The Nationless State: The Search for a Nation in Modern Chinese Nationalism

Abstract

The history of modem China, in the round, is recounted as a struggle for national reunification and liberation traced through the rise and fall of successive state formations in the imperial, early Republican (1912-27), Nationalist (1928-49) and Communist periods. What lends continuity to this history from one regime to the next is the motif of a unitary state reconstituting itself from the rubble of a disintegrating empire. Continuity derives as well from an implicit identification of the unitary state with the nation on whose behalf the state is presumed to act: the ideal of the unitary state is linked with the idea of a national people firstly in the story of their common struggle and secondly in the assumption that the one, the state, 'represents' the other, the nation. The nation is presumed to be as continuous as the hoary ideal of the unitary state itself despite the relatively recent vintage of the concept of the nation in China, despite the equally recent genesis of the idea that the state should represent anything at all, and despite the