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Hello, and welcome to another episode of New Books in Chinese Studies. I'm your host, Julia Kablinska, and I'm joined here today by Professor Julia Schneider, so two Julia's. We will be talking about Professor Schneider's book, Nation and Ethnicity, Chinese Discourses on History, History, and Nationalism, which was published with Brill in 2017. The book is an erudite study of early 20th century theories of Chinese nationalism, and by erudite I really mean it.
It's such a commendable effort to make sure everything is footnoted, and you can look up all these sources and confirm how much work Professor Schneider has done. In the book, she considers the writings of Qing Reformers, the Achi Ciao, of course, and complicates received narratives about anti-manture revolutionaries, John Taian and Yol Shapei, as well as traces of their earlier writings of Republican era theories of nation and assimilation that informed historiography and textbook writing in this period. Reconsiling the idea of a quote Chinese nation with quote China, a variously construed geographic entity occupied and ruled in large part by non-haun ethnicities throughout its years of history, becomes a key problem in these thinkers' writings. The Antitel's Assimilation Thesis, a theory that assumes non-haun groups become culturally subsumed by China as they rule over it, gains critical currency, as Schneider shows in her thorough analysis of all these sources.
Nation and ethnicity is a long volume that will delight serious scholars in its meticulous detail, attention to language and translation. The ethical stakes raised by Schneider's project, however, should interest abroad audience working in Chinese studies. In the podcast, we will lay out Schneider's arguments, theories of nationalism that inform her work, and the historical context against which her protagonists wrote. While new to this podcast, the book has been out for several years, so in addition to learning about this monograph, we will also get to hear about some of the new publications that Professor Schneider has been producing in a recent article in our recent presentation on Chinese nationalism.
So, Julia, welcome to the podcast. I wonder if we can start first with a little bit of a biography and introduction, learning more about your background. Thank you so much, Julia. First of all, for having me in this podcast and for giving me the opportunity to talk about my work.
This is great. My background is classical synology, as we call it then. I actually began to study modern synology and then changed to classical synology because the earlier history just seemed more interesting to me and I also wanted to get a thorough education in reading classical Chinese texts. When I studied in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the B.A.M.A system actually hadn't been introduced to German universities yet.
I studied in Hyderabad University. And all you could do was an MA, so either you went through with it or you had nothing at all at the end. And in classical synology, we would usually be, well, I think in my year it was only me who graduated. So, it was a very, very small field and I think it still is actually, it's a very small field at least in Europe.
So, I studied classical synology, learned about Chinese history and in one of my seminars we read Pamela Crossley's Thinking About Ethnicity. And in this text, which I found very fascinating, very interesting, she actually hints at the fact that a study would be needed to see how the, the synocization theory, what I call, usually I call an assimilation theory in my book. That this synocization theory needs more studying and more historical context when it actually developed. When did Chinese thinkers come up with this idea that synocization was a valid way to integrate people into an identity group and then of course also into the nation.
So, this is what led me to my PhD topic. Another thing is that I did my MA thesis about the Georgian dynasty in the 12th and 13th centuries. And I revisited a lot of Chinese academic literature that was written about the Georgian in the 20th century and also Western literature. And it struck me as a bit strange that the Georgian were described as the foremost example of a synthesized dynasty of a so-called foreign conquest dynasty that was then synthesized and so on and so forth.
This is a typical pattern of course to describe non-Chinese dynasties. And I revisited the sources from, usually not from the Jintimes, they are from the Jintimes and later and my conclusion was actually a different one. And I thought, okay, this is not a synthesized dynasty. It's just a narrative that emerged someone in the 20th century.
So that was the other strand that brought me to my PhD thesis or the topic of my PhD because I thought it's going to be interesting to see when did this narrative pattern of synocization, particularly of non-Chinese dynasties, but then also of non-Chinese peoples in general living in the closest surroundings of the Chinese, when did that actually emerge as such a strong pattern in Chinese historiography. Well, thank you so much. And I have been remiss. I have not told our readers yet.
