Revisiting Chinas Modernity by Jiang Sun - 9781433168765

Revisiting Chinas ModernityEthnicity, Religion, and Nation\nAuthor(s): Jiang Sun\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, United States\nImprint: Peter Lang Publishing Inc\nISBN-13: 9781433168765, 978-1433168765\nSynopsis\nInvestigating the nature of Chinese modernity from the perspectives of social and intellectual history and inspired by Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities, this book reveals the ambiguity of nation as a modern concept and opens up a new possibility for the turn of Chinas national narratives. The definitions of nation as either an imagined community or an entity with a substantive cultural origin are both partially wrong in the Chinese context, since China had its distinctive socio-cultural system in pre-modern times and the binary mode of nationality is inadequate to interpret the complexity of Chinese society. In light of this complexity, this work explores the relationship between the Manchus and the Han Chinese throughout the Qing dynasty, ex.