The Doctrine of Nationalism and the Chinese Revolution

Abstract

Nationalism became a strong movement in Europe coincident with the Industrial Revolution, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nationalism in Asia was by no means merely an imitation of the modern historical phenomenon beginning in the late 18th century with the French Revolution. Sun Yat-sen's concept of nationalism evolved through three stages. The first stage extended from the time he decided to overthrow the Manchu government when he was a young student to the time of the success of his revolution in 1911. The second stage ran from the establishment of the republic in 1912 to the end of World War I in 1918. The third stage went from 1919 to his death in 1925. When Sun carried out his revolutionary activities and attempted to reconstitute Chinese nationalism to modernize China in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Western world paid very little attention to the traumatic problems faced by the nationalist leaders in non-Western countries.