Power and Identity in the Chinese World Order

* Book: Power and Identity in the Chinese World Order: Festschrift in Honour of Professor Wang Gungwu. Ed. by Billy K. L. So, John Fitzgerald et al. Hong Kong University Press, 2003

URL = https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jc4rn

Description

"To honour Professor Wang Gungwu on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, the present fourteen studies were brought together in a volume that underscores, in its variety, issues surrounding the modern Chinese world order. The term ‘Chinese world order’ may remind students of modern Chinese history of the influential and classic volume, The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations, edited by the late John King Fairbank over thirty years ago.¹Professor Wang Gungwu contributed a seminal study of Ming China’s relations with Southeast Asia to that volume."

Contents

Some of the chapters dedicated to identity issues:

Chapter 8 Negotiating Chinese Identity in Five Dynasties Narratives

• From the Old History to the New History(pp. 223-238). Billy K. L. So

URL = https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jc4rn.14

This chapter explores historical ideas of Chinese (huaxia) identity through an examination of ethnic concepts implied in historical writings on the Five Dynasties, completed in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. Its empirical focus is on the Old History of the Five Dynasties (Jiu Wudai Shi, hereafter Old History) by Xue Juzheng, and the New History of the Five Dynasties (Xin Wudai Shi, hereafter New History) by Ouyang Xiu. The chapter approaches the main theme of Chinese identity through a textual analysis of comments in these writings on the rulers of non-Han origin. It explores the concept of Chineseness...

Chapter 10 On Being Chinese

(pp. 269-288) Adrian Chan

URL = https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jc4rn.16

To some, being Chinese ethnically and politically is like being Jewish except that instead of a maternal lineage, the Chinese call for a paternal one. That was how the current regime in Taiwan defined it until 1999 when it required that both parents be Chinese. Since that regime no longer sees itself as part of China but as a separate political entity, its idea of being Chinese becomes irrelevant.

To some others, Chinese have a tendency to show the ‘Central Kingdom Mentality’, that is, they have a tendency to be ethnocentric, regarding China as the centre of the world."