Speaker: Shoufu Yin, Assistant Professor of History, University of British Columbia

What could China—or the entire world—have been? Starting in the fourteenth century, hundreds of thousands of individuals in present-day China, Korea, and Vietnam were ruminating on this question in their own ways. They began by placing themselves in a moment in Chinese history, composing documents from the perspectives of the historical figures in question. In this process, they argued that these figures could have acted differently and that China could have been a different place—even though actual history unfolded otherwise. This talk traces how this form of counterfactualism gained popularity in East Asia through a shared curriculum and explores how such mediated political imaginations transformed the broader intellectual landscape. Specifically, using sources in Mongolian, Persian, and other languages, I contend that the Inner Asian tradition played a critical role in shaping the educational curriculum of the Sinitic sphere. Combining data visualization and close reading, I turn to long-forgotten individuals in Seoul, Suzhou, and other places. Through their counterfactual ventures, as we shall see, these historical thinkers theorized what could and should have been possible for each individual and opened up new possibilities for being in a political society.

Shoufu Yin is an assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia. His expertise lies in the intellectual and political cultures of China and Inner Asia from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries. Delving into sources in Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, Persian, and various European languages, he endeavors to show how previously unknown and marginalized thinkers had contributed to important themes in theory and philosophy. His first book manuscript, The China That Could Have Been: Rhetoric and Political Thought, 1100–1600 (currently under review), contends that the everyday political imagination of countless individuals lays the foundation of modern political thought. His next book, titled 1156: China’s Referendum, will trace how emic concepts and indigenous experiences from China can help us reframe and rewrite the global history of democratization. He has also been conducting research for another major project that rethinks global intellectual transformations through the lens of Manchu- and Mongolian-language historiographies of the seventeenth century. His recent articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Journal of the History of Ideas, History of Political Thought, Journal of Asian Studies, T’oung Pao, Journal of Chinese History, Korean Studies, and other platforms.