The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911-1929 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911–1929 Chang-tai Hung (bio) Henrietta Harrison . The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911-1929. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. viii, 270 pp. Hardcover $74.00, ISBN 0-19-829519-7. The subject of this fine book is political ceremonies and symbols, and their role in the shaping of a new national identity in early Republican China, an era of social upheaval and revolutionary change. In recent years the study of political symbols and rituals has generated an increasing number of historical and anthropological publications, for example, on France, England, and Russia.1 But few, if any, pay sufficient attention to China, especially its Republican period. Therefore Henrietta Harrison's The Making of the Republican Citizen fills a critical void in our understanding of Chinese political culture in the early decades of the twentieth century. The interest in state rituals and political symbols owes a great deal to social scientists, principally anthropologists and sociologists, who call for a broader conception of political action. The study of power, they argue, should not be viewed merely through high politics and official institutions; rather, it should be treated more broadly as a web of social relations in which politics is manifested through artifacts (buildings, paintings, and costumes) as well as events (festivals, parades, and funerals). Politics, they contend, is not a direct reflection of economic and social forces but constitutes a cultural realm with its own distinct values and rules. Harrison does not address the new Chinese political symbols and ceremonies per se. Instead, she focuses on how these ceremonies and rituals, invented primarily by the state, transformed common people's daily lives. To be a modern citizen, Harrison argues, required that people adopt a host of new symbols (for example, the national flag, the national anthem, and the solar calendar), cut off their traditional queue, participate in modern marriage, and dress in Western style. It also meant a radical break from the imperial past, when men wore long gowns, women bound their feet, and most people embraced Confucian values. The rise of a new political culture, according to Harrison, allowed ordinary people in the Republican era to develop a sense of national identity, to ask the question, "what does it mean to be Chinese?" (p. 1). The book is divided chronologically into roughly two sections. The first examines the years immediately following the 1911 Revolution, a time when a host of new symbols and customs (the solar calendar, Western etiquette, and others) were introduced to signify the founding of a modern nation. These new symbols and Western-style customs, Harrison tells us, became critical markers of a novel Republican identity, drawing a clear demarcation between the new and [End Page 389] the old, modernity and tradition, progress and backwardness. The second part, seen largely through the grand funeral procession of Sun Yat-sen in 1929, recounts the fascinating story of how the Nationalist Party rose to power after the Northern Expedition and then carefully manipulated Sun's powerful but controversial image to affirm its legitimacy to rule. In Harrison's view, the Party, now with Chiang Kai-shek having gradually emerged as its dominant leader after years of bitter infighting, replaced many of the earlier symbols of the Republic with its own ideology. On the one hand, the Party established itself as Sun's ideological heir, while, on the other, it loudly contrasted its purported success with the failure of the aftermath of the 1911 Revolution. The Party's Shining Sun flag, for instance, overshadowed and displaced the earlier Republican Five Color national flag, announcing the Party's domination over the Republic and creating a new sense of national identity among the populace. Inspired by Eric Hobsbawm's concept of "invented traditions" and Benedict Anderson's theory of "imagined communities," Harrison regards many of the traditions of Chinese nationalism in the early twentieth century as newly created, with only nebulous and dubious references to the past. She treats ethnicity and nationalism as "historical constructs," and challenges the "top-down" model in which a small number of Western-influenced politicians and elite...