In fact, a little bit more about your intellectual journey via institution. So I wanted to underscore that Dr. Schneider indeed holds a PhD in Synology from Genton, Gotingan University and is currently a professor at the College of Cork University College Cork. University College Cork, apologies.
The European system is always something that needs translation on my end. Yes. So now that we have a little introduction that tells us how you came to the project, I was quite taken with the introduction to your book. You lay out a very complex academic field, the study of nationalism, and undoubtedly a field that will only become more complex and more relevant in our current situation.
I will admit that I needed to think very carefully about how best to phrase each one of my questions because so many of the terms in the book are quite slippery and not as self-evident as they seem. Can you start by telling us why the nation and nationalism are so tricky to define in regard to one another? Thank you very much for this question. And thanks, that you like my introduction.
When I handed in the book, I actually thought, oh god, it's too long. It's actually not a real introduction. It's more like, I don't know. But when I wrote it, I just, yeah, I had the same feeling that you just described.
I just couldn't do it in less words because it is such a complex concept or they are because both the concept of nation and the concept of nationalism are important. So on the one hand, both these concepts are, in my understanding, very empty. They are not perceived with any meaning at all, I would say. So they are, when I use them in my book, I usually do not give my own definitions because I actually don't have a definition of these two terms, but I explain how individuals define these terms, how they use them in their texts.
And that doesn't mean that it gets less slippery because it really depends on the individual person, but also on the time they're writing in, on the context of their political agenda, how they understand the nation and nationalism. And they might actually change their view over time as happened in the case of Tran-Tayana in particular. The nation and nationalism, I think, are particularly tricky when it comes to China because of the terminology. And as you know, nation is usually translated as min-zu in Chinese.
But min-zu is not really only nation, it's rather the ethanol nation in contrast to Guatia, which is the state nation. And I think it's quite telling, however, that the term min-zu stuck to create the term min-zu-jui. Whereas, of course, in the Japanese thinkers, political thinkers who analyze the question of nationalism would often use both Guatia-tui, the state nationalism, and min-zu-jui, ethanol nationalism. But the Chinese political thinkers, for some reason, thought that min-zu-jui would be more suitable to their needs or in regard to what they understood to be the nation.
And the nation, obviously, in their understanding, is an ethanol nation that is a nation defined by ethnic identity. Now, ethnicity can be, it's also very slippery. It's a bit clearer than nation, I would say. But it's very much based on subjective identity markers.
And both nation and ethnicity, or the ethanol nation, are concepts that rely on belief only. You will never be able to know everyone that shares a nationalist identity with you, but you have to, like, van-t-de-g, understand the story. And you have to, like, van-de-g, understand the point that you have to imagine this shared identity. And at the same time, if you ask a single member of one nation what they think the nation is, you will get single answers to that.
And there will be overlaps, but it's usually, it can be very diverse. So I think this is what makes these concepts of nation a nationalist and so slippery, because there is no definition of them that will hold all definitions that have been made. So as I'm not a nationalist, I don't have to give a definition, I feel. I am a historian of intellectual history.
I'm not a scientist to describe other people's definitions and to understand what they are doing with these terms, so that they fit into their idea of politics and of, yeah, basically of the future in the case of the Chinese National Stingers. Absolutely. Well, we won't require a definition from you, but I will say that you're right, it is a long introduction. But I do think it lays out the questions very clearly and excessively.
And perhaps with some redaction could even be a good assignment for undergraduate students to read. I hear they can't go past 30 pages a week, at least in my institution. So perhaps not the full 50, but there's some editing that can be done to help ease the process and introduce them to some really great ideas. Okay, but let's move on to something that you've already hinted towards.
China plays an interesting role in these discussions of nationalism and one that has been understudied or underrepresented. So how does it fit into ideas of nationalism that are developed in primarily Western Europe? And more aptly, how does it not fit? And what are you doing?
