The idea of a unified Han race emerged from anti-Manchu revolutionary politics

Evidence

In the wake of the abortive Hundred Days Reform of 1898, which ended when the empress dowager rescinded all the reform decrees and executed several reformer officials, a number of radical intellectuals started advocating the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty: not without resonance to the 1789 and 1848 political revolutions in Europe, the anti-Manchu revolutionaries represented the ruling elites as an inferior “race” which was responsible for the disastrous policies which had led to the decline of the country, while most inhabitants of China were perceived to be part of a homogeneous Han race. In search of national unity, the very notion of a Han race emerged in a relational context of opposition both to foreign powers and to the ruling Manchus. For the revolutionaries, the notion of a “yellow race” was not entirely adequate as it included the much reviled Manchus. Whereas the reformers perceived race (zhongzu) as a biological extension of the lineage (za), encompassing all people dwelling on the soil of the Yellow Emperor, the revolutionaries excluded the Mongols, Manchus, Tibetans, and other population groups from their definition of race, which was narrowed down to the Han, who were referred to as a minzu. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3318

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the pattern in many nationalisms where ‘the people’ is defined oppositionally — parallels the construction of racial identity as relational found across colonial and postcolonial reading.
• DEFINE: Distinguishes reformers’ expansive zhongzu (all peoples under the Yellow Emperor) from revolutionaries’ narrow minzu (Han only).
• SEED: Article angle: how ‘the nation’ as a unified homogeneous racial entity is often invented in the midst of revolutionary struggle — the Han race as a constructed, not ancient, category.