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

Introduction

Utopian fiction from the late Qing era has attracted much academic attention since the 1990s (see e.g., Guo, 1997; Wang, 2019, 136–156; Yan, 2014, 137–168). For the most part, scholars have viewed it as a literary theme and a translation phenomenon from literary and narratology perspectives (Andolfatto, 2019), arguing that utopian novels from this era were a literary reflection and interpretation of China’s political, social, cultural, and intellectual crisis and chaos. Wang’s (2019) study of the utopian novels of Liang Qichao (1873–1929) and Wu Jianren (1866–1910) explores ‘the contradictions and confluences of [late Qing utopian fiction’s] narrative and intellectual paradigms’, but it focuses mainly on these authors’ ‘narratological methods’ as ‘an index to the debate over the future of new China in our time’ (2019, 137–141). While this article does not dispute the interpretation of utopian fiction as a literary landscape of modern China, I argue that late Qing utopian novels can also be studied from a political perspective. Specifically, the genre’s imageries reveal the ambiguities inherent in turn-of-the-century Chinese settler-colonialism.

In calling for the birth of a new China, late Qing utopian fiction encapsulated the thinking of the intellectual elite about their nation’s future within and beyond China’s borders.¹ The borderless utopian imagination in Cai Yuanpei’s (1868–1940) A New Year’s Dream (Xinnian meng), particularly its anti-imperialist currents, was seen as an important driving force in crafting cosmopolitan China (Li, 2013, 89–104; Zarrow, 2021, 57). Isaacson (2011, 181) argues that Wu Jianren’s The New Story of the Stone (Xin shitou ji) was embedded in the discourse of ‘the perceived and imagined perils of China’s fate at the hands of Western incursion’ and that Bihe Guanzhuren’s (1871–1919) The New Era (Xin Jiyuan) encountered difficulties in ‘transcend[ing] the world-making power of Orientalism’ (Isaacson, 2011, 216). Moreover, the alien civilisation that resulted from the resistance of colonisation in Huangjiang Diaosou’s (?–?) Tales of the Moon Colony (Yueqiu zhimindi xiaoshuo) also suggested that ‘the colonial subject will continue to be a colonial subject’ (Isaacson, 2011, 192). Furthermore, Andolfatto claims that getting ‘way out of the colonial impasse’ was a fundamental trait of late Qing utopian fiction (2019, 8–9).

These studies focus on how the anti-imperialist/anti-colonialist stance in the (trans)national imagination of utopian fiction writers contributed to the tendency for the discourse at that time to emphasise China’s colonisation by the Western imperialist powers and how a semi-colonised nation could be transformed into a new and strong China. However, my focus is on how China perceived itself as a non-Western coloniser while imagining a new global order.² In the development of Chinese (trans)nationalism at this time, the dominant ideological basis was anti-colonialism (Karl, 2002; Wang, 1995), but the dominance of this narrative has limited our understanding of the multitudes of colonialist discourses in developing nationalist discourses in China. Along this line of thought, this article investigates the role Chinese settler-colonialism played in projecting a borderless utopian China to rise above the traditional opposition between the colonised and the coloniser.

Said (1994, 9) defines colonialism as ‘almost always a consequence of imperialism’. Outlining modern colonial history in the context of imperialism beginning in 16^th-century Europe, Fieldhouse (1983, 6) argues that colonialism was a contemporary phenomenon usually associated with ‘an aspect of life typical of British settler societies in nineteenth-century Australia’. Alongside British ‘expan[sion] in the later nineteenth century into tropical Africa, South-east Asia, and the Pacific the process and the resulting colonial organization tended to be described indiscriminately as “imperialism”’ (Fieldhouse, 1983, 6). The term was thereby linked to imperialist empire-building, which exploited foreign profit and Lenin’s idea of the ‘highest stage of capitalism’ (Fieldhouse, 1983, 2–6). Colonialism was not a simple act of colonisation but ‘a general description of the state of subjection – political, economic, and intellectual – of a non-European society which was the product of imperialism’ (Fieldhouse, 1983, 6). Osterhammel (2005, 17) notes that there were cases of ‘“colonies without colonialism” that occurred in colonial societies without indigenous population majorities’. Osterhammel (2005, 15) thus echoes the above view that colonialism was a system of dominance, suggesting that ‘colonialism [was] based on the will to make “peripheral” societies subservient to the “metropolises”’.

The meaning of colonialism remains contested, and although scholars have different cultural, historical, and ideological emphases and concerns in defining colonialism, they agree that colonialism is a discourse linked to imperialism and capitalism in modern times. My goal is to showcase this historical background of colonialism in modern times, which was introduced to China and circulated among the late Qing intellectuals and served as a knowledge framework for later discussion. Against such a background, this article shows how the late Qing intellectuals, on the one hand, understood, rejected, and adopted the discourse. This process transcended the traditional convention between the positions of coloniser and colonised in understanding colonialism. On the other hand, these intellectuals’ reception of the modern meaning of colonialism served as the intellectual underpinning of their rejection of Qing expansionism as colonialism, illustrating the internal tension of colonial discourse at the time.

Scholars of settler-colonialism argue that the continued influence of colonialism was understood as a permanent creation of European societies in the world. For these scholars, settler-colonialism should not be understood as a subcategory of colonialism or analysed under the framework of colonialism/post-colonialism. Veracini (2015, 15), for instance, argues that settler-colonialism is conceptually distinct from classical colonialism. The prominent characteristics of settler-colonialism were land-grabbing and the elimination of indigenous people, whereas classic colonialism was characterised by the exploitation of natural and human resources alongside military control. As Wolfe (1999, 1–2) highlights, ‘settler colonies were not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous labour. Rather, they are premised on displacing indigenes from (or replacing them on) the land’.

