Nation Building and National Identity
How and why do political elites construct national identities, and what political work do those identities perform?
States must do more than administer territory: they must define the community in whose name they rule. My research examines how elites construct national identities during periods of geopolitical pressure and institutional transformation.
Existing accounts of nationalism often emphasize grievance, humiliation, and hostility toward outsiders. These forces are important, but they capture only one response to external threat. Defeat and foreign pressure can also generate emulation: elites may admire foreign achievements, selectively borrow institutions, and use external models to imagine a stronger national future.
My work develops this argument through two connected projects. The first examines how enmity and emulation shaped China's transformation from empire to nation-state. The second studies how founding narratives construct political communities across social groups and generations.
From Empire to Nation-State: Aspirational Nationalism in China. Book project. (with Haohan Chen and Yingtian He)
Book conference scheduled for September 25, 2026.
We explain modern Chinese nationalism as the product of interaction between two pathways. Enmity defines the nation against aggressors and foreign domination; emulation constructs an aspirational community through learning, institutional borrowing, and comparison with successful states. External shocks can activate both pathways, while political elites disagree over which foreign referents to resist, which to emulate, and what national transformation requires. Nationalism is therefore not simply a uniform response to threat. It is an elite-mediated process in which competing visions of the nation emerge, contend, and sometimes converge.
Empirically, the project links digitized newspapers and journals to authors' biographies, overseas experience, and intellectual networks. We combine large-scale analysis of texts and metadata with close reading of debates surrounding the Self-Strengthening Movement, the 1898 Reform, the 1911 Revolution, and the early Republic. This design allows us to trace when external pressure produced exclusionary cohesion and when it encouraged reformist learning. It also reveals how the social positions and international exposure of intellectuals shaped the national futures they advocated.
“National Narratives.” Pilot study in progress. (with Eddy Yeung)