For a century, the Chinese Communist Party has been a nationalist party. This can be a controversial point today, particularly among those who see the party’s focus on nationalist themes mainly as an instrument to retain power after the tarnishing of Communist ideology. But the reality is much more complicated. The party’s nationalist orientation is embedded in a long, historical line that connects the party of today with the patriotic ferment of the late Qing decline.
In the 1790s, as President George Washington was settling into his first term of office in the United States, the Qing dynasty was at its height. But over the next few decades, repeated provincial unrest, foreign depredations, and a sclerotic government led some officials to sense that China was entering decline. Concerned by the Qing dynasty’s slide, officials like Wei Yuan began to urgently resurrect a tradition in Chinese intellectual history that focused on the state’s pursuit of “wealth and power” (富强) as opposed to the more typical Confucian tradition of “rule of the virtuous”(德治). When China’s ongoing domestic decay collided with European imperial ambition in the disastrous First Opium War, China’s “century of humiliation” began—launching a search among many to find the means to recapture past glory. As Orville Schell and John Delury note in their sweeping intellectual history, Wei Yuan’s resurrection of the 2000-year-old phrase “wealth and power” came at the right time, and it has “remained something of a North Star for Chinese intellectual and political leaders” ever since.
