1.0 Introduction

“From now on our nation will belong to the community of the peace-loving and of the world ... Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up.”1

Mao Zedong’s famous declaration that the Chinese people had “stood up,” delivered at the opening of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in September 1949,2 came as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) secured victory over the US-backed Kuomintang (KMT) Republican forces. His proclamation signified more than a military triumph: it marked the establishment of the People’s Republic of China as a modern nation-state and articulated its legitimacy through explicitly anti-imperialist and socialist terms. In doing so, Mao’s proclamation set the course for a Chinese nationalism that would continue to persist today, albeit in varying capacities. This essay argues that modern Chinese nationalism emerged out of a series of crises imposed by foreign encroachment and the declining influence of the Qing dynasty. Fundamentally, this nascent nationalism emerged as an elite-driven and culturalist response to the existential question of its nation-statehood or lack thereof. Under Mao, nationalist discourse was anchored in the PLA’s victory over the KMT, recasting national identity through a Maoist-socialist ethic defined by anti-imperialist struggle. While early nationalists sought primarily to preserve the Qing dynasty’s territorial integrity by adopting the nation-state imaginary, Maoism redefined nationalism as a mass political project grounded in peasant revolution. Under Mao, nationalism drew its legitimacy not only from the Party’s socialist projects, but also from a conception of sovereignty in which the nation- state and the Party were rendered inseparable.

2.1 The Birth of the Modern Chinese Nation-State

Modern Chinese nationalism, as it developed in the twentieth century, was arguably a product of the profound disruptions of the nineteenth century, taking root particularly between the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), the collapse of the Qing dynasty, and the instalment of the first Republic of China. Literature shows that the modern Chinese nation- state did not exist as a concept in Chinese imperial political traditions and thought.3 Governance and imperial legitimacy had been justified through the Mandate of Heaven and maintained via a system of tributary relations and vassal states, emphasising ritualised hierarchies and cultural ‘civilising’ norms.4 A key concept for this tradition was the divine right to rule under tianxia (“all under heaven”) and the culturalist obligation to civilise so-called barbaric peoples. This order rested less on military or economic dominance than on a civilisational morality, where rites and traditions defined dynastic authority and power.5 The defeats of the Qing in the Opium Wars, waged by the British, exposed the dynasty’s technological and military underdevelopment compared to other sovereign foreign Western states. The Treaty of Nanking in 1842 forced China to cede Hong Kong to British imperialists, open four additional ports to Western trade, and pay $21 million in restitution for destroyed opium.6 The Qing’s defeat after Second Opium War granted the British further extraterritorial rights, deeper encroachment on Chinese territory and European immunity from Chinese law.7 These crises signalled not only the growing presence of foreign powers on China’s shores, but also – existentially - the dynasty’s confrontation with new international realities that the political traditions of the Qing court could neither accommodate nor reconcile with.

The defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 represented not only a territorial and sovereign crisis but also a deeply intellectual one. In particular was the underdeveloped sense of China as a nation-state: Liang for example, confesses that “we Chinese had no idea of the nation-state”.8 Reformists at the turn of the century believed that the development of the imperial state towards a Western form of a ‘nation’ on Chinese soil was vital for their collective survival as an ethnic and racial category.9 The traditional political order presupposed an isolated worldview and elided the need for distinguishing between nation and state. As Guoqi Xu observes, the imperial state suffered from a “Middle Kingdom syndrome,” making it difficult for the dynastic order to create a nationalist consciousness in the first place.10 For reformist intellectual Liang Qichao, the Sino-Japanese War “awakened China”,11 spurring reformists at the Qing courts to request and push for modernising reforms, culminating in the failed Hundred Days’ Reform in 1898, which saw reformists including the Emperor himself demanding the adoption of constitutional monarchism.12 In this view, China as a nation-state was not only absent from Chinese political traditions, but intellectually incompatible with the established imperial courts itself. Because the conservative factions of the imperial dynasty could not adapt, the Chinese were not only left with “a nation without state, but also a people without a nation”.13 The crises only highlighted the urgency for reformists to develop a nationalism, which would not only supplant the dynasty with the instalment of a new republic in 1912, but lay promise to modernise its people. Reformist elites recognised the dynasty’s decline and increasingly saw the adoption of European political models of nation-state as essential to resisting foreign domination. At the turn of the century, nationalist identity took on xenophobic and anti-foreignist overtones, mounting the Hans against the imperialist ‘backward’ Manchus who held the nation-state hostage.14 As Hans Kohn defined this phenomenon, “a state of mind” was emerging across reformist circles, “recognis[ing] the nation-state as the ideal form of political organisation and the nationality as the source of creative cultural energy and of economic well-being.”15 With the influx of translated works and greater interest and contact with European intellectual traditions through the Sinosphere and the works of translators such as Liang Qichao, intellectual elites and reformists began developing a nationalism deeply inflected by social Darwinism. As argued by Chu and Zarrow, the influential works of Liang which drove the republican overthrow of the Qing was deeply intertwined with social Darwinian theory and ethnology, which was widely accepted in intellectual circles in the late nineteenth century.16 The struggle of the old political system was often linked to the ideas of what constitutes a healthy nation as opposed to a sick and declining one. Such tropes like the ‘Sick Man of the Orient’ - in reference to the Qing dynasty - and Yen Fu’s 1895 translation of Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics played heavily into the elite’s imagining of the nation-state’s dire futurity: to resist modernising meant the inevitable and undesirable consequence of facing “natural selection” or wujing tianze; to not evolve/struggle (tianyuan) is to risk extinction altogether.17 The adoption of a new political system was understood as essential to protecting both the state and the survival of its people. Nationalism, as an ideological tool, had to be forged and adapted to meet the challenges posed by foreign encroachment and the fragility of its current troubled imperial state. In this sense, Chinese nationalism was shaped not only by the failures of the Qing imperial state but by an urgent concern for survival of an Andersonian ‘imagined’ people in an era of foreign threats of territorial domination and expansion.18

