SITUATING THE REVOLUTIONARY ARMY

The decades at the turn of the 20th century constituted a distinct historical juncture for China. Internationally, military defeats at the hands of Western powers imposed unequal treaties, extraterritorial privileges, and economic burdens upon the aging empire. The bitter loss of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) eventually shocked the entire society. Domestically, the clash between the ruling Manchus and the Han Chinese majority was intensified following the failure of two Han Chinese-led socio-political movements. The Hundred Days’ Reform (1898) was quickly shut down by the conservative Manchu elites (Kwong Reference Kwong1984). The Boxer War (1899–1901), with the widespread slogan “Revive the Qing and destroy the foreigners” [fuqing mieyang, 扶清灭洋], ended with the intensified intrusion of imperial powers (Cohen Reference Cohen1997). The political conundrum among the ruling class gradually transformed into society-wide sentiments of anxiety and frustration (Tsu Reference Tsu2005). For the Han Chinese intellectuals, the series of failures and concessions were not only appalling evidence of the political incapability of the Manchu state before Western imperialism but, more importantly, signs of national shame and humiliation. Attacks on the legitimacy of the Manchu state led to increasing suspicion of the value and dignity of Chinese tradition in the modern world. Discussion on the “perishing” [wang, 亡] and “survival” [bao, 保] of the nation pervaded public discourse in the dawning century (Tsu Reference Tsu2005, 68–78; Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 5, 17). In this unfamiliar “great arena of competition and evolution” (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 25), the heretofore undoubted self-understanding of China as the powerful and civilized center of world order was shaken at its foundation (Yang Reference Yang and Fairbank1968).

It was in this depressing and disorienting atmosphere that Zou wrote The Revolutionary Army. His intellectual background was typical of young Chinese “marginalized intellectuals” (Yu Reference Yu1993, 136) in that period, who deliberately distanced themselves from the official Confucian ideology and instead pursued divergent and activist careers. He received a classical Chinese education in Sichuan and was later exposed to Western political and scientific literatures during his study in Japan (Yoshihiro Reference Yoshihiro2003, 16–7).Footnote ⁸ Revolutionary Army was published in 1903 in the Shanghai-based radical newspaper, Jiangsu Daily (Su Bao, 苏报), after Zou’s return to China. The pamphlet criticized the Manchu government and Western imperialism and called for radical change in China. The ideological appeal of the pamphlet, especially to Han Chinese readers, could not be separated from Zou’s stirring racial discourse. In provocative language, Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 4) attributed the miseries of the Han Chinese at the turn of the 20th century to racial injustices imposed by the ruling Manchus: “What is most unjust and bitter in China today is to have to put up with this inferior race [zu, 族] of nomads with wolfish ambitions, these thievish Manchus, as our rulers.” His fellow radical intellectuals advertised the pamphlet with multiple laudatory introductions in public venues and underscored the revolutionary agenda behind his agitative rhetoric (mostly anti-Manchu). Zhang Shizhao (章士钊) ([1903] Reference Zhang, Zhang and Wang1960, 685), the managing editor of Jiangsu Daily, urged that Zou’s pamphlet should be widely used as a “textbook for educating new citizens” in China, and for channeling “[racial] resentment against the Manchus” [chouman, 仇满] toward a transformative agenda of “national enlightenment” and “revolution.”Footnote ⁹ In his preface to Revolutionary Army, Zhang Taiyan (章太炎), a leading radical philosopher and close colleague to Zou, similarly emphasized Zou’s deliberate deployment of provocative anti-Manchu rhetoric to “stir up the conscience and activism” of the Han Chinese who were “apathetic” to an urgently needed revolution (Zou Reference Zou1968, 52).

Zou’s vehement criticisms of racial and political injustice in China were not only applauded by radical intellectuals but also appealed to political activists and the broader mass audience. Twenty editions and nearly a million copies of Revolutionary Army were printed and distributed in the ensuing years, and it is often considered the most widely circulated text before the 1911 Revolution (Wang Reference Wang1998, 426). The popularity of this text and his criticisms of the Manchus made Zou an extremely unwelcome figure for the Manchu authorities and eventually led to his imprisonment and death in 1905 (Zarrow Reference Zarrow2012, 155–6). But Zou’s intellectual legacy did not vanish with his youthful martyrdom. Sun Yat-sen (孙中山), the renowned revolutionary leader and the founding father of the modern Chinese nation, was among the readers of Revolutionary Army. He was inspired by how Zou enlightened the Chinese people with novel “national and racial ideas” and encouraged immediate political action (Sun Reference Sun1981, 228–9). In his exile, Sun brought copies of Revolutionary Army to share with his colleagues in Honolulu and helped secure the publication of the pamphlet in Japan and Southeast Asia (Sun Reference Sun1981, 295). Soon after reading the pamphlet, he changed the name of his revolutionary organization into the “Chinese Revolutionary Army” [Zhonghua Gemingjun, 中华革命军] to commemorate Zou’s contribution (Sun Reference Sun1981, 228). He later even incorporated Zou’s passionate racial rhetoric, especially the anti-Manchu component, into the motto of his nationalist revolution, “Expel the Manchus and revive China” [quchu dalu, huifu zhonghua, 驱除鞑虏, 恢复中华] (Sun Reference Sun1981, 296–7).

