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Please join Comparative Historical Social Sciences as they host Iza Ding, Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.

This paper compares two failed liberal political reforms that took place in late-Qing dynasty China and 19th century Prussia. The defeat of liberalism as “rational centrist reformism” (Wallerstein 2000) in these two contexts has often been attributed to the weakness of Chinese and German liberalism in the 19th century. Yet, cultural conservatism does not explain why liberal reforms failed in two diametrically opposed ways: popular revolution in China, and reactionary victory in Prussia. I argue that how liberalism failed in the two cases can be explained by the different ways in which liberalism and nationalism interacted. When liberalism and nationalism fuse, as they did in late 19th century China, it produces powerful revolutionary thrusts determined to overthrow a regime despite its reform attempts. When liberalism and nationalism fission, as they did in late 19th century Germany, the conservatives in power successfully harnessed nationalism, leading to reactionary politics. My theory, based on historical cases, has implications for the fate of liberalism around the world today.

Iza Ding (Ph.D. Harvard, 2016) is Associate Professor of Political Science. Her research explores the paradoxes and pushbacks attending economic, political, and cultural modernization, such as creative resistance against institutional rigidities, lingering moral traditions against legal development, enduring historical memories against rapid socioeconomic transformations, and humans' simultaneous degradation of nature and attachment to nature. Ding is the author of The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China (Cornell University Press, 2022). She is currently working on a monograph on global historical waves of environmentalism.