This book addresses a long-ignored issue: How does the past failure of an ethnic people to maintain sovereignty over their homeland influence their contemporary reconfigurations of ethnic and national identities? To answer this, the book focuses on the Manzus, the second largest non-Han group in contemporary China, whose cultural and historical ancestors, the Manchus, ruled China from 1644 to 1912. It analyzes the major forces responsible for the transformation of Manchu identity from the ruling group of the Qing empire to the minority of minorities in China today. Within the first half of the ... More

This book addresses a long-ignored issue: How does the past failure of an ethnic people to maintain sovereignty over their homeland influence their contemporary reconfigurations of ethnic and national identities? To answer this, the book focuses on the Manzus, the second largest non-Han group in contemporary China, whose cultural and historical ancestors, the Manchus, ruled China from 1644 to 1912. It analyzes the major forces responsible for the transformation of Manchu identity from the ruling group of the Qing empire to the minority of minorities in China today. Within the first half of the twentieth century, four regimes each grouped the Manchus into different ethnic and national categories while re-positioning Manchuria itself on their political maps in accordance with their differing definitions of statehood. During periods of state succession, Manchuria was transformed from the Manchu homeland in the Qing dynasty to an East Asian borderland in the early twentieth century, before becoming China's territory recovered from the Japanese empire. As the transformation of territoriality took place, the hard boundaries of the Manchu community were reconfigured, its ways of self-identification reformed, and the space for its identity representations redefined. The book goes beyond the single-country focus and looks instead at regional and cross-border perspectives. It is a study of China, but one that transcends traditional historiographies.