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1 results

  • 4 - Ancient China

  • from Part i - The Politics of Ethnicity, Nationhood, and Belonging in the Settings of Classical Civilizations
  • Edited by Cathie Carmichael, University of East Anglia, Matthew D'Auria, University of East Anglia, Aviel Roshwald, Georgetown University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism
    Published online:
    27 October 2023
    Print publication:
    09 November 2023, pp 76-95

  • Summary

    Through much of the twentieth and well into the twenty-first century, scholars in China and in the West debated the nature of Chinese nationhood. In the West, the once dominant view was promulgated by Joseph R. Levenson and like-minded scholars, who depicted Chinese identity in terms of “culturalism,” that is belonging to a universalizing and inclusive civilization, defined by a common Confucian culture. A concept of national identity conceived in ethnic or racial terms was considered a modern phenomenon, closely related to China’s entrance into the world of nation-states.1 In the last decades of the twentieth century, though, this view was criticized by scholars who demonstrated the existence of traits of exclusive ethnocentric Chinese identity back in the past. Some went as far as to postulate racism as pertinent to Chinese civilization from its earliest stages.2