Resurrecting Empire in Twentieth-Century China

What is the place of empire in the age of the nation-state? Focusing specifically on China in the twentieth century, I will argue that the global discourse of geopolitics shows the persistence of empire under new guises. My paper builds upon a number of seminal works from the 1990s, which have addressed the rise of Chinese nationalism in the twilight years of the Qing. My paper challenges the dominant discourse of the nation by turning attention back to the Chinese geographical expanse. Even as the Chinese nation took root in cities and across the countryside and worked its way into both the Nationalist and Communist organizations of the party state, the geographical boundaries of the multi-ethnic empire created by the Qing have remained largely intact through the turmoil of the twentieth century. Sun Zhongshan (1866–1925) and his fellow early Republican era leaders built their ideas of the Chinese nation on late-Qing revolutionary, anti-Manchu sentiment. Although these leaders equated nation with newly formulated notions of race, they were loathe to follow their beliefs to their logical conclusion and allow the Mongolian independence movement to take its course after the fall of the Qing. Beyond Mongolia, Chinese control over Xinjiang, Tibet, Manchuria, and parts of the Southwest grew increasingly tenuous under a combination of powerful local warlords and foreign encroachment. One hundred years after the collapse of the Qing empire, it has become increasingly clear that the Chinese empire has not only survived successive revolutions of the twentieth century but is now expanding its reach beyond the Asian continent through the PRC’s “soft rising” in diplomacy. I would argue that empire remains a valuable unit of historical examination in modern history.