The above distinction between classical and settler-colonialism is not trans-historical, as the premise of these scholars rests mainly on their observations of Anglophone colonialists, particularly in Australia. Recent studies on Asian and African settler societies have opened up a space to rethink the adaptation of settler-colonialism in non-Western contexts. Lu (2019, 9) considers Japanese migration to Hokkaido, California, Texas, Brazil, and Manchuria a logic of settler-colonialism in exploring ‘the overlaps and similarities between the experience of colonial settlers and that of migrants’. In scrutinising Japan’s settler societies in North America and Taiwan at the turn of the 20^th century, Azuma (2019, 1–26) uses the concept of ‘adaptive settler-colonialism’ to illustrate how non-Western settler-colonisation was a combination of classical colonialism and settler-colonialism that aimed to exploit both indigenous lands and labour.³ Further, Elkins and Pedersen (2005) highlight settler societies in the Korean Peninsula, Abyssinia, and Kenya in the 20^th century, demonstrating a negotiation between the settlers, the imperial metropole, the colonial administration, and the indigenous people in those places. These studies suggest that settler-colonialism had its own formulations and manifestations in Asia and Africa, involving more than a simple logic of elimination.

Mindful of the historical background of Western colonial discourse and the diverse meanings of settler-colonialism, I argue that Lü Sheng’s (?–?) A Madman’s Dream, which focuses on a Chinese settler’s project in an overseas territory, offers an insightful illustration of how late-Qing-era discourse about colonialism drew from its own understanding of foreign colonialism to construct new forms of Chinese nationalism. Firstly, the repeated use of the term zhimin (‘colonisation’) in Lü’s story and the political agenda of the protagonist (Jia Xixian) evidence the links between the intellectual sources and the fictional composition of Chinese colonialism. The story illustrates how the major tropes of colonialism – land reclamation, cultural dissemination, and economic exploration in ‘overseas China’ – all played an inevitable role in making nationalist discourse appealing to late Qing utopian fiction writers.

Secondly, A Madman’s Dream explores the diverse relationships between the colonised and the coloniser in the late Qing era as China confronted and sought to overcome colonialism. The introduction of Western colonialism at this time was premised on the success of imperial invasions during the decline of the Qing Empire, which led fiction writers to consider the possibility of acquiring overseas Chinese colonies. Additionally, under the influence of social Darwinism during the late Qing period, the victory of Western colonialism was seen as a manifestation of the ‘struggle for survival’ principle, indicating that the search for overseas settler societies coalesced with the nationalist discourse. At the same time, the Chinese experience as victims of Western imperialist-colonialism underpinned Jia’s awareness of not wanting to be an aggressive coloniser because of his sympathy for the colonised. Drawing on Elkins and Pedersen’s (2005) analysis of the development of settler societies through the instability of settler-indigenous negotiations, this article explores the dynamics of settler society in A Madman’s Dream. By analysing the relationship between the settlers and the locals, it exposes Jia’s dual role as the ‘colonised/coloniser’.

Thirdly, the story highlights the role of (anti)colonialism in the construction of Chinese nationalism, as represented in an unbounded utopian imagination. Even though A Madman’s Dream has attracted academic interest, its border-crossing national imagination has rarely been examined in relation to the idea of Chinese settler-colonialism (Yan, 2014, 173–178). There are two significant aspects of this story: 1) projecting a view of an unbounded China that represents a way of imagining a new China; and 2) presenting a sense of searching for an overseas colony that is seen less in other representative utopian works of fiction. For example, Liang’s The Future of New China demonstrates an emphasis on a bounded utopian imagination, and Cai’s New Year Dream exhibits its borderless nature through constructing a moral, humanist society. Through discussing the colonisation utopian story and delving into its intellectual underpinnings, this article discusses how the appropriation of colonialism cultivated the idea of a new China.

The Discovery of Colonisation and Chinese Nationalism

It is generally agreed that the term zhimin is a loan translation from Japanese (Pan, 2013, 67). Etymologically, zhimin (shokumin) is a term that originated from the Meiji period, meaning an increase in population. According to Lu (2019, 15), the term usually appeared together with zhichan (shokusan, ‘to develop the economy’) and tuozhi (takushoku, ‘to explore land’), which indicates that ‘the acquisition of material wealth and the increase of population were consistently regarded as two sides of the same coin’. The late Qing intellectuals began to explain the meaning of zhimin to the Chinese public after the establishment of foreign concessions in the 1890s, when China was living in the shadow of Western imperialist aggression. The term has sometimes been used to mean population transplantation (Anonymous, 1899, 1), but generally it has referred to the act of colonisation, especially in the context of the invasion of Western powers. For example, Liang’s (1897, 1–4) ‘On the Impending Prospect of a Strong China’ (Lun Zhongguo zhi jiang qiang) understood the term zhimin as not only land expansion, population transfer, and competition for wealth, but also the fundamental control of power over the colonised.

