THE PHILOLOGY OF RACE IN LATE QING CHINA

Peter Yuanxi Chen

History and Theory 65, no. 3 (2026)

This article rethinks the problem of race from the late nineteenth century onward by examining how the concept of race configured an impasse in the relationship between history and nature in late Qing China. By analyzing the debate about race and history within late Qing philological discourse, it offers new readings of early foundational texts from China's long revolutionary twentieth century that address questions surrounding race, nation, and state. It takes late Qing intellectuals such as Zhang Taiyan, Liu Shipei, and Liang Qichao not as thinkers who were influenced by race but as thinkers of race—that is, individuals who scrutinized the coherence of a logic of race and its political possibilities. The fateful encounter between late Qing philology, the Kantian antinomy of race, and European comparative philology exposed the limits of a racial logic of reference by which the human was ordered on a global scale. This article locates within the reading and writing practices of late Qing philologists the demands on historical thought posed by a logic of race as well as its limits and contradictions. Thus, this article takes as its focus neither systems of racialization nor histories or genealogies of the concept of race. Rather, it scrutinizes the very use and coherence of race as a subject and/or object for historical thought. Through a critical appraisal of the late Qing philology of race, it seeks to delineate the pitfalls of the philological method while recovering the potential of its critical approach to history.

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