Twentieth-Century China as an Object of Thought: Global and Local Historical Reflections

The Wider Contexts of Theory and Practice

In his two-part essay, Wang Hui invites us to engage in a critical yet at the same time open dialogue with the twentieth century. For him, this means we cannot afford to consign the 1900s to history and assess that age solely with the concepts and normative assumptions of the twenty-first century and all its experiences. Rather than judging that bygone era from the safe distance of posterity, Wang encourages us to meet the century—its struggles, visions, and shifting notions of success—at eye level. He emphasizes that the politics of the not-yet-conscious, of a future that could not be known in advance, stood at the very core of that century’s experience (Wang, 2020: 2.143-44). We cannot connect with the core of twentieth-century struggles if we simply regard them as issues that have been solved by the progress of time. In Wang’s eyes, we must constantly be aware of the intrinsically open, necessarily undefined, nature of political movements during that time.

For Wang Hui, the twentieth century was a century of revolution, and thus a highly politicized century. His article concentrates on the period from the first revolutionary movements of the early 1900s through the ending phase of the Cultural Revolution, which he describes as China’s “short twentieth century.” Following the idea of the revolution and its close relationship with the weakest links of an international and domestic power system, he views the changing dynamics between the periphery and the center from a variety of perspectives. For instance, he invites us to view the Chinese Revolution, and by implication the Sino-Japanese War as well, in the context of continental movements opposing maritime capitalism (Wang, 2020: 2.132). He also encourages us to view the series of Chinese revolutions as an essential part of historical transformations that gave the East, indeed the entire Pacific, far more global weight than it had had in the nineteenth century. Finally, he stresses that the revolutions in China should be understood as conflicts that erupted in a pattern in which different temporalities were synchronized within an ever more entangled world. In the global system of the twentieth century, autochthonous historical timelines could no longer exist (Wang, 2020: 2.116-18).

Wang Hui argues that it is not sufficient to stress the political character traits of the 1900s, as the twentieth century with its revolutionary core was also a highly theoretical epoch (Wang, 2020: 1.37–38). He does not mean by this that abstract and highly elaborate philosophical systems framed the processes unfolding during the Chinese Revolution; rather, that the period was characterized by an exceptionally close and dynamic interaction between theory and practice. As Wang discusses throughout his article, concepts played a major role as theory and practice were being intertwined and blended together to move toward a new reality. Through complex transfers (in which the Japanese language often figured as a mediator), terms like “citizen,” “nation,” and the “proletariat” were newly incorporated into the Chinese language, particularly starting from the early 1900s. In many cases, already existing terms were redefined and given new meanings—an example is the term shehui, which after intellectuals like Yan Fu experimented with other terms, came widely to connote “society” in a modern and hence mass-based sense (Sachsenmaier, 2014). “Shehui” originally referred to religious rites, but in the Qing dynasty had come to connote associations and a wide range of other semi-organized networks. In its new meaning, it acquired a decisively future-oriented character—it was now embedded in wider visions of a new China that was supposed to emerge based on the combination of new thinking and new kinds of action.

Many of the concepts becoming influential in twentieth-century China were of Western provenance, which was clear to most historical agents using them throughout various stages of the century. Yet it would of course be wrong to regard the transplanting of such concepts into Chinese linguistic soil as a process leading to forms of Europeanization or Westernization. As Wang Hui discusses in various parts of his article, not even the preconditions for such crude duplication of European conditions would have existed. There were no masses of industrial labor that could easily be classified as Marx’s “proletariat,” nor were there fully accentuated social structures to which the concept of “classes” could easily be applied (Wang, 2020: 2.135–36). Consequently, the application of concepts like class and proletariat required forms of agency that went far beyond a mere creative adaptation or localization of Western concepts. During the revolutionary struggles of China’s short twentieth century, such concepts were situated at the frontiers of theory and practice. Their meaning exceeded their members in Chinese life, and they were intended to help create a reality that at the same time was meant to be overcome. In other words, the way toward a classless society could not be paved with concepts that were already established in the Chinese language and that had matured into a clearly circumscribed spectrum of meanings over an extended historical process.

Blindly applying the conceptual tools and revolutionary principles of European socialism to Chinese reality was not an option for Chinese revolutionaries; consequently, major concepts of European Marxism needed to acquire a fundamentally different meaning in the Chinese context. At the same time, however, it is remarkable that the Western origins of key socialist principles were not toned down or hidden throughout most stages of the Chinese Revolution. In principle, it would have been an option for Maoist thinking to strictly focus on the universality of socialist ideas and define them primarily as globally circulating concepts necessary as counterpoints to a global capitalist and imperialist reality (Knight, 1990). But while the globality of socialism was not rejected and China at times sought to position itself as the epicenter of an international revolution, the umbilical cord—not only with European revolutionary thinking but with European history itself—was never cut.

