of China's recent leadership periods with a focus on Xi Jinping's era, and contains examples of whether and how specific topics and tactics reoccur across generations. The state development strategy section then goes on to include chapters on shaping China’s strategic narratives, neoliberal discourse within state developmentalism, and keyword evolution. The practical policies part looks at the issues of re-education, health, class, and ethnicity, analysing how the leaders talk about China’s poor, frame the representations of megaprojects on social media, and discursively display diplomatic strength. As a study of the rule of Xi Jinping and the rhetoric of the contemporary Chinese political system, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Chinese politics and political science more broadly.

Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism
Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism

Author: J. Leibold

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-09-23

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1137098848

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The first full length treatment of ethnic and national identity in early Twentieth-century China, Leibold traces the political and cultural strategies employed by Han Chinese elites in the process of incorporating, both discursively and physically, the diverse inhabitants of the last Qing dynasty into a new, homogenous national community.

A Notional Analysis of Chinese Academic Discourse on China
A Notional Analysis of Chinese Academic Discourse on China

Author: Weixiao Wei

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-23

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1000989259

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Notional Analysis of Chinese Academic Discourse on China presents an executive summary of Chinese academic discourse about China’s progress and achievements in the past one hundred years. Using a scientometric method to analyze bibliographic records retrieved from the largest library database in China on aspects of Chinese Studies, this book offers an insider’s view regarding social, cultural, historical and political aspects of China that have never been systematically published in English before. This book first follows a quantitative approach using bibliometric analysis to identify keywords in the Chinese academic works about China in conceptual clusters for the past hundred years. Then a qualitative method is adopted to select significant and representative discourses within each conceptual cluster. By helping to establish two-way communication and facilitate mutual understanding, this book holds great potential for helping to resolve conflict and promoting peace. This book offers an eye-opening experience for anyone studying or researching Chinese Studies, including related subjects such as Chinese language, culture and education, or a broader subject within global politics, economy, sociology and culture, which acknowledges China as a major player in the field.

Inclusivity and Belonging in Chinese Discourse
Inclusivity and Belonging in Chinese Discourse

Author: Kerry Sluchinski

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-01-31

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1003831443

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Inclusivity and Belonging in Chinese Discourse explores how recent language change in the third-person pronoun system of Mandarin Chinese is harnessed by netizens to construct spaces of (non-)belonging along a fluid continuum in the context of pro- and anti-LGBTQ discourses. Grounded in stance, framing, and positioning theories, the monograph contributes to the notions of membership categorization and (co-)reference chains for identity construction. With a focus on newly emergent genderless third-person pronoun ta, written in pinyin, and the various noun and verb phrases which co-occur with the pronoun in specific contexts, this monograph shows how ta has become a conventionalized language practice accepted and implemented by language users of various identities, sexual orientations, and backgrounds for a vast array of interactional and communicative purposes. The monograph illustrates how ta is used in doing identity construction work for the self, another party involved in the interaction, and/or a third party external to the interaction, often simultaneously. That is, the specific function and referent of ta is defined through language users’ unique interpretations and the discourse community of use, resulting in a ‘chameleon-like’ pragmatically loaded pronoun which reflects the inherent fluidity of identity(ies). This monograph will appeal to scholars, language researchers, and advanced graduate students concerned with inclusive language use in the Chinese context, particularly within discourse analysis, linguistics, sociolinguistics, and semantics. The book will also be valuable to professionals concerned with inclusive language and identity construction.

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Discourse Analysis
The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Discourse Analysis

Author: Chris Shei

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-01-14

Total Pages: 674

ISBN-13: 1351819399

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Chinese is a discourse-oriented language and the underlying mechanisms of the language involve encoding and decoding so the language can be correctly delivered and understood. To date, there has been a lack of consolidation at the discourse level such that a reference framework for understanding the language in a top-down fashion is still underdeveloped. The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Discourse Analysis is the first to showcase the latest research in the field of Chinese discourse analysis to consolidate existing findings, put the language in both theoretical and socio-functional perspectives, offer guidance and insights for further research and inspire innovative ideas for exploring the Chinese language in the discourse domain. The book is aimed at both students and scholars researching in the areas of Chinese linguistics and discourse analysis.

The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier
The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier

Author: Benno Weiner

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2020-06-15

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13: 1501749412

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In The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, Benno Weiner provides the first in-depth study of an ethnic minority region during the first decade of the People's Republic of China: the Amdo region in the Sino-Tibetan borderland. Employing previously inaccessible local archives as well as other rare primary sources, he demonstrates that the Communist Party's goal in 1950s Amdo was not just state-building but also nation-building. Such an objective required the construction of narratives and policies capable of convincing Tibetans of their membership in a wider political community. As Weiner shows, however, early efforts to gradually and organically transform a vast multiethnic empire into a singular nation-state lost out to a revolutionary impatience, demanding more immediate paths to national integration and socialist transformation. This led in 1958 to communization, then to large-scale rebellion and its brutal pacification. Rather than joining voluntarily, Amdo was integrated through the widespread, often indiscriminate use of violence, a violence that lingers in the living memory of Amdo Tibetans and others.

Kingdom of Characters (Pulitzer Prize Finalist)
Kingdom of Characters (Pulitzer Prize Finalist)

Author: Jing Tsu

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2022-01-18

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0735214743

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PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.