"Bringing the World Home": Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China

I reserve particular thanks to Ming Feng-ying for both putting up with and encouraging the final stages of finishing this long labor.''some traditions, far from impeding certain aspects of modernization, may have actually facilitated them in some societies,'' 19 thereby in effect reinscribing a Hegelian teleological perspective of a unilinear historical progression.In other words, the pull of historical teleology has proved relentless, particularly in light of the traditional/modern binary that just does not seem to go away as a characteristic of Chinese studies, whether inside or outside of China. 20 This is not to say that the late Qing does not tell us much about what was to come (and what had just passed or was in the process of passing) and that the period between 1895 and 1919 cannot be regarded as the site of one of modern world history's most important transitions.It is to ask, rather, that we merely take a momentary step back from placing the age in the strict perspective of an ineluctably emerging and uniform modernity, a modernity ''with fixed characteristics,'' to paraphrase the contemporary Chinese slogan.Ironically, it is only by thus looking closely at ideas that could not be implemented or at things that did not necessarily work out that modernity will reveal itself in its potential infinite variety and allow us to entertain alternative possibilities as to what might have come to into being.As the Chinese government sought to insert its nation into the neoliberal world order in the 1980s and 1990s, a slogan came to the fore that recalled the attitudinal changes that began in the late nineteenth century and, indeed, served as the rubric under which research on and scholarly compilation of materials concerning that period of Chinese history were conducted.This slogan, ''China moves toward the world, the world moves toward China'' (Zhongguo zouxiang shijie, shijie zouxiang Zhongguo) 21 seems, at first glance, an adequate and appropriately upbeat summary of a salutary process.On reconsideration, however, the formulation increasingly takes on the qualities of Zeno's Racecourse, where each runner can complete only half the distance to the destination at any given time and thus PA R T I Late Qing IdeasC H A P T E R 1 China as OriginFor domination today is rarely justified through oracles, ritual superiority, or claims to birth rights; domination is now more frequently justified in terms of better acquaintance with universal knowledge and better access to universal modes of acquiring knowledge.Ashis Nandy, ''Shamans, Savages, and the Wilderness: On the Audibility of Dissent and the Future of Civilizations'' Even in submitting to the dominance of a world order it is powerless to change, nationalism remains reluctant, complaining, demanding, sometimes angry, at other times shamefaced.