An indicative example are the mental maps underlying history education during China’s short twentieth century: they provide insight into cultures of temporality and spatiality in the Chinese Revolution that we would not be able to gain when focusing solely on the political life and rhetoric of this era. As in quite many other societies, in China history education became intrinsically connected with a larger political project. One of its main tasks was to disseminate new forms of temporal and spatial consciousness within wider parts of the population to help stabilize, and at the same time enhance, not only nation-building but also the revolution. At the same time, reshaping history education as a professional teaching and research field could not possibly be a mere extension of political visions. For that, the realities of academic and educational life were too specific, and also the Chinese past was too complex and unwieldy.

International outlooks were an intrinsic aspect of modern nation-building. As a consequence, efforts to reshape aspects of the Chinese past into a national past could not ignore the rest of the world, or at least some interpretations of what mattered in the world at large. Already the great textbook reforms of the late Qing and Republican periods had basically established a dual education system in which a nationalized Chinese history was paired with world history education (Hon and Culp, 2007). But China’s world history education did not cover the entire globe equally—rather, it focused on the history of the industrialized world, that is, Western Europe, North America, and Japan (Wang, 2018; Dirlik, 1978). This focus was not radically reversed during the Mao period and after—the history of Russia and the Soviet Union was added to the curriculum, but scant attention was still paid to the historical experiences of entire world regions including Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia (Xu, 2007; Wang, 2003). In a significant number of Chinese world history institutes with a total of hundreds of professorships across the country, there were hardly any experts working on societies outside the West and Japan (Sachsenmaier, 2011).

Partly because of Soviet influence, the Chinese past had to be squeezed into historical concepts that had their own life in China but were clearly derived from the European historical experience. During the Mao years, with their forceful attempt to mobilize historiography for wider revolutionary purposes, Chinese historians spent much scholarly energy (some of them reluctantly) using Marxist historical concepts to create a new understanding of Chinese history. The task of finding equivalents in Chinese history to historical categories decocted from the European experience, like feudalism or early bourgeois revolutions, proved to be extremely challenging and generated many academic controversies (Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, 2014). When reviewing the Chinese past through the lenses Marxism had ground from European history, simple projections from the European to the Chinese world were not an option: it was clear from the beginning that concepts like feudalism or bourgeois revolution had to be critically reconsidered before applying them to the Chinese past.

Still, when it came to the goal of developing a new academic historiography that would help foster a new historical consciousness in society at large, there were no serious attempts to develop an alternative historiographical thinking based on radically alternative concepts and reference spaces. In other words, the agents of the Chinese Revolution hardly tried to develop different conceptual worlds when fighting against the oppressive, linear logics of Western dominance. There was no significant historiographical Bandung movement, and China made no serious efforts of this kind, even though it could have tried to foster a new academic ecumene across much of the Global South with the goal of creating new historical visions that would no longer rely on the European past as a primary prototype. There also was no sustained attempt to forge academic ties between Chinese historians and their colleagues in other, equally underprivileged parts of the world, which could have served as first milestones heading in such a direction. Nor did Chinese historiography truly endeavor to mobilize a grassroots and, by implication, conceptually more local understanding of the Chinese past akin to the new political roles of the peasantry in the Chinese Revolution. The same can be said for other parts of the Chinese humanities and social sciences.

Thus, the Chinese Revolution left various parts of the hegemonic European past intact. Partly through political intervention, the mental maps underlying the Chinese humanities generally and historiography particularly highlighted China on one side and the industrialized countries including the Soviet Union on the other side. This reflected a revolutionary concern about China that defined itself strongly vis-à-vis the imperialist world. This is not to say that Chinese intellectual life, including historiography, did not care about other world regions. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, the outlook of Chinese scholars was far broader than the advanced industrialized countries, that is, Japan and the West, with a significant portion of educated Chinese following with great interest developments around the world, ranging from Mexico to the Philippines and from colonial Africa to South Asia (Karl, 2002).

Nevertheless, in lived academic reality, Chinese scholarship remained quite distant from many parts of the world, and so did the country’s educational system throughout much of the 1900s. This contributed to the emergence of peculiar landscapes of academic connectivity, influence, and attention. The relations between China and India provide an illustrative example. The two countries can look back at a rich history of important historical interactions—most obviously the spread of Buddhism from India to China. But despite these commonalities and historical ties, the humanities and social sciences in the two countries have had very few connections (Phalkey and Lam, 2016). For many years, Chinese historiography as an academic field hardly covered modern India outside of Buddhist studies, and the situation is similar in Indian history departments, as well as the entire history education system, where China tends to be treated as a distant land (Jiang and Yan, 2018). In both countries, in contrast, throughout various stages of the twentieth century, shifting academic connections with the Western world were highly significant for academic historiography, but reception between Chinese and Indian history departments remained extremely limited.

