Studies On Ethnology In Modern China

Ethnology, which studies the race of human being, is a peculiar branch of human being sciences. Ethnology has many complicated targets, for instance, it can identify and classify the races, clarify the process of races development, and appraise the impact of biology and social economy's factors on the race.As far as the result of modern research in biology, ethnology, anthropology and sociology are concerned, the"race"is a term of Biology and Body Anthropology, and belongs to the conception of Biology primarily. The race does not consider more cultural factors than Biological functions. It refers to a certain crowd who has some common hereditary features in body constitution. Nevertheless, in our impression, the race commonly contacted with"racism"and"racial prejudice", therefore, I would rather believe the race is emphasized on its physical aspect than its cultural aspect.The reality of modern times was complicated. Thus, when Ethnology was introduced to China, many people, who had different purposes and ideas, viewed it as a implement to propaganda political doctrine, express their ideas, and engage on scientific research. For example, aggressors, who based on the difference among the body constitution of human being, advocated:"Yellow peril theory","China and Japan have identical language and race". What they advocated is to explore an excuse for ruling Chinese people; furthermore, in order to save our country from failure, patriots put forward a proposal that we must have the idea of self-improvement and endeavor to protect Mongoloid race. In addition, revolutionists made good use of ethnology to increase their power of overthrowing Qing dynasty; Geographers and Anthropologists mastered the knowledge of Ethnology so that they can seek where Chinese people came from; scientists questioned"the race has division of superiority and inferiority". What they did refuted the rumor and proved all races were equal. To sum up, we know that Ethnology has already been closely linked with the history and politics of the modern times in China. Therefore, when we discuss the topic:"Chinese ethnology studies in the modern times", we are not only going to discuss national health and characters, and also pay much more attention to emphasizing that nationalism is the most important showing form of race in the modern times, analysising the effect of politics, military affairs, culture on Ethnology.Above all, according to preceding texts stated, the author divides the article into six chapters: Chapter one tells us some fundamental conception about Ethnology, and generalizes the course of Ethnology spreading in China from 1840 to 1949. In the second chapter, we could know something about Ethnology that is initially introduced to China by comparing the view of race between reformers and revolutionaries. Chapter three will talk about"the theory of the Yellow Peril", I will point out this theory is absurd and confute the speech of aggressors. The following chapter will concentrate on the origin of Chinese people. In the fifth chapter, I discuss the effort that modern intellectuals improve the quality of Chinese people, and analyze how to achieve evolutionary of race handled by scientists. The last chapter has done some job filling some vacancy, the content includes: The phenomenon of respecting HuangTi in the late of Qing; A important book–"modern race";"The dangerous concept of the same language and race". These three topics have supplemented the shortcoming of transverse research. Moreover, in the end, I have to say:"the chaos caused by war, the clownish of aggressor and the Embarrassing of Chinese scholars at modern times have increased a lot of sad feeling when scholars studied the problems of race". However, only in hard environment can we have right awareness and proper direction, and we will continue to make progress.Ethnology is one of important disciplines in modern times. It has significant impact on academic history, thought history, social history, political history, military history, and other fields. Analysis of its in-depth academic will undoubtedly increase our sight of that episode of history. Especially, it is beneficial for us to pay attention to the nationalism, which was the most important showing form of race, is still having much big influence on today.