Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860–1960

'Tam's groundbreaking book transforms our understanding of Chinese nationalism by establishing how fangyan have served as both targets for language standardization projects and resources for cultural diversity and communal sentiment. It also reconstructs the complex genealogy of Chinese linguistics as an academic discipline and reveals its fraught relationship to the modern state.' Robert J Culp, Bard College, New York 'Every scholar of Chinese society needs an understanding of how Mandarin became standardized as the national language and how local languages have nonetheless survived. Gina Anne Tam not only gives us that history but, importantly, demonstrates that the relationship between dialect and nation could have been different.' Sigrid Schmalzer, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 'Tam's impressive debut book provides readers with a theoretically sophisticated, clearly argued and gracefully written account of the complex relationship between language and nationalism in modern China. The author moves across a broad chronological and geographic canvass, making claims rooted in history and based on careful archive research. Though about the past, however, Dialect and Nationalism also speaks to issues making headlines now, at a time when struggles in which language and identity figure centrally play out everywhere from Catalonia to Hong Kong.' Jeffrey Wasserstrom, University of California, Irvine