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This article uses both Manchu and Han sources to interrogate the relationship between Qing and China. After toppling the Ming reign, the Qing rulers identified their state with China as their eighteenth-century campaigns in Inner Asia redefined what China was. By the early twentieth century, educational institutions had Facilitated the Manchu efforts to gain the hearts and minds of the Han intellectual elite, who embraced the idea that China was a multiethnic state. Although Manchu rule ended in 191 I, the Chinese people never returned to the position that "China" was the property of the Han people: China's modem identity would be that of a unified multiethnic state. In other words, the Qing legacies to modem China include not just the country's vast territory but also a new concept of China that laid the solid foundation for the rise of its national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional understandings of Chinese nationalism often portray it as anti-Western, focusing on Chinese nationalists' obsession with a powerful state and on their ambition to recover the glory of China's historical empire. Such understandings clearly underlie the fear and hostility toward rising Chinese nationalism today. But this view relies too heavily on China's conflictive relations with the West and overemphasizes the impact of China's unique history, culture, and politics, making it hard, if not impossible, to draw on the concept of nationalism in understanding China's relations with its non-Western neighbors. Such a perspective neglects the importance of ideas and ideals from the international system that animate Chinese nationalism. In this article, the author characterizes Chinese nationalism as fusing realpolitik ideas and ideals and a fervent quest for national identity and power. A realpolitik nationalist, as defined here, is someone who frames an external threat to China in terms not of the country's unique culture or history but of a breach of the prevailing norms of the nation-state system, whose key dimensions include sovereignty, territoriality, and international legitimacy. Finally, the author applies this notion in examining China's conflicts with India in 1962 and with the Southeast Asian countries involved in the dispute over the Spratly Islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]