Webinar
This webinar has been organised on behalf of the UCD Asia Pacific Research Network by (opens in a new window)Dr Naonori Kodate
China is a place of vast cultural and linguist diversity. Over three hundred languages are spoken in its territory, roughly twice the number spoken in the EU. In the imperial fashion, the ethnically Manchu, Qing dynasty, was content to rule over this vast diversity with little intrusion into the lives of its subject peoples, provided they remain loyal. The struggle to overthrow the Manchu yoke, successful in 1911, was articulated as one of Chinese national liberation and self-determination. But if the Chinese were entitled to self-determination, what about the Mongols, Uyghurs, Tibetans and hundreds of other groups? The Chinese Communist Party inherited the same question, together with a socialist commitment to internationalism. This talk traces the broad history of the Chinese state's theory and practice with regard to the national question.
Bio: Nathan W. Hill is Sam Lam Professor in Chinese Studies at Trinity College Dublin and Director of the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2009 and has since published on Tibetan linguistics, natural language processing for low-resource languages, Tibeto-Burman comparative linguistics, and the history of Chinese.