Author ｜
Kok-hwa Ng
Abstract ｜
In 1927, Jinan University in Shanghai established the Department of Nanyang Culture and Education, a Nanyang research institute, which released a succession of publications focusing on Nanyang issues, including Nanyang Yanjiu《南洋研究》, Nanyang Qingbao《南洋情報》, and Zhongnan Qingbao《中南情報》. At a time of crisis when China was confronted with internal and external troubles, a group of Chinese intellectuals turned their attention to the Nanyang islands which had been colonized by the West. This study attempts to analyze the motivation, process, and significance of Chinese intellectuals’ concern for Nanyang before the end of the Second World War. Based on the Nanyang-related topography writings and travelogues in Nanyang Yanjiu and Nanyang Qingbao published by Jinan University, the study examines how Chinese intellectuals constructed an “imagined Chinese community” through the southern foreign states in response to the political discourse of “China colonized Nanyang” since the late Qing dynasty and the early Republic of China. The present study has found that these Nanyang topography writers, on the one hand, feminized, beastized, and sordidized Nanyang, trying to restore the long-broken views of all under heaven (views of tianxia 天下) through a strict Sino-barbarian dichotomy. On the other hand, they stressed that people in China and Nanyang shared the same origin in blood and language to blur the Sino-barbarian dichotomy and willfully expand the scope of China’s influence in the south. Both writing strategies were intended to include Nanyang as a part of China, thereby obtaining the psychological strength to resist Western and Eastern colonial imperialism.
keywords ｜
Nanyang Yanjiu, Nanyang Qingbao, Jinan University, mesology, Nanyang