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

This book is a study of political culture in China's transition from the millennial imperial monarchy to the quest for a modern nation-state. The subject, and Zarrow's treatment of it, are multidimensional. The old polity was embedded in popular and elite psychology and morality, as well as a Confucian cosmology with religious overtones, buttressed by ideologically sanctioned social hierarchies and expressed both in governing institutions and laws and in a variety of rituals and symbols. Moreover, its claim to universality legitimated the rule of a conquest dynasty that belonged to the small Manchu ethnic minority, whereas a modern nation-state would demand a dominant role for the overwhelming Han majority.

Under the pressure of foreign threats and humiliations, and the inundation of modern knowledge and ideas, reformers and revolutionaries pursued the survival of a newly defined nation by locating sovereignty in the people and mobilizing their strength as citizens, no longer the loyal and obedient subjects of the emperor. The emperor was first reduced to an organ of the state and eventually jettisoned altogether. Then, as Zarrow points out, civil ceremonies replaced the Son of Heaven's sacrifices to Heaven. When Heaven's representative on earth disappeared, Heaven itself lost its power, and the social and moral norms previously supported by their cosmological matrix were challenged or enlisted as civic virtues essential to the sovereign people of the nation-state. "But the transition to modern politics," writes Zarrow, "was less about popular sovereignty than the loss of belief in any kind of kingly divinity" (292).

In such an ambitious synthesis, Zarrow must inevitably rely on earlier monographic research, but he also brings his own reading of the evidence to bear on his questions. In a familiar intellectual-biographical vein, he analyzes the evolving thought of such seminal and influential advocates as Kang Yuwei and Liang Qichao, and, to a lesser extent, Tan Sitong, Zhang Binglin, Yan Fu, and the less well-known Yang Du. Careful re-examination and comparative analysis of their ideas, and the foreign sources on which they drew, yields the best and most carefully nuanced survey currently available of the logical necessities and possibilities governing the debates about national identity and constitutional forms, the roles of culture and ethnicity, and processes and prospects of nation-building. The discourse analysis based on these well-known iconic figures is further reinforced by Zarrow's fresh readings and wide-ranging citations of the contemporary public media.

Zarrow also goes beyond these familiar methods, attending to facets of material culture (costume, uniform, postage stamps, and flags), and the conversion of the imperial palace, with its art treasures, into the new National Palace Museum. His attention to ritual, ceremony, and celebration—new in the study of China's early twentieth-century political culture—draws on the anthropological interpretations of their ideological and symbolic significance in dynastic China and elsewhere in Asia and the Western world. All of these approaches contribute to a compelling case for placing political debates in a context of much broader and more profound cultural upheaval, in which the revolution of 1911 marks a more significant watershed than the strident iconoclasm of the New Culture Movement that climaxed eight years later.

Less satisfying are Zarrow's forays into political psychology, dealing with the roles of trauma memory, anxiety, and displacement in shaping attitudes toward political change. One wishes that he had explored further the ancient, persistent, and arguably more emotionally powerful orientations to authority and the group. The sociologist Fei Xiaotong's suggestion that the Communist Party fulfilled a longing for a good emperor may be too simple, but it is important (295). Even more important was the transfer of the heavy obligation of filial piety in the family to the nation. Regardless of this complaint, interdisciplinary historians and the modern China field will be grateful to Zarrow for this major contribution.