ARTICULATING THE “HAN RACE”

In Revolutionary Army, Zou urges immediate revolutionary action as the only viable means of liberating the Han Chinese and redeeming their dignity in the 20th-century world. Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 1) writes with great passion on the opening page of the pamphlet:

While the revolution should happen on multiple fronts, Zou takes the revolt of his fellow Han Chinese against the ruling Manchus as the first step and, by putting it in a racial register, emphasizes the urgency of this struggle. The revolution in 20th-century China is primarily a racial one, through which the “Han race” [hanzhong, 汉种] overthrow the domination of “foreign races” [yizhong, 异种], first and foremost the Manchus (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 23, 28). Through the lens of race and race relations, Zou distinguishes the Han Chinese from rebel groups in the past such as the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (who mistook their Han identity and struggled against the Manchus in religious term), or the Boxers (who failed to realize the irreconcilable differences between the Han and Manchus). The political agency of the Han Chinese at this historical juncture, he argues, presupposes the awakening of their distinct racial consciousness. They must fully recognize the racial character of the group and prepare themselves, as the revolutionary subject or “revolutionary army,” for the upcoming resistance and emancipation.

But who are the Han race? In what sense do the Han Chinese constitute a distinct “race” in the 20th century? Scholars have endeavored to show that race and racism are mainly modern social constructs of the West, which were originally articulated within various Euro-American intellectual paradigms (e.g., religious orthodoxy, Enlightenment universalism, biological science) and later introduced to non-Western societies as the constitutive element of colonial regimes of power and knowledge (Barder Reference Barder2019; Fredrickson Reference Fredrickson2002; Nelson Reference Nelson2024). Echoing this narrative, sinologists share a certain reluctance to embrace “race” as an informative conceptual lens in studying Chinese political thought. They either take a nativist and cultural essentialist stance to claim the categorical difference between (Western) racial thinking and the Chinese (especially Confucian) tradition (Xiang Reference Xiang2023)Footnote ¹⁰ or question the translational process in which the neologism of “race” has been imported into Chinese political discourse alongside (and even by) Euro-American imperialism (Sun Reference Sun2023).Footnote ¹¹

Zou’s work, nevertheless, challenges these accounts and their schematic assumptions about tradition and translation by articulating “race” in the exchange of local and global intellectual resources. In Revolutionary Army, Zou employs the recently imported vocabulary of race to refashion the Han Chinese identity in racial terms and situate the Han race within a global racial taxonomy. For him, the fact that race is a Western or “foreign” construct does not necessarily deprive the category of its discursive and political resonance in Chinese contexts. Indeed, close engagement with Zou’s pamphlet demonstrates that the importation of the terminology of “race” via translation is not the unreflective adoption of Western theories. It is rather an adaptive process that involves hybridization and negotiation with local intellectual inheritance. Simultaneously, the “indigenization” of racial vocabulary in early 20th-century China (and other different locales) is infused with contextually situated political concerns. The transformative agency of Han Chinese interpreters such as Zou does not simply yield to the imperial hegemony of the West but is often informed by novel political sensibilities within which racial categories are “made meaningful” (Hall Reference Hall2017, 47) in local contexts.

Zou’s rearticulation of the Han Chinese identity locates itself on the messy discussive ground where multiple representations of human difference in traditional Chinese thought coexist and contest. Skin color, among other phenotypical attributes, is signified to differentiate ethnic minorities at the frontiers from the Han Chinese majority in classical Chinese thought. For instance, Dikötter (Reference Dikötter2015, 4) points out how groups living at the margins are repeatedly referred as “the red Di [狄]” or “the black Man [蛮]” in derogatory tones in ancient Chinese texts.Footnote ¹² However, it can be misleading to simply square these segments of the Chinese tradition with essentialized racial categories in modern Western thought. On the one hand, skin color is never the sole signifier of human differences in traditional Chinese thought. It rather combines with formulations of spatial and legal divisions of populations. Di, for example, has particular geographical connotations, referring to the nomadic group from the North, and has been distinguished from residents of the Central Plains. In the Qing dynasty, the Manchu state further introduced the legal division between the Bannermen soldiers [qiren, 旗人] and the Han civilians [hanmin, 汉民] (Crossley Reference Crossley2000). Bannerman soldiers were members of the military organization called Eight Banners [baqi, 八旗] that played a major role in the Manchu conquest during the 17th century and included people of different origins (e.g., the Manchus, the Mongols, and the Han Chinese). The Han civilians, by contrast, formally maintained their secondary status as a conquered people (Elliott Reference Elliott1990).

