HIST 2410: China and Its Inner Asian Regions: Ethnic Frontipheries at the Edge of Empire and Aspirational Nation-State, Prof. Peng Hai
By the year 1884, the Manchu Qing Empire (1644-1912) had formally turned China into a manifestly inter-Asian state. Under the aegis of one royal household and one imperial capital, three theocratic traditions--Confucianism, Islam, Tibetan Buddhism--and cultures embedded and transmitted by five different scripts--Sinitic, Perso-Arabic, Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu--were demanded to recognize each other as belonging to one political entity. This acquired character made inter-Asian China of the 19th and 20th centuries incommensurate with the largely Christian, and largely alphabetic Europe. It also made China in the first half of the 20th century a fertile ground for ethnonational aspirations and state-making attempts, which left socialist China (1949-1976) and post-socialist China with the daunting task of reining in the political energy for autonomist movements and de jure recognition of ethnonational difference in the ethnic frontipheries. This seminar introduces the historiography on the military and political processes by which inter-Asian China were formed in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the political and cultural governance methods by which the weak central state of the early and mid-20th century coped with the demands and movements for national self-determination (in the emphatic plural form). Additionally, students will learn the debates between ethnofederalism and ethnic fusionism in more recent decades of the People's Republic of China (1949-present). The seminar will benefit those who have keen interests in the political and military expansion of overland empires, the regulation and control of culturally heterogeneous frontiers, and the political and cultural project of monoculturalism in so-called post-colonial nations.