EVENTS

 Abstract:

Recent scholarship on nineteenth century China has emphasized how population growth, the colonial policies of foreigners, and shifts in world trade conspired to weaken the power of Qing emperors and at the same time caused a variety of groups (even those who wished Qing monarchs to remain in power) to imagine new ways of ordering the empire. These groups shared common repertoires for articulating their visions of the polity. Using elements near to hand, including buildings, graves, poems, histories, and rituals, they could make their particular, partisan programs appear natural and self-evident. Adherents could recognize and bring about this future only if they were able to embody certain virtues.  The buildings (particularly shrines for the dead) and texts used on those shrines displayed exemplary virtues in concrete form. Leaders of utopian movements hoped their subjects would emulate these virtues and thus realize the hoped-for transformations of government and society. The most well-known – and destructive – of these groups was the Taiping, which between 1851 and 1864, made Nanjing its capital. Yet even enemies of the Taiping shared similar tactics of using Nanjing to promise a future in which government could correspond to cosmic truths. Chen Zuolin (1837-1920), a degree holder, survivor of the Taiping War, and expert in Nanjing history was one such figure. Chen’s reconstruction projects included naming and honouring the dead, reviving destroyed libraries and scholarly projects, performing rituals, and writing detailed local histories of city neighbourhoods. He saw each of these activities as forms of self-strengthening. He argued that the renewed vigour of the Qing dynasty relied primarily on the activities of local degree holding elites, not emperors, armies, or government officials. Although Chen himself was a relatively minor figure, his life exemplifies critical aspects of Chinese politics in the nineteenth century: the enduring legacies of the Taiping War, the desire of many groups to transform the polity, and the use of history and ritual to naturalize their visions of a new state.

About the Speaker:

Chuck Wooldridge is an Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College, City University of New York, and Co-Director of the Modern China Seminar, Columbia University. He holds a PhD in East Asian Studies from Princeton University and was a recipient of Fulbright Dissertation Research Grant for research on Nanjing. He also received the Chiang Ching-kuo doctoral dissertation fellowship for dissertation research in Beijing, Taipei and Tokyo. His book, City of Virtues: Nanjing in an Age of Utopian Visions, will appear in May 2015 from University of Washington Press.