To Be Conquered or Conformed: The Racial Construction of the Qing Dynasty and Meiji Japan in the Western Mind Mid-Nineteenth to Early Twentieth Century
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Authors
Brown, Grace
Issue Date
2025-04-25
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
Scholarship Sewanee 2025 , University of the South, East Asian History, Meiji Japan, Qing China, Racial Construction, Colonial Theory
Alternative Title
Abstract
During the mid-late nineteenth century Western constructions of the Chinese and Japanese races were based upon the country’s willingness to conform to Western epistemology. The Qing dynasty in China, through the Self-Strengthening Movement, sought to forge a hybrid path to modernity that combined Western and Chinese practices while resisting foreign intervention. The Qing’s unwillingness to conform to Euro-American norms led them to be constructed through a lens of Oriental despotism which dismissed them as stagnant and uncivilized in the Western mind. In contrast, the modernization of Japan during the Meiji Restoration (1868) and its subsequent confirmation to Western epistemology allowed it to be constructed through a paternalistic lens as a civilized nation capable of progress in Western discourse. However, in the early twentieth century the rising military power of Japan signaled a threat to the race-based epistemology of the West and the hegemony of white Western powers; thus the Japanese were constructed as the ‘modern despot’ in Western discourse.
Description
Citation
Publisher
University of the South