Talk by Shoufu Yin, University of British Columbia.
Thursday, April 9, 2026
9:30 AM - 11:00 AM
Royce Hall 243
This presentation seeks to problematize a particular phenomenon in history: events that repeatedly emerge yet fail to form a continuous tradition—and that remain difficult to discuss within our current order of knowledge production. Lacking a better term, I call them the unhistoriable: They can be historicized—in the sense that we may excavate and situate them in their historical contexts, but they do not form part of a continuous history that informs later actors. I present a particular case study from the land of China during a critical period of transformation (ca. 700–1200), when women and men repeatedly tested different forms of collective government—that is, the many managing their own polity. At times, for instance, thousands of men governed their polity collectively, selecting their leaders and policies through oration and deliberation; at other times, women headed key institutions and participated in governance with their male counterparts. In another instance, 333,700 households signed their policy preferences, and the majority choices were implemented. None, despite their grandiose scale, has left a positive imprint, if any. Recognizing them—not only how they emerged and evaporated, but also how they have remained elusive to our ways of thinking about past and present—poses new questions about the regions of China, the theme of collective government, and various foundational assumptions of the practice we call history.
Shoufu Yin is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the intellectual and political cultures of China and Inner Asia, bridging the mid-imperial and early modern periods. He has completed two book manuscripts. The first, The China that Could Have Been: A History of Counterfactual and Political Imagination, 1100–1600, invites us to rethink how counterfactual thinking emerged and thrived. The second, Experiments in Collective Government: A New History of Chinese Political Thought, 700–1200, challenges us to reconsider the formation and the forgetting of more inclusive forms of government. He has been working on a third monograph-length project tentatively titled The Great Intellectual Enterprise: The Manchu-Language Historiography in the Seventeenth-Century Globe. His recent articles have appeared in a variety of journals including American Political Science Review, Journal of Asian Studies, and T’oung Pao.
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies