The Collapse Of The Qing Dynasty And The Origins And Evolution Of The Concept Of "Chinese Nation"

In the late Qing Dynasty, on account of the turbulent political situation, political changes were strongly demanded. A variety of trends were widely disseminated in China, in that nationalism depending on its own unique characteristics caused a huge response in the Chinese political and intellectual circles.Under the promotion of nationalism, "Chinese nation" had been proposed for the first time, in the intellectual and cultural circles in China, as a tentative idea of the construction of national planning and ethnic relations. Since then going through the constant debate and interpretation, the content of "Chinese nation" also continued to update, from the first to refer to "Han Chinese" to "A community containing Han Chinese Confucian culture and the culture of other ethnic communities which had been assimilated by Han Chinese Confucian culture" to the final form "a political community in which various ethnics coexist equally, that is Modern nation-state". The interpretation process is also a result of a development of the nationalism from the different directions, which are the traditional Ethnic Theory and the theory of Modern Western Nationalism. At the same time, in the parallel process of political reform, with stimulation of a series of political events which contained the evolution in the late Qing Dynasty, and the dissemination of legal political symbols in the early Republican, the meaning of "Chinese nation" had gradually got public recognition and official political recognition. In the end, "Chinese nation" is interpreted as one of the most popular words in China today, containing a wide range of political, social, and cultural implications.