In their coverage of British, French, and American colonial practices and their implementation, Chinese Progress (Shiwu bao) and Pure Discussion (Qingyi bao) often published translations of Japanese articles that explained this foreign idea. For example, ‘Imperialism’ (Diguo zhuyi), an article translated from the Japanese National Citizen Daily (Kokumin Shinbun) and published in Pure Discussion in 1901, sketched the international development of colonialism. Colonisation under imperialism was designed ‘to extract, develop, and use the efficient tools of civilisation to gain greatest wealth and to increase the happiness of mankind’ (Anonymous, 1901, 5) through the elimination of inferior ethnic people. In addition to legitimating colonial aggression with such a universal value, sacrificing the colonised was an inevitable process in the development of a national community, which was not seen as ‘an immoral act’ (Anonymous, 1901, 5). The introduction of imperialism and colonialism to China coincided with the culmination of Darwin’s evolutionary and nationalist ideology. In arguing that colonialism was a product of ‘nationalist imperialism’ (minzu diguo zhuyi, 民族帝國主義) underpinned by Darwinian evolution, Liang Qichao (2006, 1252–1253) reflected how zhimin was widely understood in the late Qing. Nationalism emphasised the idea of national expansion precisely because more land and resources were needed to support it, which gave rise to imperialism. The competition between nations to expand their influence intensified imperialist-colonialist aggression, Liang argued. This competition between nation-states was inevitable as it was necessary for both human advancement and China’s transformation to a modern nation.

Put differently, a successful colonial policy was the hallmark of a successful modern nation. Crucially, the reason that the Qing Empire’s policy towards the frontier was excluded as a manifestation of colonialism was that the emperor failed to establish a modern nation after acquiring it. Ji’s (1899) ‘On zhimin’ (Zhimin shuo) argued that Qing was unable to transform itself into a modern nation because of its failed colonial policy and its failure to protect its territorial sovereignty and people. Specifically, Ji stated:

Although in the past, China also tried to obtain several large pieces of land, but not understanding what colonisation was, the land might well have been abandoned. During Kangxi’s reign, Outer Mongolia was made up of four major parts, measuring thousands of miles from the east to the west and from the south to the north, but for more than 200 years, only the Khalkha lived there alone in the absence of other ethnic groups. Yongzheng conquered Tibet and took the Qinghai-Tibet as well as thousands of miles of fertile land of Potala of Qinghai, otherwise known as the best pasture for husbandry. However, only the Tibetans and the Khoshut people live there today. There is no one else apart from the garrison stationed there (1899, 2).

Ji further argued that the authentic way to colonise was by acquiring territorial sovereignty and assimilating ethnic groups, because zhimin meant ‘to eliminate them by assimilating them’ (1899, 3). Thus, for Ji, the ability to establish a system of dominance in the colony relied on imperialist power. Further, Ji (1899) cited many examples of European colonialism and asserted that the Qing Empire was not an authentic colonial power because it had not colonised overseas as the Europeans had. On the contrary, the scholarly consensus is that Qing expansionism was colonialism, although different from the European model. In respect to Zuo Zongtang’s (1812–1885) campaign in Xinjiang, for instance, Lavelle (2020, 12–13) notes that it is erroneous to say that ‘inland colonialism was “old” whereas foreign, coastal colonialism was “new”’. Song (2018), meanwhile, sees the Chinese–Korean Tumen River Demarcation as a local manifestation of global imperialism under Qing. Rather than considering whether Qing expansionism did in fact meet the definition of colonialism, I focus on why Ji (and his contemporaries) did not see this expansionism in terms of colonialism. Since these intellectuals had adopted Western colonial discourse, I argue, they tended to disqualify Qing expansionism as an instance of colonialism.

For Chinese intellectuals at this time, neither land occupation nor population migration alone was a sufficient condition of colonisation. As Liang (2006, 1264) asked,

What is the meaning of ‘owning people’? Wherever a colony is established, [the colonisers] take the land of the local as their land, the local people as their people, the wealth of the local as their wealth, take the profit of the local as their profit and the power of the local as their power – as the Europeans and the Americans have done in China. What is the meaning of ‘being owned by people’? [The migrants] cultivate the land of the local like cattle and horses and serve the people of the local like slaves – as the Chinese have done overseas.

Liang (2006) noted that whether an expansionist move could be considered ‘colonisation’ depended on whether the coloniser had the power to assume sovereignty over the land through economic exploitation and capitalist logic, which would result in an unequal relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. The most prominent example was Britain’s use of Indian resources for its manufacturing sector and the accumulation of political and ideological influence in America through its economic investment there, in which ‘economic power [was] gradually turned to become political power’ (Liang, 2006, 1255). Liang interpreted such economic invasion as a form of political manipulation that was also occurring in Shanghai’s international enclaves at that time.

The introduction of the term ‘colonisation’ into the Chinese discourse on politics was the Qing intellectuals’ response to an urgent imperialist threat to Chinese sovereignty and ethnicity. Ji (1899) therefore asked, rhetorically, why China did not pursue its own colonial policy. This hinted that Ji and his contemporaries had developed a view of Chinese colonialism that contrasted China and the West in terms of their achievements as colonisers. In ‘Speculations on Chinese Colonial History’ (Zhongguo zhimin yishuo), Ti Yan echoed the social Darwinist principle of ‘the struggle for survival’ (1908a, 1): ‘I am aware that the competition for survival is waged not domestically but internationally. The new world policy is not to compete for land but for the right to implant one’s people in a foreign land’ (Ti, 1908a, 1).

