ABSTRACT
To discuss ‘nationalism’ is, as Benjamin Akzin pointed out thrity years ago, to enter into a terminological jungle in which one easily gets lost. 1 Different scholarly disciplines have their own more or less established and more or less peculiar ways of dealing with nationalism. In Chinese studies in the West, the ‘culturalism-to-nationalism’ thesis provided for a long time the core of a dominating discourse. 2 According to this thesis, China in imperial times was essentially a cultural entity, defined in terms of the traditional, predominantly Confucian high culture, and to be Chinese was in the final analysis the same as to be civilized. The boundaries of the Chinese state were contingent, since the emperor’s mandate was to rule ‘under heaven’, i.e. the whole world. The ideology of the Chinese empire was universalistic culturalism. Only in the wake of China’s encounter with the European powers and with Japan in the nineteenth century did it become possible to conceptually separate ‘China’ and ‘Chinese culture’. To save China, even at the possible expense of traditional high culture, became the first priority. In the language of the thesis this was the essence of the transition from culturalism to nationalism.
