Varieties of anti‐imperialism in modern China, 1890s–1920s

Abstract The modern critique of imperialism as a political economical system first emerged in Britian in late 19th century and quickly developed along two major paths: a capitalist critique and Marxian socialist one. Both critiques reached China during this period, but the Marxian socialist interpretation proved especially attractive to Chinese activists and intellectuals in part because of the influence of the Third Communist International (Comintern) but also because of the socialists' ready embrace of the linkage between anti‐imperialism and national and social revolution. This article examines the varieties of anti‐imperialist thought in late Qing and early Republican China to explain the distinctiveness of the Chinese response to the global problem of foreign imperialism in the early twentieth century, stressing the critical role played by the Chinese understandings of the nation in the process and explaining why and how the socialist anti‐imperialist critique proved more persuasive in the Chinese context.