Reshaping China

This book is the first and only English-language edition of Huang Xingtao’s Reshaping China, translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun.


In this landmark text, Huang Xingtao uses a cultural approach to the history of ideas. He traces the complex contours in the discursive
debates around the concept of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu) from its origins in the late Qing; through the pivotal moment
of the 1911 Revolution; into the contentious revolutionary upheavals of the 1920s, amidst the national crisis brought on by Japanese
invasions in the 1930s; and culminating in the widespread acceptance of the concept during the Civil War. By the late 1940s, the Chinese
nation came to represent the idea that all peoples within the country, whatever their ethnicity, were equal citizens who shared common
goals and aspirations.