Such feelings were quite common. In the late Qing, native-place identity was a very big deal. This was in part helped along by a shift in Late-Qing education policies which had adopted a policy of going from the local to the national as a way to place students in the context of the larger empire rather than just identifying with their region. As such, local gazetteers began writing about the history of their regions, often in very pro-local terms.

Prior to this, your allegiance was still to your native place, and not to the nation as a whole. The empire might not even matter to you. There was a common saying, 山高皇帝遠, "the mountains are tall and the Emperor is far away", meaning little that happens in the Capital is going to have any bearing on my life here in the village.

The village connections were how you did your business, migrated elsewhere, and otherwise made your social connections. For people moving abroad or just to other parts of China, the Native Place Associations 同鄉會 were an invaluable part of your new life. They were the groups that helped you out in business, sent your corpse back to your native soil, and otherwise offered the sort of assistance that was most important. People identified with their villages or regions, and their association with the Qing or Ming was secondary.

This has remained to some extent, though managed education in the later part of the 20th century and what sense of a Greater China that developed during the May Fourth movement era has mostly supplanted it.

Peter Zarrow has written on the education reforms in The New Schools and National Identity: Chinese History Textbooks in the Late Qing, and Hon Tze-ki in Educating the Citizens: Visions of China in Late Qing History Textbooks, both in a 2007 text (edited by the latter) called The Politics of Historical Production in Late Qing and Republican China. Ching May-bo also has a relevant piece in that same volume.