Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (review)

Since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, there has been a proliferation of writings on both European and non-European nationalisms. While most of these interpret nationalism from the perspective of time, Rebecca Karl, in her Staging the World, makes an important contribution by linking the emergence of nationalism in China to the dynamics of global capitalist spatial relations. Instead of conceiving of Chinese nationalism as merely a discourse that has come to China from the West, Karl conceptualizes nationalist movements in relation to processes and perceptions of globalization and inequality.

The main body of this book is divided into three parts, which include seven chapters and a brief conclusion. The introduction and conclusion deal with theoretical issues in which Karl highlights the importance of thinking of Chinese nationalism from a global perspective and being attentive to the perceptions by Chinese intellectuals of other colonized countries. In each of the six historical chapters, she looks at the support by intellectuals in the late Qing for various nations on the periphery of the capitalist world-system. The second chapter, which has the same title as the book, consists of an innovative interpretation of Wang Xiaonong's Beijing opera, Guazhong lanyin, which deals with the crisis of the Polish nation. Karl also supplies the reader with a translation of the first, and only remaining, part of the play in an appendix. The rest of the chapters deal, respectively, with the views of Chinese intellectuals about Hawai'i, the Philippines and revolution, the Boer War, late Qing pan-Asianism, and reform and revolution in Turkey. Since I cannot do justice to all of these chapters in a short review, I will focus critically on Karl's conception of the relationship between nationalism and the state, which is a central theme of her book.

In the introduction, Karl notes that she approaches the problem of nationalism from two angles: historical and theoretical:

Historically, it foregrounds repressed aspects of the early twentieth-century development of Chinese nationalism by reading texts written from 1895-1911 within the context of global modernity, as the latter was produced, illumined, and recognized through the most visible spaces of unevenness in the modern world: its imperialized and colonial places. Theoretically, the book proposes that this historical focus becomes available only when modern Chinese experiences and recognitions of modernity and nationalism are neither assimilated into dominating Euro-American perspectives nor rooted in reified local-place identifications and/or in notions of continuous traditional, dynastic, or statist-defined bounded national space. Such a focus is thus also available only when statism and nationalism, as historical topoi and processes, are separated.

(p. 6)

In this passage, Karl lays out her basic theoretical position. She claims that unlike most historians of China she will not look at Chinese nationalism from a Western perspective. In the late 1960s, Joseph Levenson wrote his seminal work in which he stressed that modern China broke from its imperial past and entered the realm of modern nationalism, which he understood using the Western experience as a model.¹ Against this, Thomas Metzger and others have emphasized the continuity of the Chinese tradition in modern Chinese political thought and hence have underscored the particularity of Chinese ideology and institutions.² Karl develops a position affirming the idea that modern China broke with its imperial past, but then relates China's particularity to the structure of global capitalist modernity. Instead of conceiving of modernity as a level playing field for various nations, Karl emphasizes the hierarchical nature of global space in the modern world. She contends that Chinese nationalists developed nationalism as they viewed their position in the world-system, a position that entailed struggling against imperialism and colonialism. Karl points out that since Chinese intellectuals developed their nationalism based on an awareness of their structural location in global space, they naturally supported...