Aside from the inclusion of Japan, the Soviet Union, and Russia as their historical precursors, the mental maps conveyed by China’s secondary and tertiary education system did not significantly differ from their equivalents in many other colonial and postcolonial societies. In many Latin American, African, and South Asian countries, historical research and teaching at both the secondary and tertiary levels had a combined focus on the local and the “advanced” world, thereby neglecting the study of other places in the Global South. This pattern was complemented by a European academic system that, particularly starting from the second half of the eighteenth century, paid less and less attention to societies like China or Persia, which had drawn a good deal of intellectual attention among the finest minds of the early and high Enlightenment periods (Osterhammel, 2018). The contours of such an overtly hierarchical and Western-centric education system have often been problematized and criticized (Majumdar, 2010; Mignolo, 2000), but the global-local history of this Western-centric academic system has not been written, particularly in a way that pays due attention to the transnational sociologies of knowledge and disciplinary cultures that have shaped the global landscape of the historiography and, in fact, the entire landscape of humanities and social sciences to the present day. ¹

To return to the main point of this section: the Chinese Revolution never made it a priority to build a new international academic system by uniting scholars from the colonial or former colonial world for such a cause. And on the home front, European modes of periodization and timelines remained widely unchallenged, whether or not they were suitable to conditions in China. The concept of the century itself is an important example. As Wang Hui points out toward the beginning of the first part of his article, we need to understand the twentieth century as China’s first century, in part because the notion of a “century” did not exist as a historical unit prior to the late Qing dynasty. The century as an important category, a marker of an epoch, was disseminated in China in the context of much wider transformations that revolutionized measurements and senses of time. It gained acceptance particularly after the introduction of the Gregorian calendar during the early stages of the Republican period (Zhan, 2013). Events in China were part of a wider, global standardization of time driven by a variety of forces, ranging from the standardization pressure of the railroad and telegraph age (Puffert, 2009; Wenzlhuemer, 2013; Osterhammel, 2014: 45–76), to the pressure of international institutions and of the desire of some of China’s elites to catch up with the allegedly advanced parts of the world.

In China, as in a number of other societies around the world, this shift created a good deal of insecurity and tension (Ogle, 2015; Ren and Guan, 2014). Already under Yuan Shikai there was a peculiar compromise between proponents and opponents of the new calendrical system, in which the old lunar calendar could still be used for traditional festivals, while the Gregorian solar calendar was used for most other purposes. ² But other local cultures of temporality grew less influential within parts of Chinese society and the notion of the century quickly gained widespread acceptance in Chinese politics, intellectual life, and other parts of society.

The wide acceptance of the century as a macroscopic unit of time is remarkable, not just in China, but elsewhere. It is, after all, a problematic category that is not particularly accurate as a measure of historical epochs. Its basic logic of measurement—counting time since the supposed year of the birth of Jesus Christ—was presumably not intellectually or practically convincing to East Asian revolutionaries. And its basic premise, the division of historical time into segments of one hundred years, irrespective of historical timelines or past rhythms, does not seem convincing enough to explain the century’s widespread adoption as one of the most important modes—or even the main mode—of segmenting human history. ³

Interestingly, centuries were not a particularly long-standing aspect of European historiography either. Christian chronology was already becoming dominant in Europe during the early Middle Ages, but thinking historically or conceptualizing the future through centuries hardly mattered before the early modern period. Even then, the idea of the century as a historically significant time span circulated only within narrow learned circles, and it was not before the late 1700s that the “century” started to matter to a wider European public (Lehmann et al., 1999). Around that time, the new century—that is, the nineteenth—was greeted for the first time with excitement and a sense of anticipation. Relatedly, the spirit of the fin de siècle, which Wang Hui discusses in the first part of his article, was actually the first major episode of reminiscing about the end of a century as the end of a historical epoch. ⁴ Thus, in at least some important regards, we can speak of the nineteenth century as Europe’s first century.

This introduction of the new century, or the conceptual arrival of China’s first century, is indicative of the wider conceptual transformations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like “century,” many other terms that were becoming highly influential in China’s political, intellectual, and social worlds had no long prehistory in Europe. For example, it was only in the wider historical contexts of the French Revolution that throughout many European languages and across many social strata the concept of “nation” began acquiring meanings connected with principles of statehood and notions of popular sovereignty. Moreover, the political and intellectual developments that led toward a new concept of nationhood occurred less within a genuinely European context and were more of an Atlantic phenomenon, given the new nation-states that had emerged on the North American and South American continents prior to the beginnings of nationalist pressure on older political systems like the Habsburg Empire.