How are you intervening into that conversation? Yes, thank you. That's a great question. Actually, one reason why I chose the title, the main title of my book, Nation and Ethnicity, was because I wanted to, I don't know, it was kind of stubbornness because all these Western books about nationalism and nations.
They never mention in their titles that they are actually focused on Europe. So they just say nations and nationalism since the 1780s or something like that, not indicating at all that, of course, they won't be discussing anything beyond Europe. So I thought I can do the same. I can also have such a generic main title and then only tell people in the subtitle that what I'm focusing on is actually China.
But of course, at the same time, indicating that studying China or studying non-Europe is just as relevant as studying Europe. Yeah, the history of nationalism studies is quite interesting and I think it has to do with the individual origins of the scholars who began studying nationalism in post-World War II. And a lot of them actually came from families who had been affected or murdered in the Holocaust. So they came from Eastern Europe and they were usually, or many of them were actually against nationalism and had seen the dangers of nationalism.
And of course, they began researching their own surroundings, which would usually be Europe or in many cases also Israel and what happened there. Other parts of the world were just not considered important to the development of nationalist theories. And it was usually claimed that, I mean, with so many theories, not only in political sciences but also in historiography, that the origin is Europe. And then you use this theory maybe with an adjective added to it for other world regions and the same as to for nationalists.
So in Europe, you have these two big brands of nationalism, civic and ethnic, and then this is transferred to other world regions that usually develop, let me put a very bluntly lesser kinds of nationalism. So they are not important to study. And if China is mentioned at all in these books, it's usually misunderstood as the example of a homogeneous nation state and a homogeneous nation in a homogeneous nation state. And of course, I mean, if you look at the numbers and think, yeah, 92% today are the people in the PRC are registered as some Chinese.
It seems to be very homogeneous. Of course, it's not. I mean, the Han are not homogeneous at all. Plus, you have these outnumbered but still very relevant non-Chinese peoples who, at least until recently, lived in vast areas and were quite alone in these areas, right?
I mean, there were not a lot of Chinese settling there. So describing China, no matter if it's the PRC or Republican China or Imperial China as a homogeneous nation or a homogeneous state is just long. But of course, for these books about Europe, it's not relevant at all to look at China. So I think China is very interesting if we want to look at multi-ethnic empires that are transformed into, well, nation states and then have to answer the Soka minority question or nationality question of what to do with the minorities, right?
A question that was posed in Russia, in Austria, Hungary, in wherever you find these multi-ethnic empires. So I think China does have a lot to offer with regard to nationalism studies. Let's make sure that we cross post this episode then with new books in history so that it reaches the audience who maybe are not looking out for nation ethnicity with Chinese characteristics, if I may be so glib. Okay, so as I've already mentioned in this introduction, the idea of assimilation theories play an important role, right?
Sinization theories in the work of Pamela Crossley mentioned, right? What is an assimilation theory? Why do thinkers like the Aptichau insist on bringing quote unquote these barbarians, right? And that's the term that he uses or that is used commonly into the fold.
Why do they matter? Why are they kind of intrinsic actually to the study of Chinese history according to your project? Yeah, well, the assimilation theory or assimilation theories are basically theories that assume that identities of people, usually ethnic or cultural identities of people can be changed, can be transformed. And this idea in the Chinese context, of course, it's centuries old.
You can find this idea already in warring states, period texts. And so I think when Chinese political thinkers in late Qing times read about assimilation theories in Western books on nationalism, they felt, oh, we can relate to that very easily because, of course, if you have a superior cultural people, it automatically transforms, assimilates, the inferior people, the barbarians. So I think the assimilation theory was nothing entirely new to Chinese nationalist thinkers with their culturalist understandings of the world. And at the same time, it provided the perfect solution to the nationalities question.
