Prasenjit Duara

I'm on a bit of a China binge recently, and this book, a necessary bit of reading for a big project I'm doing, is a part of that.

This is a social/cultural history, taken from primarily Japanese sources (including a survey from a Manchurian railway company), which seeks to analyze the relationship between the Chinese state (in various forms), and the people through examinations of interactions between the state and villagers in North China.

Before the Qing reforms, village power was circled around religious, cultural, or ancestral means. The Qing attempted to introduce a democracy in its later years based a limited electorate and a conservative (but reformist) gentry. As this fragile republican government collapsed shortly after the accession of the Xuantong Emperor, warlords and 'bullies' seized control, and corruption was endemic. Only later, under Chiang Kai-Shek's nationalists, did they attempt to re-establish a central, organized relationship with the rural citizens, but this, too had its flaws, and was disrupted by the mass slaughter and war committed by the Japanese.

A very interesting book (for specialists), and a little microcosm of Chinese society in the early 20th Century.… (más)

This work challenges the orthodoxy of nationalist narratives itself. He argues that nationalism has become too dominant an intellectual force that oversimplifies the narrative and crushes counter narratives that intertwine with it. His work is broken into a theoretical section and then five case studies. Duara takes Chinese scholars to task for delivering history that reinforces national myths. Unlike most other post-colonial societies, the Chinese choose to create a narrative of history that tells a unified story of national struggle against imperialism. Western scholars of China are little better, often viewing Chinese history through a Hegelian teleology that assumes progress toward modern nationalism.

Duara argues that nationalism is not a newly arrived force in China. He believes that there was a sense of identity in China long before the 19th century. He also believes that historians have created an unnatural break in their treatment of Chinese history. Historians tend to treat it as the end of one era and the beginning of the next, without realizing the continuities that existed across it. He believes that Anderson’s model for nationalism is not appropriate for China and suggests that it could be less applicable elsewhere because it over-simplified the narrative to the exclusion of all else.

The cases studies that Duara provides are interesting in demonstrating the counter-narratives that can be drowned out by nationalist histories. He discusses secret brotherhoods, anti-religious campaigns and attempts at federalism in warlord China. Perhaps the most interesting case study is his examination of the word fengjian, which is usually translated as “feudalism”. He illustrates how the term originally meant local autonomy and was invoked for government without imperial interference, giving it a positive connotation. Many late Qing reformers harkened back to the tradition of fengjian. It was part of China’s public sphere. By the republican period, fengjian had been transformed into the pejorative of feudalism. Duara’s examination of this is both intriguing and perplexing, which is symptomatic of his book. He presents the genealogy of the word as an example of history that was ignored by nationalist histories, yet it fits very nicely into a nationalist framework, with the condemnation of feudalism being a reaction to the Republics inability to control the country and restore national power. Duara does not propose eliminating nationalism from discourse, but he does propose that nationalism should not be the single focal point around which history is constructed. Yet his downplaying of the power of nationalism to support his thesis is occasionally frustrating. His work is powerful and forces the reader to examine the methods of nationalist historians. The moments in which his examples do not fully support his argument are only a minor irritation in this impressive work.… (más)