“Civilization” or “Empire”? : “China” as a Historical Entity in Contestation

Two distinct approaches have shaped the landscape of modern Chinese historical studies. One approach is the civilization-to-nation thesis, which examines modern China's difficult emergence out of its supposedly cohesive civilizational past, a past that could be shared across different groups of people in contemporary China. The other approach—that is, the empire-to-nation thesis—focuses on China's national rise from the disjointed colonial empire of the Qing (and, to a lesser degree, the Ming), a transformation through which China has become the metropolitan center that enacts structural imperial control over different local or ethnic groups across its territorial domains. This article discusses the epistemic capacities, limits, and distortions of both approaches by examining their historiographical and political implications through different historical configurations of late-imperial China and the resubstantiation of national histories in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Although the empire-to-nation approach has become more or less the standard in Western academia over the past three decades, I argue that these two approaches are both essentialist, although in decidedly different ways. In doing so, I call for a more reflective and vibrant perspective on historical China, a perspective that focuses on the lived historical experiences of the diverse groups of people who are not really confined by totalizing and essentializing national subjectivities.