Chinese nationalism

• 1. Introduction

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  Chinese nationalism begins with a wound. In the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, a country that had long regarded itself as the Celestial Empire at the center of the universe watched its armies fall to a rival it had long considered inferior. The Eight-Nation Alliance followed, marching into Beijing, looting the capital, and forcing China to pay financial reparations and extend special privileges to foreign powers. The image of a superior civilization presiding over the known world cracked beyond repair.

  This documentary traces how that crack became the foundation of a new political idea, one that has driven dynasties to fall, peasants to take up arms, and governments to reinvent themselves across more than a century. What exactly is Chinese nationalism? Who counts as Chinese, and who decides? And how does an idea born from humiliation become the signature slogan of the world's most populous country?

• 2. The Wound That Started It

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  Liang Qichao tried to save the Qing dynasty from within. A late Qing reformer, he participated in the Hundred Days' Reform of 1898, pushing the imperial government to modernize before it was too late. He failed. He was expelled from China and fled to Japan, where, living in exile, he began developing his ideas about what it meant to be Chinese in a world where Europe and Japan had demonstrated military superiority through the First and Second Opium Wars.

  Liang's diagnosis was sweeping. He blamed the Qing dynasty itself, arguing that the Manchu rulers had imposed a racial hierarchy that treated the Han as an alien race and had ignored the threats posed by foreign imperial powers. But his prescription was not simply ethnic revenge. He contended that the boundary between Han and Manchu must be erased, and that modernity was what he called an age of struggle among nations for the survival of the fittest. His vision demanded industrialization, a strong work ethic, and what he described as a strong sense of nationalism and a militaristic mentality.

  Not all reformers agreed. Zou Rong, an active revolutionary at the turn of the twentieth century, made a harder argument in his writing Revolutionary Army, demanding an educational revolution for Han people suffering under Manchu rule. He argued that the Han, as descendants of the Yellow Emperor, must overthrow the Manchus to restore their legitimacy. Wang Jingwei, who would later become an important Kuomintang figure, went further still, contending that a single-race state was superior to a multiracial one.

  Historian Prasenjit Duara summarized the logic driving these Republican revolutionaries by noting they drew on the international discourse of what he called racist evolutionism to envision a racially purified China. The intellectual ferment of this period, rooted in Social Darwinism imported from global debates, set the terms for every version of Chinese nationalism that would follow.

• 3. Five Races, One Nation

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  After the 1911 Revolution, Sun Yat-sen established the Republic of China with a national flag containing five colors, each symbolizing a major racial ethnicity of the new state. The move was, as historian Joseph Esherick has pointed out, driven by practical pressures rather than ideology alone. Japan and Russia were both encroaching on Chinese territory, and the newly born republic faced ethnic independence movements in Mongolia and Tibet, both of which claimed to belong to the Qing Empire rather than to the successor state.

  The Qing itself had governed an enormous multiethnic territory by portraying the Manchu rulers as enlightened Confucian sages whose goal was to preserve Chinese civilization. Over centuries, the Manchus were gradually absorbed into Chinese culture. The practical inheritance of that vast borderland was passed to the Republic, which decided to maintain Qing borders rather than retreat to a purely Han territorial core.

  The concept formalized as Zhonghua minzu held that five major ethnicities, the Han, Manchus, Mongols, Hui, and Tibetans, all belonged to a single Chinese identity. This framing displaced the earlier emphasis on racial hierarchy. With the growing threat from imperial powers in the 1910s, anti-imperialism overtook racism as the dominant ideology. Yet racism did not disappear. As the source notes, it was embedded in other social realms, including the discourses of eugenics and racial hygiene.

  In 1909, the Qing government had published the Law of Nationality of Great Qing, which defined Chinese nationality through patrilineal descent: born in China to a Chinese father, or born to a Chinese father who had since died, or born to a Chinese mother when the father's nationality was unclear or stateless. That legal framework would pass into the successor state, carrying forward questions about who counted as Chinese that no single revolution could fully resolve.

• 4. Muslim Soldiers, Chinese Nationalists

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  Hu Songshan, a Muslim imam from Ningxia, ordered Chinese flags to be saluted during prayer. He instructed every imam in Ningxia to preach Chinese nationalism and the unity of all Chinese people, and he harshly criticized anyone who taught anti-nationalist thinking, calling them fake Muslims. He even cited a Hadith, a saying of the Prophet Muhammad, to make his point: loving the motherland is equivalent to loving the faith.

  Ma Fuxiang had served under the Chinese Muslim general Dong Fuxiang during the Boxer Rebellion, a period when Muslim troops were noted for their fierce anti-foreign sentiment. The unit had attacked foreign churches, railways, and legations even before formal hostilities began. Ma Fuxiang himself led an ambush at Langfang, inflicting casualties on foreign forces and using a train to escape.

  In Xinjiang, General Ma Hushan, chief of the 36th Division of the National Revolutionary Army, extended Chinese nationalist authority over the Uyghurs with a colonial directness. Uyghur street names and signs were changed to Chinese. The Chinese Muslim troops imported Chinese cooks and baths rather than using Uyghur ones. The carpet industry at Khotan was pressured to shift from Uyghur designs to Chinese versions. Ma Zhancang, another Chinese Muslim general, beheaded the Uyghur emirs Abdullah Bughra and Nur Ahmad Jan Bughra, abolished the Sharia that the Uyghurs had established, and eliminated religion from public political life. The Chinese Muslim students who returned from studying at institutions such as Al-Azhar University in Egypt brought home nationalist ideas that linked Islamic and patriotic duty. One imam, Wang Jingzhai, who studied in Mecca, translated a Hadith capturing the synthesis: aiguo aijiao, loving the country is equivalent to loving the faith.

