A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology Paperback - 2002 - 1st Edition

First line

WHEN IN THE LATE-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY QIANLONG Emperor ommissioned "Biographies of Twice-Serving Officials" (Erchen zhuan) and demanded a reconsideration of generals and officials who had deserted the Ming to serve the Qing during the seventeenth-century conquest, he allowed the Great Wall of China to mark a moral boundary derived from a newly adopted vision of identity.

From the jacket flap

IN THIS LANDMARK EXPLORATION of the origins of nationalism and concepts of racial identity in China, Pamela Kyle Crossley traces the shifting ideologies of a large, early modern land-based empire, the Qing (1636-1912). Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, Crossley argues that motifs introduced under the Qing in the eighteenth century -- part of the crystallizing categories of identity that the Qing themselves promoted -- continue to distort the modern understanding of Qing origins. What has often been repudiated by nationalist foes of empire, it turns out, is frequently itself a creation of empire.

As the empire was formed, Crossley suggests, the complex or simultaneous rulership needed to address itself to increasingly discrete, abstract, genealogically constructed, and historicized audiences. She finds that these identities, some of which were adopted wholesale by nationalist spokesmen of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bore at best a loose resemblance to the factual contours of the Qing period.