Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and
socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE)
was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of
ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In
that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed
antithesis, “barbarism,” were not straightforward products of
political change but had their own developmental logic based in two
interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the
emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and
the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses
emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy,
subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to
Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization
and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned
the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society
and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and
continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the
contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new
interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history
engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of
culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.
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