Geographical Imaginations in the Process of Chinese Modern State-Building

Abstract: Forming a clear consciousness of the national territory and the world is a basic issue that must be solved in the process of modern state-building. Traditional China is a “tianxia (all under the heaven) system” based on the distinction between Han and Yi (roughly means barbarians), which is incompatible with the modern conception of nation-state. According to it, European Nations and countries are distant uncivilized barbarians and tributers. At the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century, with a series of political and cultural collisions between China and the Western countries, the subject of modern geography began to be popularized in Chinese schools. The geography textbooks during that period showed the intellectuals’ efforts of promoting Chinese modern state-building, including reversing the traditional conceptions between Han and Yi and following the modern European civilization, abadoning the traditional conception of Tianxia and shrinking China into a country with demarcated borders, and exposing the Western powers’ aggressive nature and showing the territorial crisis faced by China so as to arouse people’s territorial consciousness and patriotic emotion. The geography Textbooks in the late Qing Dynasty show that modern geographical imagination provides important impetus for Chinese modern state-building.