Cruz Guan analyzes the collision of different territorial imaginations of China in foreign and Chinese maps. Focusing on maps drawn by Chinese, Japanese, and Western cartographers, Cruz demonstrates that the nascent Chinese nation-state emerged not solely through domestic efforts but as a contested space where global imperialism and local agendas interacted. Symbols, borders, and omissions of specific regions on these maps reveal how cartographic choices advanced geopolitical aims, embedding China within transnational discourses while confronting fragmented sovereignty.

Xue Zhang investigates the 1930s clash in visuality between modern and traditional cartographic methods. Xue suggests that Ding Wenjiang’s “scientific” New Atlas of Province-Based China, which faced criticism for abandoning qualitative texts, sparked a debate about China’s broader struggle with modernity. Xue then traces how nineteenth-century pressures to adopt Western visual standards (e.g., scale maps) coexisted with enduring textual hybrids like tuzhi(illustrative gazetteers). This tension reveals a society negotiating measurement and meaning, where modernity did not erase tradition but stimulated its reinvention.

Yu-chi Chang explores the Nationalist Government’s 1920s–30s campaigns to standardize maps, driven by fears of foreign exploitation and internal disunity. By censoring “fallacy maps,” promoting state surveys, and gatekeeping “correct” territorial knowledge, the government sought to foster patriotism and assert sovereignty—particularly in disputed zones like Yunnan-Burma. Yu-chi frames these cartographic efforts as defensive and ideological, revealing how cartographic control became central to nation-building in a fractured post-imperial order.

Shifting the focus from land to the ocean, Sijian Wang’s research examines China’s nineteenth-century descriptions of coastal navigation routes. Focusing on a compilation of maps and texts in Jiangsu Haiyun Quan’an, her study explores the Qing Empire’s efforts to update, textualize, and standardize nearshore knowledge. Sijian’s research illustrates how oceanic space was bureaucratized, merging local practices with state control and leveraging hybrid knowledge systems to reimagine China’s coastal sovereignty amid ecological and economic crises.

The four papers of this panel offer a cohesive framework for rethinking modern China’s spatial imaginations by positioning cartography at the nexus of governance, knowledge production, and nation-building. Together, the panelists move beyond the traditional focus on text and presents cultural production as crossing boundaries between tradition and modernity, textual and visual spheres, as well as intellectuals’ and commoners’ worlds.