On the other hand, the rigid opposition between race and culture does not hold in the traditional Chinese rendering of human difference. The relationship of the Han Chinese with other ethnic groups was commonly represented as a division of the civilized center and a barbarian periphery. The hierarchy was established on cultural grounds but shows more internal flexibility than contemporary cultural-determinist interpretations of race (Fredrickson Reference Fredrickson2002, 4–5). Mechanisms of assimilation and transformation were at work on both sides. The Han people never monopolized these cultural norms and faced the constant risk of corruption and de-civilization, while the “barbarians” could reverse the cultural hierarchy and become “civilized” by adopting Sinic education and customs. This culturalist narrative was even adopted by the Manchu state in the 17th century to justify their expansion and rule over the Han Chinese (Ho Reference Ho1998; Pomeranz Reference Pomeranz2005).

This discursive terrain of human difference was re-mapped in the late 19th century when Western concepts of race were translated into ChineseFootnote ¹³ and became accessible to radical intellectuals like Zou. Translation, however, is neither “the sterile equation of two dead languages” (Benjamin Reference Benjamin and Arendt1986, 73) nor the hegemonic transplantation of elements of Western culture into non-Western contexts. The translational process is rather a process of “glocalization” (Müller Reference Müller2008, 157) in which the global exchange of ideas is enabled by innovative efforts of reinterpretation and indigenization at specific locales. It is thus a transformative practice through which concepts and theories travel across cultures, negotiate with indigenous intellectual resources, re-invent themselves within local conditions, and initiate novel political visions. In this sense, Zou’s use of the imported vocabulary of “race” makes his refashioning of Han Chinese identity discursively meaningful and politically informative.

In Revolutionary Army, Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 25–8) frequently uses the term “race” [zhong or zu, 种 or 族] and refers to the Han peopleFootnote ¹⁴ as the “Han race” [hanzhong or hanzu, 汉种 or 汉族]. Informed by Western and Japanese theories of race in the 19th century (Yoshihiro Reference Yoshihiro2003), both terms tap into the idea of common descent and bloodlines. Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 29) depicts the Han Chinese as “unsullied descendants” of the mythic “Yellow Emperor,” who are bonded to each other like an enlarged family. The internal unity of the group is thus established upon a quasi-biological or genealogical foundation. Zou’s rendering of the Han Chinese with an emphasis on origin and lineage is further amplified by his taxonomy of races over the globe. In the chapter entitled “For Revolution, Race [renzhong, 人种] Must be Clearly Distinguished,” Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 25) divides the world’s population into two “leading races,” the Yellow and the white, considering their collective “strength and intelligence.”Footnote ¹⁵ Both races are not homogenous entities but consist of smaller groups or subraces. The “Yellow race,” for example, can be subdivided into the “races of China” [zhongguo renzhong, 中国人种], in which the Han Chinese form the majority alongside the Tibetans and the Cochin-Chinese, and the “Siberian races,” in which the Manchus reside with the Mongolian and the Turkic. Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 25–7) demonstrates that the Han race were residents of the Central Plains since archaic times who originally settled in the Yellow River Basin and spread toward East and Southeast Asia. The Manchus, by contrast, belong to the racial lineage of “the Tungus” and derive their origin separately, from Manchuria and the neighboring area of the Amur River. Each race grows up from families through clans and tribes in an organicist process and, at the same time, maintains the boundaries between them.

At this point, Zou disrupts the traditional self-portrait of the Han Chinese and their relation to other groups by strictly subscribing to the imported notion of “race” while simultaneously trimming off certain of its conventional elements. Most importantly, he abandons those indigenous categories invested with culturalist and civilizational connotations. The Chinese terms traditionally given to signify the Han people, such as Hua [华] and Xia [夏], are largely absent in the pamphlet. Zou’s articulation of the Han race in Revolutionary Army not only shifts the foundation of their internal unity from cultural norms to shared origins and continuous lineages but also forecloses the attempt at assimilation or integration of other groups. Thereby, he dismisses the culturalist ideal of Sinicization and refashions the Manchu-Han relation and its political salience in a racial register. Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 25) suggests that the assimilation of the Manchus via acculturation can hardly be plausible given the inherent differences and rigid boundaries between races. His reference to the frontier origins of the Manchus, by the same token, denotes less their cultural inferiority in the topography of “civilization” than their separate and alien biological descent. While he deviates from the official Qing ideology and avoids citing the legal-administrative categories such as Han civilians and Bannermen soldiers, Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 29) points out that the internal purity of each race is ironically maintained by discriminatory practices of segregation and anti-miscegenation throughout the Qing dynasty. By rearticulating the Manchu-Han divide along racial lines, he maintains a subtle distinction between the intertwined concepts of “race” and “nation” [minzu, 民族] in the pamphlet. For Zou, race is determined by common descent and biological lineage. Nation, by contrast, either denotes the geographical space where a certain race resides or the political construct derived from race (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 23, 25, 29). The primacy of race as a genealogically bounded unit over the constructed nation thus confirms the racial foundation of human difference and invalidates any multiracial project of nation-building.

However, Zou turns to the notion of race and racial difference not primarily for pursuing “racialism” (Appiah Reference Appiah and Goldberg1990, 4) on a disengaged or proto-scientific ground. The racial taxonomy in the pamphlet is scattered, sketchy, and insufficient for any “objective” study of human races in the world. The “Black Africans,” for instance, are entirely absent in the taxonomy, while Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 20, 33) recurrently draws the comparison between the “enslaved Black Africans” and the miserable Han Chinese. Other than that, there exists a troubling asymmetry within Zou’s investigation of the two leading races. He sees differences between the Teutons, the Irish, and the Anglo-Saxons but constructs no detailed classification of the white race equivalent to the careful subdivisions of the Yellow (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 24, 29).

