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65 Few periods in Chinese history were more tumultuous than the seventeen years from 1895 to 1911. In every aspect of social, political, and cultural life, the advent of global modernity fueled drastic changes. The momentum of these changes started in the mid-nineteenth century. After the Opium Wars, Euro-American and Japanese powers of colonial expansion increasingly encroached on the Manchu empire of the Qing with demands for political and territorial concessions, trade expansion, and the right to spread foreign culture and religion in China. Armed with treaties from their home countries signed under duress by the Qing government, Western missionaries, merchants, and diplomats came to China with their respective agendas. Together, they presented a world of new technology, social practices, and radically new concepts to the Chinese, altering Chinese cosmology and the Chinese perception of the world and themselves, and transforming the whole Chinese way of life. The Xinzheng (新政, New Policies) program of political reforms, initiated by the Qing dynasty’s highest authorities in 1902, was part and parcel of this time of change. On the surface, the project stood for the Qing state’s response to the social and cultural tumult by exerting leadership in guiding its subjects out of the turbulence and confusion. The reform government purported to embrace the new knowledge and technology in order to fortify and preserve the old values and orientation, and it upheld the famous axiom “Chinese learning for the essence, Western learning for the application” (中學為體, 西學為用; zhongxue wei ti, xixue wei yong). The logic of this formula held that modernization should strengthen, rather than alter, the foundations of Chinese culture. In reality, the Xinzheng program soon became a total overhaul of government organization and state apparatus. In 1906, when the Qing promulgated a plan to transform 2 Redeploying Confucius The Imperial State Dreams of the Nation, 1902–1911 Ya-pei Kuo 郭亞珮 UC-Yang-rev.indd 65 UC-Yang-rev.indd 65 8/27/2008 1:01:42 PM 8/27/2008 1:01:42 PM 66 / Ya-pei Kuo the imperial system into a constitutional monarchy, it transpired that the reforms had become a full acknowledgment of the force of the new. The most enduring institution in Chinese history, the dynastic empire, was to be replaced with an openly imported system. The Xinzheng program was a government-orchestrated effort to implement a new vision of modernity in China. Many historians have interpreted this effort as a desperate strategy of regime survival at the expense of virtually all of its institutional heritage. Yet even those who hold this opinion do not deny the project’s formidable legacy. The thorough revamping of government structure, the compilation of new legal code, and the creation of Western-style schools all departed sharply from the past model and laid the structural foundation for later state formation (Reynolds 1993; MacKinnon 1983). And many of the Xinzheng initiatives introduced what Michel Foucault famously identified as modern political technologies for social discipline and engineering. Institutions such as the prison, the educational system, and the police force were inaugurated, and would become permanent features of the Chinese state apparatus from this point onward (Dikötter 2002; Bailey 1990; MacKinnon 1975). Through these devices, the Xinzheng reforms established a new regime of statecraft and envisioned a modern state that would be both expansive and extractive. Although the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 abruptly forestalled the full implementation of these reforms, the new vision provided the blueprint for later phases of state formation. The most radical departure of the Xinzheng program from the past was an overt embracing of nationalism. The monarchical empire expressly attempted to engineer its own transformation into a nation-state of mass citizenry. In stretching “the short, tight skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire,” the motive behind the Xinzheng program was indeed what Benedict Anderson calls an “official nationalism” that aimed to “combine naturalization with retention of dynastic power” (1991:86) by appropriating the image of the nation into the empire’s self-representation.1 However, in contrast to the European examples on which Anderson bases his analysis, the Qing government’s deployment of the nation was not “an anticipatory strategy adopted by dominant groups who are threatened with marginalization or exclusion from an emerging nationally-imagined community” (Anderson 1991:101). In 1902, print capitalism and the imagined community barely existed in China. Still, the imperial state shifted its claims to legitimacy to a focus on the representation of China as...

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