Questioning the Teleology of the Central State in Republican China

Abstract

No doubt the expansion of the reach of the state can be considered one of the prominent features of the twentieth century.1 Many studies have described this process in Western Europe and beyond.2 In the case of China, however, there is a marked tendency in the historiography to assume that, except for the Qing dynasty’s lastditch efforts to modernize from 1901–1911 with the New Policies (新政 xinzheng) reforms and a short-lived attempt during the Nanjing Decade (1928–1937), the first half of the twentieth century represented, for the most part, a discontinuation in the process of state building. It was in order to question this assumption that we organized a conference on “State-Building through Political Disunity in Republican China,” held in Paris at EHESS (École des hautes études en sciences sociales) in September 2018. The idea was to target the Republican period (1912–1949) as one of critical importance in the process of state building in modern China. A key aspect of the Republican period, in fact, is political fragmentation. None of the central governments asserting themselves and (mostly) recognized as such—the Beiyang governments (1912–1928) and the subsequent Nationalist government (1928–1949)—was in a position to control China Proper, let alone the whole territory formerly dominated by the Qing dynasty. Moreover, these central governments faced many formidable challengers, including regional warlord and Communist regimes as well as pro-Japanese governments. Contemporaries lamented the lack of effective centralization because they saw political disunity as a decisive obstacle on the road toward a modern and powerful China capable of (among other things) renegotiating the “unequal treaties” as Meiji Japan had done. This Republican concern for disunity and its negative effect on state building tends to persist among today’s specialists on Republican China (regardless of nationality). Admittedly, scholars have demonstrated that the Beiyang governments, despite their