As a key element of the broad Chinese racial discourse at the turn of the 20th century, global racial taxonomy frequently appears in the writings of Han Chinese intellectuals. As early as 1896, Yan Fu (严复), the esteemed translator of Herbert Spencer and J.S. Mill, divides global races into four categories by skin color: the white, the Yellow, the Red, and the Black. Within a Social Darwinist framework, he affirms the racial divide by describing ceaseless inter-group struggles for existence and thereby sketches a hierarchical world order in which the whites take advantage of physical and intellectual “strengths” to dominate over the “colored” races (Yan Reference Yan2014, 24–8). Similarly, Tang Caichang (唐才常) ([1897] Reference Tang and Jiang2010, 502) sides with Yan’s taxonomical scheme and radicalizes its hierarchical implications. In an 1897 essay, he puts the Yellow and white together as the “intelligent, dominant, and united” races and counterposes them to the “ignorant, subordinate, and divisive” Red and Black peoples. For a slight variation of this taxonomy, influenced by the German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Liang Qichao (梁启超) ([1898] Reference Liang, Tang and Tang2018, 102) classifies the human species into five races but insists that the “relentless confrontation between the Yellow and white” across the globe overshadows the subdivision of other “colored” races in the 20th century.Footnote ¹⁶

Despite the apparent differences in specific taxonomical plans, these accounts are similarly underlined by a political sensibility concerning the relative position of the Yellow (primarily Han) race in the global racial order. In the formation of Han Chinese discourse on race and race relations, Zou and his contemporaneous intellectuals actively grappled with the hierarchical connotations underlying the (pseudo-)scientific pretension of Western theories of race and reinterpreted these imported notions innovatively for their own situated predicaments and political purposes. While Zou’s categorization of world races is relatively underdeveloped in comparison to similar contemporaneous efforts, the puzzling composition of the taxonomy in Revolutionary Army should be seen as a clue for grasping the distinct political concerns of Zou’s employment of “race.”

Zou’s incomplete racial taxonomy effectively serves as a heuristic device to centralize the identity of the “majestic Han race” [huanghan renzhong, 皇汉人种] in relation to other “foreign races” at the transnational intersection of racial inequality and imperial domination (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 5). By subscribing to the biological notion of race, Zou not only counterposes the Han Chinese to the dominant white race but also differentiates them from other lineages within the Yellow race, especially the Manchus. Regarding his imbalanced classificatory account of the Yellow and white, Zou strategically foregrounds the divergence and conflicts within the Yellow race and, in particular, problematizes the domestic domination of the “inferior,” “thievish” Manchus over his fellow Han Chinese (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 4). In the meantime, global white supremacy, and its alignment with Euro-American imperialism, is provisionally accepted as the de facto structural arrangement in which the white race as a whole dominates over the world and subjugates the “colored” races into a “zone of non-being” (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann2008, 2) with respect to their independence and dignity. The relation between these two political concerns becomes more evident when examining how the racial identity of the Han Chinese is ordered by nuanced spatial-temporal narratives in Zou’s pamphlet.

DIAGNOSING THE “DOUBLE ENSLAVEMENT”

In Revolutionary Army, the division of races based on descent and skin color is deeply interconnected with political considerations. With respect to Zou’s contrast between the “majestic” and “inferior” races, racial difference implies, if not necessarily inscribes, racial hierarchy. While various hierarchical implications are inherent to the development of Western racial sciences (Saini Reference Saini2019), Zou does not simply yield to the epistemic authority of the West and the Euro-American-centric racial order. His appropriation of racial inequality is rather invested with situated and conjunctural political concerns within a transnational horizon. In the pamphlet, Zou constructs a variety of spatial-temporal narratives within his discourse on race in order to diagnose the current situation of the Han Chinese and to illuminate their political tasks in the dawning century.

In the chapter entitled “The Purport of Revolutionary Independence,” Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 34–5) explains the urgency of a revolution for the Han Chinese with their “double enslavement” by the Manchus and white imperial powers simultaneously:

If imperialism can be defined by the enforcement of inequality and differentiation between populations within a political unit, then the ongoing subordination of the Han Chinese is located at the intersection of domestic and global imperialism.Footnote ¹⁷ From the Han Chinese perspective elaborated by Zou, imperial domination and its intertwinement with racial division and racial inequality are not unique to the white imperial forces. The Manchu empire, a non-white regime, is similarly structured to Euro-American imperialism in differentiating peoples of diverse origins and privileging the dominant race (Rawski Reference Rawski1996). It is thus the complex racial dynamics and power relations at this trans-imperial nexus that accounts for the particular situation of the Han Chinese in the 20th century. For Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 4–5), white supremacy as a transnational regime has subordinated the Han Chinese alongside other non-white races (e.g., Indian, Egyptian, and Black people in Africa and the US) across the globe. Nonetheless, these peoples still acquire a minimum amount of independence on internal affairs. It is the Han Chinese alone that are further “enslaved” by the Manchus along a domestic color line, while the Manchus themselves are subjugated by white imperialism internationally and sacrifice the interests of the Han Chinese to appease Euro-American forces. At the bottom of both domestic and global racial hierarchies, therefore, the Han Chinese are forced to abandon their independence and dignity as the “slaves of slaves” (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 20). In the 20th-century world where competition and evolution become the guiding principles of politics, Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 20) is deeply pessimistic about their racial future: “With internal chaos and external humiliations the country may be annihilated within a decade, our race within a century. Nothing is more certain.”

