Nation-building in China and Turkey :|an analysis of the thought of Sun Yat-sen and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in comparative perspective

Abstract

The thesis is about the 'revolutionary' history of China and Turkey, which orients towards the thoughts of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk(1881-1938) and Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) on nationalism and socio-political change. Their principles are analyzed through a reading of primary sources, which are the writings, speeches, declarations and letters of these respective leaders. The thesis searches for mainly three questions that are answered by these two nationalist leaders. Firstly, "how could their 'nations' strengthen and 'modernize' themselves while preserving their distinctive identity?". Secondly, "how could they inject the consciousness of being a nation to the people that they had inherited, and around which values could they 'unify' the people from which they attempted to construct a nation?". Thirdly, "what would be the political role of the people after the revolution against the monarch had succeeded?" and "What did they really mean by the principle 'people's sovereignty' that they had made frequent use in order to legitimize their own role before the eyes of the people?" Answering these questions particularly, the thesis concludes that although the modernization perspectives of these two respective leaders differ, both of them as the leaders of two 'nations', which are 'orientalized' by the West, attempted to grant their nations with an 'autonomous voice'. They expected their nations to become equal partners of the nation-state system of the contemporary world.