As historians, we are still at a fairly early stage when it comes to exploring the complex global and local dynamics that led to such profound terminological changes. Global conceptual history is a new field and a challenging one, requiring a combination of a broad range of linguistic (and by implication also regional historical) expertise with multilayered and border-crossing frameworks of inquiry. ⁵ Though we have a good grasp of the rising prominence of new concepts within several languages including Chinese (Liu, 1995), we are just beginning to be able to ask genuinely global historical questions about the semantic changes that occurred during this time. In the future, what we will need to understand better are the exact channels through which the globally influential concepts of the twentieth century moved across continents, societies, and languages, and how they came to fill the lifeworld of a growing number of people in many different parts of the globe. This is vital, as concepts ranging from the “individual” to “society,” from “equality” to “revolution,” were coming to play a central role in political and societal struggles around the world.

However, not all politically relevant concepts were disseminated exclusively through political and intellectual movements. Certainly, the concepts mentioned above, as well as those like “the West,” “the world,” or “modernity” were central in the work and thought of theoretically minded political movements and politically concerned intellectuals. At the same time, such concepts were highly influential in other—transnationally connected—sectors of society, including the arts, media, the business world, and civil societies. They even figured importantly among widening circles of China’s less educated classes, in the cities as well as in the countryside. Already during the first decades of the twentieth century, these parts of society experienced a sea change in their conceptual worlds triggered by changing living conditions, the impact of politicization, and, particularly in and near cities, even a certain degree of marketization.

What can we gain from conceptual historical perspectives when studying China’s short twentieth century and its transregional and global historical contexts? The potential learning goes far beyond the history of the Chinese language: the study of concepts can give us an additional angle from which to view the changing lived realities, and their new cross-regional entanglements, of parts of Chinese society ranging from the highly privileged to the uneducated. We would also gain fresh possibilities to further contextualize the inseparable bonds between theory and practice that Wang Hui elaborates on so skillfully in both parts of his article (Wang, 2020: 1.38, and 2.144).

From a slightly different perspective, it would be worthwhile to relate the challenges of the revolutionary theoretical-practical frontiers, which Wang assesses in his article, to developments in other parts of society that also experienced massive transformations. The political arena was certainly where the main struggles over the future shape of Chinese politics, economy, and society were being fought out. Yet also the builders of new universities and academic networks, of new companies and merchant associations, and of new internationally connected religious and artistic movements, all had to resort to some kind of theory to act in a reality they were no longer willing to accept as continuous with the past. In some ways, their situation was not entirely dissimilar from that of the revolutionaries: for both, theories could only illuminate a small stretch of a future that was shrouded in uncertainty. Obviously, a large part of this uncertainty stemmed from the fact that the momentous changes of that time were triggered by the massive influx of foreign concepts, ideas, and theories into China.

The basic parameters of this story are well known. Nonetheless, taking a closer look at the complex movements of key concepts across a wide variety of languages during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offers different perspectives on the nature of Western hegemony during the time. Looking at the revolutionary worlds alone does not give us a sufficiently broad answer to the question of why the Chinese Revolution preferred to fill concepts derived from European history with new, localized meanings rather than adding, on a broad scale, its own conceptual worlds to the political picture. To properly contextualize this pattern, it would be useful to look more systematically at parts of Chinese society beyond revolutionary circles and even beyond the realm of politics itself. During the first decades of the twentieth century, journalists, consumers, teachers, peddlers, workers, and many others in China started using concepts that were foundational to the revolutionary movement as well. Yet the precise meaning of concepts like “nation,” “class,” or “revolution” differed among various social groups. What most groups, however, had in common was that they believed in the necessity of change, and that this change was not envisioned solely as a linear pattern reaching from the Chinese past to the future (Wang, 2008). Rather, visions of the future became, in one way or another, semantically tied to spatial concepts, most notably “Europe” or the “West.” Even concepts like “revolution” at least implied the idea of Europe as a negatively and positively connoted reference space.

And what about the situation in Europe itself? It would be wrong to regard European intellectual and political life as the unmoved mover of the worldwide transformations of the early 1900s. Agents in Europe were also reacting to global changes, and these reactions had a deep impact on European societies. Wang Hui discusses the influence that the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and other events around that time had on revolutionaries in Europe—including Lenin himself (Wang, 2020: 1.44–46). For instance, as Wang points out, events in China had a formative influence on the Bolshevik movement and the newly established Soviet Union. The leading figures of the USSR, Lenin included, adjusted their global outlooks and ideological frameworks by taking the East Asian theaters of world politics absolutely seriously. They would have probably not done so without events such as the Russo-Japanese War and the Revolution of 1911.

