 It's my pleasure to welcome everyone to the first lunchtime lecture of this academic year. I'm Nathan Hill, I'm professor in Chinese studies and director of the Trinity Center for Asian Studies. But my role here is just to welcome Julia Schneider who is today's speaker and she is a professor in Chinese history at Cork and her talk is called Who Belongs to the Chinese Nation? Inclusion and exclusion in Chinese Republican historiography. And with that said, then I will disappear and let her give her presentation. Thank you, Nathan. Thank you very much for your kind introduction. Let me first share my slides because I do have some slides. They are really only to illustrate some of the things I'm going to say. My content is in the talk and not so much in the slides. Yeah, I want to talk about the question who belongs to the Chinese nation. I want to talk about the question who belongs to the Chinese nation and about how different people or peoples living in China are included or excluded in Chinese historiography in Republican times. Now the situation of non-Chinese or non-Chinese citizens in the People's Republic of China, as you probably well know continues to provoke controversies both within and outside the PRC, the People's Republic of China, regarding issues of ethnic identity as well as of political self-determination. And for many decades, scholars have analyzed how the Chinese majority society approaches its ethnic minorities, its so-called ethnic minorities, based on ethnocentric chauvinism and of course also on assimilation theories. I would argue that such ethnocentric or sinocentric attitudes have derived from dichotomous hierarchical concepts of superior Chinese self on the one hand and inferior non-Chinese other on the other hand that date back centuries. And they were strengthened and complimented though in Republican times when nationalist images of China needed to be legitimized. So in this lecture, I aim to shed light on how Chinese historiography in the first half of the 20th century was complicit in nationalist approaches towards non-Chinese people living within the claimed territory of the Republic of China or actually living in the territory of the Qing Empire before its downfall. Let me also say that here I understand relations between texts on a given topic such as the approaches to non-Chinese peoples in Chinese historiography as a discourse according to Foucault's idea of discourse and of apparatus or also called dispositive. This apparatus is ultimately to use Foucault's own words of a strategic nature to influence and to use power relations that is a cluster of relations and I quote him again, more or less organized, hierarchical, coordinated. Here it is more of a significant to mention that Foucault links the apparatus or dispositive to and I quote again, certain coordinates of knowledge which issue from the apparatus but to an equal degree condition it, the apparatus being the discourse. In my talk, I give particular attention to how the theory of China's assimilative power or the assimilation theory facilitated an integration of non-Chinese peoples as on the one hand marginal but on the other hand firm parts of China's history as well as of China of the Chinese nation and the territory of China. Already in late Qing times, Sinocentric that is in the late 19th and early 20th century Sinocentric attitudes towards non-Chinese peoples increasingly dominated the discourse among Chinese thinkers. Although this discourse was of course mainly about China's present and China's future, it included analysis of the past that were supposed to contain value for the present and future and that this was of course a very traditional Chinese approach. Ethnocentric attitudes actually went against official Qing policy which was based on the so-called Altai model, a term phrased by Peter Perdue in his analysis of Qing inner Asia and a strategy of simultaneous rule, a term coined by Pamela Crossley. And particularly the strategy of simultaneous rule was intended to strengthen and ethnify distinct identities. It goes beyond the scope of my lecture today to dwell on Qing ethnification. So suffice to say here, the Qing emperors emphasized the Manchus, Mongols, Chinese, Tibetans to a certain degree, Turkic Muslims known as Uyghurs today as the pillars of their empire because these four or if you want five peoples occupied prominent positions regarding territory, regarding politics, religion, language, loyalty and culture. Moreover, these four or five peoples alleged or real forefathers had founded powerful canads, powerful kingdoms and empires in the past. So based on these two preconditions that is on the one hand the Qing ethnification project and on the other hand the histories of powerful empires related to these four or five peoples, it was actually not unlikely that in the political upheaval of late Qing times that were charged with nationalist aspirations, all these five people would actually aim at individual nation-building projects dividing the Qing Empire's geo-body. So I will analyze how non-Chinese peoples were approached and integrated in Republican general, so-called general histories, Tung Shi which was originally a European genre and is largely equivalent with history textbooks. My analysis show that there in the Chinese assimilation theory was a basic assumption. I will focus on, or my sources actually are more than a dozen general histories and also cultural histories