Ruling the Mongols of Manchuria

Jiani He
Title
Ruling the Mongols of Manchuria
Subtitle
Language, Literacy, and Power in Late Qing Borderlands
Author
Price
€ 146,00 excl. VAT
ISBN
9789463727075
Format
Hardback
Number of pages
364
Language
English
Publication date
Dimensions
15.6 x 23.4 cm
Discipline
Asian Studies
Table of Contents
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Acknowledgement
Note on Transcription, Names, Toponyms, and Document Titles
Qing Reign Periods
Governor General of the Three Eastern Provinces
Table list
Introduction
Chapter 1 Kamcime: Ruling a Polyglot Empire
Chapter 2 The Linguistic Scene
Chapter 3 The Literacy Question
Chapter 4 Literate in What Language
Chapter 5 Reimagining China and the World
Chapter 6 Trilingual Practice in the Jirim League and Manchuria
Conclusion
Bibliography

Jiani He

Ruling the Mongols of Manchuria

Language, Literacy, and Power in Late Qing Borderlands

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Jirim League witnessed a linguistic wrestle between Manchu, Mongol, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian powers. The Qing Empire envisioned a trilingual educational system, with the aim of improving the Jirim Mongols’ ability to read Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian. Through this policy, the Qing sought to transform loyal imperial subjects into modern patriotic nationals and incorporate them into an integrated and united China under a Manchu constitutional monarchy. The late Qing’s linguistic practice for ruling the Mongols of Manchuria was an attempt to cope with the enduring legacies in Qing administration and people’s everyday life, growing local ethnic tensions, cross-boundary connections, imperial rivalries, and the rise of new ideas concerning nation, modern state, and international relations in East Asia. This book challenges the notion of Chinese language reform as a story of linear progress towards national monolingualism, unfolds the power of multilingualism in Chinese nationalist discourse from a peripheral, non–Han Chinese perspective, and questions the extent to which national languages dominate the writing of history.
Author

Jiani He

Dr. HE Jiani is an assistant professor at Peking University, specializing in studies of borderlands and frontiers, the politics of language, and history of China’s foreign relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.