근대 중국의 민족제국주의와 단일민족론

Abstract

This article investigates the perception of nation in modern China, reveals the logic of empire internalized therein, and explores the way to examine it. Both the Constitutional Monarchists including Liang Qichao and Republican Revolutionists including Sun Yatsen perceived nation as culture-nation, which is close to the concept of ethnos today. This perception, however, contrasted with the multi-ethnicity of the Qing Empire, which caused both of the groups to establish the concept of one state- nation that includes all the culture-nations within the empire’s boundary, and they regarded the assimilation and integration of various nations as natural in order to achieve one great nation. As a result, the term “the Chinese Nation(Zhonghua Minzu)” has been coined and used since 1905. Even the revolutionists, whose slogan was anti-Manchurian, made it clear before the revolution in 1911 that the revolution was not an ethnic struggle to seclude Manchurians, but a political struggle to overthrow Manchurian government. In their perception of nation, the right to form a country did not belong to culture-nation, but only to the Chinese Nation which is a state nation. Thus, the state- nation inevitably implied imperialism which aims to combine various culture-nations. This is why Liang Qichao and Sun Yatsen argued that China should implement national-imperialistic policy as Europe and America did. The Chinese Empire in the premodern era had once allowed culture-nations political autonomy on the basis of their own identity, but from now those nations had to be assimilated and integrated as one nation to form the Chinese Nation Empire. This is where national-imperialism boils down to unitary nation. Nonetheless, Chinese people did not realize that such idea had been internalized in their perception because of the influence of antiimperialistic nationalism and sino-centric imperialism in the premodern era. It is necessary to identify ethnic group, which is close to cultural nation, with nation in order to examine and disclose the internalized imperialism. The notion of state nation, which is based on popular sovereignty, used to serve as a logical basis justifying the expansion of empire, oppressing the ethnicity of minorities. It stands to reason that in the 21st century where popular sovereignty is commonplace, the notion of culture-nation, which embraces cultural diversity, will be used as an intellectual weapon to disclose and examine the repressivism of the notion of state-nation.