which is a genre very closely related to general histories as well as essays that focus on topics of ethnicities and assimilation in China. My analysis has brought forth patterns of Republican historical narratives that show the discursive manifestation and the hardening of approaches to what non-Chinese peoples that originated in late imperial times and then were continued in Republican times. Of course the intimate relationship between nationalist agendas on the one hand and constructions of history is on the other hand is visible from the time when nationalism developed as a political theory in the late 18th and then particularly the 19th century and this has often been analyzed by historians of nationalism regarding Europe and it has also been studied intensively for China. However, the issue of Chinese nationalist approaches toward non-Chinese peoples and their entanglement with historiography in particular the assimilation theory and its widespread influence on Republican historical narratives has not been analyzed thoroughly until recently. Here I would like to further develop recent findings by broadening the corpus of sources to analyze the assimilation theories development and its consolidation in the first half of the 20th century. I argue that Chinese nation-building was ultimately advocated as a project of Georgia Agamben's exclusive inclusion that identified non-Chinese people in the category of people without history or non-historic people lacking in legitimacy to pursue individual nation-building projects and position them in a permanent state of exception. Also term that Agamben regularly uses in his analysis or approach. In the texts I refer to here the general histories, cultural histories and historical essays. Monchus, Mongols, Tibetans, etc are constructed as the opposite, the non-self or the other of the Chinese people and they are united so to speak in a certain conceptual elements. I think it is therefore justifiable to apply the term non-Chinese although it's not used in the sources. The sources usually refer to them individually but bundle them together. In the end of course ethnic and other identities are constructions by oneself and by others that cannot ultimately be manifested objectively although these concepts are also not totally random. The structure of my talk is as follows I will first refer to the roots of nationalist thinking and particularly of the assimilation theory in late imperial times then tell how these approaches were consolidated in republican historiography and finally say a few words about the terms I've used just now of historic versus non-historic peoples and how that came to be part of republican approaches to non-Chinese peoples and then I will give a short conclusion if time allows that is. During the so-called century of humiliation from the Second Opium War until the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 Chinese self-confidence so to speak was profoundly challenged. In this regard however self-confidence is measured against external others that is particularly the imperialist states the European imperialists as well as Russia and Japan however a certain assumption of Chinese superiority vis-à-vis internal internal others that is non-Chinese peoples within the Qing Empire remained intact. This idea of Chinese superiority was informed by pre-nationalists or proto-nationalist Sino-centric culturalism. In general culturalism is a ethnocentric way of imagining the world as well as the self and the other which many scholars understand as having been shared by most Chinese thinkers at least in late imperial times. Culturalism usually denies the existence of other cultures and accepts only the self's culture so consequently others who want to become cultured or civilized have to turn to this one culture and they have to transform themselves in order to become part to become civilized. So culturalism usually upholds a seemingly inclusive concept of a culture that is open for others to join but at the same time it constructs a dichotomy of cultivated self versus barbarian other so as long as the barbarian other does not assimilate to the self's culture the barbarian will forever remain with that and it cannot become civilized or cultured without assimilation. Now in the late 19th century European socio-political concepts like nationalism social Darwinism and of course also pseudo-scientific racism and also historical concepts like linear progressivism universalism and historicism traveled so to speak to China often via Japan so Japanese intellectuals since the Meiji reform in the 19th century translated German, French, English works on European philosophy, political thought etc into Japanese using a lot of kanji characters so it was pretty easy for Chinese thinkers to read these texts and to translate them for either translate them into classical Chinese or into Chinese or just read them in their Japanese form. Chinese political thinkers at that time were convinced that the Qing Empire needed political reforms or even a revolution otherwise it would be unable to survive the imperialist threats and however if the Qing Empire managed to become a Chinese nation state either by reform as a constitutional monarchy or by a revolution to become a republic they argued China could indeed rank also the most powerful imperialist nation states due to his size, due to its long history and its large population European concepts also