Public Seminar
Monday 21st November 2011, 11am - 12.30pm, Room KSW.G.01, Kingsway, LSE
Speaker: Peter Zarrow
Chair: Stephan Feuchtwang
Chinese reformers in the late nineteenth century sought to re-make the traditional monarchy by associating it more closely with the “nation”. Efforts to radically reshape monarchies were seen in many countries, but in the Chinese case the gentry class (the educated social stratum from which the bureaucracy was recruited) sought to use Confucian resources to modernize the entire apparatus of the state by forming a constitutional monarchy. The pre-modern Chinese kingship had possessed little or no relationship to the concept of the nation, but was rather based on a concept of territorialized cosmology which the emperors of the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) inherited and even further developed. Chinese reformers looked to Britain and Germany as models and especially to Meiji Japan. Using the Confucian Classics, they emphasized the importance of the common good or “people as base”, which they interpreted in a quasi-democratic fashion. But whether Confucianism could help build national spirit was another question. Revolutionaries sought to build patriotism on “race”, which disqualified the Manchu Qing from rule over Han Chinese. This was not a stable solution, however.
Dr Peter Zarrow is Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. His research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Zarrow previously taught Chinese history at Vanderbilt University and the University of New South Wales. His recent publications include China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (Routledge,2005); Creating Chinese Modernity: Knowledge and Everyday Life, 1900-1940 (edited; Peter Lang, 2006); and After Empire (Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2012). He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Asia Research Centre, LSE.
Professor Stephan Feuchtwang is Emeritus Professor, Department of Anthropology, LSE.
Additional Information
This event is free and open to all with no ticket required. Entry is on a first come, first served basis. For any queries email arc@lse.ac.uk| or call 020 7955 7615.