In an almost parallel development, a large majority of American policymakers as well as the U.S. public in general began to pay far more attention to the world beyond their country’s Western shores (Wang, 2020: 1.24). Starting in the late nineteenth century, the mood in the United States had shifted decidedly in favor of a greater global presence, even though groups like the old New England senatorial elite dissented from this new dominant opinion and portrayed their country’s new transregional ambitions as a betrayal of the ideals and values underlying the American Revolution. They were outnumbered in the U.S. Congress and in general public opinion, which was increasingly supportive of the American presence in East Asia. These sentiments reached a first crescendo in the annexation of Hawaii in 1898 and the Philippine-American War between 1899 and 1902. Alfred Thayer Mahan, president of the Naval War College, exemplified this approach when he stated that the command of the seas was the chief element in the power and prosperity of nations and that it was “imperative to take possession, when it can be righteously done, of such maritime positions as contribute to secure command” (Tuchman, 1962: 145). The fascination with the Pacific continued even when the United States also became a European and new global power after joining the Great War in 1917.

Yet while the majority of European political observers during the 1910s and 1920s regarded the U.S. entry into the war and the founding of the Soviet Union (both in 1917) as major changes in the world order, only a very few paid genuine attention to the Pacific as a new central theater of world politics or a region in which far-reaching global change would start. The new presence of the Soviet Union and the United States in world politics was primarily understood in terms of its implications for European politics and the global roles of European powers. And because of their origins, both the United States and the USSR were commonly regarded as offshoots of European history, as two competing versions of the Enlightenment’s political values or two rival ways of putting the French Revolution into twentieth-century practice. The idea that these two powers were decisively shaped by their specific Pacific experiences remained very marginal in Europe during that time and for a long time after.

Similar things can be said about the fin de siècle. The term described a complex combination of feelings and thoughts; it connoted insecurity about the future, a sense that the world faced mounting dangers and shrinking opportunities. It was often accompanied by a critical attitude toward modernity, which many envisioned as a civilizational cul-de-sac. Many observers at the time believed human agency had been greatly humbled by new technological and structural forces. We can relate Max Weber’s seminal work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1904 and 1905, to the overall climate of the fin de siècle. Weber’s theory of the iron cage of modernity was a devastating critique of the forces of rationalism and instrumental rationality that he conceptualized as key shapers of the modern age. Yet at the same time, Weber disregarded the idea that societies like China or India could be the source of any kind of alternative system that would carry global relevance for the present (Brook, 2017). In The Protestant Ethic, he famously portrayed Confucianism as the spirit of China and Hinduism as the spirit of India, and saw both collapsing under the weight of European modernity, which he deemed the only universalizable civilization.

The idea that a modern China could potentially be a globally influential model or the source of an alternative modernity did not figure in Weber’s historical and contemporary outlooks. Even in his later writings, he paid little attention to the Chinese Revolution of 1911 or other major events in East Asia. The same can be said about the main currents of fin-de-siècle literature. The sense of looming doom was not accompanied by the idea that the formative regions of the future world might be in East Asia. If we exclude some notable exceptions from the picture, the fin de siècle as a crisis was formulated based on the idea of the—however critically judged—superior strength of Europe and its modern program. The sense of Europe as a teaching civilization with nothing to learn from the rest of the world had solidified since the late eighteenth century and remained almost entirely intact during the fin de siècle.

It also widely survived World War I. Certainly, the experience of the war pushed a few European intellectuals, including influential figures like Romain Rolland, Henri Bergson, and Rudolf Eucken, to consider studying Eastern values as a remedy for what they regarded as Europe’s civilizational sicknesses. Yet except for a brief period immediately following the war when visitors like Rabindranath Tagore drew sizable audiences, voices arguing for looking at Asia as a source of inspiration and profound change were still rarely heard in Europe (Mishra, 2013; Sachsenmaier, 2006). More importantly, even individuals who were facing East tended to have an Orientalized image of China and other parts of Asia and were often attracted first and foremost to the alleged spirit of a timeless Asian philosophy. During the 1920s, only very few individuals in Europe, particularly outside Leninist circles, paid serious attention to the possibility of a new China. The Chinese Revolution, the New Culture movement, and many other events seemed to happen in a world far from Europe, not just geographically, but intellectually, as they were thought to carry no message or implications for Western political and public life.

This inability to take China seriously as a reference space persisted throughout much of the short twentieth century in most parts of Europe and North America. In the context of the 1968 student revolutions, student movements on both sides of the Atlantic wrote Maoist slogans on their banners (Wallerstein and Zukin, 1989). But it would be far-fetched to define the late 1960s as the beginning of a sustained and grand opening to China within Western public spheres, political circles, and intellectual realms. Such a transformation took place only from the 1990s onward, when China as an emerging global economic powerhouse and internationally influential player started drawing progressively more attention from the West. Particularly during the past two decades, China has been increasingly covered by the Western media, and the number of students studying Chinese has grown rapidly in many societies. For the first time since the mid-eighteenth century, European public debates often include China in the picture when ruminating about the future of the West or the world at large.