contributed indirectly to the late Qing revival of anti-manchurism initiated by Chinese scholar officials particularly by so-called statecraft scholars anti-manchurism is a feeling or later also a movement directed against the empires, the dynasty of the Qing Empire which was of course founded and ruled by non-Chinese people by Manchu peoples and by the Manchu Qing Empire this revival of anti-manchurism became more powerful when thinkers like Zhang Taiyan and Yushu Pei and also others legitimized anti-manchurist claims with social Darwinists and racialist justifications explaining that the Manchu emperors belonged to a race that was just unfit to rule and this of course comes from social Darwinist ideas of human beings such conceptualizations of self and other form the roots of the later Chinese discourse on non-Chinese peoples as expressed in historiography in a Foucaultian sense to come back to something I said at the beginning these conceptualizations were part of a so-called largely silent development that presupposed the discourse on nationalism informing nationalist concepts of identity that would become powerful later now around 1900 the concept of nationalism or as it should actually be more precisely translated ethno-nationalism Minzu Jui entered the Chinese political discourse there was actually also a term for state nationalism which was rather popular in Japan but it never became very popular among Chinese thinkers who tended to use Minzu Jui many political thinkers began to engage in discussions whether the Chinese people constituted a nation and if so who actually belonged to this Chinese nation so who was China, what was China most shared two fundamental assumptions we already heard heard about that the Chinese were superior to the non-Chinese peoples particularly those in their closest surroundings living within in the Qing Empire and second the strength of a nation dependent on its level of homogeneity different conclusions were drawn from these two assumptions in relation to the question if the non-Chinese peoples in the Qing Empire should actually be included into a future Chinese nation state two different schemes were paramount the first scheme which was ultimately less influential was exclusion some thinkers argued that the Qing Empire was to be divided so that an exclusive Chinese nation state could be established in the borders of so-called China proper also called the 18 provinces so it's usually a loose reference to the forum territory of the Ming dynasty China proper refers to the regions that are inhabited by people speaking Chinese languages the second scheme was inclusion a concept as first mostly followed by reformist thinkers who favored the continuation of the Qing Empire as a constitutional monarchy but then also adopted by Republicans according to this scheme the Qing Empire was to stay territorially intact all non-Chinese peoples and regions were to be integrated into the future Chinese nation state but also assimilated into Chinese culture because national homogeneity supposedly enhanced political and social equality and stability one of the most prominent formulations of the assimilation theory can be found in Liangxi Chao's texts on the Swiss political thinker Johann Kaspar Blunchley and you can see the two here Liangxi Chao and Johann Kaspar Blunchley Liang published his texts in 1903 and actually it was rather word for word translation of a Japanese essay about Blunchley with a lot of word for word quotations from Blunchley's texts Liang believed that the Chinese were able to assimilate others even when they were conquered by them and this indeed was Liang's theory of the special assimilative power of China the combination of social Darwinist and culturalist ideas Liang gave several criteria that according to him constituted a nation and it sound actually pretty familiar he said a nation was was constituted by criteria such as place, blood relation, physical appearance language, script, religion, customs and way of living however he mainly understood assimilation as happening in the fields of language, script and customs so if non-Chinese people adopted Chinese language and script and customs they would actually be assimilated to the Chinese famously Liang rejected ideas of exclusion and popular Chinese sentiments towards other domestic and ethnicities like the Manchus Mongols, Tibetans, etc merely reflected what he called lesser or petty nationalism whereas greater nationalism was the feeling that all domestic nations could learn to share towards foreign nations he also argued that the Chinese could use their assimilative power in order to form one greater nation together with the non-Chinese however it was always clear for Liang's child that the Chinese would be at the center of this Chinese nation would lead this Chinese nation however by uniting with the non-Chinese people the China could defend herself against foreign threats and moreover become the largest and most powerful nation in the world that was Liang's dream Liang saw assimilation basically as a dream of an ancient old development that according to him continued with or without the consent of the non-Chinese people it was just inevitable or automatic that non-Chinese people would assimilate due to the great power of Chinese culture so due to their historical excellence in advancing civilization the Chinese people were nominated to assume a leading or central position in the project of