Contesting Indigeneity: Sun, Dai, Chiang and the Diplomatic Translation of KMT Legitimacy in 1920s China

Purpose: This article examines how claims to ‘indigenous’ legitimacy were contested, narrowed and reformulated within the Kuomintang (中國國民黨; KMT) and how that reconstructed political language was translated into diplomacy in the 1920s China. Rather than treating Confucian political vocabulary as a stable cultural inheritance, it argues that culturally resonant concepts functioned as a flexible political repertoire shaped by intra-party struggle, ideological authorisation and diplomatic adaptation . Methods: Combining the discourse-historical approach with conceptual history, the article draws on Chinese- and English-language personal writings, party texts, speeches, diplomatic declarations, parliamentary records and treaty documents. It traces how political language moved across ideological, organisational and diplomatic settings . Findings: The article shows that KMT diplomacy in the late 1920s is best understood not simply as a shift in external alignment, but as the diplomatic reformulation of contested legitimacy through the procedural idioms of treaty revision, sovereign equality, tariff autonomy, legal revision and recognised interstate negotiation . Originality/Value: It reframes ‘indigenous diplomacy’ as a politically contested and historically reassembled repertoire rather than a self-evident cultural essence .