When contouring the local and global color lines spatially, Zou also reconfigures the Han race and its subordination in a temporal register. He constructs a subtle historical narrative within his racial discourse to demonstrate how “internal troubles” between the Manchus and the Han Chinese have conditioned and eventually caused “foreign humiliations” (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 20). As scholars on Black political thought incisively point out, racial inequality is often articulated in terms of the temporal disjuncture of “racial time” (Hanchard Reference Hanchard1999, 252) or the “racial domination of time” (Paris Reference Paris2025, 14). The subordinate races such as African Americans are discursively positioned as being left behind. Their temporal and political agency is reduced to mimicking what has already been done by their white counterparts and to “catching up” within an externally imposed regime of time. We can see similar phenomena at work in how Zou diagnoses the political situation and racial identity of the Han Chinese between the past and present and toward a conjectural future in a modern world shaped by racism and imperialism. He discursively instantiates the meanings and experiences of “being Han Chinese” by traversing the messy and unruled spatial-temporal structures in Revolutionary Army.

In Revolutionary Army, Zou informs his Han Chinese readers that their double enslavement should be primarily attributed to the prolonged domestic domination of the Manchus throughout the Qing dynasty. He traces back the condemned situation of the Han Chinese at the turn of the 20th century to the origins of the oppressive Manchu empire in the 17th century. Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 5) reminds his fellow Han Chinese that the day that the Manchus overthrew the Han-led Ming dynasty is also “the day for the majestic Han race to commemorate the loss of their country [guo, 国].”

The illegitimacy of the Manchu conquest and the Qing government is disclosed with diverse Chinese and Western intellectual resources. For instance, Zou appeals to the civilization-barbarism distinction predominant in both Confucian heritage and Western imperial ideology at the time to invalidate the historical ground of Manchu rule. While diverging on the route and agency of progress, both traditions emphasize the alignment of political authority and cultural superiority. The ruling group should justify their power over the ruled with a higher level of civilization or civilizing capacity, according to which their governance put the supposedly “backward” people onto the track of progress and development.

By contrast, the Manchus subvert the order of civilization by sheer force, whose subjugation of the Han Chinese is thus morally condemned and rhetorically juxtaposed to the rule of “oxen and horses” over the herdsmen (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 16). Following the same logic, Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 5) further compares and connects the 17th-century Manchu conquest to the 19th-century invasion of Euro-American imperialists in China:

Here Zou binds together the shameful past (the Manchu conquest), the miserable present (the Han subordination), and a hypothetical future (the fully fledged white imperialism) from the Han Chinese perspective and problematizes their sufferings within a civilizing narrative. The racial hierarchy is dramatically represented as enslavement and transposed onto the spatial-temporal order of civilization and progress. For Zou, Manchu rule signifies the “living presence of the past” (Balfour Reference Balfour2011, 16) that has transformed their unjust conquest into sustained domination over the Han Chinese and foreclosed the racial uplift of the latter toward a civilized future. In a Social DarwinistFootnote ¹⁸ world where struggles and conquest become vessels of progress and evolution, Zou insists that even the upcoming conquest of Western imperialism over the Manchu empire will nevertheless draw the Han people closer to the fruit of civilization by putting them back on the track of development.

At the same time, Zou discursively invokes traumatized historical memories of the Han Chinese to unsettle the ongoing racial injustices. While emphasizing the genealogical foundation of the racial divide and rejecting the prospect of racial assimilation, Zou does not take the “greatness” or “inferiority” of races as absolute or biologically determined. The barbarity of the Manchus, in particular, is rather discursively constructed on historical grounds in Revolutionary Army. Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 5, 14) reminds his Han Chinese readers of the cruelty and brutality of Manchu rule by tapping into their bitter memories of shame and humiliationFootnote ¹⁹ in the past: a massive number of Han Chinese were murdered, tortured, and raped during the 17th-century Manchu conquest; the Manchus forced the Han to adopt alien customs and abandon their own; they subjugated the Han people in the manner of foreign military occupation and stationed garrisons to intimidate potential rebels; and the Manchu elites monopolized the highest governmental positions. He also utilizes derogatory bestial metaphors (“wild beasts,” “the furry race”) and other demeaning rhetorical strategies to retrieve these distant memories and arouse anti-Manchu sentiments of revenge and restoration (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 16, 18).