nation building other thinkers to name just one of the very very few thinkers who had a different opinion other thinkers like Wang Jingwei criticized the ambiguity of Liang who claimed that the mantras were assimilated but still referred to them as a people distinct from the Chinese and this is actually one of the main problems of the assimilation theory which makes this theory some kind of a circular theory one pointed out that Chinese and Manchus did not belong to the same nation and he doubted that the letter could assimilate into the Chinese nation this was related to Wang Jingwei's definition of a nation actually his criteria are very similar to the ones I've listed here from Liang T Tao but Wang Jingwei put emphasis on historical relations and according to him the historical relations of Manchus and Chinese were just too unequal so they didn't share historical relations in a way that made them one nation or that made them likely to assimilate let me now come to my second part the consolidation of the assimilation theory in republican historiography I think it has become clear that before 1911 images of the Chinese nation were influenced by the wish for national homogeneity influential political thinkers and intellectuals like Liang T Tao but there were others as well of course published analysis of Chinese history often using history to make a case for contemporary political issues particularly for the exclusion or the inclusion of non-Chinese territories into a Chinese nation state now in the time of political and territorial fragmentation after the Xinhai Revolution in 1911-1912 the narratives of inclusive nationalism finally prevailed over exclusive schemes one reason for this were probably security considerations which made inclusion appear rather appealing in contrast to exclusion another cause however was that over the course of the 19th century as Matthew Mosca has shown in an article from 2011 very convincingly Chinese literati have begun to imagine the non-Chinese regions of the Qing empire as part of the inner lands that may be of the empire also finally the perception of a Samoan geographical or as Liang T Tao called it natural great unity of the Qing territory contributed to the broad acceptance of the inclusive scheme of course this geographical unity was a construction if you look at China it's actually not that logical but Liang T Tao found it convincing in the inclusive scheme national homogeneity in turn required sorry that non-Chinese peoples assimilated whatever that finally meant we can see that the assimilation theory had fully entered the political discourse by looking at Sun Yat-sen's approach to non-Chinese peoples in one of his famous texts this one from 1919 it's not as well known as the one from 1924 Sun Yat-sen argued that a penta ethnic understanding of the nation as suggested by the theory of unity of the five races or five ethnicities and of course symbolized in the five colored national flag was disruptive to national unity so Sun Yat-sen actually had not been in favor of adopting this five colored flag but he had actually opted for another but was overruled so despite the conceptual haziness of the assimilation theory because it never actually becomes really clear what is concretely meant by assimilation how this is concretely how this could be concretely managed by the state republican historians adopted the concept particularly his series of non-Chinese dynasties later they were to be called foreign Western dynasties were narrated as processes of assimilation and thereby a case was made of course for China's assimilative power as Liang Chichao had explained it so his basic argument had been even if foreign conquerors conquered Chinese regions they in the end assimilated to the Chinese and not the other way around was his argument. The 1910s and 1920s represent a crucial period of political transition paralleled in the production of and education in Chinese history in late imperial times Chinese thinkers believed that the main task of historiography was to answer which ethnicities constituted the Chinese nation and which regions constituted the Chinese nation state after 1911 politics had theoretically answered both questions however assimilation and integration of non-Chinese peoples and regions did of course not happen automatically and was not an inevitable process neither the Beiyang regime nor the Nanjing government had the resources financial militarily political resources to execute assimilative policies in practice nevertheless the official agenda propagated the idea of national unity and of homogeneity based on assimilation as in many new nation states everywhere around the world history and historiography were intrinsically entangled with political demands and were thus essential to the nation building process consequently the political ideas idea of non-Chinese peoples assimilation into the Chinese nation and their inclusion and particularly the inclusion of non-Chinese histories into China's national history informed and legitimized each other Republican historiographical approaches towards non-Chinese peoples show how knowledge and knowledge production and power were mutually constituted Chinese historians discursively integrated non-Chinese peoples into the imagined Chinese nation state and their narrations of Chinese national history and thereby they developed two historiographical patterns one pattern was that they habitually used the