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.It may be that racial categories as such were not new to China: typing and denigrating foreigners by skin color and other physical features can be traced to ancient times.30 However, racism in the sense of a belief in the congenital and immutable inferiority or evil of a particular group or of other societies was not part of mainstream Confucianism.Modern Chinese nationalism also depended on a new kind of history – not the traditional history of the state but the history of the Chinese people.Again, Liang Qichao led the way, explicitly calling for a national history in 1902.But it was the revolutionaries who understood that a history of the Chinese nation meant reading ethnic differences back into the past – and into the future.Zhang Binglin and other members of the “National Essence” school looked at both biological and cultural factors to show how the “Han race” evolved historically.By biology, they were primarily thinking about ancestry and tracing lines of descent (as Chinese clans had long done).By culture, they were primarily thinking about the philosophers of the classical period of the Western Zhou (seventh through third centuries BC).One of their charges68The road to revolution, 1895–1919against the Qing was that the court, through the examination system, had suppressed the non-Confucian “hundred schools” of the Western Zhou, thus denying intellectual freedom to the Chinese.In historical fact, the Qing was following an orthodoxy created by the Chinese, but the rediscovery of the non-Confucian philosophers contributed to the intellectual ferment of the late Qing.Zhang Binglin became one of the century’s foremost scholars of the historical and philological research of Han Learning, specifically supporting the “Old Text” school opposed to Kang Youwei’s New Text position.31 He took such late Ming thinkers as Wang Fuzhi as his intellectual ancestors.Zhang affirmed that cultural identity rested on racial identity.Assimilation was thus a chimera: the Manchus could never become civilized.At the same time, culture was not simply determined by biology: it was built up and maintained only by the efforts of the particular people in question.Zhang believed that the Han people must understand that their historical role was to continue their common culture, lest it and thereby the Chinese people themselves be lost.Historically, he acknowledged that the Han was not a“pure” race, but in so far as other races had mingled with the Chinese over the centuries, they were not the racial enemies of the Chinese.These propositions existed in some tension with each other.If Chinese could lose their identity and become barbarian, why couldn’t Manchus become civilized? Above all, if a people is defined by cultural consciousness inherited from the past, where does change come from? Zhang saw culture as simultaneously rooted and growing.He even acknowledged that culture was learned, not genetically inherited – but he had a fallback position.He emphasized that if the Manchus were to become civilized, they would still have to relinquish their control over China, since civilized peoples did not oppress others.Zhang also believed that a conscious cultural identity required self-rule.This made the Manchus, defined as non-Han, automatically illegitimate rulers, though it also implied that the Manchus also deserved their own homeland.Unlike some revolutionaries, Zhang was not a committed democrat, though he was not necessarily opposed to democracy.Self-rule to him meant the self-rule of the ethnic nation.But who were the “Han”? To answer this question – and in fact to pose it in the first place – Zhang and other revolutionaries turned away from cultural and moral categories to the notions of kinship and lineage.These were among the most basic tools of Chinese social organization and provided the vocabulary for separating the in-group from out-groups.The Qing had long distinguished “Man” (Manchu) from “Han,” as well as the other peoples and tribes of the Empire to the west.32 “Han” here was one of several terms used to describe the people(s) of a geographic area south of the Great Wall, east of Central Asia’s mountains and deserts, west of the Pacific Ocean, and somewhat vaguely north of Southeast Asia’s jungles.But the Qing was trying to classify loosely defined political groups, not genetically determined races
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