"[W]hat is nationalism? And what nationalism is actually Western invention. Imperial China had no nationalism. Where do they get their ideas of nationalism? Well, they got their ideas of nationalism from the Japanese, which emerged as a national state in the 19. Well, where did the Japanese get their ideas about nationalism, which were then translated into Chinese? They got it from the Germans. So what they imported was a 19th-century version of social Darwinism in which race is of the fundamental basis of nationality and there are very – when you hear Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders talking about cultural pollution, when you talk about the natural affinity of all Chinese people wherever they are, you begin to worry that there is this submerged, and sometimes not even so, some racialist component."
China

January 1, 1970

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