Furthermore, insofar as imperial China had real borders, it shared these with a weak Russifying Tsarism that was already on its last legs. (The Japanese naval victory over the Tsarist fleet occurred only six years before the Manchu dynasty collapsed and 11 years before Tsarism came to a bloody end).
All this encouraged most first generation nationalists in China to imagine that the Empire could, without too much trouble, be turned into a nation. (This was the dream also of Enver Pasha in Istanbul in the same era, of Colonel Mengistu Mariam in Addis Ababa three generations later and Vladimir Putin in Moscow today).
They thus combined, without much thought, the popular nationalism of the world-wide anti-imperialist movement, with the official nationalism of the late 19th century: and we know that this latter was a nationalism which emanated from the state, not the people, and thought in terms of territorial control, not popular liberation. Hence the bizarre spectacle of people like Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙), a genuine popular nationalist, also making absurd claims to territories in various parts of Southeast and Central Asia, based on real or fanciful territorial conquests of dynastic rulers, many of them non-Chinese, against whom his popular nationalism was supposed to fight.
Part two of this lecture will run tomorrow. Benedict Anderson is a professor of International Studies, Government, and Asian Studies at Cornell University. The lecture was prepared for the International Conference on World Civilizations in the New Century: Trends and Challenges held by the INPR (
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