This project aims to analyse how federalist movements and individual activists unsuccesfully tried to redefine the distribution of power and legitimacy between the centre and the peripheries in modern China, more specifically in the late 19th – early 20th century. Adopting a conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) approach, this research intends to examine how intellectual and political actors elaborated and used the concepts of lianbang and liansheng (federalism) – often in connection to zizhi (self-government) – to (re)articulate the relationship between the “central” and the “local” political spheres, within a new macro-concept of political order (zhengzhi zhixu) produced in response to the collapse of the imperial system.
Databases, archives and publications presenting the activities of proponents of federal ideas, their personal networks and biographies, their political plans, and ultimately their failures, will show how these concepts were developed and narrated. The conceptual constellation covering the wide spectrum of “federation”, “federacy”, “self-government” or “feudalism” will be thus observed in its formation and evolution in the late Qing and Republican period. Its history will be studied as a multi-layered translation: as a translation from the past (with regard to the use of traditional Chinese political categories and historical precedents in the articulation of federal theories); as a translation from an alien political and cultural context (with regard to the references made by supporters and opponents of federalism to non-Chinese historical examples of federalist countries); finally as a purely linguistic translation of foreign terms.
Besides its historical focus on the late imperial and early republican period, the research could be extended diachronically with the aim of tracing the legacy of this conceptual debate - involving key issues as State-society relations, definitions of autonomy and self-determination, local and provincial governance – in 21st-century China.