“The Chinese as I Have Seen Them”: A Diachronic Analysis of Western Perception on the Chinese in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries
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Abstract
It is estimated that around 12000 Westerners were living in the Chinese Empire at the end of the 19th century (Détrie 509); especially after the first Opium War (1839-1842), locals and Westerners learnt to co-habit, with the latter improving their quality of life. However, both groups maintained their lifestyles, criticizing those habits they thought objectionable, or downright barbaric (ibid.). Locals are Othered in travel literature, seen through a Western “power gaze” (Calzati); we can assume this opposition was stronger at a time of political tension.
This paper aims at looking at how Western perceptions of China and the Chinese changed over the course of the 19th and early 20th century, as emerging from war, travel and life accounts written by anglophone expatriates, travelers, and military men.
The analysis was carried out with a mixed quantitative-qualitative approach, drawing from corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The print books published between 1843 and 1919 were digitized using OCR software to make them readable by corpus analysis tools. Two subcorpora weree created, one including 2 2-volume books recounting the events of the first Opium War, and the second one including 6 books describing life and travel in China between 1897 and 1919. An analysis of selected keywords and their concordance lines, with the aid of Critical Discourse Analysis, attempts to shed light on how the perception of the Chinese on the part of Anglophone people has evolved between the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century.
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