assimilation theory as an authoritative prism to examine the histories of non-Chinese people and the second pattern was that they generally downplayed and marginalized non-Chinese histories within their historical narratives and I just put this list had to show whose general histories and historical essays I have analyzed and you can see by the sheer mass of sources that this was a pretty general approach none of these of these historians listed here except two and I will come to them shortly questioned the validity of the assimilation theory and thereby they contributed to sinocentric and ethno-nationalist understandings of history and further manifested of course the hierarchical dichotomy of superior Chinese versus inferior non-Chinese cultures and ethnicities and let me just shortly refer to the two exceptions I've listed here so very few historians actually argued against the assimilation theory and there were mainly two Wang Guowei and Xiang Da however neither Wang Guowei nor Xiang Da actually wrote general histories at the same time so their influence remained confined to specialized historians so they didn't have a broader influence they didn't publish history textbooks for example all the other historians generally followed culturalist understandings of assimilation that is they described the adoption of Chinese language the adoption of Chinese family names and of dynastic administrative structures as assimilative processes and it comes to the fore in many Republican general histories by the 1940s the assimilation theory was already believed to be something traditional a traditional theory to understand Chinese history and even until today it continues to be a vital part of China's general histories and particularly of PRC history textbooks as has been analyzed by two scholars recently by Ranovic and Lu now Republican general histories narrated the histories of non-Chinese peoples and in particular those who founded powerful dynasties as processes of absorption into Chinese Karshan people when Liang Titao first formulated the assimilation theory in the early 1900s he had already referred particularly to the histories of non-Chinese empires namely the Tupkach or Tuoba people of the Qitan people the Georgian and the Manchu people as is well known these peoples founded powerful dynasties the Tuoba founded the northern way and then there were also the Tanguts who founded the Western Xia the Qitan founded the Liao the Georgian the Jin and of course the Manchus founded the Qing and all and of course the Mongols founded the Yuan but even Liang Titao wasn't so bold to claim that that the Mongols had assimilated during their Yuan dynasty that was an exception from the rule all these dynasties conquered Chinese territories among other territories actually their contact with Chinese cultures was the basis for Liang's assumption that they assimilated into Chinese culture and people and I quote from Liang Titao once the Jin and Qing had entered the central plains their native characteristics disappeared and vanished now characteristic narrative patterns derived from that were again first the marginalization the marginalization of the Liao the Western Xia and the Jin these were three non-Chinese dynasties that existed parallel to a Chinese dynasty the Song dynasty and this marginalization is clearly visible by the stark contrast of number of pages attributed to their histories versus the Song dynasty and a second pattern was that a general disregard of distinct cultural characteristics and also ruling strategies particularly of the Mongolian and the Manchus Qing dynasty two non-Chinese dynasties that ruled alone without a parallel Chinese dynasty now since the Republic of China proclaimed itself as a successor to the Qing dynasty and thus as legitimate inheritor of the Qing Empire's territory the narration of Qing history was of course directly related to the Republican nation building agenda regarding territory and ethnic constituencies as well as to manifesting the understanding that the Manchus assimilated and that the Qing thus was actually a Chinese dynasty an Altaic heritage of the Qing heritage from the Timurid or Tamalans Empire from the Zonghar Khanate and the Koshu Khanate was only recently rediscovered by new Qing history scholars and also by empire studies but Chinese historians would never refer to that at all in Republican times the other non-Chinese dynasties the Liao, the Jin and the Western Xia and also the Yuan did not have direct impacts on the nation building project most general histories for example devote one or several chapters to the Liao and Jin dynasties but these chapters are always shorter than their Song counterparts and often the Liao and the Jin are even dealt with in only one chapter together sometimes even lumped together with the Western Xia or the Yuan or they are not dealt with in specific chapters at all but are included in the chapters on and only in relation to the Song moreover the situation of the founding peoples the Georgian, the Qitan, the Tanguts, etc before the establishment of their dynasties is described with tropes of cultural essence that is nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyles as well as the lack of script the lack of administrative systems and reads at the time of their demise they either fell back to a non-historic or a historic state or according to the historians had assimilated into the Chinese also cultural histories