The Image of the Semu People: Mongols, Chinese, and Various Other Peoples under the Mongol Empire (original) (raw)
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Chinese History Paper #2 (2).docx
Final Paper for East Asian Civilization: China, wherein I discuss the cultural and ethnic evolution of dynastic China between the Song and Qing dynasties.
Biran 2017 Non Han Dynasties in M. Szonyi A Companion to Chinese Hisroey Blackwell 129-142.pdf
For about half of its recorded history, parts or all of imperial China were ruled by non-Han peoples, mainly from Manchuria or Mongolia. The dynasties they founded (mainly the Liao, Jin, Xia, Yuan, and Qing) contributed greatly to the shaping of late imperial and modern China's boundaries and ethnic composition. Yet until recently these non-Han dynasties were treated as the stepchildren of Chinese history, and were studied mainly through the prism of Sinicization, namely when and how they embraced the allegedly superior Chinese culture. The chapter reviews the reasons for the marginalization of these dynasties and the historiographical turns—in terms of both sources and historical frameworks—that, especially since the 1990s, led to their study in their own Inner Asian terms. Highlighting the 'New Qing History' that led this change, the chapter discusses the common political culture of the Inner Asian dynasties and reviews directions of current and future research.
Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, 2014
This article examines how dynasties applied the Five Elements theory in their respective legitimation discourses throughout the history of imperial China. Drawing on both documentary and visual sources, I reveal that the Liao, Jin, and Yuan rulers constructed different dynastic lineages that challenged the “orthodox” dynastic succession pattern formulated by Han Chinese dynasties. In particular, I will show that the Yuan tacitly invoked Metal as its dynastic element and white as its imperial color. I argue that the Yuan choice of dynastic element essentially claimed succession to the Jurchen Jin, another non-Han conquest dynasty, rather than to the Song as scholars have previously assumed. However, these constructions were later negated by the Ming dynasty, which restored a purely Han Chinese dynastic lineage that excluded the Liao, Jin, and Yuan. These ideological conflicts, which were ultimately grounded in ethnic tensions between Han and non-Han peoples, eventually led to the disappearance of the Five Element theory in the Qing political rhetoric. This article sheds new light on understanding how a dynasty engaged its cultural heritage and ethnic background in its political ideology and how it perceived its own place in the Chinese dynastic lineage.
2022
The topic of this paper is inspired by Professor Aloys Winterling’s discussion of the social integration of politics and the political integration of society in ancient Rome. My study is also benefited from his elaboration on the relationship between societal formation and forms of system differentiation as well as his comparison of Weber and Luhmann. This paper aims to investigate different types of structural coupling between stratification and political office service in Chinese history. These types reflect, to some extent and perhaps with time lag, the societal formations in different periods because they were often both cause and effect reciprocally. My investigation also would address the interplay between stratification and functional differentiation, and therefore shed light on the particular way of Chinese society to functional differentiation. It can help us to understand better contemporary China’s situation.
Ethnic and Status Identity in Qing China: The Hanjun Eight Banners
This dissertation is focused on the Hanjun, the ethnically Han component of the Qing dynasty’s Eight Banner System. The liminal status of the Hanjun – part of the banner system, which was closely associated with a Manchu ruling house, and yet marked as ethnically Han – makes their history a valuable window into Qing ideas about identity. This dissertation traces how the Qing court managed the Hanjun over the course of the dynasty, finding that though Han ethnicity was central to official conceptions of Hanjun identity, it was secondary to their status identity as banner people prior to the 1750s. Though scholarship on the banners often describes them as a fundamentally Manchu organization that served to reinforce a shared Manchu ethnic identity, careful study of the Hanjun reveals that for much of the Qing the banners were an inherently multiethnic institution. Banner people, I argue, constituted a “service elite,” like the samurai of Edo Japan or dvorianstvo of imperial Russia, a common early modern technology of rule that used legal privilege to maintain the loyalty of a large hereditary class of soldiers and administrators. A mid-eighteenth-century policy of expelling much of the Hanjun population from the banners represented an attempt to change the Qing service elite from a status-based category to an ethnic one, but this attempt was abandoned by the early nineteenth century, and the multi-ethnic Qing service elite persisted until the end of the dynasty.