For the Han Chinese, these historical traumas, in combination with racial animus against the Manchus, were further activated by transnational racial dynamics during the encounters with Euro-American imperialism at the turn of the 20th century. Their double enslavement at the trans-imperial nexus imbued the historically grounded Manchu domination with a new spatial orientation. In Revolutionary Army, Zou points to the unique position that the Manchu inhabit in the global racial order: the domestic oppressor is simultaneously the oppressed on the world stage. “Exhaust the wealth of China to gain the sympathy and friendship of foreign countries” has been the diplomatic guide of the Manchus (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 14). Under Manchu rule, the deprivation of political independence and the exploitation of material resources signify the deteriorated racial dignity of the Han Chinese in the global context. Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 15) takes the cession of Jiaozhou (胶州), the sacred homeland of Confucius, by the Qing government in 1898 as the most appalling example of the “humiliations” collectively imposed by the Manchus and the white imperialists. This mentality of loss and shame is further demonstrated by Zou’s account of overseas and diasporic Han Chinese in the pamphlet: the Han Chinese students (like himself) were mocked and insulted in foreign countries for their “pigtail-like” hair style and bizarre dress, both customs of the Manchus; Chinese workers were kidnapped and ill-treated in the Pacific coolie trade; migrants from China were discriminated against by Exclusion Acts in the US and Australia (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 11–2, 17). For Zou, these personal experiences become the most recent pages of Han humiliation which directly resulted from either the barbarity of the Manchu race or the incapability of the Manchu state. In this sense, Zou reaffirms his diagnosis that the domestic enslavement imposed by the Manchus is the most pressing obstacle to the racial uplift of the Han Chinese.

INSTANTIATING THE REVOLUTION

The spatial-temporal ordering of race relations, alongside other discursive and rhetorical strategies in Revolutionary Army, is constructed to mobilize the political agency of the Han Chinese and urge them to immediate revolutionary action. For Zou, the emancipatory future of the Han Chinese in the dawning century depends on a comprehensive racial-political revolution at the intersection of local and global politics. As the chains of racism and imperialism obstruct the spontaneous, peaceful path of development, Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 2) idealizes revolution as the “the universal principle of evolution” that radically transforms “barbarism into civilization” and “slaves into masters” within a Social Darwinist world picture.

For Zou, this upcoming revolution of the Han Chinese must simultaneously happen on three interrelated levels. As he puts it,

According to this roadmap, first a racial revolution of the Han people against the ruling Manchus is demanded to reclaim their racial dignity and independence. In Zou’s diagnosis of the current critical situation of the Han Chinese, he attributes the root cause of their double enslavement at the trans-imperial nexus to Manchu domination. From the Han Chinese perspective, the domestic color line is not simply the extension of the global color line. Rather, it is the confluence of the local and global racial dynamics that shapes the unique political landscape and prompts distinct political sensibilities at different locales. Within this transnational horizon, Zou elaborates on the urgency and priority of an anti-Manchu revolution in Revolutionary Army.

In Zou’s account ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 25), the subversion of domestic Manchu rule is inevitable in light of the universal principle of “uniting kin and repelling the outsiders” in race relations. On the one hand, as evident in the history of Manchu domination, the genealogical difference between the Manchu and the Han Chinese deems the ideal of Manchu-Han harmony illusionary and instead posits the two races in persistent tensions and conflicts. On the other hand, the Manchus deprive the Han Chinese of their political agency and even the opportunity to participate in international relations with other races (especially the white imperialists). An anti-Manchu revolution of the Han Chinese is thus imperative to redeem their political independence and vindicate their racial dignity. Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 21) compares this upcoming anti-Manchu revolution with the struggles of the Americans and the French which overturned their subordination: “The French carried through three revolutions, the Americans seven years of war…There must be a revolution [in China] if there is none.” Drawing on these well-known precedents, Zou claims that the Han Chinese not only face the necessity of such a racial revolution but also have the capability for revolt. While doubly condemned for centuries, the Han Chinese still have a massive population and various talents for their own emancipation. What the Han Chinese lack at the moment, as Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 1, 35) puts it in intentionally inflammatory and racialized language, is only the courage and determination to “kill the Manchu emperor” and “annihilate the five million and more of the furry and horned Manchu race.”