Changes of this kind—which do not necessarily lead to a better image of China—constitute a significant transformation of the West’s educational, political, economic, and public spheres. Perhaps someday historians will list them among the transformations that demarcate the beginning of the twentieth-first century. Yet the twentieth century, especially the short one, presents a different picture. Despite all kinds of Chinese agency, it remained an age of highly imbalanced relationships between China and the West. Even as Chinese intellectuals and revolutionaries operated with concepts and narratives shaped by local conditions, they remained wedded to the European experience. On the other side, China remained a distant land, a terra incognita, in much of Western intellectual and political life. This imbalanced and hierarchical relationship survived the two world wars and much of the Cold War, remaining basically untouched throughout the century of revolution.

Revolution and Nationhood as Faces of a Century

The fight for national sovereignty was an important aspect of the Chinese Revolution, yet it would be wrong to view it solely from a national vantage point. Obviously, all stages of the Chinese Revolution, from the 1910s to the early 1970s, were characterized by various kinds of international entanglements. What is more, China’s different revolutionary movements did not even try to pretend that the revolution as a political act was conditioned only by local factors. In the case of the Communist Party of China, internationalist rhetoric played a particularly important role within the orbit of political ideals and objectives. Its protagonists portrayed the revolution at least partly as a reaction to imperialist oppression. Moreover, as discussed above, many of their key concepts and narratives were wedded to Western history and politics—the revolution’s legitimacy was not based on the claim that its origins were entirely Chinese. Nonetheless, not only the proclaimed historicity of China’s main revolutionary movements but also their future visions were chiefly framed by local concerns.

However, the picture was different in the case of another essential element in the political contestations defining China’s short twentieth century, an element to which Wang Hui pays much attention in his article as well as many of his other writings: nationhood. Even though concepts like “nation” were the result of translingual exchanges, the international dimensions of Chinese views of the nation were far more ambivalent than they were for the revolution. Unlike the revolution, it was possible to emphasize the homegrown roots of the Chinese nation in the offing, and during the early 1900s there were certainly prominent thinkers, including Kang Youwei, who worked to bring about another China while primarily using Confucian and other local traditions of ethico-political thinking.

Nonetheless, the majority of China’s new political forces emphasized that China had to embark on a process of nation-building; in other words, they did not try to diminish the modern character of Chinese nationhood (Zhao, 2004). Already during the late Qing dynasty, many observers came to regard nationalism and nationhood as intrinsic aspects of modernity. Among the most common justifications for transforming China into a new nation-state was the notion that only this political and societal form would ensure China’s survival in a world framed by imperialist forces. A system based on popular sovereignty would, it was thought, enable China to mobilize the resources and collective energies necessary to survive in a world that seemed based on the principle of the survival of the fittest. But Chinese nation-building was not positioned solely as a defensive measure against oppressive and exploitative imperialist forces. Central political currents also saw other benefits of modern nationhood, and quite a few observers believed that a large number of highly industrialized countries had already realized these benefits. Many regarded the modern nation-state and all the privileges and rights they associated with citizenship as the source of great hope for the flourishing of individuals and society at large. In any case, the future-oriented and novel character of Chinese nationalism could hardly be denied, even by those who remained deeply convinced of, and in some regards even loyal to, the weight and continued significance of Chinese history. ⁶

What many nationalist positions had in common was a decidedly critical attitude toward the main patterns of the Chinese past. As much historical work has pointed out, the spread of linear historical thinking was accompanied by an unfavorable view of Chinese history that saw China as an old empire unable to respond appropriately to new challenges. In his article, Wang Hui offers fresh reflections on ideas of old and new in twentieth-century politics. He points out that although much of the political language of the time was based on a juxtaposition between the ancient and the modern, these were simplifications of a much more complex situation. In reality, relations between the old and the new were continuously being reconfigured “between multiple temporalities, all of which were embodied within a new, shared temporality” (Wang, 2020: 2.116).

The claims to newness and critiques of oldness were tied to the assumption that the trajectories of Western, Chinese, and other experiences were now inseparably connected. For example, this context made it possible to articulate the revolutions in the East as forces of the new that were developing counter to a Western system whose power was, through the revolutionary act and its accompanying thought, definable as ailing and timeworn. The conception of large parts of the East as spaces that were bringing about a new time is among the important continuities between China’s short twentieth century and its posterity, up until the present day. Since the Reform and Opening period, ideas like a “new Asia,” or “Pacific century” have been prominent in China’s public and intellectual debates. The exact connotations of such terms shifted over time, but they positioned China, or Asia at large, on a global stage. Despite the alleged global implications of terms like “new Asia,” such ideas of newness typically implied more specific comparisons between the East and the West, or, more recently, between China and the United States.

