Empire, Nation-state and Chinese Identity:
The Vision of Inside (Nei) and Outside (Wai)
in Qing Scholarship of Jinwen Jingxue (New Text School)

Hui Wang
University of Washington

The paper aims at the interpretation and re-interpretation on Nei/Wai (inside and outside) and Yi/Xia (Foreign and Chinese) by Qing scholars of Jinwen school. The first part discusses Zhuang Cunyu and Liu Fenglu’s works against the background of racial conflicts in Qing and argues that the efforts to blur the clear distinctions between Nei and Wai, Yi and Xia contain the demanding for racial equality on the one hand, legitimize Qing ruling on the other. Both sides of it lead them to re-define the meaning of China or Chineseness. Taking Gong Zizhen and Wei Yuan as cases, the second part analyzes how this vision of Nei/Wai and Yi/Xia provided them a perspective from which they developed their scholarship about the Western regions of China and the remaping the position of China in a maritime world. The third part deals with late Qing thought of Gongyang, especially Kang Youwei’s idea, especially the shift of the focus in Jinwen Jingxue from the issue of Nei/Wai and Yi/Xia to the issue of the evolution of three worlds and how a multi-ethnical Chineseness as an Identity for the building of Qing empire was transformed into the form of modern national identity in a world of nation-states.