Zou’s discourse of anti-Manchu revolution was part of the “loud chorus” (Rhoads Reference Rhoads2000, 12) of passionate (and sometimes, openly racist) rhetoric of anti-Manchuism in China at the turn of the 20th century. While moderate thinkers such as Liang Qichao ([1898] Reference Liang, Tang and Tang2018, 101) still urged for “the diminishing of the Manchu-Han divide” as an essential part of political reform and national salvation, radical plans for immediate racial revolution took center stage in the public debates over the Manchu-Han relation. Zhang Taiyan, Zou’s close colleague, was among the most ardent critics of the Manchus in his time. For Zhang, the Manchu-Han divide had been developed into a political hierarchy in which the former monopolized “civil rights” [minquan, 民权] and rendered the latter an “alien and inferior race.” The opposing interests of the two races required “repelling the Manchus” as an urgent political agenda for the Han Chinese (Zhang [1901] Reference Zhang, Zhang and Wang1960, 94–5).Footnote ²⁰ However, Zhang did not think anti-Manchuism, especially in Zou’s provocative rendering, was of a merely vengeful nature. In his preface to Revolutionary Army, Zhang draws a clear distinction between “revolution” [geming, 革命], as the alteration of government of and by the same race, and “restoration” [guangfu, 光复], as the displacement of alien rule. “Expelling the foreign race” itself thus can hardly be revolutionary. To make his anti-Manchuism properly a revolution, Zhang thinks that Zou is equally concerned with the transformation of the “politics, education, learning, customs” of the Han Chinese by resisting the Manchus (Zou Reference Zou1968, 52). This observation was confirmed by other careful readers of Revolutionary Army. In his contemporaneous book review of Zou’s pamphlet, Zhang Shizhao ([1903] Reference Zhang, Zhang and Wang1960, 685), for instance, points out that Zou’s vehement anti-Manchu rhetoric actually serves as a “useful means” [yong, 用] for achieving the “essence” [ti, 体] of collective consciousness and civic virtue among the Han Chinese.

The constructive function of anti-Manchuism is integral to Zou’s grand scheme of revolution in the pamphlet. His reflection on racial uplift does not stop at boasting of the potential strength of the Han Chinese and denouncing the racial inferiority and political illegitimacy of the Manchus. Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 30) rather contends that, as the result of habituation and propaganda, most Han Chinese have explicitly or implicitly accepted their racial servitude and “enjoyed being the slaves of the Manchus.” This phenomenon, for him, can be observed across social strata. While the Han masses are too preoccupied with working for sustenance to resist collectively, the Han elites have voluntarily served in the Manchu government and traded the independence of the entire race for partial interests and personal reputations (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 10–1). This voluntary servitude of the Han Chinese cannot even be simply attributed to Manchu domination, as Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 28) finds the same mentality manifest among the submissive Han people living in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other territories recently colonized by Euro-American powers. For him, the institutions and practices of “despotism” [zhuanzhi zhengti, 专制政体] (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 31) throughout the imperial history of China have inculcated a slavish culture particular to the Han Chinese. Slavery, in other words, finds its roots in despotic societies where an unaccountable ruler is sacralized at the top to oversee the entire society and suppress all dissent. Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 31) bitterly admits the fact that “we Chinese enjoy being slaves is no new thing,” because “those who live peaceably under despotism, whatever their aims, are bound to be slaves.” The political virtues of “loyalty” [zhong, 忠] and “filiality” [xiao, 孝] traditionally cherished by Confucian orthodoxy thereby become the major obstacles to awakening the Han consciousness and catalyzing their political activism.Footnote ²¹ In this regard, the ongoing subordination of the Han Chinese in the 20th century just provides a new manifestation of this inherited mentality.

Therefore, the upcoming revolution should be transformative in nature and have a “civilizing” dimension in removing domestic despotism and refashioning political culture. Political revolutions, taking the form of peasant rebellions and dynastic change, were not novel in Chinese history. For Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 21), these uprisings are all deemed “barbaric revolutions” which aimed at the rotation of the ruling class (if not simply the ruling family) and created nothing other than “the reign of terror” through “violent destruction.” By contrast, “civilized revolutions,” such as the American and French Revolutions, “destroy and reconstruct.” Destruction is not an end in itself but clears the ground for equality, freedom, and the rights of all. The impending revolution of the Han Chinese is thus to accomplish these political values by radical activism and institutional innovation. Zou urges that monarchy should be replaced with a republican government where the rights of citizens (Han Chinese, of course), regardless of their gender and class, should be realized and secured by constitutional principles and political representation (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 36–7). However, he does not take citizenship as the final product of a completed revolution. Catalyzed by the self-consciousness of one’s political rights and equal worth, citizenship is instead cultivated through direct participation in the revolution and inscribed upon the personal experiences of all participants. To this end, “revolutionary education” (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 22), or education via revolution, is needed to transform the political agency of the Han Chinese into the solid foundation of democratic institutions. This upcoming revolution, according to Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 21), should thus be widely participatory: “it has its origins in the people, and cannot be made the private possession of a few individuals.”

Finally, the revolution carries nuanced anti-imperial implications by contesting the global color line. After the domestic racial and political revolutions, Zou speculates that the Han race will prepare themselves as the vehicle, if not the only legitimate embodiment, of the modern Chinese nation.Footnote ²² Political independence and racial redemption converge in the rise of the Han Chinese as “a powerful nation on the globe” that “plays the leading role” in world politics (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 1). In Zou’s fevered imagination,

Zou thus envisages the uplift of the Han Chinese within an alternative global order infused with complex racial dynamics. In the first instance, the imagined rise of the Han Chinese will hold back the imperial intrusion of Euro-American imperialism in China and effectively overturn the transnational regime of white supremacy. For Zou, the Yellow and the white are two leading races of the world and as such are placed into a competition over global leadership. Endowed with “superior intellectual and combatant capacity” (Zou [1903] Reference Zou1971, 25), they necessarily clash against each other in the Social Darwinist realm of “natural selection and evolution.” While veiled by their current disadvantage in global racial politics, the significant potential of the Han race is repeatedly confirmed in the pamphlet. Zou ([1903] Reference Zou1971, 37) even reads the condescending narrative of the “Yellow peril” against the grain as evidence of how the white imperialists themselves are intimidated by the size and strength of the Han Chinese. The rise of the Han people, representing the Yellow race as a whole, will thus unsettle global white supremacy by declaring the political presence of non-white populations on the global stage.Footnote ²³

