After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885-1924 by Peter Zarrow (review)

As China, and other non-Western societies became deeply entangled with the global capitalist system, fundamental transformation began to take place in the political, economic, and social realms of these societies. In the Chinese case, the transition from a universal empire (the Qing dynasty) to a nation-state with defined political boundary (Republic of China) exemplified the local inflection of such global transformations.

The envisioning of a Republic was rendered possible through new conceptual categories like “citizen”, “democracy”, “equality”, “popular rights”, and the diminishing of the notion universal empire in Confucian tradition. Peter Zarrow’s finely argued and cogently presented After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885-1924 serves the purpose of interrogating these ideas and their meanings in the Chinese political discourse.

As Zarrow’s research demonstrates, the manifold transformation took place in several realms, from empire to nation-states, subject of the Qing to citizen of the new Republic. Chapter one discusses the conservative political reformism of Kang Youwei, whose constitutional monarchism upheld the Confucian emperor as the sole source of political legitimacy. For conservative reformers like Kang, Zarrow points out, the primary concern was “protect the country, protect the race and protect the teaching” (p. 57). Chapter two pertains to Kang’s disciple, Liang Qichao, who eventually diverged from his mentor’s Confucian monarchism, and advocated for a state constituted by national citizens. The emergence of a public sphere, and the ever-expanding participation of people from all walks of life, including low-ranking gentry, educated urban dwellers, women from the upper class and so on, formulated the notion of national citizen in late Qing.

The next three chapters (3, 4 and 5) deal with the intricate relation between nationalism and statism in the state-building project commenced during the late Qing era. It is in this part that Zarrow scrutinizes the transition from universal empire, embodied in the Qing imperial rule, to a “sovereign territorialized state”. Accompanying this process was the formulation of racial and national consciousness.

The late Qing and early Republican era was characterized by the indelible marks of Social Darwinism. Among the early revolutionary, a foremost task was to apply the borrowed Social Darwinism in their interpretation of the indigenous conditions, namely China’s backwardness in the arena of global capitalism. The epistemological break with Confucianism eventually allowed the increasing radicalization of revolution thinking.

At the early stage, revolutionaries could only be distinguished from the more conservative reformers by the former’s anti-Manchu sentiment. Hence, the early revolutionary ideas of republicanism, and even socialism, were associated with the anti-Manchu, anti-dynastic sentiment. With the transitory success in the founding of the Republic of China, the revolutionaries changed to a strategy that aimed at organizing a unitary nation-state through the incorporation of the five races (Han Chinese, Manchus, Mongolians, Tibetans and Hui Muslims) into “an ethnic-based state” and “turn imperial subjects into citizens who felt the mutual bonds of national fellowship” (p. 284).

The last three chapters (6, 7 and 8) illustrate that the irreversible 1911 Revolution not only embarked on the state-building process in the Republican era, but it also, more significantly, inaugurated the fundamental transformation in the intellectual realm. New social and intellectual trends, such as Social Darwinism, beliefs in “rights” and “equality”, adoption of linear and progressive notion of history, began to overshadow and surpass the millennium Confucian traditions of emperorship and the Sino-centric notion of “All Under Heaven”. Despite this pervasive transformation in all political, economic, social, and cultural realms, it did not imply a rupture from China’s imperial and Confucian past. The remnants of the imperial past lingered on, and resurfaced in Yuan Shikai’s attempt to restore the dynastic rule by claiming himself the new emperor of China in 1916 with the reign title of Hongxian (Glorious Constitution). Yuan’s misjudgment that “ideology and rituals of emperorship continued to resonate” predestined the fatal failure...