Chinese Nationalism

Abstract

Nationalism was the 'moving force' of the Chinese revolution, wrote Mary Wright, capturing in a phrase a conviction widely shared among students of modern China.1 In this perspective, a 'rising tide' of nationalism is a constant factor, perhaps the only one, in China's long revolutionary era. As the metaphor suggests, the waters of nationalism steadily engulf all that stands in their path imperial, Republican, and Communist institutions, elite and popular classes, coastal and interior regions, reformist and conservative factions, Chinese at home and abroad. Other movements and ideologies wax and wane, but nationalism permeates them all. The paradigm that governs this perspective is what I call the 'culturalism to nationalism thesis'. It is a loose paradigm at best and has no single source or definitive formulation, but its underlying assumptions pervade the academic literature on modern China. The core proposition is that a set of ideas labelled 'culturalism' dominated traditional China, was incompatible with modem nationalism and yielded only under the assault of imperialism and Western ideas to a new nationalist way of thinking. The history of modem China, then, is one in which nationalism replaces culturalism as the dominant Chinese view of their identity and place in the world. Because this was a transformation of collective cultural and political identity, itwas a long and traumatic process that left its mark, and continues to do so, on all periods and divisions within the modern era.