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The discourse of Xinmin
Mindset remodeling and nation-building in early twentieth-century China
- Source: Chinese Language and Discourse, Volume 13, Issue 1, Mar 2022, p. 122 - 142
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- 30 Aug 2021
- 01 Dec 2021
- 29 Mar 2022
Abstract
Abstract
Focusing on Liang Qichao’s campaign of national moral character reform, this article examines the discourse of xinmin (新民 new people) as a social engineering project that sought to remold the mindset and behaviors of the people a means of nation-building in the 1900s. Drawing on Koselleck’s idea of conceptual history, it analyses how the idea of qun (群) was deployed as a discursive building block of xinmin to cultivate a sense of membership in the political community of Chinese nation. It argues that the xinmin discourse facilitated a fundamental restructuring of the mental-cognitive framing of society in changing China from a Confucian cultural entity to a national political identity.
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