2.2 Maoist Nationalism and the Cultivation of Loyalty to Party-state and Nation.

Nationalism under Mao took on a distinctly socialist and political form, reconstructed as a project of state-building and revolutionary class-consciousness under the authority of the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP’s victory in the civil war over the Kuomintang was not only a military success but a political moment that crystallised a sense of nation-state unity which successive republican governments had failed to secure. The first Republic had fractured almost immediately after its founding in 1912: Yuan Shikai’s authoritarian rule alienated reformists and revolutionaries alike, and the subsequent warlord era left much of China in the hands of militarised cliques.19 The Japanese occupation during the Second World War further deepened the trauma of foreign domination, while the corrupt and elitist structure of the KMT during and after the war eroded its supporter base, now sceptical that KMT leadership could install a politically stable and viable Chinese state.20 By the time Mao declared victory on 1 October 1949, the CCP was able to present itself as the only force capable of unifying the nation and defending its sovereignty. As Zhao has argued, the collective experience of unfulfilled promise of the first republic and subsequent violent Japanese occupation created fertile ground for a political nationalism that extended far beyond the traditional urban elite, allowing for the absorption of an anti-imperialist positionality and the CCP’s socialist nationalist discourse to take hold.21 Imperialism was depicted not simply as external aggression, but as a structural condition of dependency, entangling landlords, compradors, and the Kuomintang as its domestic agents,22 and it was against this whole nexus of exploitation that the socialist revolution was positioned. By placing anti-imperialism at the centre of national identity, Mao gave socialism a rhetorical and emotional force necessary for the cultivation of this new nationalism. In literature, nationalism is often associated with the emotional world of its subjects; for primordialist scholars of nationalism, this emotional “inherently irrational” motivation to serve at a national level is purely imaginative yet constitutive to the experience of the Chinese nation- state among other nation states.23 The reconstruction of Maoist nationalism was not only successful and powerful because of its socialist-ethical imagination, but it was successful because it was given emotional coherence by the ideology itself, namely its discourse on anti- imperialism and Marxist-Leninist ethics. Maoist nationalism capitalised on its historical context, and reconstructed nationalism in socialist terms that were not merely imported from the West, but highly indigenised to the living memory of imperialist conquest and violence. The result of which was a socialist brand of nationalism that was pan-ethnic, territorial and highly political rather than culturalist.

Central to this reconstruction was Mao’s sinification of Marxism-Leninism, which reoriented the nation around the peasantry and emphasised the “mass line” as the foundation of Party authority. Revolutionary legitimacy, Mao insisted, came from his insistence to idolise the peasantry, drawing on their experiences and reworking these into policies that could both mobilise and transform Chinese society. His slogan reads: “from the masses, to the masses.”24 In practice, this translated into a nationalism that celebrated workers and peasants as the authentic ‘spirit’ of the nation, casting elites, landlords, and compradors as bourgeois enemies, whose continued existence threatened sovereignty and the socialist future. Campaigns such as the Yan’an Rectification Movement, the early land reforms of 1950, and the collectivisation drives of the mid-1950s were framed not only as class struggle but as acts of national renewal, necessary to break away from the failures of the old ‘backward’ order.25 The cult of Mao reinforced this political nationalism: his voice and image became synonymous with the voice of the people, and by extension the imagination of the new socialist nation- state. His leadership was often presented as the embodiment of the nation’s destiny. As Vu explains, in Asia, the cold-war communist leaders particularly in Vietnam and China held a consistent “binary worldview” that aligned with Leninist-Marxist thinking.26 On the one hand, the imperialists represented the predatory capitalists and morally bankrupt backwardness of the world, while the socialist revolutionaries were the future, modern, anti-imperialists, who understood deeply the corruptive nature of capitalism and greed. It follows from the linear model of progress, where the ideas of Marxism not only highlight how socialism was morally superior, but that its revolution and futurity was inevitable, a natural conclusion within the machinery of ‘progress’ and stages of modernisation.27 Maoist nationalism therefore adopted this particular progress model in its imagined national identity. By the early 1950s, nationalism had been thoroughly subsumed into the revolutionary cause: to defend the nation was to advance socialism, and to advance socialism was to guarantee China’s sovereignty and future prosperity.28 What emerged was a nationalism rooted not in cultural revival or the adoption of Western institutional models, but a total rejection of it in the form of a socialist praxis: the Party was both the vanguard of the revolution and the embodiment of the nation-state itself, and to be loyal to the Party was simultaneously the utmost expression of loyal to the nation and its people.

