1839-40 The Opium War 1850-1863-The Taiping Rebellion in China

1839-40 The Opium War

1850-1863-The Taiping Rebellion in China

1853- The Opening of Japan by Commodore Matthew C. Perry

1868- The Meiji Restoration

1874-The sovereignty over the Ryukyu Islands; Japanese expedition of Taiwan

1894-95-The First Sino-Japanese War; Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule

1900-The Boxer Rebellion

1904-5-The Russo Japanese War

1910-Korea under Japanese Colonial Rule

1911-Founding of the Republic of China

1919-March, Student Protest in Korea May, the May Fourth Movement in China

What is a nation? (1882)Ernest Renan

“A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life.”

Nations and Nationalism (1983)Ernest Gellner

• Nationalism rose in industrial societies where people “needed” a new standardized form of identity -- which the "high culture" of the nation happily provided

• “Nationalism is primarily a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.”

Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (1992)

E. J. Hobsbawn

• The basic characteristic of the nation and everything with it is its modernity.

• “I do not regard the 'nation' as a primary nor as an unchanging social entity. It belongs exclusively to a particular, and historically recent, period. It is a social entity only insofar as it relates to a certain kind of modern territorial state, the 'nation-state', and it is pointless to discuss nation and nationality except insofar as both relate to it.”

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983)

Benedict Anderson• “A nation is imagined because the members of even the

smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members.”

• An analysis of nation building projects and their relationship to print media.

• “It is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”

Taiwan Expedition (1874)

The First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895)

The First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895)

Russo Japanese War (1904-1905)

The Boxer Rebellion (1900)

The Russo Japanese War (1904-1905)