That China fell prey to colonialism was evidence of Western colonialism’s success in making a nation a strong competitor in the social Darwinian struggle for survival through nation-building, which was a kind of colonial activity in terms of identifying boundaries (Dirlik, 2002, 435–436). In the process of building a Chinese nation, colonialist thought informed and inspired many visions among those searching for a new China. The major tropes of colonialism – speeding up racial/ethnic development, exploiting economic/natural resources, and acquiring lands to build a utopian China – appealed to many of the late Qing intellectuals. As such, Chinese colonialism was favourably incorporated into a ‘new China’ project, to which many intellectuals contributed.

In particular, the Qing intellectuals privileged the role of establishing overseas settlements in Chinese colonial formation. One representative example was Liang Qichao’s ‘The Eight Heroes of Chinese Colonialism’ (Zhongguo zhimin ba da weiren zhuan), which he wrote under the penname of Zhongguo zhi Xinmin (1905), or literally ‘a new citizen of China’. Another example was Ti’s (1908a; 1908b) ‘Speculations on Chinese Colonial History’. Both authors emphasised the importance of seizing control of new and uninhabited lands, thus exemplifying Sack’s (1986) argument that territoriality was a fundamental element of the geographical expression of power. Both Liang and Ti used the same criterion to define a hero: i.e., the ability to ‘colonise’ new land outside the borders of the ancient Chinese empire and build a new society of settlers. In particular, Ti’s (1908a; 1908b) definition of Chinese colonialism exclusively favoured the success of building overseas settlements. Xu Fu’s (255–210BC) voyage to the Eastern Seas to find the secret elixir of immortality and Zheng Chenggong’s (1624–1662) defeat of the Dutch and his establishment of the House of Koxinga in Formosa were examples of colonial settlement, while Qin Shi Huang’s (259–210BC) relocation of convicted criminals to distant places was retrospectively included in Ti’s genealogy. Wistfully, Liang ruminated on the prospect of a day when ‘our country should possess the power to extend its imperialist potential’ (Zhongguo zhi Xinmin, 1905, 87), a hope that reflected the commonly held belief that the building of a modern nation-state rested on both national spirit and the material power gained through acquiring more colonies.

Additionally, in introducing colonial discourse and constructing China’s own colonial history, late Qing intellectuals presented different colonial methods and types of colonisation – for example, agricultural colonisation, settler-colonisation, commercial colonisation, and investment colonisation (Ti, 1908a; 1908b; Xie, 1910). They also privileged the role of the settler society’s establishment and cultural dissemination in the colonial discourse, though they rarely talked about the role of military colonisation in the development of China’s own discourse about colonialism as it could hardly be achieved at that stage (Ti, 1908a; 1908b).

Although different types of colonisation were introduced, acquiring a settler society became the most critical action because it symbolised the expansion of power and the establishment of political sovereignty overseas. In the face of the imminent threat of being partitioned by imperial power, the acquisition of a new permanent home could create a vision of a new China. The most prominent example of this belief is Liang’s unpublished utopian story New Peach Blossom (Xin Taoyuan), which describes how Chinese people took over an overseas settlement to develop a civilised China. Most intellectual discourse during this period was premised on the symbiosis of nationalism and imperialist-colonialism. Intense feelings of nationalism as well as racial and ethnic superiority were central to the success of the imperialist-colonialism project. At the same time, the conquest of new lands brought resources, wealth, and actual and symbolic power to facilitate the growth of nationalism, which was considered ‘a stage on the way to a universalist ideal’ (Duara, 1997, 1033) in the growth of transnational imagination in China at the turn of the 20^th century. In the framework of Chinese nationalism, the settlement of new territories was crucial to state-building as well as nation-building, as ‘territory’ was the primary element in an array of factors and force could be imposed.

Liang and his fellow intellectuals advocated the exercise of legitimate authority in overseas areas inhabited by Chinese people as Chinese colonies. The collective plea to announce Chinese extraterritorial laws and colonial policies was a manifestation of this programme. Liang called for the establishment of an official system that rewarded the exploitation of new lands, as the resources generated in the colonisation process would make China a strong and ‘united state’ (hezhong yiguo, 合眾一國) in a material sense. In ‘On the Impending Prospect of a Strong China’, Liang (1897, 3) highlighted the economic resources and materials that territorial colonialism provided for the effective functioning of the colonising state, alluding to the fact that the successful formation of a nation-state in the United States rested on the occupation of new lands full of resources:

Four or five hundred years ago, for fear of over-population, Columbus ventured out to explore new lands, successively establishing colonies in the Americas, India, Africa, and the island of Australia in the southern oceans, and relocating Europeans to fill up those lands.

The material powers of territoriality were highlighted in a large body of writing at the time (e.g., Anonymous, 1906b). In particular, Xie’s (1910, 2) ‘Colonial Policies’ (Zhimin zhengce) introduced commercial and agricultural methods for acquiring new colonies, eventually turning them into ‘places that produce food and industrial products for the mother country’. As Penrose (2002) states, the material power of territoriality was transformed into the resources necessary for the survival and development of a nation’s citizens. At the same time, the border of the nation-state was defined by the coloniser, who could supply material resources to ‘us’ but not ‘them’. The acquisition of new territories, therefore, also brought with it the significant symbolic and emotional power of controlling both land and materials.

