page_title: Chinese nationalism
section_title: Ideological sources
hierarchical_section_title: Chinese nationalism / Ideological sources
caption_attribution_description: English: Wang Jingwei日本語: 汪兆銘中文（繁體）‎: 汪精衛於南京偽國民政府前，匾額刻有「忠孝 仁愛 信義 和平」。
context_page_description: Chinese nationalism is a form of nationalism in both mainland China and Taiwan which asserts that the Chinese people are a nation and promotes the cultural and national unity of all Chinese people. It is significantly distinct from Han nationalism, a sense of jingoism that is felt by purely Han Chinese people who deem themselves superior to other existing ethnicities in China.
  Chinese nationalism emerged in the late Qing dynasty in response to the humiliating defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War and the invasion and pillaging of Beijing by Eight-Nation Alliance. In both cases, the aftermath forced China to pay financial reparations and grant special privileges to foreigners. The nationwide image of China as a superior Celestial Empire at the center of the universe was shattered, and last-minute efforts to modernize and strengthen the old system were unsuccessful. These last-minute efforts were best exemplified by Liang Qichao, a Qing Dynasty reformer who failed to reform the Qing government in 1896 and was later expelled to Japan, where he began work on his ideas of Chinese nationalism.
  The effects of World War I continually shaped Chinese nationalism.
context_section_description: The discussion of 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 but exists in various forms, including political, liberal, ethnical, and state nationalism. Over the first half of the twentieth century, Chinese nationalism has constituted a crucial part of many political ideologies, including the anti-Manchuism during the 1911 Revolution, the anti-imperialist sentiment of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, and the Maoist thoughts that guided the Communist Revolution in 1949. The origin of modern Chinese nationalism can be traced back to the intellectual debate on race and nation in late nineteenth century. Shaped by the global discourse of social Darwinism, reformers and intellectuals debated how to build a new Chinese national subject based on a proper racial order, particularly the Man-Han relations. After the collapse of the Qing regime and the founding of the Republic of China in 1911, concerns of both domestic and international threat made the role of racism decline, while anti-imperialism became the new dominant ideology of Chinese nationalism over the 1910s. While intellectuals and elites advocated their distinctive thoughts on 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. He thus proposes to supplement the Chinese communist ideology in the discussion of Chinese nationalism, which he labels "peasant nationalism."
  Chinese nationalism in the early twentieth century was primarily based on anti-Manchurism, an ideology that was prevalent among Chinese revolutionaries from late nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century. After Qing's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, reformers and intellectuals debated 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 Man must be erased (ping Man-Han zhi jie). Liang's thought was based on the idea of racial competition, a concept originating from social Darwinism that believed only superior races would survive whereas the inferior races were bound to extinct. Liang attributed the decline of China to the Manchu (Qing) rulers, who treated the Han as an "alien race" and imposed a racial hierarchy between the Han and the Manchus while ignoring the threat of imperial powers. Liang's critique of the Qing court and the Man-Han relations laid the foundation for anti-Manchuism, an ideology that early Republican revolutionaries advocated in their efforts to overthrow the Qing dynasty and found a new Republic. In his writing “Revolutionary Army,” Zou Rong, an active Chinese revolutionary at the turn of the twentieth century, demanded a revolution education for the Han people who were suffering from the oppression of the Manchu rule. He argued that China should be a nation of the orthodox Han Chinese and no alien race shall rule over them. According to Zou, the Han Chinese, as the descendants of the Yellow Emperor, must overthrow the Manchu rule to restore their legitimacy and rights. Wang Jingwei, a Chinese revolutionary who later became an important figure in the Kuomintang, also believed that the Manchus were an inferior race. Wang contended that a state consisting of a single race would be superior to those multiracial ones. Most of the Republican revolutionaries agreed that preserving the race was vital to the survival of the nation. Since the Han had asserted its dominant role in Chinese nationalism, the Manchus had to be either absorbed or eradicated. Historian Prasenjit Duara summarized this by stating that the Republican revolutionaries primarily drew on the international discourse of "racist evolutionism" to envision a "racially purified China."
  After the 1911 Revolution, Sun Yat-sen established the Republic of China, the 
caption: Wang Jingwei
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