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Title:
Disunifying the Nation: Modern Disciplines and Knowledge Transplantation in China, 1912 – 1949
Speaker:
Dr. Liping Wang (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong)
Date:
January 20, 2016
Time:
4:00 pm
Venue:
Room 201, 2/F, May Hall, The University of Hong Kong (Map)
Language:
English
Enquiry:
(Tel) (852) 3917-5772
(Email) ihss@hku.hk
China in the early 20th century, like other post-imperial states, faced the challenge of creating a nation encompassing different social groups and parochial cultures. How to identify different ethnic groups living in the borderlands and generate nation-wide social cohesion became the most essential question binding the different intellectual communities. Conversations and debates flourished in public media, creating an interactive intellectual space sustained by the prospering printing capitalism. Yet, the circulation of nationalist discourses in China was not conductive to the unification of the nation, or even the unification of the intellectuals. Quite contrary, nationalism, conveyed through modern academic disciplines, tended to become a fissuring mechanism fracturing the social body. It split the social interests of the middle class intellectuals and eventually partitioned them. This paper illustrates why nationalism is potentially such a disunifying force. It focuses on the evolution of two disciplines, i.e. ethnology and the ethnographic sociology. Both of them were undertaken to map out the ethnic composition in the frontier regions. The transplantations of these two disciplines, one from continental Europe and the other from the Anglo-American tradition, followed disparate paths and resulted in different modes of indigenization.
Liping Wang is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. She earned a Ph.D. degree in Sociology from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, Ethnicizing the Frontier: Imperial Transformation and Ethnic Confrontations in China-Inner Mongolia, 1890s – 1930s, was completed in 2013. It examines forms and causes of Mongol-Han confrontation in Inner Mongolia during the Chinese imperial transition. In it she questions general theories of empire to nation transition in an historical examination of the Chinese case. Her alternative approach focuses on the maintenance and dissolution of the relations that sustained crosscutting identities on the frontier. She is now turning her dissertation into a book manuscript. In addition to that, she has been working on transnational movement of knowledge in modern academic disciplines, the indigenization of that knowledge, and, most especially on the creation of a knowledge regime dealing with ethnicity in Republican China (1912 – 1949). She is now embarking on a project that compares patterns of luxury trade binding various frontiers to the Chinese imperial center in the 17th century. Her future research includes a comparative study of how elites mediated minority politics under the Qing and how they do so in contemporary China. These studies uncover path dependence that links contemporary Chinese society to its imperial legacies and the dramatic transformations it underwent throughout the long twentieth century. Her research has been published in The American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and The Annals: The American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. Before joining the University of Hong Kong she was Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. She was Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College in 2013 – 2014.
