Reddit reviews Construction of Chinese Nationalism in the Early 21st Century: Domestic Sources and International Implications

There are entire books on Chinese nationalism that I would recommend you seek out, but I'll try to sketch a useful answer for you.

I don't think we could point to a unified response among Chinese nationalists to this question. Different contexts and the passage of time has meant that there are different types of Chinese nationalists, who themselves might disagree on everything but the existence of a Chinese nation. Consider, as an example, anti-traditionalists like Qian Xuantong who thought China would be strengthened by abolishing its "backward" language and replacing it with something more practical (like Esperanto according to Qian) and then consider nationalists today (like Xi Jinping) who invoke Confucianism in trying to construct an essentialist Chinese national identity:

> "The honor and shame of an individual is related with that of the nation," Sha said. "This goes back to the time of Confucius, when Chinese were taught to protect the honor of the nation. Society is a complicated network, and we play our roles as members of a collective unit, so this is natural for us."

source)

 

Qian Xuantong represents those anti-traditionalist nationalists who blamed China's humiliation largely on cultural differences--a backwards language, Confucian social structures, feudalism, and non-scientific ways of thinking. This anti-traditionalism was the common sentiment among leaders of the May Fourth Movement and New Culture Movement. Mao is difficult to pin down on this issue, in my assessment, but here is an early writing of his that follows along these lines:

> It is not that basically we have no strength; the source of our impotence lies in our lack of practice. For thousands of years the Chinese people of several hundred millions have all led a life of slaves. Only one person — the 'emperor'— was not a slave, or rather one could say that even he was the slave of 'heaven'. When the emperor was in control of everything, we were given no opportunity for practice.

 

Though the Manchus would soon be incorporated by the ROC as one of China's five major ethnic groups, Sun Yat-sen at one point also blamed the ruling Manchus of the Qing dynasty for China's backwardness: China could not respond effectively to European imperial powers because it was ruled by corrupt and backward barbarians. If only the Chinese people could shrug off the Manchu yoke, China would be able to restore itself to its former glory. This Han-centric nationalism, as you might expect, runs very much counter to the Chinese nationalism we see today which emphasizes the territorial integrity of China and the ethnic harmony and brotherhood of China's various ethnic groups.


 

This leads me to the next view, which claims the "century of humiliation" occurred predominantly because foreign powers were naturally (because they were capitalist) aggressive and exploitative whereas Qing China was not. For example, imperial powers plied the Chinese people with opium and their addiction to it meant they were unable to deal with the Europeans and Japanese. Consider this line from Mao's famous speech "The Chinese People Have Stood Up!":

> The Chinese have always been a great, courageous and industrious nation; it is only in modern times that they have fallen behind. And that was due entirely to oppression and exploitation by foreign imperialism and domestic reactionary governments. For over a century our forefathers never stopped waging unyielding struggles against domestic and foreign oppressors, including the Revolution of 1911 led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, our great forerunner in the Chinese revolution. (Compare this Mao quote to the one above!)

Nationalist scholars today have echoed this sentiment when pushing back against claims by Western scholars that the Qing was an aggressive, expansionist empire. An English explanation here.

For communists, this also fits in nicely with Leninist explanations for imperialism which sought to place imperialism as the highest manifestation of capitalism.


In any case, there are other explanations I have not touched on; Chinese nationalism is so virulent today that there are probably some pretty half-baked strains out there on internet forums with their own explanations as to why China was humiliated for a century.