At the turn of the twentieth century, the Jirim League witnessed a linguistic struggle between Manchu, Mongol, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian powers. The Qing Empire envisioned a trilingual educational system, with the aim of improving the Jirim Mongols’ ability to read Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian. Through this policy, the Qing sought to transform loyal imperial subjects into modern patriotic nationals and incorporate them into an integrated and united China under a Manchu constitutional monarchy. The late Qing’s language policy and strategy for ruling the Mongols of Manchuria was an attempt to address the enduring multilingual legacies in Qing administration and people’s everyday life, growing local ethnic tensions, cross-boundary connections, imperial rivalries, and the rise of new ideas concerning nation, modern state, and international relations in East Asia. This book challenges the notion of Chinese language reform as a story of linear progression towards national monolingualism, highlights the power of multilingualism in Chinese nationalist discourse from a peripheral, non-Han Chinese perspective, and questions the extent to which national languages dominate the writing of history.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transcription, Names, Toponyms, and Document Titles
- Qing Reign Periods
- Governor General of the Three Eastern Provinces
- Introduction
- 1. Kamcime: Ruling a Polyglot Empire
- 2. The Linguistic Scene
- 3. The Literacy Question
- 4. Literate in What Language
- 5. Reimagining China and the World
- 6. Trilingual Practice in the Jirim League and Manchuria
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- List of Map and Tables
- Map
- Map 2.1: A General Map of the Mongolian League in the Three Eastern Provinces
The map, titled “A General Map of the Situation of Planning Mongolian Affairs in the Three Eastern Provinces” (東三省籌蒙大勢圖), was drawn by Zhu Chaozong (朱朝宗), with an inserted scrip
- Tables
- Table 2.1 Han Chinese Administrations in the Jirim League
- Table 2.2 Languages used in some Qing-Russian treaties in the nineteenth century
- Table 3.1 Proposals about phonetic writing discussed in Chapter 3 (1892–1911)
- Table 6.1 Distribution of the first four volumes of the Trilingual Textbook (December, 1909)
- Table 6.2 Distribution of the first four volumes of the Trilingual Textbook (February 1910)
- Table 6.3 The third-round distribution of the Trilingual Textbook (September–October, 1911)
- Table 6.4 A comparison between the number of textbooks and students in the Jirim League
- Table 6.5 The syllabus of the Senior Elementary School: Class One
- Table 6.6 The syllabus of the Junior Elementary School: Class Two
- Table 6.7 The number of students in each score range
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