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179 Nationalism and Pragmatism The Revolutionists in German Qingdao (1897–­1914) Jianjun Zhu German Qingdao (1897–­ 1914) was the urban area of the German Kiautschou Leasehold (Jiao’ao Leasehold in Chinese), which was occupied by the Germans in 1897 and was leased under force from Shandong Province of China in 1898. Recent scholarship on German Qingdao has focused on the complexity of the colonial society in German Qingdao and highlighted various kinds of response, resistance, and negotiation of the Chinese against German colonial rule, which based analysis on different Chinese groups.1 So far, varying degrees of academic interest in Chinese officials, businessmen, and coolies have brought more or less light to understanding Chinese responses to German colonialism . Nevertheless, there is one social group that has received disproportionately little attention, namely, the revolutionists in German Qingdao. Clearly, the German colonial authority in Qingdao supported the Qing government before and during the Revolution of 1911 when the Han Chinese revolutionists strived to overthrow the government that was founded and ruled by Manchu emperors. However, German Qingdao was not beyond the reach of the revolutionists. From 1906 to 1908, some concealed revolutionists resided in German Qingdao and undertook revolutionary activities secretly. They were expelled in 1908 due to exposure of their identities. In the next three years, the German colonial administration did successfully keep Qingdao quiet in general from organized revolutionary actions against the Qing government, even during the 1911 Revolution that eventually resulted in the fall of the Qing Dynasty. But then in 1912, soon after the Republic of China was founded, German Qingdao was visited by the revolutionists’ leader Sun Yat-­ sen, accompanied by several of the revolutionists who had been in Qingdao during 1905 through 1908. Those revolutionists’ responses to German colonialism are to be examined in this essay. German colonialism in Shandong could be summed up into two main 180    German Colonialism Revisited types of activities. On one hand, German Qingdao was built to be an exhibition of German achievements and was characterized by German features and modern techniques, as the German colonial authority in Qingdao resolved to create a modern and effective “model colony” to showcase “the special German colonialism with scientific planning, professional implementation, and government supervision.”2 On the other hand, the Germans expanded from Qingdao into the interior of Shandong, seeking railway-­ building and mining privileges. The two types mingled together, making the German image among the Chinese very complicated. Furthermore, the degree of the German colonial power’s involvement in each type of activity was not balanced and fixed during Germany ’s seventeen years of presence in Qingdao. In fact, the previously vigorously forced German colonial expansion policy began to move toward a cultural policy since 1906 in view of the Qing government’s abolition of the imperial examination system and Chinese intellectuals’ enthusiasm for Western learning. It showed clear changes since 1909, when Qingdao began to be planned and developed more as a cultural center and became more significant for demonstrative and educational purposes.3 This essay gives attention to the revolutionists’ response to both types of German colonial activities and the change of German colonialism in Qingdao and Shandong. The revolutionists’ responses to German colonialism were more complicated than those of other groups, given that the revolutionists entered German Qingdao not to make a living or make a profit, but to prepare for their ambitious national agenda. Therefore any examination of the interactions between the revolutionists in German Qingdao and the Germans shouldn’t be conducted only in light of factors within German Qingdao; instead the revolutionists’ overall agenda outside the leasehold should also be taken into consideration. This essay tries to do so from the perspective of nationalism. The rise of Chinese nationalism is generally regarded as a significant response of China to imperialistic aggression at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, and nationalism is considered “an undercurrent during troubled times.”4 Nevertheless, nationalism is not a single, unified force and “is rarely the nationalism of the nation, but rather marks the site where different representations of the nation contest and negotiate with each other.”5 Furthermore, the nationalistic view of the same force also negotiates with its past and future and evolves along with changes in time and space. Clearly, the Chinese revolutionists at the turn of the twentieth century formulated “nationalism” on an ethnic base that “called for a specifically Han Chinese revolution against the Manchu Qing”6 so as to establish...

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