So what to do with the non-han or the non-Chinese peoples that live in the Qing Empire actually played a very important role in the Qing Empire, what to do with them in a new Chinese nation state? Well, thinkers like the anti-towards, they would just automatically come and be transformed without the state actually having to do much. Now this naive assumption, maybe if the anti-towards not shared by all, for example, things that need to be state guided measures to be put in place to make these people assimilate. What is common to all these latent people think is that they all believe, first of all, that the Chinese are a superior and second, that they have this power to assimilate others.
They only differ on their understanding of if that would be a good idea or not. Now, the anti-towel, I think after I read all his texts that are related to this question of ethnicity, in the end I thought he's actually obsessed with the question of non-Chinese peoples and how to integrate them into the nation state. With the other thinkers, I think it's not as extreme. That on the other hand, the anti-towel had, I mean, he wrote so much that maybe he was obsessed with a lot of things.
So he is absolutely certain that the assimilation theory will work and that the Chinese nation state can truly be Chinese, meaning Han Chinese nation state, or the Chinese culture that's everybody using Chinese script, living according to a Chinese understanding of the way of life, etc. Now, who are these non-Chinese people? They mainly talk about the mantras, of course, as the imperial family and the ruling elites. They also talk about the Mongols.
Similarly, they are also part of the ruling elite. And then of course, Mongolia was a large part or inner and outer Mongolia formed a large part of the Qing Empire, so it was clear that they needed to be integrated or they would lose a large, large region, similar Tibetans. And then people they called Hui, which usually refers to Muslims in general, but I think in their case, it usually refers to Turkic speaking Muslims who today would call them Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, etc, etc. So these are the non-Hang people and they matter, of course, because they occupy, I think, three-fifths of the Qing territory.
So if they couldn't be integrated in some way or other, this would mean that the Chinese nation state would be much smaller than the Qing Empire, and that was obviously not desired. So Chinese political thinkers usually assumed that it was desirable to inherit the Qing Empire's territory, to establish the new Chinese nation state, and thus inherit the multiethnic composition of this empire, then what to do with it in a non-multiethnic nation state. So you've mentioned some other thinkers, in particular the anti-Manchu, Jiang Thayan, but also his anti-Manchu comrade, Yoshipai, are usually construed as thinkers who diverge from the Yang's reformist agendas, but how does he think he informed their ideas about the Chinese nation? So perhaps even you can start with Jiang Thayan, right, whom we've already named Rokta.
Yeah, Jiang Thayan, I mean, he's a very interesting thinker, because he, as I said, I think he maybe changed his opinion or maybe he expressed different opinions for different readerships, I'm not entirely sure which of the two is true, because he does express very different opinions and different texts, and I find it very interesting, because that makes you wonder, okay, did he change his opinion, did he always, you know, why is that? And one of the most well-known texts by Jiang Thayan is, of course, is explaining the Chinese, the Republic of China to Hwami Ghatia, written in 1907. And the interesting thing about this text is that it has been analyzed in a way that seems to indicate that Jiang Thayan did not want the non-Chinese regions to be part of the Chinese nation state, if they decided they wanted to be to found their own nation states. But if you read this text really from beginning till end, it's obvious that he does want these regions to be part of the Chinese nations, that's very clear.
And he does not only want them to be part of the Chinese nations state, but also he wants the Tibetans, the German Muslims, and the Mongols to assimilate to Chinese ways, Chinese language, writing, political thinking, what she calls political thinking, etc, etc. And he even has a time plan saying that it would take about 20 years to make this assimilation complete until, so as long as the assimilation is not complete, these people can of course not participate fully in the nation states politics or in the government, but then after most they could. So I think Jiang Thayan is an, and maybe you have noticed that I have not mentioned the Manchus because he doesn't mention the Manchus in his text. The Manchus are an exception, so to speak, from the non-Chinese people in his opinion, because the Manchus are of course the absolute villains in his understanding, right?
