Chinese nationalism in the early twentieth century was primarily based on anti-Manchurism, an ideology that was prevalent among Chinese revolutionaries from late nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century. After Qing's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, reformers and intellectuals debated how to strengthen the nation, the discussion of which centered on the issue of race. Liang Qichao, a late Qing reformist who participated in the Hundred Days' Reform of 1898, contended that the boundary between Han and Man must be erased ("ping Man-Han zhi jie"). Liang's thought was based on the idea of racial competition, a concept originating from social Darwinism that believed only superior races would survive whereas the inferior races were bound to extinct. Liang attributed the decline of China to the Manchu (Qing) rulers, who treated the Han as an "alien race" and imposed a racial hierarchy between the Han and the Manchus while ignoring the threat of imperial powers. Liang's critique of the Qing court and the Man-Han relations laid the foundation for anti-Manchuism, an ideology that early Republican revolutionaries advocated in their efforts to overthrow the Qing dynasty and found a new Republic. In his writing “Revolutionary Army,” Zou Rong, an active Chinese revolutionary at the turn of the twentieth century, demanded a revolution education for the Han people who were suffering from the oppression of the Manchu rule. He argued that China should be a nation of the orthodox Han Chinese and no alien race shall rule over them. According to Zou, the Han Chinese, as the descendants of the Yellow Emperor, must overthrow the Manchu rule to restore their legitimacy and rights. Wang Jingwei, a Chinese revolutionary who later became an important figure in the Kuomintang, also believed that the Manchus were an inferior race. Wang contended that a state consisting of a single race would be superior to those multiracial ones. Most of the Republican revolutionaries agreed that preserving the race was vital to the survival of the nation. Since the Han had asserted its dominant role in Chinese nationalism, the Manchus had to be either absorbed or eradicated. Historian Prasenjit Duara summarized this by stating that the Republican revolutionaries primarily drew on the international discourse of "racist evolutionism" to envision a "racially purified China."