In the second instance, however, these anti-imperial and anti-racist implications are complicated by an evident chauvinist (if not imperialist and racist) urge within and among peoples of color as Zou describes them. The relationship of the Han Chinese to other non-white races is highly fraught in the alternative racial future envisaged by Zou. He not only takes the liberty to grant the Han Chinese the revolutionary leadership of the entire Yellow race but also disturbingly assumes the continuing subordination of other subaltern peoples and “colored” races (“India, Poland, Egypt and Turkey”) across the world. Instead of fully erasing the global color line and replacing it with an egalitarian racial order, Zou paradoxically preserves the structure of global racial hierarchy and reiterates it in terms of a speculative Han superiority.

Zou’s alternative rendering of the global color line, containing segments that simultaneously oppose and support racism and imperialism, resembles the ideology of “anti-imperial imperialism” (Simon Reference Simon2017, 33) in Creole revolutions. While similarly problematizing the imperialist-imperialized binary to animate more contingent, strategic visions underlying the ambivalent commitments of anti-imperial revolutionaries, the global racial order in Zou’s paradoxical reconfiguration foregrounds the precarious situation of the Han Chinese shaped by transnational dynamics of racism and imperialism. Unlike the European-descended colonists in the 18th-century Americas, the Han Chinese at the turn of the 20th century were doubly subjugated at the bottom of local and global racial hierarchies.Footnote ²⁴ Zou deliberately mobilizes these predicaments in Revolutionary Army and engages the peculiar positionality of the Han Chinese at the local-global nexus with discursive strategies of racial vindication or “vindicationism” (Scott Reference Scott2004, 79). The uplift of the Han Chinese, similar to the struggles of African Americans and other subordinate peoples, faces a twofold vindicative task of “refutation” and “reclamation” (Getachew Reference Getachew2023, 53). On the one hand, they have to reject imperial domination and racial subordination as well as the derogatory images of inferiority and incapability that have been used to justify these oppressive regimes. On the other hand, they also need to redeem their long denied political independence and racial dignity by refashioning the ground of revolution and emancipation. In the pamphlet, Zou crafts this kind of vindicative narrative by tracking complex racial dynamics and contingent political alliances within a transnational horizon. To disclose the frail foundation of Manchu rule and the power dynamics between peoples of color, for instance, Zou transposes them onto global politics where the domestic oppressors become vulnerable and submissive to stronger and more “civilized” white imperialists. The continuing subordination of other “colored” populations under Han superiority is speculated within the same discursive structure of vindication. As a rhetorical strategy instead of a real policy agenda, it serves to reclaim the status of the Han Chinese as an independent and influential actor in the global racial order while raising the specter of a miserable but possible future of themselves that they can only escape with immediate revolutionary action.

Nevertheless, Zou’s vindicative discourse reflects some shared perplexing tasks in anti-imperialist and anti-racist mobilizations. As Zou depicts it in his alternative global racial order, the Han Chinese will liberate themselves from the double enslavement of the Manchus and the whites on both racial and imperial lines but maintain the urge for racial superiority and imperial privilege over other peoples of color. Although Zou manipulates these contradictions painstakingly for the purposes of racial vindication and revolutionary mobilization, he nonetheless reinscribes the oppressive structures that he strives to fight against and runs into the paradoxes of “anti-imperial imperialism” and “anti-racist-racism.” As Scott (Reference Scott2004) and Liu (Reference Liu2024) demonstrate in different contexts, when the subordinate groups launch resistance to racial and imperial injustices, they can hardly evade, erase, or overcome the categories of domination. Rather, they are “obliged” (Liu Reference Liu2024, 874) to speak back to those categories and then run the risk of reproducing and even perpetuating “the very technologies, conceptual languages, and institutional formations” (Scott Reference Scott2004, 168) that have subjugated them. In the case of Zou, despite his innovative interpretation and discursive maneuvers, “race,” as both an imported category and a living reality, still sets the conditions which simultaneously enable and restrict his political intervention. The genealogically grounded racial ideas articulated by Zou, while facilitating the refashioning of Han Chinese identity in transnational politics, also foreclose the possibility of interracial solidarity and multiracial nation-building. In the pamphlet, Zou’s radical rendering of interracial competition and struggle is instrumental to raising racial consciousness and prompting revolutionary activism among the Han Chinese yet, simultaneously, reinforces the hierarchical and confrontational notions of race relations and undercuts egalitarian and collaborative alternatives (especially between peoples of color). Therefore, Zou’s paradoxical discourse of Han Chinese uplift powerfully illustrates this dilemma of anti-imperial and anti-racist mobilization and reminds us of the persistent challenges and intricate craft of emancipatory politics.