Chinese nationalism is a form of nationalism that asserts that the Chinese people are a nation and promotes the cultural and national unity of all Chinese people. According to Sun Yat-sen's philosophy in the Three Principles of the People, Chinese nationalism is considered a multi-ethnic nationalism, which some distinguish from Han nationalism or local ethnic nationalism.
Modern Chinese nationalism emerged in the late Qing dynasty (1644–1912) in response to China's humiliating defeat at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War and the invasion and pillaging of Beijing by the Eight-Nation Alliance. In the aftermath of both events, China was forced to pay financial reparations and grant special privileges to foreigners. The nationwide image of China as a superior Celestial Empire, which was located at the center of the universe, was shattered, and last-minute efforts to modernize the old system were unsuccessful. These last-minute efforts were best exemplified by Liang Qichao, a late Qing reformer who failed to reform the Qing government in 1896 and was later expelled from China and fled to Japan, where he began to develop his ideas of Chinese nationalism.
The effects of World War I continually shaped Chinese nationalism. Despite the fact that it had joined the Allied Powers, China was again severely humiliated by the Versailles Treaty of 1919, which transferred the special privileges which were given to Germany to the Empire of Japan. This event triggered the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which developed into nationwide protests that were marked by a surge of Chinese nationalism. During the Warlord Era, large-scale military campaigns which were led by the Kuomintang (KMT), overpowered provincial warlords and sharply reduced special privileges for foreigners contributed to the strengthening and aggrandizing of a sense of Chinese national identity. After the Empire of Japan was defeated by the Allies at the end of World War II, Chinese nationalism again gained traction as China recovered territories which it lost to Japan before the war, including Northeast area and the island of Taiwan. However, the Chinese Civil War (which was paused during the Second Sino-Japanese War) was resumed, damaging the image of a unified Chinese identity. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was victorious in 1949, as the KMT's government retreated to Taiwan. Under CCP chairman Mao Zedong, the CCP began to employ Chinese nationalism as a political tool. Chinese nationalism has become more Han-centric since Xi Jinping became CCP general secretary and assumed power in 2012.
Historical development
The first state of China was confirmed as the Shang dynasty (). The Chinese concept of the world was largely a division between the civilized world and the barbarian world and there was little concept of the belief that Chinese interests were served by a powerful Chinese state. Commenter Lucian Pye has argued that the modern "nation state" is fundamentally different from a traditional empire, and argues that dynamics of the current People's Republic of China (PRC) – a concentration of power at a central point of authority – share an essential similarity with the Ming and Qing Empires.
As it emerged in the early 20th century, Chinese nationalism was modeled after Japanese nationalism, especially as it was viewed and interpreted by Sun Yat-sen. In 1894, Sun founded the Revive China Society, which was the first Chinese nationalist revolutionary society.
Chinese nationalism was rooted in the long historic tradition in which China was considered the center of the world, in which all other states were offshoots of China and owed some sort of deference to it. That sense of superiority underwent a series of terrible shocks in the 19th century, including large-scale internal revolts, and more grievously the systematic gaining and removal of special rights and privileges by foreign nations which proved their military superiority during the First and Second Opium Wars, based on modern technology that was lacking in China. It was a matter of humiliation one after another, the loss of faith in the Qing dynasty. By the 1890s, disaffected Chinese intellectuals began to develop "a new nationalist commitment to China as a nation-state in a world dominated by predatory imperialist nation states." Overall, their concern was not in preserving a traditional Chinese order but instead the construction of a strong state and society that could stand in a hostile international arena.
Unlike many nationalist projects in other countries, the trend among Chinese intellectuals was to regard tradition as unsuitable for China's survival and instead to view tradition as a source of China's problems. For the Qing dynasty, ethnicity was a troublesome issue. Some of the ethnic groups within the empire were identified according to language and culture, including the Manchus who originated in a non-Han Chinese population and ruled the dynasty. Most citizens had multiple identities, of which the locality was more important than the nation as a whole. Anyone who wanted to rise in government non-military service had to be immersed in Confucian classics, and pass the imperial examination. If accepted, they would be rotated around the country, so the bureaucrats did not identify with the locality. The depth of two-way understanding and trust developed by European political leaders and their followers did not exist.On how Confucianism was an invented tradition in China see Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese traditions & universal civilization (Duke UP, 1997) pp. 3–7.
