ABSTRACT
The concept of the nation-state replete with sovereignty and territory took shape in modern China at the end of the nineteenth century after the defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. Certainly, the military invasion of the powers from the Opium War (1840—42) forward—”gunboat diplomacy”—had given rise to a national sense of crisis among all living under the Qing dynasty. The turning point in the case of modern China was probably the string of domestic reforms—the Wuxu bianfa of 1898 and the Xinzheng reforms at the end of the Qing—which unfolded from the end of the nineteenth century into the beginning of the twentieth. As the case of the Baoguohui demonstrates, the issue of nationalism in modern China was above all portrayed as a conflict or contradiction between the dynastic system and the principle of a modern state.