of China follow this approach pre-nationalist culturalist ideas remained fundamental to the understanding of interactions between Chinese and non-Chinese peoples and the effects of these interactions non-Chinese Asian cultures including Mongol, Manchu, Tibetan and Turkestani cultures were not thought to have contributed meaningfully to China's culture Dungou Wenhua and of course Wenhua was also a rather recent concept that was used only since the late 19th century so these cultures are usually not even mentioned in chapters on culture the only exception was India and particularly Indian Buddhism and this was explained by the accepted fact that India, like China had something called high culture in contrast to the other Asian peoples let me shortly come to the concept of historic and non-historic people in Republican general histories Chinese and non-Chinese peoples are presented in a hierarchical dichotomy as I've already mentioned reflecting the pre-nationalist assumption of a sinocentric culturalist hierarchy besides its origin in Chinese culturalism this hierarchical dichotomy between Chinese self and non-Chinese other relates to the concept of historic and non-historic people or people with history and people without history as put forward by Hegel and also by Leopold von Ranker Hegel linked historicity or having history to his concept of reason including script and what he called consciousness and non-historicity to a what he called natural spirit similarly Ranker assumed that peoples or races without literate cultures were non-historic and thus nations as he said nations in eternal standstill now such concepts were introduced to Chinese thinking as part of Blunchley's writings Blunchley actually gave Ranker's interpretation a social Darwinist twist if you like and added nationalist political ideas Blunchley assumed that peoples who had not been able to form strong states were non-historic peoples consequently he denied such peoples the right to build their own nation states but argued for their inclusion and assimilation in nation states founded by historic peoples now Leonti Chao applied Blunchley's assignments and conceptualized the non-Chinese as non-historic races and the Chinese as historic races this classification of historic Chinese versus non-historic non-Chinese peoples encouraged political thinkers and historians alike to take a chauvinist approach towards non-Chinese peoples on the one hand they needed to differentiate the Chinese self from the non-Chinese in order to strengthen a Chinese national identity on the other hand they needed to deal adequately with such otherness as the Republican government claimed the Qing Empire's territory and thus needed to legitimize the integration of non-Chinese peoples into the Republic of China to this end historians became complicit with politicians who pursued this aim and selectively and arbitrarily included non-Chinese peoples histories into China's general histories and the story of assimilation despite the assimilation narrative however the dichotomy between Chinese self and non-Chinese other was maintained and let me come to my hopefully short conclusion so fundamentally the assimilation theory depends on a belief in the inherent Chinese cultural superiority this belief enabled late imperial thinkers to rescue a faltering Chinese identity in a state whose national and territorial sovereignty had been repeatedly compromised by waves of imperialist aggression they drew on the difference of the non-Chinese other to ascertain the superiority of the Chinese self Republican historians then arbitrarily included the histories of non-Chinese peoples as part of national Chinese history to help political leaders consciously or unconsciously retain the full extent of Qing territory against waves of successionist movements while excluding non-Chinese peoples from the project of nation building Agamben's logic of exclusive inclusion can help us understand why generations of Chinese political leaders ever since Sun Yat-sen discriminated against their non-Chinese citizens while trying to hijack their histories and identities by inventing and constructing minority Min-zu identities and histories and ultimately colonizing their man despite mostly not sharing the same level of deprivation severed by Agamben's homo-satza who is eternally captured in a state of exception in a concentration camp non-Chinese peoples have indeed been excluded from a community of the Chinese self socioeconomic and ethnocultural discrimination moreover reports of the last three years about more than one million Uighurs and other Muslim peoples being detained in so-called re-education camps indicate a worrying change of the situation towards Agamben's case of the homo-satza in an eternal state of exception thank you very much while allowing the chat to fill up with some questions I will ask a question or two about historic and non-historic races let's say if I were a nationalist or nationalist Republican historian I would have found it quite easy to argue that like the Miao or the Honey who it seems like maybe just weren't even on the radar for these historians were non-historic peoples but something like the Tibetans who had had writing for like a thousand years and had at one point actually conquered the Chinese capital it would seem quite hard to argue just based on these criteria like well they have a script they have a history and they formed a strong nation so