Returning to the early twentieth century, it is important to note that ideas of a new China were enunciated on the basis of several key concepts, with nationhood and revolution arguably the most important. These concepts were not only influenced by the sense of convoluted temporalities during that period—they were an essential component of it. This means that the tensions between multiple temporalities and an overarching, shared temporality ran right through the concepts of revolution and the nation.

At first glance, it may seem that the potential for conflict over the temporalities of the Chinese Revolution was limited. As discussed, it was impossible to situate the revolution within solely Chinese contexts: the majority of groups advocating revolutionary changes in China articulated them at least partly as responses to the imperialist West. In addition, most revolutionary groups connected their key agendas and principles to key concepts and narratives derived from the European past. Still, in the battles over the legitimacy of the Chinese Revolution questions surrounding temporalities and spatialities were a large factor. Critics of the revolution particularly questioned whether it was compatible with China’s historical heritage. This was not only the case with the political revolution in a narrow sense but with all the major transformations of the economy and society during China’s short twentieth century. Many opponents of these revolutions tended to portray them as forms of Westernization (Fung, 2009) rather than as Chinese versions of de facto global transformations and opposed them on that basis.

When it came to the idea of Chinese nationhood, the situation was rather different, and it was so in two main ways. First, the concept of the Chinese nation had far fewer critics than the concept of the revolution. Even reformers who were unconvinced by the promises of revolutionary change subscribed to the idea of Chinese nationhood. But though there were fewer contestations over the project of the Chinese nation, there were more over the question of where that nation fell in time. Some had decidedly modern and future-oriented visions of the nation as a project, a condition that had not yet been attained. On the other hand, the 1900s witnessed great efforts to imbue the Chinese nation with a long history. As Wang Hui has pointed out while paying much attention to historical detail, the political tropes in China’s transition from an empire to a nation-state were far more complex than any kind of Westernization hypothesis could grasp. One sign of that is the way that, to varying extents, a wide variety of political movements used ideas and principles from earlier historical epochs (Wang, 2004–2007; Wang, 2014). Moreover, in a manner typical of many national education and media systems, Chinese nationhood was portrayed as the heir or result of long historical continuities; the international contexts of modern nationalism and statehood were typically downplayed (Zheng, 1999). Many leading political figures of the first decades of the twentieth century were aware of the resulting ambivalence, and several tried to bypass it by not elaborating on the tensions between the two conflicting timelines (Duara, 2009: 104–5).

While the formative roles that international entanglements played in shaping the revolution were always on display, there were inclinations to downplay those elements of modern Chinese nationhood that were decidedly the results of outside influences and global transformations. This is not to suggest that it would be futile to explore more drawn-out historical continuities reaching from imperial China into the twentieth century or even up until the twenty-first century. Some important work has reflected on specific patterns of longue durée reaching from China’s past to the present—for instance, in sectors such as the relationship between statehood and religion (van der Veer, 2014), rural commerce (Wong, 2002), or China’s political economy (Huang, 2019). Much of this literature seeks to strike a balance between the study of continuities with the significance of transregional entanglements during the twentieth century. Yet some academic schools, for instance parts of the new or current Guoxue movement, may run the danger of overemphasizing the idea of autochthonous historical trajectories. Given the enormously important role of international entanglements in twentieth-century Chinese history, the search for continuities reaching deep back into the Chinese past is most promising if it is also equipped with transnational and global historical toolboxes.

As Wang Hui suggests, there are currently tendencies to marginalize the revolution when thinking about modern China and its historicity, but the concept of the Chinese nation is not under a similar kind of pressure, at least within the People’s Republic of China. ⁷ In many regards, as an outcome of China’s short twentieth century, nationhood even rests on a much firmer fundament than in many other parts of the world. In many of the world’s regions, including parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia, failed states have produced a mounting distrust among large parts of the population in the promise of national political order (Maier, 2000). In some parts of the Arabic world, religious networks with a political mission often operate not only widely independent from national political interests but often also against them.

We may even add Europe to this picture of the crisis of the nation-state in many parts of the world. As is well known, in the years preceding the Great War, the international socialist movements failed to prevent jingoism and national chauvinism from dragging the entire continent into a disaster: the lure of national identities and the anxieties of other regimes were too great. Nonetheless, at gatherings like the congresses of the International Socialist Bureau during the early 1900s, the controversial debates within European socialist camps on the question of national or transnational belonging left a deep imprint on the European left, as did the tragic failure of politicians like Jean Jaurès and thinkers like Rosa Luxemburg who fought to prioritize class consciousness over national consciousness. ⁸ In other words, European political life also witnessed strong currents that, partly based on revolutionary principles, were decidedly critical of a nation-based political order and its ideological foundations.

