Prof. Xu Guoqi 徐国琦, “The Idea of China: A Contested History”
主讲嘉宾：徐国琦 现为张学义中国史讲席教授和香港大学跨国史研究院创院院长 (Prof. Guoqi Xu, David H. Y. Chang Professor of Chinese History, Department of History, Founding director of the Institute of Transnational History of China, The University of Hong Kong)
演讲题目及简介：本讲座基于同名新书 The Idea of China: A Contested History (Harvard University Press, 2026)An acclaimed historian’s bold response to two simple, yet vexed, questions: What counts as China, and who counts as Chinese?
China became a capitalist superpower by investing in globalization. Now that it has established its credentials—and emerged as a major US competitor—its leaders are looking within, focused on suppressing dissent and fostering cohesion. The result has been an increasingly nationalist cultural agenda, celebrating a Chinese identity steeped in the mystique of the Middle Kingdom and nostalgia for heroic twentieth-century resistance. Yet Chinese nationalism, like nationalism everywhere, is fraught. Few Westerners, and even fewer Chinese, recognize that the very idea of China is up for grabs.
In this sweeping history, Xu Guoqi explores the transnational construction of Chineseness. The Idea of China describes an identity constantly under renovation. Through dialogue and confrontation with neighbors, more distant outsiders, and Chinese speakers and writers within the state, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the diaspora, the idea of China has been reshaped repeatedly across time. Even bedrock cultural formations like Confucianism have been reimported to China after their translation in Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere. The idea of China has always been and remains a continuing process, invented, subverted, and reinvented to serve the shifting needs of kings and bureaucrats, industrialists and intellectuals, allies and adversaries.
Xu’s chronicle is as provocative as it is rigorous, and his conclusion could hardly be starker: China, fundamentally, is constituted by a shared history. To accept this is to begin moving past the heated great-power rivalries that threaten international peace and stability today.