The University of Nottingham's Taiwan Research Hub presents a talk by
Dr Qiang Zhang, ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History, the University of Nottingham
Rehabilitating Republican China: Historical Memory, National Identity and Authoritarian Fragmentation in Post-Mao China
Thursday 14 March 2024
12noon-2pm, Room A27Humanities Building, University Park
Hybrid Event including Lunch
Talk abstract
The Republic of China (ROC), which ruled the Chinese mainland from 1912 to 1949 before being overthrown by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and retreating to the island of Taiwan, has undergone a surprising rehabilitation in the People’s Republic of China. The CCP’s orthodox historiography holds that the ROC ceased to exist in 1949 and its rule on the mainland was incompetent and repressive. In recent decades, however, this negative image has given way to a much more positive view. In books, newspaper articles, documentaries and dramas, Republican China has sometimes been portrayed as a vibrant society making remarkable progress in modernisation in the face of severe external challenges.
This study explores the origins of the rehabilitation of the ROC and examines in detail how the Republican-era legacies have been reassessed in the reform era. It finds that, while the post-Mao regime has continued to use the negative view of China’s pre-communist history to maintain its historical legitimacy, it has also been promoting a positive view of aspects of the same period in order to support its post-1978 priorities of modernisation and nationalism, a trend that has persisted under Xi Jinping despite his tightened ideological control. The selective revival of Republican legacies, though conducive to the CCP’s current political objectives, has given rise to revisionist narratives that damage the hegemony of its orthodox historical discourses.Speaker biography
About the speaker
Qiang Zhang is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History, the University of Nottingham. He holds a DPhil from the Department of Politics and International Relations, the University of Oxford. Prior to academia, he worked as a BBC journalist for over a decade, reporting on Chinese political developments and analysing Chinese media content.
Chaired by
Dr Chun-yi Lee, Taiwan Research Hub, University of Nottingham