It was not only socialist movements that cast doubt on nationalism and actively sought alternative pathways to Europe’s future. After the First and particularly the Second World War, movements working on some kind of transnational integration in Europe became more influential within broader segments of the political landscape. ⁹ Together with other factors, these currents fed into the beginnings of European unification during the 1940s (Judt, 2005). Contrary to Carl Schmitt’s reading of European history, we can choose to interpret the processes leading to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community and eventually the European Union as part of a long history of transnational connections and institutions in Europe, some of which had managed to survive the era of the nation-state. At least to some degree, the Westphalian myth, that is, the pretense of national sovereignty as the core principle of international politics, was a distorted representation not only of global political rationales during the imperialist age but also of intra-European realities. Right now, two decades into the twenty-first century, the political shape of the continent is again uncertain, but it remains a fact that in Europe—just as in many other parts of the world—the nation-state and its underlying political assumptions did not emerge uncontested from the twentieth century. ¹⁰

By contrast, the widespread acceptance of the nation by all major social and political groups is one of the great continuities between China’s short twentieth century and the beginnings of its twenty-first century, however we may choose to demark the latter. The nation-state was certainly a central component of all major political struggles and changes during this time. And just as the history of the Bandung movements and the worldwide reception of Maoism remind us, all major developments in the Maoist era had an international dimension (Wang, 2020: 2.115). For that period, Wang Hui stresses that the creation of the people as a political subject combined national liberation with the goals of the international socialist movement (Wang, 2020: 2.135-36).

Yet at the same time, the nation remained the main theater for the Chinese revolutions, and many of its key objectives were wedded to its existence. In other words, it served as the main frame for the key developments, and their core visions, of China’s short twentieth century. These include, most notably, the unusual spread of political authority and intervention beyond the state apparatus. In Wang Hui’s words, this process included a “politicization further expressed through the integration of various problems (related to youth, women, workers and labor, language and literature, city and country, and so on) into the category of ‘culture,’ thereby turning politics into a field of creativity” (Wang, 2020: 2.151). As discussed above, inseparable connections between theoretical reflection and political action were a major aspect of this high degree of politicization. In many respects, these can be considered as experimental in a metaphorical sense but also in a very real, immediate way. Yet despite all new international policy fields, the main experimental thrust of the Chinese Revolution was occurring within the boundaries of the People’s Republic of China. To a certain degree, the politics of the not-yet-conscious, of purported contradictions, required the solid frame of the nation. Similar things can even be said about the Reform and Opening period, which politically was articulated as an era of continued nation-building combined with shifting economic policies on the integration of China into a globally connected market economy.

National political visions and concepts still play a crucial role in Chinese politics but nevertheless, the People’s Republic has now become globally more influential than ever in its own history as well as the preceding history of Republican China and the late Qing dynasty. In the context of the Belt and Road Initiative, China has now taken sustained steps to build new international institutions and to establish close relationships with countries on virtually all continents. Many observers around the world perceive these processes as new developments of great regional and global relevance, and as such they arouse a high degree of expectations, but they also trigger waves of concern, fear, and distrust.

The question about perceptions of China in other parts of the world, and across various local and translocal social networks, actually points to a huge field that has hardly been explored yet. The meaning of China, as a place and as a concept reaching far beyond any concrete space, has become inseparably connected with our visions of the global situation and the twenty-first century at large. Far more than in the twentieth century, reflections about the future contours of China are intertwined with expectations of the contours of the global future. A better sense of the complex global and local landscapes of perceptions of China and its future roles would tell us more about China’s current place in “the world,” taken as a shorthand for complex, contradictory, and kaleidoscopically changing global realities. But for a topic of such complexity and magnitude, the methodologies of opinion research would hardly be sufficient; similar things could be said about the logics underlying the current debates on global soft power.

To better understand China’s place in a world of perceptions, we would need to revisit some main facets of the twentieth century, including those that may have not yet come to an end. Regarding various types of hegemony, we would need to look at shifts and continuities in a wide range of global arenas, extending from the education system to the flows of concepts and cultures. We may also ask about the implications of the importance of nationhood in China’s twentieth century for the People’s Republic’s standing in a global system in which it has already moved closer to the center. With an eye on China’s mounting global influence, we can also ask questions about the historical preconditions for its increasing influence in a global system that cannot survive without a politics of global responsibility. What facets of Chinese society, and China’s overall structure, could prove to be highly relevant for a world characterized by a transnationally influential China? Where are potential contradictions between China’s shifting inner conditions and its changing outside entanglements? And how are these rooted in the country’s short twentieth century and beyond?

Some of these questions regarding the twentieth century are obviously conditioned by the early stages of a twenty-first century, a century whose main parameters remain basically unknown. They reflect the not-yet of our own current condition; they are questions that our twenty-first century currently can bring to the table. If we raise them well, we may indeed “reconstruct a dialogic relationship between ourselves and twentieth-century China” (Wang, 2020: 1.5).