Chinese Settler-Colonialism and the Borderless National Imagination in Lü Sheng’s A Madman’s Dream

ABSTRACT

Studies on Chinese nationalist discourse in the late Qing era rarely consider the role of settler-colonialism in the development of nationalism, instead assuming that anti-colonialism was the dominant ideological source. This article transcends the traditional binary discourse of the colonised and the coloniser by exploring how settler-colonialism helped to project a borderless China in late Qing utopian fiction. I argue that this body of literature, as exemplified by Lü Sheng’s A Madman’s Dream, is a useful lens for exploring how Chinese settler-colonialism developed a (trans)national imagination. China, as a non-Western settler-colonist, had a dual identity: its experience of being colonised by the West resulted in its acting as a settler-colonist, while its efforts to promote a ‘new China’ overseas were intended to create solidarity with others who had suffered from colonisation. This article thus contributes to the growing body of scholarship about Qing expansionism as an instance of colonialism by demonstrating the internal tensions within Chinese discourse on colonialism in that era. I illustrate that Chinese settler-colonialism displayed a unique blend of discourse about expansion in the past, the experience of suffering in the present, and imagining the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Late Qing fiction
• utopian imagination
• China
• settler-colonialism
• nationalism
• transnationality
• Lü Sheng’s A Madman’s Dream

Acknowledgements

Thank you to David Hundt for his critical reading. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and challenging questions, which helped me to greatly improve my work. All shortcomings are my own.

Disclosure Statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

¹. The categorisation of late Qing fiction in recent scholarship has been inconsistent. Some follow the classification of fiction during the Qing period, while others have reclassified fiction according to the issues of current scholarly interest. For example, published under the subgenre of political fiction, Liang’s The Future of New China is also understood as a work of utopian fiction in today’s scholarship (Wang, 1997). Zhang (1986) argued that the nature of utopia is realistic and optimistic in the face of social problems since it advocates a prospective future society, and the blueprint of utopia involves a transformation derived from the decline of social systems and institutions in the real world. As for the perfect world in ancient China, Zhang (1986) called it ‘leyuan’, which suggests nostalgia and can be seen as the desire to look backwards to earlier sovereigns. Fokkema (2011) strengthened this idea, arguing that Confucianism always looks back to past and virtuous rulers because of the collective memory of the accomplishments of the mythical Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors. Given the progressive nature embedded in Lü’s project, it aligns well with Zhang’s and Fokkema’s definitions of utopia.

². Scholars have treated Qing expansionism in Xinjiang, Taiwan, Tibet, Central Asia, Mongolia, and Korea as a kind of Chinese colonialism that was spread through political (e.g., frontier military conquests) and cultural (e.g., cartography and ethnography) means. Their argument of the Qing Empire as a non-Western colonialist rests on the premise that the Qing conquests in the 17^th through 19^th centuries were a part of early modern colonialism from the perspective of world history (Hostetler, 2001; Lavelle, 2020; Perdue, 2005; Song, 2018; Teng, 2004). Echoing Perdue’s (2005) call for the need to place Qing expansionism in the context of world history, Hostetler (2001, 2) stated that ‘the term “early modern” can appropriately be used to describe global, rather than uniquely Western, processes’. Wang’s (2011) idea of ‘interactive colonialism’ emphasised how the Qing Empire adapted colonialism when it encountered British colonialism in Tibet. These studies implicitly and explicitly considered the Qing Empire an imperial power and aimed to challenge the prevailing view in modern Chinese historiography that China used its victimised experience of colonialism as a source of nationalism to build a modern nation-state. I share their rethinking of the possibility that China was a non-Western coloniser, but as I have emphasised, both Chinese colonialist and anti-colonialist sentiments had a role in Chinese nationalism. Moreover, I understand European colonialist discourse differently from previous studies, which treated European colonialism mostly as a methodology and place in the history of the Qing Empire in a framework of comparison with the West. Rather, I treat European colonial discourse as a product of knowledge dissemination in the late Qing era, the complex meaning of which is explored in late Qing literary production. In my study, European colonialism was an actual topic circulated, learned, and overcome by late Qing intellectuals, rather than a retrospective construct. Wang (2006, 349) discussed the Qing Empire’s actual response to British colonialism when it adjusted its policy on Tibet, wherein British colonists were treated as a colonial power instead of as a source of Chinese colonial formation. Additionally, some scholars have noted the Qing Empire’s expansion and settlement policy on the Sichuan frontier, although they were less concerned with its relation to Chinese colonialism (Dai, 2009; Lawson, 2011).

³. This argument is largely built upon the fact that Japanese settler-colonialism was mainly influenced by the British model, but it did not adopt the British approach in its treatment of natives (Azuma, 2019, 2–4).