I'm curious did anyone try to actually argue the case with that evidence or was it just somehow seen through or brushed to the side I would say that usually it's just brushed aside so as I try to explain the histories of the non-Chinese people were not really told in the general history in these general histories so they were only told in so far as they are related to I'm using this term a Han Chinese history of what the historians understood real Chinese history which is basically Han Chinese history they would usually not tell the history of Tibet like that of an independent country or having an independent history at all so also for the others they would not tell the Manchu's history from before Qing times but history would only begin usually with the conquest of Beijing or maybe the founding of the Qing and 1636 but they were not really interested in their real if you want real history I mean this idea of not having script and therefore being non-historic is of course an idea that we still find today right it's I think it's still a very common approach to not take oral history very seriously in history studies so but in case of the republican historians I think it's conscious or unconscious ignorance or ignoring the histories of these people no matter if they were Tibetans or Miao actually it's no difference to them so just put simply then like the to us blatant contradiction that you're saying a people is non-historic who for instance just does have a script and everyone would know it had a script just there was there was no constituency who felt it necessary to point out that contradiction no usually not there's a question by Yushu two questions did you come across any discussion on marriage between Chinese and non-Chinese people in these general histories what's the place of women in these general histories and not what do you think this absence of gender could reveal what's the place of overseas Chinese in these general histories writing okay let me first answer the question about marriage now marriage yeah I could have actually mentioned that in the when I talked about the general culturalist understanding of assimilation so in most a lot of historians don't actually say in detail what they mean by assimilation they would usually refer to the well-known emperors of the northern way who adopted Chinese family names for example this would be the all of them would refer to this one story and of course they would also refer to marriage between or would sometimes refer to marriage between non-Chinese emperors for example to Chinese wives as a sign of their assimilation they would not explain in detail why marrying a Chinese means assimilation to the Chinese and they would also not explain in detail why adopting Chinese style administration means assimilation into the Chinese so this would always remain rather hazy that's what I meant by calling this referring to the haziness of a concept it's actually not a very clear concept because it isn't thoroughly explained or analyzed what assimilation concretely means in history as well as in the contemporary times when these histories were written so marriage would be mentioned but in general women I didn't come across women as crucial parts of these general histories well I think this absence of gender is nothing particular to Chinese general histories but I think this is something you will find in probably all general histories around the globe at that time because general or women as active parts of history were just not discovered let's say or they were just not considered to be of any importance sometimes women as leaders for example among the Qitan in particular were mentioned as referring to the barbarian state so keep as you might know the Qitan people in the Liao Dynasty had quite a few powerful females as entrances and as leaders but that would usually be used in order to argue for their barbarity and not for them being civilized but I can't say that this is a very an issue that is touched by a lot of historians it's rather a marginal point overseas Chinese I'm sorry I didn't look into that at all and it didn't I didn't I don't think it's it had a lot of it wasn't very it's a very important part of general histories they might have one little chapter on overseas Chinese in their chapters on at their time contemporary history but usually that's not an important part of their histories yeah so Isabella asks how did these ideas about ethnic nationalism relate to the adoption of the five nation flag with stripes reflecting the five major ethnic groups this flag was not favored by all Republicans I said that in my talk but it was adopted by the young republics so reflected some ideas about how ethnic groups should be integrated into the nation yeah this is actually an ambivalent feeling that among the young Chinese nationalists or the Chinese nationalists in the young republic let me put it like that and so on the one hand they I mean the Mongolia and Tibet of course broke away from the Qing Empire and from the Republic of China rather immediately immediately before and immediately after the Republic of China had been declared so it was rather obvious to Republican nationalists that there was this danger of separatism so they were on the one hand they were anxious to show to these people that they would include them in their nation-state and in their concept of the Chinese Republic symbolized by the flag however this flag was really