China's defeat by Japan at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) was fundamental to the development of the first generation of Chinese nationalists. The most dramatic watershed came in 1900, in the wake of the invasion, capture, and pillaging of the national capital by the Eight-Nation Alliance that punished China for the Boxer Rebellion.Mary Clabaugh Wright, ed. China and revolution: the first phase, 1900–1913 (1968) pp. 1–23. During the Late Qing reforms, the rise of the national education trend emphasizes instilling national values in education and inspiring patriotic sentiments. For example, the Chinese geography textbooks published during the period usually praised China's superior geographical conditions, and such texts generally came from the first chapters of the textbooks, which were convenient for guiding students to develop a love for their motherland when they first came into contact with China's geography. Chinese nationalists drew inspiration from Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War, which they broadly viewed as demonstrating the fallacy of a European-centric racial hierarchy.
The Second Sino-Japanese war was one of the most important events in the modern construction of Chinese nationalism. The Chinese experience in the war helped create an ideology based on the concept of "the people" as a political body in its own right, "a modern nation as opposed to a feudal empire."
Not only was this ideology perpetuated by the Second Sino-Japanese War, but it also later served as a tool to rebuild legitimacy for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Although the CCP initially gained support through nationalist resistance, its legitimacy declined after setbacks like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which caused economic hardship and social unrest. To recover, the CCP increasingly relied on nationalism to shift the focus to national pride and unity. They accomplished this by implementing "patriotic education" campaigns, promoting a victimization narrative, and revising textbooks to emphasize conflicts with Japan and the West. These initiatives reframed the CCP as the "savior" of the nation, helping restore public support and reinforcing its political legitimacy.
Ideological sources
The discussion about modern Chinese nationalism has dominated many political and intellectual debates since the late nineteenth century. Political scientist Suisheng Zhao argues that nationalism in China is not monolithic because it exists in various forms, including political, liberal, ethnic, and state nationalism.
Chinese nationalism is shaped in part by the Western-derived Westphalian system. During the first half of the twentieth century, Chinese nationalism constituted a crucial part of many political ideologies, including anti-Manchuism, which was espoused during the 1911 Revolution, the anti-imperialist sentiment of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, and the Maoist thoughts that guided the Chinese Communist Revolution. The origin of modern Chinese nationalism can be traced back to the intellectual debate about the subjects of race and nation which occurred during the late nineteenth century. Shaped by the global discourse about Social Darwinism, reformers and intellectuals both held debates about how they should build a new Chinese national subject based on a proper racial order, particularly on Manchu-Han relations. After the collapse of the Qing regime and the founding of the Republic of China in 1912, concerns about domestic and international threats caused the role of racism to decline and during the 1910s, anti-imperialism became the new dominant ideology of Chinese nationalism. While intellectuals and elites advocated their distinctive thoughts about Chinese nationalism, political scientist Chalmers Johnson has pointed out that most of these ideas had very little to do with China's majority population—the Chinese peasantry. Thus, he proposes to supplement the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party in the discussion of Chinese nationalism, which he labels "peasant nationalism."
In some revolutionary circles in the 19th century, the significance of the development of a Chinese national identity was the result of an attempt to negatively identify the Han people by turning them against the Qing dynasty, which was non-Chinese in their view. Under this initial view of Chinese nationalism, the Chinese identity was primarily associated with the majority Han ethnic group.
After Qing China's defeat at the end of the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, reformers and intellectuals debated about how to strengthen the nation, the discussion of which centered on the issue of race. Liang Qichao, a late Qing reformist who participated in the Hundred Days' Reform of 1898, contended that the boundary between Han and Manchu must be erased (). Liang was among the most prominent nationalists who viewed earlier conceptions of a Han-focused national identity as too restrictive. Liang attributed the decline of China to the Qing dynasty which was founded by the Manchus, who treated the Han as an "alien race" and imposed a racial hierarchy between the Han and the Manchus and ignored the threats which were posed by imperial powers. However Liang's critique of the Qing court and the Manchu-Han relations laid the foundation for anti-Manchuism, an ideology that early Republican and nationalist revolutionaries advocated in accordance with their efforts to overthrow the Qing dynasty and found a new Republic in China. More broadly, Liang's view was that modernity was "an age of struggle among nations for the survival of the fittest" and that therefore the Qing government should support industrialization and develop a Chinese people with strong work ethic, "a strong sense of nationalism, and a militaristic mentality."