This last point about the mobilisation of the emotional power of territoriality to develop a national community illustrates Duara’s (1997, 1032) argument on the inability of territorial nationalism alone to mobilise a nation-building project in the fullest sense: ‘[T]he modern nation-state and nationalists have to appropriate a variety of historical, non-territorial, and often incommensurate conceptions of political community to try to “make” the territorial nation racially and/or culturally cohesive’. Liang’s idea of a ‘natural’ claim over places where overseas Chinese people lived as belonging to China was grounded in consideration of race and ethnicity: ‘In the southern part of the oceans are several dozens of countries where most inhabitants are the descendants of the Yellow Emperor. These places are our natural colonies, geographically and historically’ (Zhongguo zhi Xinmin, 1905, 88).

The act of naming a colony rested on the idea that naming had the capacity to ‘naturally’ give the coloniser the legitimacy to occupy a new land, as if it had territorial sovereignty (Smith, 1999). Culturally, Liang’s calls for the awakening of a national consciousness in acquiring Chinese colonies overseas exemplified Penrose’s (2002, 277–297) argument that the claim on territoriality was made by creating historical stories and myths that reinforced the connection between those places and the country of the colonisers. For Liang, the emotional power of territoriality endorsed the legitimacy of China’s past ‘colonies’ and helped to establish the historical traditions of the Chinese version of colonialism. Furthermore, the meaning of ‘territoriality’ was not only emotionally but also culturally defined. The importance of the territory was that it allowed the geographical distribution of a culture. A prominent example is Guan’s (1905, 95) argument in ‘The Reasons for the Non-development of Colonial Culture in Our Country’ (Wo zhimindi zhi bu fasheng wenhua heyu):

If one can move the culture of the mother country to a colony and develop it so that it prospers in the new land, then a new civilised country will come into being outside the mother country. Separated by distance, the mother country and the newly colonised country will compete in their prosperity. The USA is one such example. Suppose our race could develop our culture in colonies and establish new countries; then we could have numerous new Chinas besides our China, and the whole world would be occupied by our race.

Expanding on Liang’s idea of considering locations inhabited by overseas Chinese to be natural Chinese colonies, Guan (1905) called for new exploration to locate other potential overseas colonies and the separation of social and cultural activities in these areas from China itself. Liang and Guan put equal emphasis on the material and emotional powers of territoriality to develop the state-building project of a greater China, as well as its national imagination, to establish an ideal borderless Chinese nation.

In light of this, my focus on uncovering how Chinese settler-colonialism generated Chinese nationalism adds nuances to Karl’s (2002) argument on how anti-colonialism in modern China became a source of ethnic transnationalism. Karl establishes an ideological connection between Chinese intellectuals’ anti-colonial nationalistic movement and non-Euro-American currents but does not consider how Euro-American imperialist-colonialism promoted Chinese (trans)nationalistic thought. At the turn of the 20^th century, given China’s embeddedness in (anti-)colonialism, (anti-)imperialism, and social Darwinism, it was not surprising that Liang’s aspirations for China to become the ‘strongest state’ in the future tense were in no way contradictory to Karl’s (2002) depiction of China as a colonised ‘weakened state’ in the present tense. In the progressive historiography implicit in Liang’s The Future of New China, China would inevitably become the strongest state. However, and crucially, in its weakened state, China had to develop its own policies on colonisation immediately to avoid becoming even weaker. In the remainder of this article, I show how Lü’s utopian imagination echoes this unofficial voice of Chinese colonial discourse and how his creation of de/reterritorialised China takes the form of establishing a settler colony.

A Deterritorialised China in A Madman’s Dream

The story A Madman’s Dream is about Jia Xixian’s search for a secluded place called ‘Immortal Island’ (xianren dao, 仙人島) after his exile. The name of the island calls to mind Xu Fu’s search for the secret elixir of immortality in the 3^rd century BCE, a source that was appropriated by Ti (1908a; 1908b) to construct Chinese colonial history. As a Chinese exile, Jia does not colonise Immortal Island on behalf of a colonial metropole. Acquiring a new land is the first step in Jia’s construction of an alternative settler nation by establishing a new political, economic, and educational system. The attachment that Jia and his fellow settlers demonstrate to this secluded island echoes Elkins and Pedersen’s (2005, 2) emphasis on settler-colonialism, in that the settlers’ invasion ends with the building of a ‘permanent home’ for a settler population. However, Lü’s narrative is consistent with the ‘exterminationist’ variant of settler-colonialism (see Lu, 2019), as Jia interacts, collaborates, and negotiates with the indigenous people. The depiction of events in his novel is reminiscent of Japan’s settlement of Korea in that the settlers used ideological and material resources to develop alliances and collaborate with the indigenous population (Elkins & Pedersen, 2005, 6), although Jia’s settler project does not take the form of migration as Japan’s did.

As a settler-colonist, Jia’s settler project is primarily an imitation of Western invasions of China (and the world). At one point (Lü, 1989, 190), Jia specifically mentions that

[b]y heading out to sea, we are practising what is known in the Western countries as colonisation. China has always been plagued with the problem of overpopulation. It will do China good to set up colonies overseas. Why do we want to go back?

He says that if he and other settlers succeed in developing a new China overseas on Immortal Island, they will later occupy the surrounding islands and establish a new Chinese territory like the Western powers did. Nonetheless, the Western invasions of the late Qing period compel Jia to sympathise with and understand the locals of Immortal Island. Undeniably, cooperation with the local population is exploited for the development of Jia’s settler project, but it is noteworthy that Jia takes care not to behave like a Western coloniser, a purposely ruthless and unfeeling invader. Jia and his fellow settlers intend to create a Chinese-style settler-colonialism in a way that ‘cleverly exercises the right of the strong’ (miaoyong qiang quan, 妙用強權) over the aboriginals (Lü, 1989, 186). They decide to open fire not on the residents but on a pillar as a demonstration of their superior military power to compel the master of Immortal Island to surrender his authority. The idea of ‘the right of the strong’ was thus evident in China’s acceptance of social Darwinism’s ‘struggle for survival’ as well as in defining the attitude of imperialist invasion.

