The international relations of the ‘imagined community’: Explaining the late nineteenth-century genesis of theChinesenation

Abstract

Benedict Anderson'sImagined Communitieshas long been established as one of the major contributions to theories of nations and nationalism. Anderson located the rise of national identities within a long-evolving crisis of dynastic conceptions of identity, time, and space, and argued print-capitalism was the key cultural and economic force in the genesis of nations. This article offers a critical appropriation and application of Anderson's theory through two steps. Firstly, it evaluates the conceptual underpinning of his approach through an engagement with recent scholarship on the ‘theory of uneven and combined development’. The fruits of this interchange provide a deeper analytical framework to account for what Anderson calls the ‘modularity’ of national identity, that is, its universal spread across the globe. Modularity is now reconceptualised as a product of combined development with its causal efficacy derived from the latent dynamics of a geopolitically fragmented world. The latter gave shape and form to the new national communities. Secondly, this revised framework is applied to the emergence of Chinese national identity in the late nineteenth century. This allows Chinese nationalism to be recast as an ideological amalgam of indigenous and imported elements that emerged out of the crisis-ridden encounter between Imperial China and Western imperialism in the nineteenth century.

Sovereignty regimes in the South China Sea: assessing contemporary Sino-US relations

“…And one could fruitfully source this political project in the peculiarly potent ethnic component of nationalist Chinese discourse formed in the late nineteenth-century ferment of colonial encroachment, anti-imperialism, and economic stagnation -traces of which are still evident in, for instance, the contemporary Chinese use of minzu as a racially infused importation of the word nation (Cooper 2015). There is much to be said for an argument that plays on the significance of the "remembered history" (Zhao 2015) of China's imperial past updated through the socialist lens of recent history, particularly its serial humiliations (Callahan 2015), to reclaim China's place in the world and popular legitimation of the regime at home in China (one of the key objectives of the current leadership; Johnson 2015).…”

Deciphering the modern Janus: societal multiplicity and nation-formation

“…But is this thesis not fatally contradicted by the numerous cases of potent nationalist movements and successful nation(state) formation in countries with no, or very limited, levels of capitalist development; the same circumstance, which has, as I argued above, frustrated modernist attempts at theorising the historical link between nation(alism) and capitalism? Revolutionary France (Shilliam 2009: 30-58), the late Ottoman Empire (Duzgun 2018), late Qajar Iran (Zia-Ebrahimi 2016:12), Mandatory Iraq (Dawisha 2003) and pre-revolutionary China (Cooper 2015) are a few important cases in point.…”

Multiplicity, group identity and the spectre of the social

“…In the last decade, uneven and combined development (UCD) has quickly gained traction in IR theory (Anievas and Matin 2016;Anievas and Nişanciog lu 2015;Cooper 2015;Matin 2007Matin , 2018, thanks in large part to the work of Justin Rosenberg. In accounting for and theorising the distinct causal dimension arising from societal multiplicity-the international itself-the renaissance of UCD has opened up a distinct path for research aimed at grasping 'the enormous constitutive significance of the international for the social world in all its dimensions' (Rosenberg 2016a, 148).…”