근대 중국 민족주의의 형성과 中華帝國의 전통 - 중국 민족주의의 제국적 기원 -

Abstract

The modern theory of Chinese nationalism was not yet appeared until Liang Qichao(梁啓超), an exile in Japan, wrote the famous enlightening essays on the new history and new nation from 1901 to 1902. It was evolved from the ideology of national sovereignty(國權), that was moulded from the traditional ideas and institutions of Chinese Empire, Sino-centric and Confucian culturalistic, under the powerful influence of Western imperialism since two Opium wars(1840~1860) and the Taiping rebellion. Qing(淸) China still maintained to be the old regional empire in East Asia, even if faced with these outer and inner crises, and subordinated to unequal treaty system under the imperialist pressure of western powers. Qing government promoted the self-strengthening reforms in order to remain the imperial sovereignty, and tried to reintegrate the Confucian imperial system, and unify the decentralized government and splitted territory. These Confucian currents to restore the ideological and institutional tradition of the unified empire from the declining tendency of the universal empire, began to emerge through the New Textment school(今文經學), Gong Zizhen(􀕇自珍) and Wei Yuan(魏源), even before the Opium war, and more reinforced by western aggressions. These current thoughts of imperial restoration to reunify and strengthen the declined and disrupted Qing empire were promoted greatly through the suppression of the Taiping rebellion(太 平天國) under the leadership of Zeng Guofan(曾國藩), etc. This anti- Taiping officials and literati were influenced from the prophetic ideas of imperial restoration in the Opium war period, and enforced the Yangwu(洋務) reform. During the Yangwu era, the restoration trend encouraged Qing officials to incorporate the border regions and nations, loosely ruled so far, into China proper, and resist foreign pressure including the criticism on the unequal treaties. These showed the political phases that the idea of national sovereignty rised among some reformists or anti-foreign officials according to the results of Yangwu(洋務) reform. The recover of ritual and legal systems was insisted as the symbol of imperial restoration by all the political factions. However, the results of self-strengthening reforms were limited by the conservative efforts to guard the old polity of Confucian empire, as found in the maritime defense(海防) policy and factional politics in Confucian officialdom. This premodern limits of national sovereignty in the reformed imperial polity would be overcome by the modern reform of national polity, the establishment of modern sovereign state according to the disintegration of Imperial system, which was attempted for the first time by kang Youwei’s(康有爲) party. This modern reform movement would be promoted on the basis of the government by the modern laws, influenced by reformist’s new vision to be adapted for the modern international order among the equal and competitive nation states. In the last phase converting to modern nationalism, Kang’s utopian visions of the world unity, based on the traditional image of universal empire, played the role of urging the absolute equality among states in the current imperialist world. At last, Yang Qichao pursued the great-China nationalism to unify solidly the multination empire inherited from the Qing dinasty under the modern national state, that would be reorganized after the western model of modern imperial nations. And his ideas of great unification and cultural assimilation derived itself in part from the Confucian culturalism in Chinese literati’s tradition of statecraft. The modern China’s nation-state has sustained the efforts to build the great nation to have the structure of empire in itself that reflected the enormous influence of the long Chinese imperial history.