Fang Weigui 方維規
Hong Kong: Chung Hwa Book Company, 2024
Reviewed by: Saloni Sharma (PhD Candidate, Jawaharlal Nehru University, HYI Visiting Fellow)
Defining and distinguishing China as a unique geopolitical, cultural, and historical entity has been an ongoing project of Sinology. However, the storm of New Qing History (hereafter, NQH), has interrogated several common claims about China’s identity and historical consciousness through a rigorous reinterpretation of the past. This has complicated and unsettled the widely accepted fundamentals that have formed China’s identity. Raising questions on historical continuity and legacy, centrality, ethnic Sinicization, colonialism, as well as Chinese nationalism, NQH, has seemingly punctured many tall narratives that characterise China as a contemporary continuation of a unified ancient entity.
“思想與方法：歷史中國的秩序變動與文明交錯” (Ideas and Methods: Changing Order and Interweaving Civilizations of Historical China) responds to those claims and controversies stirred by NQH by providing an insightful and diverse array of conceptual and theoretical analyses. The eponymous volume is an outcome of a conference on critical issues confronting Sinology held at Beijing Normal University in 2016. The book maintains sincere loyalty to the conference in the hope of letting the reader become a participant way forward in time. It lists twenty-one titles in the table of contents including a preface, two rapporteur remarks during Q&A and a final word by Wong Young-tsu. While some might dismiss the book as merely a record of an event held nearly a decade ago, its significance lies in binding together diverse and conflicting viewpoints between two covers. Over two days of discussions, notable sinologists and other prominent voices problematized the binaries of internal/external, central/peripheral, civilized/barbaric, universal/special, and threaded together diverse perspectives that touch upon these keywords. The rationale is justified: these binaries that characterise China, render a convenient framework to accommodate debates evoked by NQH, and are also key to construct a shared lexical understanding to conceptualise and iterate differing ideas. However, questioning these binaries by their very virtue, as Mark C Elliot also spells out, “make[s] us disagree and hinder our understanding” through oversimplification (p. 48).
Writing in the preface, the editor, Fang Weigui acknowledges that the undercurrents of NQH run through and cut across the contributions despite it not being the theme of the conference. My reading of the volume is prompted through surfing these undercurrents, while simultaneously acknowledging the value dispersed on the pages for nuanced historical enquiry and analysis. Surveying each chapter in the book, Fang Weigui alludes to a thematic coherence entwined across chapters that contests the idea of a monolithic conception of China. He sets the agenda by claiming that instead of being a static entity, “China”, is rather an evolving construct, traced through centuries of boundary changes and political reinventions. This is the central premise of the book. From fluid ‘inside/outside’ boundaries and center–periphery relations to debates over ’empire vs. nation-state,’ ‘Hannization’ Sinicization, shifting frontiers, and the Tianxia worldview, the book explores pivotal ideas shaping Chinese consciousness. At the heart is a fundamental question: ‘What is “China”?’ and how its boundaries—both conceptual and territorial—have been shaped over time?
The following few chapters set the stage to discuss why “中国” remains such a contested term, how imperial boundaries and cultural identities shifted over time, and why new approaches—particularly the NQH—provoke heated debate. Ge Zhaoguang responds to the overarching questions through an exploration of the historical relationship between “inside” (內) and “outside” (外), arguing that these concepts have always been fluid. He traces how historical China continuously redefined its peripheries, incorporating new territories and peoples in ways that were not always consistent. Uradyn E. Bulag, responding to Ge, introduces a counter-reading of “inside” as a position of subordination rather than simple inclusion by injecting a Mongol-centered perspective. His metaphor of “賤內” (the subordinated wife) critiques the assumption that those absorbed into China were treated as equals, instead suggesting that their incorporation often meant marginalization within a Han-dominated hierarchy. In parallel, Mark C. Elliott talks about conceptualising “Empire” as an analytical category. His intervention is less about redefining “China” than ensuring that historians do not anachronistically impose present-day ideas onto the past by confusing methodologies and definitions. Elliott’s convenient conflict avoidance does not go unchallenged. Wong Young-tsu takes direct issue with the NQH approach, particularly with Elliott’s reluctance to frame the Qing as a Chinese dynasty. Wong pushes for a more traditional interpretation by arguing that placing too much emphasis on the Qing’s Inner Asian identity risks severing it from China’s historical continuity. While acknowledging the Qing’s multiethnic nature, he insists that its governance was fundamentally continuous with previous Chinese dynasties: rooted in established imperial traditions rather than foreign rule. Together, these chapters establish the volume’s fundamental debates and make the reader question as to what degree new global methods reshape our understanding of empire, ethnicity, and national identity.
