The Native Place and the State: Nationalism, State Building and Public Maneuvering

Viewing the disarray of the polity in the warlord period, two great architects of the modern Chinese state, Sun Yat-sen and the young Mao Zedong, contemplated the task of nation building. As activists, not merely visionaries, they each sought building blocks in the social realities which surrounded them, through which to begin the construction of the new national unity they imagined. In a 1919 essay written a few months after the May Fourth Movement, Mao expressed great optimism in regard to the Chinese people’s capacity for organizing and argued for the creation of a “great union of the popular masses”