On the Family-Nation Discourse and Its Symbolic Structure during the Anti-Foreign-Religion Movement in Late Qing Dynasty

After the Opium War, Christianity gained its legal missionary status in China, but the Anti-Foreign-Religion movement became more intense, and finally reached its peak during the Boxer Uprising in 1900. From the perspective of symbolic anthropology, this paper examines the family-nation discourse and its symbolic cultural structure from four aspects: the structure of family power in the traditional rural society, the metaphorical legitimacy on transforming the sense of family protection into the family-nation discourse, the nationalistic reconstruction of the popular views on calamities, and the integration and implementation of the family-nation discourse. It reveals how the communal consciousness, which was eager to release various social conflicts and express symbolic power, was produced, transformed, integrated and implemented.