3.0 Conclusion

As He and Guo writes, “the goals of nationalist movements are national identity, national unity and national autonomy”: three aspirations that defined the trajectory of Chinese nationalism from its fractured beginnings in the late Qing through to the early stages of Maoist state-building.29 What began as an elite-driven intellectual project of survival, deeply shaped by foreign encroachment and the rhetoric of social Darwinism, was transformed under Mao into a mass-based political discourse that fused loyalty to the Party with loyalty to the nation. By reframing nationalism through socialist praxis; land reform, collectivisation, the mass line, and the cult of Mao - the CCP ideologically installed a nationalism within a Marxist-Leninist framework: the CCP as its vanguard and source of sovereign identity. Ultimately, nationalism under Mao was not just a departure from earlier forms but a radical reconfiguration: from a defensive, culturalist response to decline and invasion into a forward- looking political project inseparable from socialist futurity and modernisation. This allowed the CCP to consolidate sovereignty, legitimise its authority, and inscribe the Party-state as the embodiment of the nation itself.

FOOTNOTE

1 Mao Tse-Tung, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung Volume V (Pergamon Press, 1977), 15.

2 Ibid.

3 Hong-Yuan Chu and Peter Zarrow, “Modern Nationalism: The Formative Stage,” in Exploring Nationalisms of China, eds. C.X. George Wei and Xiaoyuan Liu (Greenwood Press, 2001), 6.

4 Jilin Xu, “Intellectual Currents behind Contemporary Chinese Nationalism,” in Exploring Nationalisms of China, eds. C.X. George Wei and Xiaoyuan Liu (Greenwood Press, 2001), 33; Guoqi Xu, “Nationalism, Internationalism, and National Identity: China from 1895 to 1919,” in Chinese Nationalism in Perspective: Historical and Recent Cases, eds. C.X. George Wei and Xiaoyuan Liu (Greenwood Press, 2001), 102-3.

5 Guoqi Xu, “Nationalism,” 103.
6 Richard S. Horowitz, “The Opium Wars of 1839–1860,” in East Asia in the World: Twelve Events That Shaped the Modern International Order, eds. Stephan Haggard and David C. Kang (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 179.

7 Ibid.
8 Chu and Zarrow, “Modern Nationalism,” 7.
9 Ibid., 8-9.
10 Guoqi Xu, “Nationalism,” 102.
11 Ibid., 103.
12 Xiaobing Tang, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford University Press, 1996), 94.

13 Chu and Zarrow, “Modern Nationalism,” 10-1.
14 Chu and Zarrow, “Modern Nationalism,” 19-20.
15 Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (Macmillan, 1961), 16.
16 Chu and Zarrow, “Modern Nationalism,” 11-2.
17 Andrew Morris,“‘To Make the Four Hundred Million Move’: The Late Qing Dynasty Origins of Modern Chinese Sport and Physical Culture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 4 (2000): 902, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2696696; Chu and Zarrow, “Modern Nationalism,” 9.

18 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006), 6.

19 James E. Sheridan, “The Warlord Era: Politics and Militarism under the Peking Government, 1916–28,” in The Cambridge History of China, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 287-9.

20 Theodore Hsi-En Chen, “Communist China and the Kuomintang,” Current History 13, no. 196 (1957): 339-40, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45309819; C. L. Chiou, Democratizing Oriental Despotism: China from 4 May 1919 to 4 June 1989 and Taiwan from 28 February 1947 to 28 June 1990 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), 24.

21 Suisheng Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism (Stanford University Press, 2004), 17.

22 Mao Tse-Tung, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung Volume I (Pergamon Press, 1975), 13-4.
23 Russell Hardin, “Self Interest, Group Identification,” in Perspectives on Nationalism and War, eds. John L. Comaroff and Paul C. Stern (Taylor and Francis, 1995), 15.

24 Lin Chun, “Mass Line,” in Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi, eds. Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Loubere (ANU Press, 2019), 121, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvk3gng9.23.

25 Gao Mobo, “Collectivism,” in Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi, eds. Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Loubere (ANU Press, 2019), 37-40, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvk3gng9.8.

26 Tuong Vu, ““To be Patriotic is to Build Socialism”: Communist Ideology in Vietnam’s Civil War,” in Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia: Ideology, Identity, and Culture, eds. Tuong Vu and Wasana Wongsurawat (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 33.

27 Ibid.
28 Zhao, A Nation-State, 23-4.
29 Baogang He and Yingjie Guo, Nationalism, National Identity, and Democratization in China (Ashgate Publishing, 2000), 1.

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