They are autocratic, they are despotic, they have mismanaged the Qing Empire, which he understands the Chinese Empire, so they are not really worth to be integrated in the Chinese nation. So he doesn't clearly say in this text what he wants to do with them, but it's clear that he doesn't really believe in their assimilation. Well, he doesn't really tell what he thinks would happen to them after a Chinese nation state is founded, but anyway, so he has these different approaches to the Manchus and the other three. What is interesting though is that although he refers to the other three seemingly individually, in the end they are just all Bavarians and they are on the same non-civilized non-cultivated level and need education, they need help from the superior Chinese to be lifted up to another level.
So to speak. So, Don Taiyen, I would argue in the end came to the conclusion that it was desirable to integrate these people into a future Chinese nation state. I would guess because of, or I think because he knew that the bigger the territory, the larger the population, the stronger the nation. Now, Yutupe had a different idea.
Of course, Yutupe also believed in the superiority of the Chinese people, and he also even believed in their ability to assimilate, only disagreed with Don Taiyen and Yangtichao, and the fact that he thought assimilated in the world. But assimilating non-Chinese people would delude the Chinese essence, the national essence of the Chinese, so it would be bad to integrate too many non-Chinese people because this would just pollute Chinese culture and identity. But I think at the end what is interesting is that they all share, of course, this absolute belief in Chinese superiority, cultural superiority. A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my card doesn't get stolen.
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One of the big new ideas that circulating in China at the end of the 19th century and that really informs the collapse of the Mountruh Empire is the social Darwinism, which had been imported, of course, to China by Enfus translation of Spencer. How does this evolutionary theory intersect with these declensionist theories of Tianxia are all under heaven? The clench by the clenchist, I mean, of course, the Manchis are losing their mandate at this moment. Yes, absolutely.
So first of all, I think Tianxia and social Darwinism are similar in that they assume a hierarchy, a hierarchy of peoples. So you have people who are like the Chinese who are culturally, but for something is also racially superior to others. And then you have other people who are inferior, both racially and culturally. And I think that this idea of cultural superiority is very strong in the Tianxia concept, but it is a, I think the racial idea is disguised already there.
So it's already in the Tianxia concept. There's already this idea that there could also be a racial superiority. Not all thinkers would follow that, but there are thinkers, at least from Ming and Qing times, who did argue in that way, that there was a racially ingrained superiority of the Chinese people, which means in the end means if superiority is racially ingrained, then it's more difficult to assimilate others because it's difficult to change a race, where it's easier to change a culture. And I think these two concepts of the understanding of Tianxia, with its culturalist idea of the Chinese at the center of cultivation and civilization, and then the others surrounding them in circles and the further apart these circles are from the center, the further removed these peoples are from from culture and civilization.
That this fit quite well with social Darwinism and the idea of who is supposed to guide the others, to dominate the others, and not only supposed, but who has the right to do that legitimately. And in social Darwinism, we also find this idea that there are just people who are stronger than others, or fitter than others, and they are then legitimately allowed to dominate these others and to tell them what to do. So now maybe we can take a step back even further from the book to ask about the impact of this assimilation theory that you've described on Chinese historiography, both the history of the U.S. but also on the modern discipline of history in the Chinese context that has emerged in this early 20th century, and how it is practiced today.
What are the stakes of what you're saying, even for you as a scholar? I think the assimilation theory in Chinese historiography hasn't really been questioned much. So you can find it as a very normal reference in history textbooks in particular that emerged in the 1920s and afterwards. So by the 1930s, it's totally accepted, absolutely normal narrative, to talk about non-Chinese peoples as being assimilated peoples, in particular about the non-Chinese dynasties.
And of course today this just continues. So non-Chinese dynasties, non-Chinese peoples that live within the PRC today are either described as already being assimilated and synthesized, or as being in the process of being synthesized and assimilated. And by that narrative, what happens, I think, are at least two things. On the one hand, it legitimizes why or it explains and justifies why a Chinese government can rule all these non-Chinese people and dominate them basically.
But at the same time, it also implements this narrative deeply into the, for example, school children's understanding of history. So they will not question this narrative, of course not. I mean, if you have been studying this since class one of history, then of course you believe it, right? There are no alternative histories told.
