Cultural advance and retreat of Chinese in Southeast Asia in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China

The book "Cultural Construction of Chinese Communities in Nanyang in the Late Qing Dynasty and the Early Republic of China" is a revised doctoral thesis by Ms. Xue on how to construct cultural discourse right and cultural space in this special period of the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China. Published by Life Reading Sanlian Bookstore.

The article is divided into seven parts, including introduction, five chapters and conclusion.

One,

The best part of this article is the introduction. It mainly explains the author's research theory, research model, research object and research scope. The author uses many theories, including Jim Clifford's travel theory, interaction theory and Lefebvre's space theory.

First of all, the travel theory attaches importance to the exploration of travel notes. Ms. Xue's research angle is cut from Nanyang Travel Notes during the period of 1877- 1937. In fact, it is no stranger to study travel notes as historical materials, but today's scholars only pay attention to ancient travel notes and pay insufficient attention to modern overseas travel notes, so this book is novel in material selection.

Secondly, when discussing the Chinese community in Southeast Asia, the general research model is the bipolar interaction model between China and Southeast Asia. In the book, the author tries to break this fixed pattern and establish a new, deeper and more comprehensive multi-level interactive model, in which the multi-polar interactive parties include China, Japanese, colonial empires, aborigines and Southeast Asian Chinese, and the interactive center is Southeast Asian Chinese.

Finally, Ms. Xue applied Lefebvre's "space theory" to discuss the relationship between the establishment of Raffles' library and museum and cultural space, and devoted herself to sorting out the clear context between colonial discourse system and China discourse system.

Second,

In the fourth chapter, the author regards Raffles Library and Museum as independent cultural spaces, and thinks that their establishment means the establishment of a colonial discourse system, and expounds how the Chinese in Nanyang establish their own cultural discourse under the colonial discourse system and the process of implicit confrontation with it.

The central group of this chapter is Nanyang Chinese, but the actual content is vaguely biased towards Taiwanese. The article points out that there are differences between Chinese in Taiwan Province Strait and other Chinese dialects. This difference has been recognized by both China people and the government, and the official recognition has further strengthened people's understanding of this group. The author also clearly pointed out that "China people in the Taiwan Province Strait are different from the general Nanyang Chinese community." However, most of the following pages are basically focused on "Chinese in the Straits". The attendance of "Chinese in the Straits" in the museum in the second section and the establishment of "Chinese in the Straits" magazine in the third section all seem to highlight "Chinese in the Straits" and ignore the reactions and actions of ordinary Chinese groups to some extent.

China people on both sides of the Taiwan Straits have become a special group because of the complexity of their identities. Different from the ordinary Chinese in Nanyang, they generally received British education and training, were influenced by both sides in ideology and culture, and even tended to colonial countries in political ideals. Although Chinese in the Taiwan Strait often fall into a dilemma, for example, British people suffer racial discrimination because they are politically close to Britain and are spurned by other Chinese. But their advantages are also obvious: they are business elites, and even if the British discriminate against them, they have to choose to do business with them; They are also the upper class of Chinese in Nanyang, and they play the role of Chinese organizers and leaders under the colonial system. The above advantages have a particularly prominent feedback on the establishment of their own discourse system.

Besides, I think there are obvious similarities between the author's "China people in the Straits" and Kong Feili's "China people among others". First of all, both of them are influenced by colonial culture and education, and they have the characteristics of "combining Chinese and western". The multiplicity of their identities forced them to face other immigrants and colonists at the same time and cope with the double pressure from their hometown and current residence. Secondly, these two groups are relatively small, but they hold most of the wealth and power. Are the products of the combination of overseas Chinese and colonial rule under the colonial system. The emergence of this phenomenon is not accidental, it means the flexibility and adaptability of overseas Chinese communities in the face of various long-term changes.

In addition, when explaining why Raffles Museum and Library became the founders and dominators of the local colonial discourse system, the reasons cited by the author are somewhat thin and far-fetched. The most important thing is the lack of reference groups, which can not highlight the leading and dominant position of the second museum.

In the author's view, the potential difficulties and shortcomings of this book are that the travel notes contain strong personal colors, and at the same time, the text content is random and scattered, lacking overall consciousness. Therefore, researchers need to have better information selection ability and historical data sorting ability. In addition, too rich use theory is sometimes a double-edged sword. In the face of these theories, the author's personal research and historical evidence are inevitably somewhat inadequate. Especially when quoting and using Lefebvre's "space theory", the author did not directly quote the original theory of "space production", but quoted the works of other scholars. The reason is unknown, but it is obviously easy to misunderstand the theory, which leads to logical defects in writing, which is also a taboo in historical research.

To sum up, the highlight of this book lies in the flexible and innovative application of classical research theories and research models, as well as the application of new historical materials, namely travelers' travel notes in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China. As the author thinks, the new model of travel research can allow analysts to follow the pace and vision of travelers on the one hand, and analyze the social and cultural phenomena seen by travelers on the other. For "space research", the travel research of "changing scenery" can capture the space with research value better.

In a word, the reason why I recommend this book is obvious. This research work on the Chinese community in Nanyang is still of great reading value and reference value to the cultural history subject in the study of Chinese overseas Chinese. Especially for undergraduates who are new to the history of overseas Chinese, the difficulty is moderate and enlightening.