1940년대 西安 建都論과 ‘漢唐盛世’ 복원의 꿈

Abstract

At the time when the Sino-Japanese War was moving into the latter half phase, a lively controversy developed in Chinese society as to where the post-war Chinese capital should be placed at. In the early 1940s, the proposal to designate Xi’an as the post-war capital generated considerable response for a while. They emphasized the threat from the northern continent and argued that Xi’an should be designated as the capital to prepare for future northern inland threats. Their basis was based on China’s historical experience. And also, they presented China’s historical experience and traditional culture as a model for the construction of ‘New China’ after the war. For them, restoring the ‘glory of Han-Tang dynasty’ was the goal of building ‘New China’.BR However, Xi’an was too backward a place to realize this idea. After the Song dynasty, Xi’an was pushed to the periphery of China’s political and economic development, and after China moved into the modern period, the developmental gap with the eastern coastal area widened further. In order to overcome this contradiction between ‘necessity’ and ‘reality’, pro-Xi’an advocates emphasized the development of north west China. The idea was to achieve ‘balanced development’ throughout the country by making Xi’an the capital and developing the northwestern region.BR However, their argument was inappropriate as a realistic alternative. At the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War, the arguments of pro-Xi’an advocates temporarily gained resonance, but as the end of the war drew near, the position of Nanjing’s rival city was passed on to Beijing. The traditional inland-defense strategy of the pro-Xi’an advocates did not reflect the changes in the international situation since the 19th century, and the past-oriented nation building concept could not fully contain the task of building a modern nation-state. In addition, the task of ‘balanced development’ to overcome the contradiction between the ‘necessity’ and ‘reality’ of pro-Xi’an argument, was forced to be pushed to the lower priority in a situation where numerous difficult problems had to be solved in a short time with limited resources. The pro-Xi’an arguments show that the past-oriented discourse based on the model of ‘the Golden Ages of Han-Tang dynasty’ was once widely spread among the various ideas that competed for the founding idea of ‘New China’ at the time, but at the same time it clearly reveals its fundamental limitations.