Hunanese nationalism and the revival of Wang Fuzhi, 1839--1923 (China, Mao Zedong)

This dissertation paints a portrait of a forgotten nationalism in the south-central Chinese province of Hunan in the late 19th- and early 20th centuries. The author traces the movement's beginnings to the 1839 rediscovery of a Hunanese hermit scholar named Wang Fuzhi, whose idiosyncratic writings came to be seen as the local origins of otherwise Western ideas of progress, democracy, humanism and nationalism. The narrative follows three generations of Hunanese scholars who, as part of an ongoing effort to build a new provincial ethos to counter the widespread perception of Hunan as an intellectual backwater, transformed Wang Fuzhi into the iconic forefather of the modern "Hunanese spirit." Their scholarly revival gave rise to a localist movement bearing all of the markings of nationalism---including appeals to a common historical destiny, an insistence that Hunan's culture was different from the rest of China, bitter complaints of China's oppression of Hunan, and finally outright calls for independence---of which the young Mao Zedong in 1920 was one of the most strident voices.; Hunan had been firmly part of the Chinese empire since the Qin unification in the third century BC, and so---in contrast to peripheral provinces such as Taiwan, Xinjiang or Yunnan that were brought into China only by Qing expansion---it is the last place one expects to find strong voices of separatism. The depth of Hunanese patriotism depicted in this dissertation therefore calls into question the very foundations of modern Chinese nationalism---in particular the longstanding assumption that Confucian loyalty to the empire transformed naturally into a patriotic desire for a unified Chinese state. The case of Hunan shows that the Chinese nation's inheritance of the Qing empire was anything but natural or inevitable, and that scholars in the hinterland through the early 20th century did not necessarily consider "China" to be the object of their loyalty at all.