20 2011 Opening speech by Prof. Wang Hui ... - Litteraturhuset

political structures and cultural identity, internal colonization, the tendency to centralize politicalpower, and the complex interrelationship of empire with the formation of the nation-state.If, however, we should approach the relationship between empire and early modernity from theconventional binary of “empire vs. nation-state,” it will be easy to fall into or simply provide evidencefor a nineteenth-century European historical view, which holds that China has no real politicalsubjectivity. The key point here is not to affirm or deny the existence of a “nation-state” in Chinesehistory, but to clarify different sorts of political entity and their different forms, and in so doing freethe concept of “state” from being completely enshrouded within the history of modern Europeancapitalism and the nation-state. Modern states have different political cultures, with socialist andcapitalist states each having their own. Thus, since any discussion of modern states involves comingto grips with distinctive political cultures and traditions, addressing pre-twentieth-century states andtheir subjectivities only as abstractions is inadequate. The Kyoto School lays stress on the Songdynasty [p. 13] as a mature state with a centralized administration, or, in fact, a quasi-nation-state.Therefore, when Kyoto School scholars connect such a centrally administered state with earlymodernity, they once again affirm the binary of “empire vs. nation-state.” This binary can beportrayed in widely divergent ways, but such depictions never depart from positing an inherentconnection between the state and capitalism, Miyazaki Ichisada’s argument being a prime example.Within this conceptual framework, we cannot really imagine what a non-capitalist nation-state mightbe.Because of these factors, I emphasize the overlapping relationship between the construction ofempires and the nation-state rather than becoming entangled within the binary of empire vs. nationstate.Since the nineteenth century, virtually all studies of pre-modern history have been conductedwithin the category of the history of empire, for instance, that representative work of the 1960s, S. N.Eisenstadt’s The Political System of Empires. This highly influential work synthesized historicalstudies of great world civilizations within a Weberian framework, placing “pre-modern” history underthe rubric of the “political system of empires,” a rubric that grew out of the binary of “empire vs.nation-state” in nineteenth- century European political economy. Within this binary, “empire”constitutes all the features that are the opposite of modernity, and even when a relationship betweenempire and modernity is acknowledged, the relationship is only allowed retrospectively; for instance,it might be asked: what are the origins of despotism and authoritarianism in the modern nation-state?Or, why is the modern nation-state unable to break away from its inherently violent nature? In otherwords, all the manifestations of the crises of modernity will be traced back to the historicalrelationship between empires and the modern world. The Political System of Empires is an excellentexample of how nearly all twentieth-century “pre-modern histories” were encompassed within thecategory of “empire.”In my volume Empire and State, I mainly discuss the following problems: First, how didConfucianism legitimize the Qing as a Chinese dynasty? How were pluralistic identities andpluralistic political/juridical institutions within the imperial system constructed? On one hand, animportant part of the exploitation of Confucianism by the Qing rulers to consolidate their rule was toidentify themselves as a “Chinese dynasty.” On the other hand, the Qing literati also used athoroughly legitimate Confucianism to criticize the dynasty’s ethnic hierarchy, with the result thatcertain principles and propositions of Confucianism were fused with the issue of equality within aspecific historical context. Second, since a number of important post-nineteenth-century scholarlyworks take empires as the antithesis of the state, what are the historical relations between theconstruction of empire and the construction of the nation-state? [p. 14] As a response to this question,in my discussion of Qing classical scholarship, and Gongyang learning in particular, I emphasize thatconstruction of the empire, including the expansion of the tribute system, and the construction of theQing state are two sides of the same coin. In fact, phenomena defined as typical symbols of thenation-state, such as boundaries and administrative jurisdictions within those boundaries, alreadyexisted by or began to develop as early as the seventeenth century.Litteraturhuset Tlf.: +47 22 95 55 30Wergelandsveien 29 Fax: +47 22 95 55 310167 Oslo, Norway post@litteraturhuset.no