So to start with, the idea of what “Chineseness” or being Chinese means is very politically charged. What exactly makes someone “Chinese?” These were legitimate questions that the growing nationalist elite of the early 20th century within China struggled to answer and come to terms with themselves. A frustrated Liang Qichao wrote in 1900,

Hundreds of millions of people have maintained this country for several thousand years, and yet to this day they have not got a name for their country

a reference to the fact that China 中国(Zhong = “central/center” Guo = “Kingdom/state”) in Chinese simply meant “Central Kingdom,” while other (European/Japan) nations attached the name of their state to their nationality (France/French, England/English, Japan/Japanese). Even earlier, a Portuguese soldier-merchant named Galeoto Pereira (who spent time in a Ming prison) had the opportunity to inquire about such things:

We are accustomed to calling this country China and its inhabitants Chins, but when you ask Chinese [Zhongguoren] why they are called this, they say “We don’t have this name, never had.” Pereira was very intrigued, and asked again: “What is your entire country called? When someone from another nation asks you what country you are from, what do you answer?”… The Chinese thought this question very odd. In the end they answered: “in earlier times there were many kingdoms. But now there is only one ruler. But each state still uses its ancient name. These states are present-day provinces (sheng). The state as a whole is called the Great Ming (Da Ming), its inhabitants are called Great Ming people (Da Ming ren).

I will not get too caught up in the racial semantics of “Chineseness,” and what being Chinese means; it is neither my forte, nor is it an easy question to answer and in many ways, it is still an open question. I’m not exactly sure if this is what you’re asking for, but for the sake of simplicity we’ll have “Chinese nationality” here mean Han, the Mandarin term for the nationality that make up ~95% of modern day China and what we, in English, would generally refer to nowadays as “Chinese,” while leaving the other 55 recognized nationalities (such as Manchu, Tibetan, Mongols, etc.) on the table when dealing with exactly why this was a big deal for the PRC, and excluding those nationalities who were not chosen to be recognized by the PRC to this day. As a note, there are myriad cultures and nations within modern day China, who all have their own individual identities that should be respected, some recognized by the PRC, and others not.

Background

To start with a little background, with the arrival of Europeans in force in the mid-1800s and the resulting “Opium Wars,” Qing-dynasty China found itself in an increasingly precarious situation. Ravaged by internal war (most notably the Taiping rebellion) and taken advantage of by hostile imperialists (primarily the UK, Russia, and France, but also eventually the US and Japan by the late 1800s), the state’s authority that rested on Confucian ritual began to dwindle. A huge cultural diffusion of ideas took place between East-West, with future Chinese nationalists discovering many of the popular ideas among their contemporary Western intellectual, for the sake of this post, the two most important would be what we call nationalism, and social Darwinism.

Chinese elite’s understanding of nationalism would be diffused through Japan, with lasting influences such as the Japanese term Minzoku, brought to China in the form of Minzu (nationality). In order to weaponize this new ideology against their ethnically different overlords, the Manchu-led Qing dynasty, various nationalists such as Zhang Binglin, Zou Rong, and Liang Qichao (who all studied in Japan) would promote the words “Hanzu,” and “Manzu,” creating a clear delineation between two people who were once held together by the fibers of Confucian ritual. If you upheld Confucian ritual in the past, you could obtain the Mandate of Heaven, just as the Mongols had once done (Yuan dynasty), and the Manchu’s were doing now. But now, these ideas divided human populations along lines of cultural and ethnic differences. Rebecca Karl explains more deeply in Staging the World how these nationalist ideas lead to the creation of a link between the Hanren (or, “Chinese”) and other oppressed people of what was becoming known as the “Third World,” and subsequently turn on the Manchu-led Qing as “internal imperialists,” rather than Mandate of Heaven-obtaining people.

As for social Darwinism, the popular idea only reinforced the “inferiority” of Manchu people compared to the much more populous, and industrious Han. Zou Rong’s 1903 “Revolutionary Army” is probably one of the best examples of such vitriolic abuse thrown at the Manchu’s: in it, Zou refers to the Manchus as “the furry and horned Manchu race,” criticizing “the wolfish ambitions of this inferior race of nomads, the bandit Manchus.” Zou classified Manchus as a “northern barbarians, a goat race with beast hearts,” while claiming that the Han were “slaves of slaves”—slaves to the Manchus, who were in turn slaves to Japan and the West. Yang Du argued that of the “five races” (Han, Manchu, Mongols, Hui, and Tibetans, the first five “races” of China to be distinguished from one another in the aftermath of the 1911 Revolution), only the Han were civilized enough to lead China. The early Tongmenghui periodical People’s Journal also repeatedly made the point that Manchu’s and Han were of a very different origin despite their “Asianness,” and that the only way forward for their race was to assimilate into the Han.

As you can see, even before the 1911 Revolution, and well before the establishment of the PRC in 1949, these ideas were quite popular regarding minorities within Han intellectual circles. Whereas once in the past in order to obtain the Mandate of Heaven, you simply had to be favored by Heaven, regardless of race, by the 20th century Han nationalists created a vision of a China for “Chinese,” whatever that meant. And truly, I don’t want to give the picture that everyone necessarily agreed with Liang Qichao and Zou Rong’s takes. Indeed, a major point of contention between the CCP and the KMT during the Republican period socially was exactly what to do, and how to regard, China’s various ethnic minorities.

For the KMT, in the aftermath of the 1911 revolution, racial ideology was primarily driven through the idea of “Greater China-ism,” (Da Zhongguo zhuyi), an idea influenced by the Qing model which primarily identified the Han, Tibetans, Mongolians, Manchus, and Hui as the major (if not sole) ethnic composition of China, as represented by the five-layer striped flag that accompanied the new Republic. But by 1928 the KMT had discarded the idea of any sort of multinational China, and began to formulate ideas of a singular, and ethnically homogeneous Zhonghua Minzu, which itself was partially a response to the CCP-influenced ideas that had permeated the tense KMT-CCP coalition before 1927; Chiang Kai-shek wanted to oust these ideas from the KMT in the aftermath of the bloody schism, opposing ideas of self-determination.

For the CCP, increasingly coming under the influence and leadership of Mao Zedong Thought and Mao Zedong, this meant for both practical and ideological purposes building coalitions with various minority populations to fight the much more repressive KMT regime. Indeed, Mao’s first tenable rebellion against the KMT was in Jiangxi (1931-1934), a province predominately inhabited by Gan and Hakka people, and one which had strong ties to the Taiping rebellion against the Manchu Qing dynasty just decades prior. The Constitution of the Soviet Republic of Jiangxi, proclaimed on November 7, 1931, stated that:

The Chinese Soviet Republic (CSR for short) categorically and unconditionally recognizes the right of national minorities to self-determination

Such statements reached out to neighboring minority groups across China with the offer to separate from this newly established CSR, join it, or establish an autonomous region within the CSR. Of course, the CSR would not live on to have some sort of glorious conquest of Chiang’s KMT to fulfill these promises, and the CSR was stomped out by KMT forces in 1934, pushing the communists north into Yan’an, to begin a new period of CCP history. It should be noted, however, that while self-determination and recognition was a main point of early CCP ideology on the surface in order to survive, ideas of racial integration more closely resembled their ideas of a properly socialist China. These ideas will come into fruition, again for both practical and ideological reasons, after the establishment of the PRC.