Conclusion

Abstract

In his chapter in the authoritative Cambridge History of China, Joseph Fletcher perceptively outlined three important eighteenth-century changes that “set the course of China’s subsequent history”: the arrival of Western imperialism, the doubling of China’s population, and the dramatic expansion of its territory under the Manchu Qing empire.¹ This book has attempted to demonstrate how these three interrelated developments shaped the form and structures of modern Chinese nationalism. These radical transformations helped fashion a spatially defined Chinese geo-body set firmly within the boundaries of the Qing empire and placed internal and external pressures on the new state to politically and culturally incorporate the once marginal frontier and its indigenous population into a more encompassing national imaginary.