Nation State-Building from Below: The Transformation of Local Governance and its Shifting Knowledge
Foundations in Late Imperial China

PhD Project

Nation-state building has been the most important and urgent task for China since the late Qing Dynasty. This PhD project focuses on one critical facet of this building process – the transformation of local governance.

Of various reforms, the Local Self-Government Movement 地方自治 （1898-1911） could be viewed as the most systematic and influential local governance reform in late imperial China. Driven by a range of global knowledge, in particular the local self-government models from Prussia and Japan, it was dedicated to building a strong state and a united nation by reorganising local communities and rationalising administrative institutions as well as by unifying imperial subjects and transforming them into national citizens.

Based on numerous studies on critical figures and reform events with regard to the Local Self-Government Movement, this project focuses mainly on the interactions between the Movement and its shifting knowledge foundations in the late Qing within a global context.

The leading concept of this project – knowledge foundations – builds upon the research agenda of the Department of Thomas Duve and its more recent working concept of ‘knowledge of normativity’. Knowledge foundations can be understood in a narrow sense, namely as ‘disciplinary knowledge’, encompassing not only the core concepts and theoretical frameworks with regard to local governance, but also the fundamental premises defining what could be recognised as ‘knowledge on local governance’. On the other hand, knowledge should be understood in a broader sense, i.e. as the epistemological, cultural-ideological and ethnic assumptions underlying the Local Self-Government Movement. Although these knowledge foundations were seldom declared explicitly by policy-makers and intellectuals, they actually led reforms in certain directions and imposed invisible boundaries.

To better understand the entanglement of aforementioned practices, institutions and knowledge, this project draws extensively on interdisciplinary methodologies such as global legal history, historical sociology, cultural studies and knowledge studies. In terms of sources and materials, primary sources from the First Historical Archives of China and the Tianjin Archive have been collected and processed, and a broad range of published or digitised sources such as edicts, diaries and newspapers articles will also be analysed.

By reconceptualising late Qing local self-government reforms as a site of knowledge contestation and cultural negotiation, this project ultimately sheds light on the entangled histories of governance, identity and modernity in China and beyond.