So the assimilation theory is politically important because it explains why the situation is fine as it is, and why nationalism is so to speak, not for everyone. I mean, the basic theory of nationalism being that every nation has the right to establishment nation state. And obviously there are people who are either not really nations, like from the Chinese perspective that would be the Tibetan say. And so this has to be explained.
Why are these people not allowed to have their own nation state? So why is this really, why is China a Chinese nation state? So I think this is the main use of the assimilation theory. And for me as a scholar, yeah, I mean, it's very problematic.
And I'm reading articles about school education and history in contemporary China is just, to be honest, very depressing because it is so nationalist. And I think nowadays we already see the consequences of that. Well, I don't want to go too far, but with, for example, Chinese students coming to Europe to study, there's often a clash because they have been learning all these assimilation theories and these ideas of culture superiority, blah, blah, blah. And you have to somehow de-educate, or I don't know, it's nearly impossible to eradicate that and tell a new story because it is so strongly ingrained in them.
So the historical context we're living in is quite tumultuous for yourself now as a writer of Chinese history and the teacher of Chinese history. But one of the through lines of your book is really the tunnel of history, the context of history that is informing all of these writings and all of these ideas about nationalism. Perhaps maybe if we can think optimistically, we'll allow things to change in a positive way, looking toward the future. But not looking towards the future, looking towards the past.
One of the things that I found attractive in your book as somebody who works primarily with things like literary form is the attention that you have paid to the writing itself. So if you could humor me, can you feel that kind of tumult in the writing? Like, as you're reading, is there this sort of trace of that kind of material background of the history that they're living through? Well, on the one hand, so I think it's to me it was visible mainly indirectly by the gap between basically the Hineive Evolution and the early 1900s or late 1910s, or after you enter Caistat.
So I think this was just a period of kneeling, I mean, they must have written texts, I guess they did, but they didn't publish a lot. And I think that's interesting. What I find equally interesting is that maybe because of that gap, only very few thinkers made it from being widely published in late Ching Times and still being widely published in the 1920s, and I would say L'Anci Charles, one of the few. Although I'm not so sure if people in the 1920s were still so attracted to what he had to say because there were, of course, other things on offer like communism for its Marxism.
In anti-chouse writing, and that is interesting, you can't really see that change. And that's why I'm not sure his writings were still very attractive in the 1920s because he seems to have been in a, you know, like he had slept for the last decade and then just awakens in the 1920s and still thinks that the assimilation theory totally works and that everything just needs time and then it's going to sort itself out, which obviously wasn't the case. I mean, by then Tibet had declared independence, Mongolia had declared independence, Xinjiang was ruled quasi independently by warlord, etc, etc. So I think the main thing is that these thinkers, that we have a shift of thinkers all the time between the Xinhai and revolution and May 4th.
Yeah. Okay, so speaking of the so-called other that impacts the development of Chinese history, Japan, of course, is important. It's a place that many thinkers had to flee, but it's even much more than just a safe haven. It's also a place where these Chinese thinkers come into contact with modern Japanese ideas about Chinese history, which are, of course, strongly informed by modern ideas that are coming from Europe.
And one area of historical inquiry that Japanese scholars seem to be thinking a lot about is periodization. You talk about these currentization schemes in one of your chapters, even even there's even a very fun table with various propositions. But, you know, of course, like immediately shows us the degree to which these things are as, I don't want to call them fully empty, but like malleable. What is the import of periodization?
Why do we care about that? Why is there such an intense need to periodize and what do Chinese thinkers accept and reject from the Japanese periodization of Chinese history? Oh, I'm so glad you like the table. I had immense fun driving it actually.
Because it shows you in one second how chaotic the periodization was, and that was an all straightforward way to periodize Chinese history at all. And I think that still isn't. I mean, we use points like Chinese antiquity, and sometimes we also say, I don't know, medieval China, but it's very loose. It's still not entirely clear.
