Reinventing the Chinese States: Territory, Sovereignty, and the Media of Power in Late Imperial and Modern China

AHA Session 93
Friday, January 6, 2023: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Commonwealth Hall A2 (Loews Philadelphia Hotel, 2nd Floor)
Chair:
Fei-Hsien Wang, Indiana University
Papers:
A Nation Defined by State: Revisiting the Chinese “Guo” through the Image of Yue Fei (1103–1142)
Yue Du, Cornell University
Kokandi Traders, Kirghiz Robbers, and Qing Law in the Qianlong Period, 1736–95
Jaymin Kim, Rice University
Journeys to the Northwest: Lin Pengxia and the Limits of Narration
Will Julian, Harvard University
Geopolitics, Sovereignty, and the Monetary Revolution in Tibet, 1951–62
Yanjie Huang, National University of Singapore
Comment:
Fei-Hsien Wang, Indiana University

Session Abstract

Historians of late imperial and modern China have extensively examined the sovereign and territoriality of the Chinese state from both comparative and local perspectives. The comparative scholars, such as Par Cassel, Tim Brook, and Maria Adele Carrai, contextualize Chinese sovereignty and territoriality in Sino-West political conflicts and intellectual exchanges. The localist scholarship, such as Seonmin Kim’s study of Manchuria and Eric Schluessel’s works on Xinjiang, study how state power interacted with local elites and the environments to create a sovereign space. While both approaches are path-breaking, they usually focus on state power as exercised directly through local agents or interactions with other states. Less examined but equally consequential is the manifold, changing media of powers, when state power was not exercised directly by armies, bureaucracy, and law courts but indirectly by mediating legal, social, and cultural exchanges when formal state institutions were absent or only inchoate. While successive Chinese states often institutionalized changing conceptions of territory and sovereignty through formal coercive means, they also extended sovereignty claims on territories and subjects as a curator of national symbols, a mediator of foreign disputes, a manager of the printing press, and an issuer of legal currency. These ways of mediation were no less critical for articulating sovereignty, maintaining territorial control, and creating political identities than formal state institutions.

All four papers in this panel focus on the mediation of state power in the creation and transformation of sovereignty and territoriality in late imperial and modern China. The media discussed in these papers span from national symbols, print culture, imperial law to paper money. Historicizing the source of Chinese sovereignty, Yue Du traces the changing locus of sovereignty in China from the twelfth century to the present by analyzing the image of the banner of loyalty in late imperial China and the emblem of patriotism in modern China—Yue Fei (1103-1142). Jaymin Kim’s paper analyzes several cases from eighteenth-century Xinjiang in which Qing officials intervened on behalf of Kokandi traders raided by the Kirghiz. As neither people were Qing subjects, the very act of Qing mediation complicates our understanding of sovereignty, highlighting the elasticity of territoriality, subjecthood, and property rights in early modern Asia. Following Lin Pengxia, China’s first female aviator from Nanyang, on her journey to the Northwest in 1932, Julian Will’s paper analyzes how Lin was inscribed into both urban and frontier space to demonstrate how gender and territory came into conversation with one another. Based on archival documents, surveys, memoirs, and oral history, Yanjie Huang examines how the RMB was established as the sovereign currency in Tibet against China’s transformation from a multilayered imperial state to a modern party-state. Altogether, these papers seek to uncover from a global comparative historical perspective how late imperial and modern Chinese states mediated their sovereign power within and beyond the shifting boundary of actual or imagined territories.

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