Short answers, pulled from the story.
Chinese nationalism 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 Three Principles of the People, it is evaluated as multi-ethnic nationalism, distinct from Han nationalism or local ethnic nationalism.
Modern Chinese nationalism emerged in the late Qing dynasty (1644-1912) in response to China's defeat at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 and the invasion of Beijing by the Eight-Nation Alliance. These events forced China to pay financial reparations and grant special privileges to foreigners, shattering the image of China as a superior Celestial Empire.
Liang Qichao was a late Qing reformer who participated in the Hundred Days' Reform of 1898, failed to reform the Qing government, and was subsequently expelled from China and fled to Japan, where he developed his ideas of Chinese nationalism. He argued that the boundary between Han and Manchu must be erased and that modernity demanded industrialization and a strong sense of nationalism.
The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 outraged China because the allied powers transferred German-occupied territory in Shandong to Japan rather than returning it to China. This triggered the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which developed into nationwide protests marked by a surge of Chinese nationalist sentiment.
Xi Jinping first used the phrase Chinese Dream during a visit to the National Museum of China on the 29th of November 2012, at a national revival exhibition. The phrase became the signature political slogan of the Xi era and is closely linked to nationalism and the Belt and Road Initiative, encoding the idea that China will recover its rightful place in the world.
Since Xi Jinping became CCP General Secretary in 2012, Chinese nationalism has become more Han-centric. Preferential policies for ethnic minorities have shrunk, assimilation of non-Han groups has become more overt, and the CCP has been accused of cultivating far-right ultranationalism. A 2021 Oxford researcher noted a shift toward deriving legitimacy from nationalism rather than from economic performance.