ABSTRACT
The Chinese term minzu 民族, commonly translated as ‘nation’ in English, is considered in this paper as neither an indigenous Chinese concept embedded within a traditional symbolic system nor as a “copy” of the Western concept of ‘nation’, but a concept embedded in an emergent conceptual framework which always explicitly or implicitly situated a Chinese minzu in relation to the West. As China and the world experienced revolutionary changes over the course of the twentieth century, the meaning of minzu was itself transformed. To illustrate these changes, the paper discusses two compounds prominent during different parts of the century which pointed to widely divergent formulations of minzu—minzuxing 民族性 (‘national character’) and minzu jiefang 民族解放 (‘national liberation’). It is argued that the respective rise and fall of these terms and the concepts behind them can be linked to the changing fortunes of a particular social location and intellectual framework—that of the urban, Western-oriented liberal intellectual—over the course of China’s revolutionary twentieth century.