mainly was a didn't really reflect their political ideas and we can see that the powerful politicians of that time like Sun Yat-sen and others either they didn't have any time at all to think about these people because I mean they were very occupied with the disaster situation of the Chinese of China proper and they couldn't really occupy themselves with what was happening in Tibet, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Manchuria, but those of them who did think about these regions would nearly all of them would argue for their inclusion and in order to stabilize this inclusion and to prevent future separatisms of these regions nearly all of them would also argue for active assimilation policies in these regions but this comes to the fore in the sources I have studied the general histories only indirectly because these are not political handbooks but these are history textbooks of course there is a question by Hannah which came before Isabella's and let me shortly refer to this question how do you feel that the anti-child's ideas of nationalism, Chinese superiority and assimilation have inspired modern-day PRC assimilation policies and nationalist education? My feeling is yes I haven't tried to to show this connection by I don't know looking at PRC history textbooks myself and looking for example at how are these things phrased, how are they narrated is it very similar but I know that a lot of republican history textbooks and also cultural histories particularly for example Nui, Zheng, Zhong, Wen, Hua are used until today as textbooks at university and also school education so textbooks from republican times with their rather cynocentric approach to China's history are still used and are obviously found not found problematic in national education in the PRC so I do think that anti-child directly or indirectly had a strong impact on how history and particularly history of non-Chinese people has been interpreted also in PRC times and probably also in the Republic of China on Taiwan today. I'd like to ask also a final question about the constitution of territoriality where let's say, let's put it this way if I were a Chinese nationalist I've always thought that I would say well the Ewenki who were in kind of Outer Manchuria they're one of our Minzhu and so are the Ryukyuns and after the Sino-Gurkha war there were Amban stationed in Kathmandu so of course Nepal is an inviolable part of the Chinese nation how did the particular imagination of the Qing's territoriality come to be stabilized and how is it represented in these textbooks? You mean how it's argued that the Qing Empire's territory is China? I even mean how do they know what's part of the Qing Empire? That's a very good question actually so usually well, Liang Tichao and the texts in late Qing times in my reading usually refer already begin this Penta-ethnic understanding to repeat on the one hand repeat this Penta-ethnic understanding of China or the Qing Empire which is of course so Manchu's Mongols, Chinese, Tibetans Turkic Muslims and the regions inhabited by them they don't and they use of course also the names for the administrative regions used by the Qing so for example they would use the term Xinjiang or they would use the older term Tian Shan Nan Lu Tian Shan Bei Lu for this region they would use the term Zhang or Xi Zhang for Tibet et cetera but it's rather again I have to say it's like the assimilation theory it remains rather hazy it's not you can't really pin it down and in the general histories we see something else we see on the one hand something similar so the reference to the Qing Empire with the the 18 provinces Manchu and then again the four other regions Manchu, Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang but we also see some references to the Yuan Empire where we have this idea of China could be even bigger than the Qing Empire so the Mongols so you can find formulations like the Mongols unified China of course a very interesting idea of the Yuan dynasty on the one hand and of China on the other hand so I think at that time for late imperial thinkers but to a certain degree also for republican historians the territory of China isn't entirely clear and it's never made that clear the reason why Korea isn't part of China is because the Qing didn't incorporate it in its in its own ethnic theory is your yeah definitely I mean Zhang Taiyan a famous political thinker and historian and scholar in general of late Qing times but then also republican times wrote his famous text in 1904 in 1907 and in this text he actually does refer to Korea and Vietnam and he develops this interesting theory saying well the final aim should of us nationalists should be to integrate Korea and Vietnam and actually to liberate them from their colonial oppresses but before we do that it's probably easier to to stabilize our own territory with Xinjiang Tibet and Mongolia and assimilate those people and when we have managed that we can also take Korea and Vietnam who are culturally so much closer to us so they do have that in mind but I think after the the downfall of the or after the abdication of the last Qing emperor and the establishment of the Republic Vietnam and Korea somehow seem to not to be in the focus anymore probably also for very practical reasons so thank you very much for this talk and thank you everyone for joining us okay then I guess I will say goodbye and thank you again and then I will shut this off