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Comments on the Seminar of “Local Consciousness and National Identity since the Ming and Qing Dynasties”
YU Hai-bing
2015, 47 (3):
163-166.
doi: 10、16382/j.cnki.1000-5579.2015.03.018
Research of locality has become a heated topic in the academic circle. The Seminar of “Local Consciousness and National Identity since the Ming and Qing Dynasties” is aimed to examine the relationship between local consciousness and national identity from the perspective of national construction, carry out cross-field dialogues in terms of historical anthropology, social history, political history, history of ideas, and study on intellectuals, and explore the historical process of national construction and national identity of modern China via different approaches and subjects. Participants in the seminar mainly discusses the issues such as what is “locality”, whose “locality”, what kind of “China”, and what is “China”. Firstly, with varied connotations and denotations, “locality” can mean an administrative region, a geographical or a cultural space. It’s a dynamic notion covering countries, counties, provinces as well as south, north, northeast, and northwest regions. Secondly, the historical subjects who take part in the construction of local consciousness and national identity are diverse, so the imagined “China” varies from the intellectual elite and institutional culture at the national level to the religion experts and social organizations at the local level, and from the border of China to the external world. Finally, scholars heatedly discussed the identity behind the diversity of “locality” and many issues such as when and how China became a nation-state from multi-perspectives of the relationships between locality and nation, race and nationality, tax system, protocol and religions, war and industrial capitalism. The variety will not hinder our understanding of “China”; rather, it is the premise and beginning of our understanding.
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