Dr. Ya-pei Kuo
Arsenaalstraat 1, PO Box 9515
2300 RA Leiden, Netherlands
Introduction
My current research focuses on two periods in modern Chinese history: 1). the first decade of the twentieth century, and 2). the 1920s. Both periods, in conventional narrative, are moments of anticipation in the eve of revolution. The first decade of the twentieth century was capped by the 1911 Revolution, which toppled the last dynasty and founded the first republic in China. The 1920s ended with the Nationalist Revolution (1927-1929), where two major political parties, the Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party, jointly create a revolutionary regime. Overshadowed by these larger-than-life events, these periods are often framed in the dichotomy between the doomed order of the ancien régime and the forward-moving momentum of historical progression. My work brings into question the interpretative assumptions latent in such master narrative, and explores the interest that these ‘anticipatory’ periods hold in their own right.
Specifically, I am working on two projects:
1. Debating Cultural Matters at the Time of Revolution: Xueheng, 1922-1933.
This book project is a substantive expansion of my PhD dissertation, “The Cultural Crisis of Modern Conservatism: The Case of The Critical Review, 1922-1933” (UW-Madison, 2002). It focuses on a group of Chinese scholars who, after receiving higher education in the US, returned to China in the early 1920s and inaugurated the journal Xueheng (The Critical Review) (1922-1933). They immediately joined the ongoing debate on China’s cultural future, and took a dissenting position from prevalent radicalism’s denunciation of Chinese tradition in the name of modernity. Through the group’s critique, the book traces the formation of ‘culture’ as a concept as well as a field of activities in the midst of Chinese society’s militarization for revolutionary cause.
2. Creating Modern Education in Late Qing China: Idea, Institution, and Politics, 1901-1911
This project examines the initiation of modern school system in 1901-11, and reassesses the falling Manchu dynasty’s ambiguous legacy. In the name of nation-building, the founding of modern schools placed at the imperial state’s disposal a powerful tool of governing through social and cultural programming. As such, the creation of modern school system, while a landmark in China’s institutional modernization, also carried imprints of the imperial state’s expansionist ambition.
An intellectual historian by training, I place discursive analysis at the center of both projects, and pay special attention to the working of discourse in history. To me, discourse is simultaneously an agent and a product of historical changes. Its power of suasion shapes people’s outlooks and choices. At the same time, due to its susceptibility to reinterpretation, the meaning of a discourse is constantly a site of fluidity, and a reflection of its wielders’ power and particular interests. Through the story of a discourse, one learns not only the complex mental reality of an era, but also how this mental reality intersects with the sociopolitical reality in history.
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