Published at about the same time as A Madman’s Dream, an anarchist article entitled ‘The Consequences of Imperialism’ (Diguo zhuyi zhi jieguo) strongly criticised the concept of ‘the right of the strong’ and defined imperialism as ‘the most barbaric and darkest power’ (qiang quan, 強權) that destroyed weak species (Anonymous, 1908, 10). The article promoted the ideas of de-nationalisation, cosmopolitanism, and the development of an anarchist community that offered mutual support for its members, rather than Darwinist evolution (1908, 10–12). Clearly, Jia’s aim is not an anarchist utopia, but his assessment of imperialism and colonialism demonstrates that his utopian project is in line with the anarchist rejection of the coloniser’s aggressiveness. Jia also rethinks the legitimacy of the conspiracy of imperialism and colonialism underpinned by the evolutionary principle, and eventually abandons the idea of aggression and power supported by nationalist imperialism.

Jia’s identification with the weak provides a useful lens to understand the ambivalence of the Chinese reception of colonialism. Jia’s mild colonial policy comes from his sympathy with the African slaves who suffered from American colonial mistreatment during his voyage to Immortal Island, as well as his reflection on the unfair hierarchical structure that places the strong over the weak:

Menghe said, ‘It is definitely true that the superior will triumph, and the inferior will lose. I fear that in the future, only the intelligent will survive. The benighted races will become extinct’. Xixian said, ‘How true! I am afraid that the benighted will not be able to compete with the intelligent, and they will then pass away. Then even the intelligent might come to compete with each other, and the rule that the superior will triumph, and the inferior will lose out will play out once again. In lording over the blacks, the whites may think that they are strong, but who is to say that in the future, someone else will not come along to lord over them?’ (Lü, 1989, 186).

This passage recalls the hardships that the Chinese suffered as a result of imperialist invasions, in that Jia believes that the Chinese share the same fate as the African slaves. The dual role of Jia – as a settler-colonist and a victim of colonisation – gives rise to his twofold colonial mentality. On the one hand, he attempts to acquire land and uses an overseas colony to build a future China, while on the other his colonial activities can be understood as a way of building solidarity with the oppressed people who have been colonised by the West. Jia believes that becoming civilised is an essential element in winning the social Darwinist competition, and thus his cultural and economic plan is to civilise the residents of Immortal Island. He carries out his colonial project for the benefit of the weak, as his programme aims to strengthen the weak and eventually generates a counter-Western hegemonic force. Jia implies that Western hegemony and dominance should be deconstructed and questioned: ‘Who is to say that in the future someone else will not come along to lord over them?’ (Lü, 1989, 186). In this regard, Jia’s approach to colonisation is more complex than Dirlik’s (2002) suggestion that anti-colonialist national liberation is merely ‘a replica’ of Western colonialism. Jia’s dual status recasts his colonial actions so that Chinese settler-colonisation becomes a way of empowering the subordinates suffering from Western invasion. Although Jia does not pursue the cosmopolitan commonwealth as the anarchists did, he uses the settler-colonial project to find a third possibility: a borderless utopian mapping of China, between the two orientations of imperialist nationalism and anarchist cosmopolitanism.

Jia’s first method of mapping a utopian China is a cultural colonisation policy to ‘win the minds across the entire island’ (Lü, 1989, 187), which can be understood as his acceptance of Western colonialism. Jia’s cultural programme results in Immortal Island’s master losing support, and the locals are ultimately unable to maintain their territory and power. Simultaneously, Jia sees education as a way to liberate the indigenous population from the master’s superstitious ideas and, in turn, to empower the oppressed. Jia’s attitude towards the oppressed is at odds with the Western mentality because he considers the ‘indigenous’ not merely as a colonised people but as comrades whose solidarity he seeks for an anticipated fight against the West. In particular, Jia’s awareness of pursuing a cultural civilisation but not transforming the local people is evident when he says: ‘I do not want to convert people of your religion [i.e., the indigenous people]’ (Lü, 1989, 195). Precisely because of the ambiguity and duality of Jia’s attitude, his cultural colonisation should not be understood simply as a settler’s reprogramming of indigenous people (Wolfe, 2006), but instead as his effort to overcome foreign colonial discourse.

The role of the Jews in A Madman’s Dream furnishes more evidence of Lü’s understanding of colonialism. The indigenous people whom Jia finds on the island are Jews of intelligence and wealth, but their superstitions result in their own subjugation. This echoed the prevailing Chinese understanding of the Jewish diaspora at that time. As the article ‘The Reasons behind the Perishing of the Jewish State Revisited’ (Zai qing kan youtairen wangguo de yuangu) explicitly stated, ‘[i]f we trace it back to the beginning, the birth of their civilisation coincided in time with Fu Xi and Huang Di in China’ (Anonymous, 1906a, 11). The analogy of the Jewish diaspora is a warning that the Chinese people will also be scattered if they continue to be superstitious (Anonymous, 1906a, 10–11). Lü believed that there were points of similarity between the Jews and the Chinese in the difficulties they faced in establishing modern nation-states. To avoid such consequences, Jia subscribes to the theory that education is a way of empowerment, in that it can ‘patiently set the islanders onto the right path’ (Lü, 1989, 191). Jia emphasises that an education in basic knowledge and practical skills is necessary for the indigenous people to survive under the dominant country’s unfair governance and to defend their integrity as a nation. In this respect, the Jews’ suffering in Lü Sheng’s story hints at the situation of the Chinese people.

