Revisiting China’s Modernity Ethnicity, Religion, and Nation

“In this essay collection, Professor Jiang Sun, a leading scholar in the field, makes new contributions to our understanding of China’s modernity. Sun brilliantly weaves many small pieces of history into magnificent narratives of the key themes of modern China such as ethnicity, religions, and nation. Sun has a great ability of discovering the forgotten histories hidden in texts and of reconstructing history from the unearthed materials. These essays inspire us to reconsider ideological origins of secret societies, intellectual sources of the 'Five-Race Theory,' the soil of growing the Chinese communist revolution, and many other important issues. His knowledge of scholarship in Chinese, Japanese, and Western languages make this work unique, insightful, and significant. ”
—Di Wang, University of Macau
“In this collection of closely connected essays, Jiang Sun establishes himself as one of the foremost historians of the late Qing-Republic transition. He combines extensive textual knowledge and a command of foreign, particularly Japanese scholarship and history, to generate insights into how the historical actors were shaped by, but also engaged and deployed Chinese historical and popular practices to create the nation-state.”
—Prasenjit Duara, Duke University
“In this book, Jiang Sun, the foremost authority of conceptual history and memory studies in China, brings together a number of articles concerning crucial topics in modern Chinese history: race, nation, religion, power, memory, and representation. These erudite essays are highly recommended reading for any student of modern China interested in the question not of what China ‘actually was’ but of how it was represented, conceptualized, and committed to memory—and how this process shaped what modern China is.”
—Kai Vogelsang, Hamburg University