Actually, we might have used these terms. So I think I can just give a short answer. I'm conscious of time. I think they wanted to be modern by using a European concept, usually of a threefold periodization, and they just wanted to make it work.
So they all thought different arguments and structures and ways to just take this European periodization, which was clearly developed for European history. And even there, I guess it doesn't fit all histories in Europe. And use it for Chinese history in order to show that Chinese history wasn't an equal standing with Western history. I think this is the main reason why they did it.
Yeah, and then of course, the Japanese intervention here to position Japan vis-a-vis that received history of China, but also these new ideas from the West. So for those who are curious about that process, I really encourage you to take a look at the book. Another one of those, Joyce, the reading here, is the attention to language, which is, of course, in Tamil to in this period, right? It shifts away from classical forms and classical language.
There's an adoption of new terms, which are often the so-called reverse loans from Japanese. And the emergence of a national vernacular means that you're dealing with a very hybrid textual field. Especially since language is in motion, you are careful in your translations. Can you tell us maybe practically how one can deal with such linguistic complexity?
I'm sure you're not the only scholar working on China who has to think about how many different synonyms of this particular term exist and what they mean precisely. So how do we make sure that our analysis is rigorous in this type of situation? For me, the most important thing was that I was able to add the original Chinese to every quote I had, but I made in the book. Because I want to give the readers the possibility to re-read the Chinese original if they have the ability to do that.
And because translation can be so tricky, particularly when it comes to this time, as you just described, not only because of this wide variety of different styles of writing, vernacular and classical and mixture usually of both, but also because the terms are so tricky. And because they use the same terms with very different meanings, and that's particularly true of nation, nationalism, race, racism, and not racism, state, etc. So this is why I really wanted to make sure that everybody could see what I have been doing in my translations. And I do miss that in a lot of books I have to admit.
So many books, either they just paraphrase or they give you a translation, but they don't tell you what the Chinese original is. And that is problematic sometimes when it's a difficult issue. And when it's about concepts and what terms matter, I think it's better for the reader to see for themselves. Okay, so let's say we've dealt with all this linguistic complexity and we have a national language figured out, which of course I mean that there is the establishment of vernacular.
Perhaps not everybody knows how to read it. Perhaps people are still trying to decide exactly how it functions, but nevertheless it starts to be published in, especially importantly in the production of textbooks, right? The kind of newspapers of nationalism speak, right? We all read them in the same language so we can feel we're in the same nation.
What story do these textbooks play in your book? These textbooks mainly come through the form or mainly analyze in my last chapter where I use them to show what became of the assimilation theory basically. So how did this theory, which was introduced by the Antichao in its nationalist version? Yeah, how did it develop in the 1920s?
The textbooks of that time show quite clearly that by then the assimilation theory had to become an established narrative. And I actually continue this in a recent article published last year in the Journal of Asian History where I go through the 1930s and 1940s to show even more textbooks and how they make use of the assimilation theory. Because I found that the examples I give in my book might not be enough to convince some readers that this really is an established narrative and had become one certainly by the 1930s at the latest. So yes, this is how I use these publications and that's also why I focus on chapters that discuss particular sort of foreign-conquered sinuses because how they are described shows very nicely how the assimilation theory is used.
So I was going to ask you about that article later on, but I guess is there anything else you'd like to share about it before we move on to a different question about your more recent work? Actually, I have to admit that I'm not focusing on 20th century China anymore because the topic of nationalist thinking, to be very honest, is really depressing. And looking at what happens in PRC today under Xi Jinping and particularly for the detention camps in Xinjiang and the cultural politics in Tibet, etc. This is something that really depresses me very often.
And so I decided to move back in time, as I said, in a classical synologist, so I have this option. And I actually moved to the 18th century focusing on book censorship of the general emperor and then even before that the books he censored are from the 15th and 16th century. So this is my new focus. I also wrote a piece about the question on if the Qing Empire was a colonial empire because that interested me theoretically, and is also to certainly related to what I have been doing with regard to nationalist historiography.
