{"id":16881,"date":"2019-01-20T10:13:44","date_gmt":"2019-01-20T00:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinaheritage.net\/?page_id=16881"},"modified":"2023-05-10T08:59:07","modified_gmt":"2023-05-09T22:59:07","slug":"translatio-imperii-sinici","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/chinaheritage.net\/translatio-imperii-sinici\/","title":{"rendered":"Translatio Imperii Sinici<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

China Heritage Annual 2019<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The topic of \u2018Empire\u2019 has enjoyed renewed debate among historians and political scientists for over a decade, and it has featured in our own work since the launch of China Heritage Quarterly<\/em> in 2005 and through our advocacy of New Sinology \u5f8c\u6f22\u5b78<\/a>. It was a particular focus of my 2008 book\u00a0The Forbidden City<\/em><\/a>, as well as being prominent in the joint academic discussion of China\u2019s Prosperous Age \u76db\u4e16<\/a>\u00a0from 2010, in the long-term collaboration with the photographer Lois Conner (see, for example, our 2014 book Beijing: Contemporary and Imperial<\/em><\/a>, and the essay ‘Beijing: In an Imperial Vein’), and in a collective undertaking to \u2018Re-read Joseph Levenson\u2019 over the years 2012 to 2014 (see The Practice of History and China Today<\/a>, The China Story<\/em>, 25 August 2015). My interest in the topic really began to take form in 1994, having been introduced to the work of Charles Moore in Los Angeles after my first trip to Las Vegas. My own account of \u2018Learning from Las Vegas\u2019 will be the topic of a future chapter in this Annual<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In Drop Your Pants!<\/a>, our five-part series on the Communist Party\u2019s 2018 patriotic education campaign, we discussed the creation in the 1920s of the Chinese party-state \u9ee8\u570b d\u01ceng gu\u00f3<\/em>, a Nationalist-era term revived in recent years to describe the People\u2019s Republic. We also introduced the journalist Chu Anping\u2019s observations on Party Empire \u9ee8\u5929\u4e0b d\u01ceng ti\u0101nxi\u00e0<\/em>, a word he used to describe holistic Party control and one that re-entered China\u2019s political vocabulary as a result of the investigative historian Dai Qing\u2019s study of Chu, and China\u2019s suppressed liberal political traditions, in 1989.<\/p>\n

In light of developments during the first years of the Xi Jinping era (2012-), the political scientist Vivienne Shue has recently suggested the importance of discussing \u2018the Sinic world\u2019s singular experience of empire, imperial breakdown, and passage to political modernity\u2019. Once more, it seems pressingly relevant to investigate the country\u2019s \u570b\u9ad4 gu\u00f3 t\u01d0\u00a0<\/em>\u2014 an ancient term revived for use in nineteenth-century Japan and subsequently \u2018re-imported\u2019 to China when thinkers were debating the nature of dynastic or, for that matter, post-dynastic government. \u570b\u9ad4 gu\u00f3 t\u01d0<\/em>\u00a0is not merely about\u00a0formal governance or the system of rule, or indeed limited to the ideological underpinnings of the state, it is also used to indicate \u2018national essence\u2019, that is those things which constitute a ruled territory, its mores and imagination, its identities and cultures, in fact, its total existential presence. In an essay titled \u2018Party-state, nation, empire\u2019, Shue asks: \u2018What light \u2026 can reexamining China\u2019s oddly intact transfiguration \u2014 from dynastic empire to people\u2019s republic \u2014 shed on how the Party has governed since 1949?\u2019 (See Shue, \u2018Party-state, nation, empire: rethinking the grammar of Chinese Governance\u2019<\/a>,\u00a0Journal of Chinese Governance<\/em>, vol.3, August 2018: 268-291.)<\/p>\n

In China Heritage Annual 2019 <\/em>we\u00a0will contribute to just such a line of inquiry, although our interests range beyond the immediate academic concerns of political scientists. While mindful of the yearnings, or at least nostalgia, for empire redux<\/em>\u00a0in such diverse modern polities as Erdo\u011fan\u2019s Turkey, Putin\u2019s Russia, Modi\u2019s India and Abe\u2019s Japan, as well as however one manages to characterise the United States of America under Donald Trump, we would posit that\u00a0Translatio Imperii<\/em>, is no recent fad in China; indeed, it has been unfolding since the Taiping Civil War (1850-1864) and the Tongzhi Restoration (\u540c\u6cbb\u4e2d\u8208, 1860-1874, also known as the Self-strengthening Movement). It reached a significant contemporary moment in 1997 when Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin used the old Qing dynastic-era expression \u2014 \u2018restoration\u2019 \u4e2d\u8208 zh\u014dng x\u012bng<\/em> \u2014 to describe the post-1978 and post-1989 restoration of his regime\u2019s fortunes. Our concerns, therefore, are not merely with the incipient \u2018Red Empire\u2019 of the Xi Jinping era \u2014 something discussed at length by Tsinghua Professor Xu Zhangrun \u8a31\u7ae0\u6f64<\/a> \u2014 but also with the ideas, habits, cultural expressions and aspirations of empire that have marked China\u2019s modern history, and which still powerfully influence the Chinese world, and will continue to do so.<\/p>\n

If we were to assay a Chinese translation of the Latin term\u00a0Translatio Imperii<\/em>, it would be \u5e1d\u696d\u4e4b\u901a\u8b8a d\u00ec y\u00e8 zh\u012b t\u014dng bi\u00e0n<\/em>.\u00a0This formulation combines the pre-Qin expression \u2018the imperial enterprise\u2019 \u5e1d\u696d\u00a0d\u00ec y\u00e8<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 the unified rule over a people and geopolitical territory, as well as the regulation of its customs, history and ideas, by a man of destiny and his successors, an \u2018enterprise\u2019 that reaches back well before the Common Era \u2014 with another hallowed term,\u00a0\u901a\u8b8a\u00a0t\u014dng bi\u00e0n<\/em>, \u2018the creative adaptation of familiar traditions\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Geremie R. Barm\u00e9
\nEditor, China Heritage<\/em>
\nJanuary 2019<\/p>\n

\n

Table of Contents<\/strong><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n