Historical analyses of the relationship between the locale and the Chinese nation have often attempted to place the development of a Chinese national identity into some sort of linear framework that leads to nationalism and nation-building. Beginning in the 1990s, however, some analysts argued that local and provincial identities have much to do with how the nation was imagined and that the local was often intimately connected with the national. Indeed, viewing local identity as historically dynamic has forced us to realize that questions of history, national values, and Chinese identity are not drawn from a single narrative. As one searches through the past of modern China, it quickly becomes apparent that the form and substance of what the nation meant to the Chinese people differed from place to place. One of the most crucial questions that many local communities faced in the first half of the twentieth century was how to maintain a meaningful local identity while being committed to building a strong nation.

In turning our attention to Xiamen, one is immediately struck by how the complexity of the relationship between the city and its overseas émigrés influenced this relationship. Like many other Chinese cities, important political and economic forces such as warlordism, imperialism, and nationalism certainly affected the relationship between Xiamen and the nation. In Xiamen, however, ties to the nation, both economic and political, were in large part managed and overseen by a group of people that had spent long periods of time overseas — the city's Overseas Chinese (Huaqiao). Drawn from both the city and the villages scattered across southern Fujian (Minnan), the southern Fujianese or Hokkien had dominated seaborne commerce with Southeast Asia (Nanyang) for centuries. This tradition of maritime trade also meant that the ways in which questions of national identity were negotiated by city residents was, in turn, affected by their international experiences. Much of what can be termed a “Xiamen identity” grew out of a mixture of a dynamic entrepreneurial culture and a cosmopolitanism that had been born in southern Fujian but raised in Southeast Asia.

Introduction

Over centuries, China-Southeast Asian interactions have been best manifested through the tributary system from above and the Overseas Chinese or Chinese Overseas from below. However, over decades after World War II, the linkages of the two were overshadowed by the imagined China threat on the one hand and suspicions of the loyalty of Overseas Chinese on the other because of the Cold War and nation-building processes. Only with the end of Cold War and the rapid rise of China, China and Southeast Asia have started to be reconnected with each other substantially and at an unprecedented rate. From the dusty past, the long-neglected prominent figures like Admiral Zheng He and Dr Sun Yat-sen have eventually been rediscovered for that purpose. Zheng He's case serves perfectly to refute the China threat, while Sun Yat-sen's legacy proudly exhibits how Nanyang and Nanyang Chinese contribute to the making of a modern China. In Southeast Asia, neglected memorial halls and temples are hence renovated and rebuilt on the dusty and even damaged sites with government funding and private donations. Likewise, there have been symposiums, films and exhibitions on these subjects. Such development is an amazing contrast with the socio-political landscape just a few decades ago.

How and why were Sun Yat-sen and the 1911 Revolution represented in China and Southeast Asia under changing situations? How and why were they imagined and commemorated differently in different periods? Based on the reports in the People's Daily from 1946 to 2010 in China, the chapter, while not studying Sun Yat-sen and the 1911 Revolution per se, tries to construct and reconstruct their commemoration and representation in China and Southeast Asia and their dynamics.

Sun Yat-sen and Nanyang

Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary activities and legacy in Nanyang should at least include three aspects: (1) directly, his own physical involvements; (2) indirectly, his fellow compradors' activities under his leadership; and (3) the activities after the 1911 Revolution.