{"id":13812,"date":"2022-12-14T13:24:17","date_gmt":"2022-12-14T11:24:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cogito\/home\/?p=13812"},"modified":"2022-12-15T10:49:58","modified_gmt":"2022-12-15T08:49:58","slug":"erasures-and-the-quest-for-modernity-the-case-of-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cogito\/home\/erasures-and-the-quest-for-modernity-the-case-of-china\/?lang=en","title":{"rendered":"Erasures and the Quest for Modernity: The Case of China"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The writing and rewriting of history, and its use for political purposes are in the spotlight again. But the disproportionate attention given to violence in the past\u2009\u2013\u2009conflict and domination\u2009\u2013\u2009has us often overlook the history of daily life, customs, and seemingly more mundane historical actors; in other words, questions of community and public welfare. Even such histories can be seized for political purposes, especially when the whole parts of these histories are obscured. Presentation by Pierre Fuller<\/a>, researcher at the Center for History.
\nIn my book Modern Erasures: Revolution, the Civilising Mission, and the Shaping of China\u2019s Past <\/a>(Cambridge University Press, 2022), I show how narratives of daily life can be conducive to the valorisation of some cultures and denigration of others. These narratives continue to structure the modern world today. I seek to highlight the extent to which many socially beneficial actions (typically performed within native communities) were left out of histories when they did not serve the so-called modernisation process.
\nMy case study is modern China, with a major focus on the surprising overlaps and similarities between two movements that appear to be anathema to one another: the civilising mission of colonialism, on the one hand, and of communism on the other.
\nIn both cases, state and party agents justified their interventions on the basis of sociological surveys, by identifying and classifying social actors and their (alleged) defects, and then determining solutions to remedy them. The ultimate goals of colonialism and communism, however, far apart they may seem, initially gave rise to remarkably similar discourses.<\/p>\n

Social Studies and Colonialism<\/h3>\n

There is little doubt that native communities in the colonial world were deeply destabilised by the interventions of imperial powers and their integration into global markets. Government officials, missionaries, and the emerging social sciences purportedly studied these communities in order to capture their essence. In place of pictures of community practices over the long-term, the producers of \u2018modern\u2019 doxa were satisfied with a few snapshots of these cultures at moments of crisis, as the community fabric frayed and social obligations were jettisoned.
\nVietnam is a case in point. At the beginning of the 20th century, French colonialism enterprises transformed Vietnamese subsistence farmers into landless wage earners who depended on rubber and other large plantations for their survival. As the Vietnamese were subjected to regressive taxation to fund new forms of administration and infrastructure that altered political and commercial relations at the village level, some populations benefited from new profit opportunities, while mutual support networks collapsed for others. It is in this context that French studies of the social values and associative life of the More importantly, these imperialist diagnoses were internalised by \u2018Vietnamese activists and writers\u2019 of the period, notes historian Van Nguyen-Marshall. In the 1920s, for example, they \u2018portrayed philanthropy and charity as new, modern, and Western\u2019. But the actual innovation lay elsewhere, in the new way of conceiving philanthropy, charity and civic acts as a service to the nation-state and to fellow citizens: the very \u2018foundation of a modern society\u2019(1)<\/sup><\/a>Van Nguyen-Marshall, \u201cThe Ethics of Benevolence in French Colonial Vietnam: A Sino-Franco-Vietnamese Cultural Borderland<\/a>\u201d en Diana Lary, ed., The Chinese State at the Borders<\/i>, University of British Columbia, 2007.<\/span><\/span>