Author ｜
Si-yi Li
Abstract ｜
This paper examines the interaction between Sun Yat-sen’s railway plans and the emerging discourses of nation-state in early Republican China. It takes Sun’s “railway dream” as an Utopian experiment with substantial ideological significance, revealing the constructive role played by the conceptual frames and visual metaphors of this dream in the formation of a new community. The first section discusses Sun’s early railway plans and his thoughts of railways’ contribution on shaping a new community. An imaginable unified image of modern China on the dimension of geographical space is a very late invention, arising in the historical contexts with the help of Sun’s advocating for railways. The second section focuses on Sun’s mature planning and mapping of a national railway system with its visualization, especially its effects on modern imagination of territories. The visual metaphors of railways set stages for the establishment of homogeneous space and provide legitimacy for a new imagined community. The last section demonstrates a comparative study between nationalism and railways with a reflection on Sun Yat-sen’s thoughts of nation-state. Through revealing the isomorphism relation among them, the paper points out that the desire for an unified and homogeneous nation-state and the demand on a single subject are supported by material and concrete things, namely railways. Based on above, I argue that Sun Yat-sen’s railway thoughts and plans are extremely significant to the shaping of Republican China. Not only does Sun’s “railway dream” involve the practice of imagining a new community, but the dream itself carries many important epistemological shifts, such as from “under Heaven” to nation-state, from imperial regions to sovereign territories, from multiple nationalities to one single subject, etc.
keywords ｜
Sun Yat-sen, railways, maps, nation-state, nationalism