Another way of mapping a new China is through a new trading network, which Jia introduces in imitation of Western colonialism. This new network contains the exploitative features of colonialism whereby indigenous labour is roped into the building of a new nation. Seeking local partners, Jia’s trading network transcends the traditional treatment of settler-colonialism (Veracini, 2014). Not only does Jia not apply ‘the logic of elimination’ to deal with the indigenous people, but this trading network is also operated by the indigenous ‘Others’ (Veracini, 2014, 623). Building this trading network for the project of a new China has a threefold meaning: firstly, a connection that allows the indigenous people of Immortal Island to be self-sufficient; secondly, a link that allows Immortal Island to connect with the inhabitants of other islands (including China); and thirdly, an autonomous industrial network for both Chinese and indigenous people to achieve self-sustainment. As Jia states, ‘We will ban American goods … promote manufacturing, so our nationals will use national goods’ (Lü, 1989, 188–189).

When the new trading network is established, Jia’s father worries that this might turn colonisation into a capitalist conspiracy:

If everyone is led by the nose by money, then in the future, those who have more money will take the lead, and those who contribute to the production of goods will not be able to share the surplus profit (Lü, 1989, 211).

Hence, Jia’s colonial method causes another dilemma: a trading network that is based on the development of new resources on Immortal Island gives the indigenous people self-sufficiency, but it undoubtedly exploits indigenous human and material resources. What is more, his planned trading network will confront and compete with that of America and other Western countries. Jia practises the coloniser’s methods even though he embraces the mentality of the colonised, which recalls Liang’s (2006) and Fieldhouse’s (1983) criticism of the collaboration between imperialist-colonialism and capitalism as ‘an inevitable consequence of the disproportionate industrial and political power’ (Fieldhouse, 1983, 2). Liang (2006, 1264), meanwhile, states that the prevailing colonisation method of the West is to open new ‘markets’ instead of ‘battlefields’. Hence, the establishment of the new educational programme and the new trading network directs this new China in an unexpected way that betrays Jia’s original utopian goal, though not his efforts to understand the natives.

Jia also emphasises the importance of giving the indigenous people a representative government (Lü, 1989, 197). In the face of huge economic benefits, the coloniser must choose between economic exploitation and political equality. In Lü’s utopian imagination this is a choice between the two tendencies of colonialism: occupancy (i.e., the coloniser’s methods) and sympathy (i.e., the colonised mentality). The relationship between ‘the coloniser’s methods’ and ‘the colonised mentality’ recalls Bakhtin’s (1984, 176) carnival juxtaposition: ‘opposites come together, look at one another, are reflected in one another, know and understand one another’. To understand the Chinese reception of the foreign discourse of colonialism, the positions of both the coloniser and the colonised must be recognised. These opposing positions together highlight Jia’s cooperative and contradictory relationship with the indigenous people in the story: his sympathy for the islanders is not simply a façade to subjugate others, because it involves China’s own colonial experience as well as sympathy stemming from his own suffering. Interestingly, there is an irony inherent in this relationship: Jia makes full use of the land and natural and human resources. Further, Jia’s education programme for the islanders is indirectly and inexplicitly a means of transforming their hearts and minds. This contrasting/reconciling effect showcases the ambivalence and struggles of receiving and overcoming colonialism while both being a victim of colonialism and also building inclusive settler societies as a possible solution to the contradiction between the coloniser/colonised identity. At the end of this utopian story, as long as visitors and inhabitants of other islands come to the new utopia of Immortal Island, the newcomers will be given an education. Eventually, a new borderless China will be achieved in accordance with Jia’s political agenda and developed based on Chinese settler-colonialism and transnational imagination.

Lü’s utopian narrative highlights the importance of Chinese settler-colonialism in the establishment of a modern nation-state, which was dependent on the control of space, which in turn was used to define the geographical scope of sovereignty. Dissatisfied with the traditional education system and the Qing government, Jia chooses an alternative way to transform China by establishing another sovereign state. Here he stands in contrast to his contemporaries Ning Sunmou, Wei Tanran, and Li Langfu (representing Kong Youwei [1858–1927], Liang Qichao, and Sun Yatsen [1866–1925], respectively), who advocate either the reform of the existing sovereign state or its overthrow via revolution. Jia’s effort to de/reterritorialise Immortal Island as a new colony illustrates Duara’s (1997) argument that the configuration of Chinese nationalist discourse in the early 20^th century depended on a transnational imagination precisely because of the insufficiency of nationalistic discourse. Jia’s actions anticipate Duara’s (1997, 1030–1051) argument that territory played a key role in imperialist-colonialism and nationalism in China. Social Darwinism in particular demonstrated the legitimacy of colonisation, whereby sovereign control of colonial territory represented symbolic power in the international arena.