Subsequent chapters continue exploring how the lines between “inner” and “outer” China were drawn and contested across various dynasties, as well as how neighboring societies grappled with, or reshaped the Sinocentric worldview. Chapters by Gan Huaizhen, Ma Rong, and Li Zhuoran explore Tang codification of inner and outer (“化內” and “化外”), demarcation of outsiders through imperial policy and Confucian moral frameworks, and how Vietnamese or other regional rulers adopted or contested them, respectively. In a similar spirit, Choi Yongchŏl, Irina Popova, Luo Xin, and Feng Jinrong, bring perspectives from diverse geographies of Inner and East Asia. Together, these studies portray a world in which “Chinese” core and borderlands grew or receded, overlapped or diverged, under the pressures of conquest, religion, diplomacy, and trade, creating a mosaic of interactions rather than a monolithic center.
The next set of chapters turn squarely to the Qing dynasty and its modern repercussions, unpacking how a multi-ethnic empire evolved—and was later reinterpreted—amid shifting claims to sovereignty and national identity. Supported by historical evidence, the contributions from Zhao Gang and Shen Weirong challenge NQH simplifications and broaden the conversation through nuanced interventions in the debate. Li Huaiyin, Okatomo Takashi, and Uradyn Bulag deal with the intricacies of transitioning from imperial to nation to address complexities pertaining to continuity, sovereignty, and diplomacy. Finally, Fang Weigui returns to interrogate the conceptual gap between traditional Chinese ideas of “minzu” and the Western-born notion of “nation,” depicting the latter as a modern ideological construct that nonetheless draws upon older Chinese cultural memories. In all, the group shows how the Qing’s mosaic of peoples and territories became a proving ground for competing interpretations of “China,” revealing a complicated legacy that extends from imperial rule to modern nationalist discourse. The volume closes with several helpful appendices that preserve the forum’s real-time exchanges and offer a reflection on what it means to study “China” within its own cultural-historical context.
The book is a great production of an important conference and my quibbles with it are few. Dividing the book based on themes and indexing keywords would have helped for a more concentrated reading. It does tend to lean towards a didactic style of narration at places, lacking critical context but overall the contents are engaging, accessible in most parts, and highly informative to readers.
The book does not settle the NQH debate but rather deepens it by providing multiple, often conflicting perspectives. The volume’s greatest strength lies in its methodological diversity, combining conceptual analysis, administrative history, historiographical critique, and geopolitical inquiry to explore how the Qing should be situated within broader narratives of Chinese and Inner Asian history. Beyond NQH, the volume should be appealing to anyone interested in conceptual analyses of key concepts such as nation, empire , ethnicity, and so on.
The volume familiarises the reader with the key theoretical and conceptual debates in the global and diverse practice of Sinology and reinforces the idea that how we interpret the past is inseparable from the frameworks we choose to apply. While the edited volume’s diversity is both a strength and a source of occasional fragmentation, its comprehensive coverage of
key issues remains invaluable. In summary, 思想與方法 is a thought-provoking collection that offers a critical historical context and a basis for further inquiry through which current and future scholars can understand the evolution of China.