The Modern Geopolitical Research

The modern state-building is an unceasingly historical process of seeking rationalization among state, market, society and individual. In this advancement, the centralization of state power structure has destroyed the authoritative pattern of regional separatism and forced jurisdiction to go to central government. Hence the seepage, control and independent expansion of state power going down to the regional society and corresponding resistance against it has became a main struggle in state-building. The two sides launched competition on the ownership and distribution of political authority and on the resources of political identification. The collapse of the Late Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China symbolized the beginning of Chinese modern state-building. In the transition from traditional empire system into modern country, it is extremely important and urgent for China to establish a modern country to keep abreast of the times. From the view of political development, it can be seen that the basic path of Chinese politics is from traditional dynasty politics to modern democratic politics and that two core goals of China nation-building are political democratization and national unification. The central task for modern China's nation-building is to reestablish a nationwide political power center and state system and bring multi-polar regional political powers into the new state system. Since modern times, however, China has been pursuing a democratic politics, which is contradictory with the demand of centralization of central government. That's exactly the contradiction for modern China's nation-building. So the inner-intensities between expectation of local self-government and demand of centralization for nation-building became an important factor influencing Chinese political reform.Regional politicalization is an important feature of modern China during its nation-building process. The so-called regional politicalization means that regional elites and regional political powers take political actions on the basis of economy and culture of the local society, thus forming obvious regional consciousness and political identification and aiming to start nation-building while developing regional politicalization. Regional politicalization deals with the history of modern China's politics from the angle of geographical space (region and state). This kind of spatial characteristic goes far beyond pure geography. Rather, it refers more to the thought and motion which take shape in the practice of local society. Before modern times, the regional society is a self-sufficient living space in economy, accepts Confucianism in culture and in politics approves centralization of monarchy system. After entering into modern times, as a result of the impact of western civilization, the traditional political system of China and the Confucianism gradually declined and finally collapsed. The highly integrated social structure of "culture-society-politics-psychological structure" disintegrated at last. During the transformation towards modern society, regional society has accepted the modern western political thought, formed a political thought different from traditional Confucianism due to the influence of the nationalism, and developed a state-building path of "from the bottom to top". This paper puts the research of regional politicalization into the historical course of modern China's nation-building, then makes deeper analysis on path choice of nation-building and formation of state system of modern China.From the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, with the traditionally political identification crisis and the debacle of political society order, people tended to identify smaller common community for order construction, therefore regional awareness sweeped rapidly. Regional society that combined separation and solidarity justified its independence by western modern political idea while reaping political independence continually. The politicalized regional awareness prompted regional society to seize the power from state, leading to the collapse of national holon-structureeventually and falling into fractal-structure n regional society, hence nation collapsed into society. Then China's nation-building took the same road as western countries did: reconstructing a political unit (central sovereignty) and making efforts to solve and consolidate regional political identification, founding modern national identification through the marriage of many factors such as citizen and nation etc.The paper studies the origin and development of regional politicalization in modern China, involving the interactive relationship between regional politicalization and nation-building, and analyzing it through regional awareness, regional identity and regional political development. The paper believes that during political transformation in modern China, regional politicalization is an important phenomenon of nation-building.During political identity crisis and legitimacy crisis, regional society not only caused different political awareness and regional identity, but also constructed a kind of thought and action in practice. Its task of nation-building was set as Federalism Republicanism, which transformed the core of nation-building from directly founding central political power to institutionally reforming region and grass-roots. It becomes a path choice of nation-building in modern China. In order to explain historical development, character and impact, the paper is arranged as follows:The introduction analyses proceedings and theories on nation-building and regional politics development in modern China, and positions regional politicalization in theory, according to characteristics of political science and question consciousness. In summing up different kinds of perspectives and theories of political transformation in modern China, the paper