Jia’s implementation of colonisation on Immortal Island comprises a unique synthesis of social Darwinism, nationalism, and colonialism. As such, the transnational imagination channelled Lü’s utopian Chinese nationalism in a twofold manner. On the one hand, the material existence of a new territory (i.e., Immortal Island) allows the establishment of a new sovereignty outside China to compete with and even overthrow the original state’s power. On the other hand, the new colony is considered a symbol of success, in the sense of the struggle for survival, and a channel to develop an overseas China. With these goals in mind, Jia’s first task is to claim sovereignty over Immortal Island under a mild colonial policy. The second task is to complete the implementation of education reform and the establishment of a new trading network. Jia’s cultural education programme is designed to unite ethnic and non-ethnic Chinese people in an overseas China (i.e., Immortal Island) and in China. Although the story upholds the argument of the sovereign territorial state, it also emphasises that the proper order of space is an essential part of the education of every citizen.

The creation of Jia’s desired China through education reforms, a new trading network, and civilising the people of Immortal Island can be understood in light of Albert’s (1998) postmodernist view on sovereignty, which was practised in the process of de/reterritorialisation in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) sense: ‘For territory to be meaningful, it has to be reproduced by the enactment of challenges to it, by questionings and erasures of boundaries as markers of space, but also through the inscription of new boundaries’ (Albert, 1998, 61). Simply put, the first step in the process of de/reterritorialisation is colonisation and the formation of a new power. The second step is de/reterritorialising inland China as the periphery of Immortal Island, which will become the centre of civilisation and will unwittingly benefit China. However, in this process of de/reterritorialisation, the building of an overseas China transcends the ironclad binary of the centre and the periphery in such a way that a transborder cultural and economic network is realisable.

More specifically, Jia’s vision of a new trading network for mineral and agricultural products connecting Hong Kong, Macau, China, and Southeast Asia illustrates Burch’s (1994) acknowledgement that a mobile economic arena can underpin the stability of a new sovereignty. In this sense, transborder cultural and economic connections activate the function of de/reterritorialisation, and in finding Immortal Island, Jia appropriates transnationality to develop Chinese nationalism. Such a borderless China is therefore constituted through an endless process of boundary drawing and crossing.

Conclusion

My discussion of A Madman’s Dream has illustrated the complex relationship between the Chinese utopian imagination and the concept of colonialism in the late Qing era. This article has shown how Chinese settler-colonialism was a channel by which utopian intellectuals such as Lü Sheng could imagine a new, strong, and utopian China. A Madman’s Dream demonstrates a view of utopia as mobile: the utopian imagination was no longer confined to the territorial state of China, and the pursuit of colonialism was seen as integral to the search for a perfect nation. The late Qing intellectuals thus saw colonisation as a modern means of achieving both civilisation and knowledge so that China could transform itself from a semi-colonised country into a modern nation-state.

China’s encounters with social Darwinism and Western colonialism gave rise to its own style of settler-colonialism. My analysis of theoretical writings and fictional speculation on the concept of zhimin demonstrates the potential of China’s subjectivity as a ‘settler-colonist’ during the late Qing period. It underscores that China yearned to become the strongest power in the world by colonising new lands and reshaping its past into a modern colonial history. Crucially, the Chinese construction of its own colonial discourse hinged simultaneously on the acceptance and rejection of the Western imperialist-colonial discursive framework, which required social Darwinism as a pre-condition wherein the success of imperialist-colonialism validated the success of the struggle for survival. At the same time, such a colonised mentality became the intellectual basis for late Qing intellectuals to implement and imagine their own logic of settler-colonisation.

My analysis also highlights some characteristics of the Chinese case. Firstly, the privileged role of the material and emotional powers of the territory worked together to form a kind of utopian thinking. Secondly, the late Qing intellectuals and literati chose to de-emphasise the role of military conquest in colonialism. In particular, the attitude of Jia and his fellow settlers towards the oppressed in A Madman’s Dream demonstrates that China’s status as a victim of imperialism explains how the foreign colonialist discourse was received in the local context. Although I am not arguing that Jia’s cultural programme and economic trading network were less invasive than military means, Jia’s efforts to understand and empathise with the colonised were also noteworthy. Thirdly, in A Madman’s Dream, indigenous people were included in both the construction of Immortal Island and the structural system that produced a new China. Based on the solidarity between the Chinese settler-colonists and the indigenous people, they shared the experience of the ‘colonised’. Hence, the settler–indigenous relationship depicted in the story rises above Wolfe’s (1999) definition of settler-colonialism, in that the use of local labour and land-grabbing does not usually coexist because of the logic of elimination.

All this suggests that the type of settler–indigenous relationship depicted in the novel combined the ‘top-down’ perspective of the coloniser’s governance and the ‘bottom-up’ perspective of the suffering of the colonised, and this duality was represented by the story’s aesthetic juxtaposition. The utopian imagination thus went beyond the theoretical writing of the late Qing intellectuals. Consequently, the binary between the ‘colonialist’ and the ‘colonised’ in this discussion was not an ossified opposition. Rather, my analysis suggests how the ‘colonialist’ and ‘colonised’ mentalities can be connected to understand the dissemination and adaptation of colonial discourse in China. By identifying the links between these mentalities, the article may also be illustrating how Qing era intellectuals were seeking to overcome the Western discourse of colonialism. As such, the late Qing intellectuals’ approach to Western colonisation can be summarised as ‘the colonial imagination of the colonised’, with a twofold identity of China as a non-Western settler-coloniser: its role of settler-colonist was facilitated through its experience of being colonised by the West, while the building of a utopia was aimed at gathering people suffering from colonisation.

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).