China from Empire to Nation-State by Hui Wang (review)

Wang begins with two central questions: What is “modern China”? And can the concepts of “empire” and “nation-state” help us answer the first question? Michael Gibbs Hill provides an accurate and smooth translation of the introduction to Wang’s four-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought. It is best read not as a typical introduction to a typical monograph (which Rise is not), but as a somewhat free-floating, reflective essay on how we have, how we might, and how we should understand “China.” Wang’s approach owes something to Edward Said’s Orientalism, but Wang takes ideas more seriously, and his “we” includes both Western scholars of China and Chinese themselves since about the nineteenth century.

In places brilliantly insightful, always stimulating, and sometimes infuriating, this book presents a very complex version of the story “from empire to nation-state”—complex and seemingly contingent. On the one hand, Wang seems to see vast forces at work, both indigenous developments and outside colonialism, shaping potential Chinese modernities. On the other, Wang rejects the notion of linear progress, seeing various developments “rising” from time to time. In my reading, Wang wishes to transcend the old problematique of the “failure” of China (and also thereby to problematize its contemporary “success”). Yet in the end Wang is hardly clear about where we can find China’s national modernity, and while we may ask whether Western modernity (capitalism, industry, nation-state) is the only modernity, any vision of alternatives remains hazy indeed. After reading (rereading) this book, this reader, at least, still did not learn Wang’s answers to the two questions above. This is thus a book about the journey, not the destination.

Wang begins with an insightful historiographical analysis of two major frame-works for understanding China: as agrarian empire (backward, pre-capitalist, weak but despotic) associated with Western Orientalism and the Fairbank school, versus East Asian modernity (meritocratic, commercialized, urbanized, and bureaucratized) associated with the Kyoto school. Here Wang spends some time kicking dead horses but goes beyond critique to highlight certain premises shared by these schools and by modern Chinese intellectuals as well.

Second, Wang attempts to analyze the nature of the Chinese empire (帝國 diguo) using a kind of evidential studies methodology rather like that of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte). The problem is that while it becomes clear that diguo existed in a semantical field different from that, say, of the Roman imperium (and not at all like the notion of “empire” brought to China by Westerners in the nineteenth century), Wang fails to apply a typology of political forms that might sort out what has been at stake in discourses of empire. As Wang points out, Chinese Marxists inherited a discourse from Hegel and Adam Smith that equated capitalism and modernity with the non-despotic, non-imperial nation-state—leading Marxists to similar conclusions about the crisis of the Qing state as those of the Fairbank school. Yet when Wang states that “unified empires always tend toward using centralized power to govern the state” (59), this seems misleading, for it misses the balances of powers that distinguish empires from modern states and are perhaps invisible to modern eyes. And if we deny the usefulness of the empire-nation binary, such reflections about empire are not necessary in the first place.

In his third chapter, the most historically substantive of the book, Wang lays out the distinction he makes between the premodern concept of Heavenly Principle (天理 tianli) and the modern concept of Universal Principle (公理 gongli). Simplifying, the former referred to “a universal set of values for a moral-political community” (61) and, as Wang could do more to emphasize, was based on a particular cosmology and metaphysics. The latter referred to a scientific and progressive perspective that formed the basis for a modern nationalist ideology. I suspect that Universal Principle is better seen as a development of Heavenly Principle than as a rejection of it—a new term that signified...