After the 1911 Qing collapse, race replaced Confucian cosmology as a science-based national-unity ideology.

Evidence

The Qing empire collapsed in 1911, a momentous political event which was marked by a number of important developments, for instance the rapid transformation of the traditional gentry into powerful new elites, such as factory managers, bankers, lawyers, doctors, scientists, educators, and journalists. The result of new economic opportunities created through contacts with Western traders and the closer integration of the country into a global economy, the gradual emergence of new social formations was particularly pronounced in the large metropoles of the coast. Based on a common ground of social values, a sophisticated network of relations webbed intellectuals, urban notables, and financial elites together into a modernizing avant-garde. With the collapse of the imperial system, moreover, neo-Confucian knowledge rapidly lost its credibility and authority. With the decline of conformity to the moral imperatives enshrined in a canon of Confucian texts, a growing number of people with a modern education believed “truth” to be encoded in a nature which only science could decrypt. Identity, ancestry, and meaning were buried deep inside the body: anthropology or genetics, by probing the body, could establish the “natural” differences between population groups. Modern science, in the eyes of modernizing elites, came to replace imperial cosmology as the epistemological foundation for claims about social order. These elites viewed race as a credible concept capable of promoting national unity after the collapse of the imperial system. Not only was “race” deemed to be an objective, universal, and scientifically observable given, but it also fulfilled a unifying role in the politics of the nation: it promoted unity against foreign aggressors and supressed internal divisions. Even the “peasants with weather-beaten faces and mud-caked hands and feet” could be represented as the descendants of the Yellow Emperor, as “race” was a notion which could overarch gender, lineage, class, and region to conceptually integrate the country’s people into a powerful community organically linked by blood. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3326

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the theme of race as a modern invention used for nation-building; parallels Hobsbawm’s ‘invented traditions’ and Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities.
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense causal chain: imperial collapse delegitimizes Confucian knowledge, science fills the epistemological void, and race is the specifically effective concept because it overarches gender, lineage, class, and region into blood solidarity.