• 5. Peasants and the CCP's Nationalism

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  Political scientist Chalmers Johnson drew a line that most theorists of Chinese nationalism had missed. The nationalism articulated by Kuomintang intellectuals and the May Fourth Movement of 1919, he argued, was not a mass movement. Its participants were a small proportion of society, and the peasants, who made up the overwhelming majority of China's population, were simply absent.

  The Second Sino-Japanese War, which ran from 1937 to 1945, changed that. When Japan invaded, the Chinese Communist Party began mobilizing the peasantry through propaganda centered on the idea of national salvation. Johnson observed that after 1937, the CCP's messaging shifted away from class struggle and land redistribution toward a nationalist call to defend China. The wartime alliance between the peasantry and the CCP was, in his framing, a species of nationalism in its own right, which he labelled peasant nationalism.

  The Second Sino-Japanese War was also pivotal in another sense. The Chinese experience of that conflict helped create an ideology based on the concept of the people as a political body in their own right, a modern nation as opposed to a feudal empire. After Japan's defeat, the CCP's legitimacy suffered setbacks through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which caused economic hardship and social unrest. To recover, the party increasingly relied on nationalism. It implemented patriotic education campaigns, promoted a victimization narrative, and revised textbooks to emphasize conflicts with Japan and the West, reframing the party as the savior of the nation.

  Under Mao Zedong, the concept of Chinese extended to a huge Chinese family that included the Han and 55 other officially recognized ethnic groups. Following the People's Republic's establishment, the government formalized this by recognizing 56 ethnicities in total as comprising the Chinese nation.

• 6. Nationalism Online and in the Streets

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  On the 7th of May 1999, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the United States bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese citizens. The US said the strike was an accident caused by outdated maps. Few Chinese accepted that explanation. Chinese officials called it a barbarian act and a war crime. Thousands joined protest marches in Beijing and other provincial capitals. In Chengdu, the American Consul's residence was firebombed. The incident sharpened anti-Western sentiment across China at a moment when nationalist forums on the Chinese internet were just beginning to take shape.

  The 1995 book China Can Say No had already established a benchmark for 1990s nationalist sentiment; it was itself modeled on the 1989 essay The Japan That Can Say No, written by Shintaro Ishihara. In 2005, twenty-two million Chinese netizens signed an internet petition opposing Japan's efforts to join the United Nations Security Council. The Yasukuni Shrine website was hacked by Chinese hackers during late 2004, and again on the 24th of December 2008.

  The 2008 Olympic torch relay became a flashpoint. When a pro-Tibetan independence protestor attempted to snatch the torch from a young handicapped Chinese athlete in Paris, the images circulated widely and triggered an internet rumor accusing the French supermarket company Carrefour of funding Tibetan independence groups. Protests and boycott calls followed. At least five thousand Chinese Americans protested outside CNN's Hollywood offices after a commentator described Chinese products as junk and the Chinese as goons and thugs.

  A 2013 survey found a counterintuitive pattern: respondents who sourced their information about South China Sea disputes from traditional state-regulated mass media were less supportive of hardline policies than those who did not. The researchers concluded that state media coverage was more of a dampener than a driver of nationalistic policy preference. Publishing in 2025, journalist Shuyu Zhang described the new online patriotism as encompassing overseas-educated students who distanced themselves from Western ideals, patriots with faith in the China model, populists who saw China as a victim of Western hegemony, and fan girls who adopted fan club culture in their patriotism, a group known as Little Pink.

• 7. The Chinese Dream and Xi's Era

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  On the 29th of November 2012, Xi Jinping visited the National Museum of China with his Standing Committee colleagues to attend a national revival exhibition. He used the phrase Chinese Dream for the first time in a high-profile setting, and the slogan quickly became the signature political phrase of his era. Scholar Peter Ferdinand has argued that the Chinese Dream encodes a vision in which China will have recovered its rightful place.

  Since Xi became CCP General Secretary in 2012, Chinese nationalism has become more Han-centric. Before his rise, the PRC's ethnic policy was shaped in part by the Soviet Union's Korenizatsiya model, which emphasized respecting the culture and language of each ethnic group. Preferential policies for ethnic minorities shrunk under Xi, and assimilation of non-Han groups became more overt and intensified.

  On the 1st of July 2021, Xi delivered a nationalist speech at Tiananmen Square marking the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party. He told the assembled crowd that the Chinese people would never allow foreign forces to bully, oppress, or enslave them, and that whoever nursed delusions of doing so would crack their heads and spill blood on the Great Wall of steel built from the flesh and blood of 1.4 billion Chinese people.

  A researcher at the University of Oxford's Internet Institute, Hannah Bailey, noted in 2021 a shift in how the CCP derived legitimacy, moving away from economic performance and toward nationalism. A 2018 Credit Suisse survey found that young Chinese consumers were turning to local brands as a result of growing nationalist sentiment. The hanfu movement, which seeks to revive traditional Chinese clothing from the Ming Dynasty and earlier, had by 2025 generated a 662 percent spike in online orders compared to the year prior, a material sign that Han-centric cultural nationalism was finding a new generation of adherents.