But this article I've just been referring to from last year, that was so to speak a final findings I had with regard to this nationalism project that I wanted to share. And I was also using a theory from George Agam, which I find very interesting about the hominy, I don't know if you're familiar with that, but maybe that goes beyond the scope of this podcast to explain that in detail. Okay, so readers who have some homework read the article. In your question, in your answer to my question, you bring up the term colonialism and these two terms, Orientalism and colonialism come up towards the end of your book.
They're familiar to us in their Western contexts. What about their relationship to Chinese nationalism? I mean, we think of them as China being the victim of these two historical processes, right? Yeah, definitely.
But China can be both a victim and a obviously opposite of the victim in English, how do you say that? A victimizer, thank you. And I think in both cases to me, at least it's very clear that China's both. So Orientalism to me is how we talk about the other, particularly from the position of power.
And of course, it has been talked about China in an Orientalist way. But if we look at not only what these nationalists think are safe, but also afterwards, how do Chinese historians, social scientists, politicians, Chinese society, describe non-Chinese people living in their closest surroundings, whether I mean Tibetans, Mongolians, or these non-Chinese ethnicities in China, how do they talk about them, I think, can be described as being an Orientalist, exoticizing and what isizing at best, but also belittling derogatory, making them into underdeveloped barbarians on the other, right? This is also something that I describe in the article where I describe how the barbarians became the non-historic people and became the hoministarchy today, who are put into camps where they are supposed to be re-educated, remolded, right, assimilated to an extreme degree. So I think to me at least that's quite clear.
Orientalism is a concept that can be used in different settings of domination and power than the West and the rest. And when it comes to colonialism, I think it's just very similar. But that was one reason why I wrote the other article about the question, was the Qing Empire colonizing empire? Because I actually don't think so.
I don't think that we can conceptualize the Qing as colonizers, but I do think that we can conceptualize the PFC as a colonizer. And to certain degree also, the Republic of China until 1949 might have been, or were, victims of colonialism, certainly. But that doesn't mean that the PFC cannot be a colonizer in itself in its approach to the non-Chinese people. And I think it's a similar development that we see in Russia when it becomes the Soviet Union and claims to be freeing all these Central Asian peoples from the imperial colonization, but at the same time actually just being a colonizer itself in a different way, but just as oppressing, just as dominating.
Yeah, so that's a pretty grim reality that we have to deal with as scholars. Let me end with a provocation from another scholar, something that comes up in your book, Victor Mayer, says, were it not for the Northwestern people? There would be no China. What does that mean?
Oh, I love that quote. Actually, Victor Mayer in the chapter where I have this quote from, he has a long list, a historical list of kingdoms and dynasties and states that's that were founded in China and empires where he shows which of these dynasties were actually founded by non-Chinese people. And it's an incredible large number. I think what he meant by this particularly is that whenever what we call China today was at its largest with regard to territory, you can be certain that it was non-Chinese emperors who did that.
So China today, the PRC today and its orders are absolutely dependent on the Qing emperors who were Manchus, of course. And this is another reason why these Qing emperors have to be described as assimilated emperors because otherwise it wouldn't make sense that a Chinese nation state inherits the emperor of some Manchus, right? So I think this is what Victor Mayer meant with this quote, that the present-day China is very much dependent on what earlier non-Chinese emperors conquered and how successful they were with their progress. So a lot of research questions that can be directed towards this idea.
Perhaps not by you, perhaps you have been a little bit exhausted by the subject of nationalism. I hope that we will be able to host you again when you have a new book about these Manchu potentially colonizers, but maybe not colonizers. It's in the works, right? Yeah, maybe the censorship censorship book about book censorship, how apt.
Thank you very much for your conversation with us today. Listeners, please become readers, pick up Professor Schneider's book, and keep on listening, I'm looking forward to meeting with you again in the next episode of new books in Chinese studies. Thank you Professor Schneider. Thank you so much for having me.
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