suggests its core-point and explains its spatiotemporal choice, research approaches and proceedings' origin.Chapter 1 involves the origin and evolvement of regional politicalization, analyses the overall political society construction and character in ancient China and historical role of regional society, studies character and form of modern regional politicalization and discusses the cause of production of regional politicalization. The paper points out that traditional regional society lacks self-consciousness and political independence, therefore it is the affiliation of political system of the "world unifying" .During modern political transformation, regional society gains ideological and political independence, combines modern democracy along with autonomy of western society and regional awareness of ancient China and takes the first step of political modernization.Chapter 2 holds a belief that the centralization of the political fringe is an important feature in the political transformation of modern China, having finished probing into the causes of the collapse of the traditional political system. It examines the rise and growth of regional identification in Guangdong province and comes to conclude that the consciousness wakening from "xiang" to "country" , from " subject" to " citizen " indicates the shaping of modern political identification and as a political mobilization in the course of political transformation of modern China, points out that organizational locality is a short-lived but effective organizing and combined methods leading to ethnic identification and national identification. It also analyzes the profound unity between nation and state, which is covered with the separatism showed by the regional consciousness of modern China apparently.Chapter 3 conducts a survey on the thoughts and actions concerning regional politicalization. In terms of the thoughts, it analyzes the close association between the rise of regional consciousness of modern China and the shaping of modern political value identification; meanwhile, it implores the characteristics of Chen Jiongming's thought characterized by joint province autonomy. In the terms of the proceeding of regional politicalization , it studies, on the one hand, the development, achievement and features of the modernization of regional politicalization in Guangdong Province, and on the other hand, it conducts an analysis on the causes of the failure in regional politicalization through case study, i.e. researches through reviewing political competition between Sun Yatsen and Chen Jiongming in Guangdong province, the fights and differences between joint province autonomy movement and state-building by the party.Chapter 4, focusing on the spring-up of party-state system and the decline of regional politicalization and investigating the evolvement of Sun Yatsen's party ideology and the establishment of the guideline of state-building under the leadership of the KMT party in the 1st representative conference, presents that the spring-up of the party-governed state-building ideology and system indicates the replacement of regional politics by Leninism in terms of ideology and organizational system concerning party, and the gradual decline of regional politicalization with the development and maturation of KMT's the state and the party system. The last chapter analyzes the reason for the decline of regional politicalization.By an analysis of the history of regional politicalization, the last chapter of this paper explores the fundamental characteristics and historic significance of regional popliticalization theoretically and arrives at the conclusion that the understanding of regional politicalization is the key to the understanding of state-building of modern China; that the regional politicalization and sense of regional identity coming into being reshaped the traditional identification model of China as an important subculture related to national identity, and an important ideological resource for the national state-building; that regional politicalization, on the one hand, reflects the quest for political democratization in china's state-building, and on the other hand, presents a new scheme for the state structure of China via a peaceful and institutionalized way to realize the political and national unification. The joint-province movement in 1920s conducted autonomy by each province, providing the basis for the establishment of a federation. Provincial constitutions were made to guarantee the provincial autonomy and political powers and restrict their powers. In this way, a specific vehicle and operational mechanism for federalism were found. As a result, there appeared the co-existence of constitutionalism, republicanism and federalism in China's state-building, in which, the endeavor to establish a modern country and realize political democracy had been interwoven. As a new pattern of political transformation and development in modern China, regional politicalization, although it failed to develop successfully in a bottom-to-top way according to its own logic for various reasons, provides a lot of thoughts and experience of social politicalization of regions and a perspective to understand Chinese politics: that the natural development of regional politcalization is important for the political transformation of China; and that the political development is vital and suitable for China, which takes root in the tradition and reality of China.The paper explores the inner mechanisms of political transformation and state-building by investigating the development of regional politcalization of modern China. However, there are still many questions to be explored, such as the inter-predicament confronting the development of regional politicalization, the value of relationship between central and local power, the historical enlightenment of the regional politicalization for political development of present-day China, etc.