Federalism as a Floating Signifier: Ideology and State-Building in Early Republican China

Yuan Xi, University of Virginia

This paper examines the rise and fall of federalism as a contested political discourse in early Republican China, arguing that it functioned as a "floating signifier" whose meaning was strategically defined by competing political actors. By employing dynamic network analysis, BERTopic-based dynamic topic modeling, and archival research, the study analyzes over 350,000 newspaper articles alongside a wide array of secondary sources. The findings reveal that federalism initially aligned closely with anti-colonial and democratic aspirations but later became stigmatized as feudal and reactionary. This semantic shift was shaped both externally—through competition with revolutionary discourse—and internally—through tensions between the principles of federation and provincial autonomy. Various factions strategically leveraged these shifting connotations: warlords used federalism to legitimize regional autonomy; sincere federalists pursued provincial self-governance but struggled to build a cohesive federal government; and revolutionaries, such as Sun Yat-sen, initially embraced and later rejected federalist rhetoric in their pursuit of national unity. In tracing these discursive shifts, the paper challenges conventional binaries of centralization versus decentralization and underscores the complexity of state formation driven by competing political projects. Ultimately, reconceptualizing federalism as a historically contingent and strategically deployed discourse contributes to broader scholarly debates about state-building and political legitimacy in modern China and beyond.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 115. Historical Social Sciences and China (III): The State and Empire in Chinese History