Reshaping China: The Concept of the Chinese Nation in Modern Times (Ideas, History, and Modern China, 32)

Book info: Reshaping China: The Concept of the Chinese Nation in Modern Times (Ideas, History, and Modern China, 32) (Hardcover, 520 pages) – Brill, 2024. Language: English.

This book is the first and only English-language edition of Huang Xingtao’s Reshaping China, translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun. In this landmark text, Huang Xingtao uses a cultural approach to the history of ideas. He traces the complex contours in the discursive debates around the concept of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu) from its origins in the late Qing; through the pivotal moment of the 1911 Revolution; into the contentious revolutionary upheavals of the 1920s, amidst the national crisis brought on by Japanese invasions in the 1930s; and culminating in the widespread acceptance of the concept during the Civil War. By the late 1940s, the Chinese nation came to represent the idea that all peoples within the country, whatever their ethnicity, were equal citizens who shared common goals and aspirations. Editorial Reviews About the Author Huang Xingtao, Ph.D. (1992), Beijing Normal University, is Executive Director of the Institute of Qing History at Renmin University and Professor and Dean of the School of History at Renmin University in China. He is a cultural and intellectual historian of late imperial and modern Chinese history.

Lane J. Harris, Ph.D. (2012), University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is Chair and Gordon Poteat Professor of History and Asian Studies at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. Among his recent publications is The Peking Gazette: A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Chinese History (Brill, 2018).

Mei Chun, Ph.D. (2005), Washington University in Saint Louis, is the author of The Novel and Theatrical Imagination in Early Modern China (Brill, 2011) and several articles in the journals Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR); Asia Major; and Renditions.