Civilizing the Chinese, competing with the West: Study societies in late Qing China

As one of the major institutional platforms for the activist intellectuals to inaugurate political and cultural modernity, study societies had been proliferating throughout late Qing China (ca. 1894-1911). While existing studies have subsumed this distinctive sociological phenomenon under the political programmes of the broader reform and revolutionary movements, or conceived it as an instance of prototypical formation of civil society in the sociopolitical context of late Qing, they fail to problematize the meanings and functions of 'civilization' and 'civility' as the constitutive (albeit highly contested) principles of the various cultural-political practices of study societies. This study purports to fill this gap by analyzing the symbolic and practical aspects of the study society movement, with specific reference to its guiding motifs of 'Confucian religion' and 'military citizenship'. Despite their manifold differences, these notions implicated the reconstruction of social ties and cultural tradition with the distinctive purpose of constituting and strengthening a 'civilized' community of the Chinese people and citizens, which was to engage in cultural and political competition with Christianity and the imperialist states of the West.; The dual themes of competition and civilization in study societies are then explained in terms of the sociological theory of state formation and civilization, which has been articulated on the basis of European experiences of absolutist and bureaucratic state-building. Art alternative model of nationalist-imperialist state formation is set forth to explain why and how the late Qing study societies arose as a civilizing movement despite the breakdown of the state monopoly of violence and powers, an exceptional setting standing in contrast to the rise and spread of 'civilization' in the European and other world-historical contexts. The concrete courses and outcomes of the study society movement in reformist Hunan and revolutionary Shanghai are further compared and explained in terms of the cultural impacts of war-making, which in the context of late Qing had led to the rapid rise and demise of study societies by transforming the gentry elites along the directions of local militarization and semi-colonial commercialization.