The very location of Chongqing itself was also important in changing China’s sense of its own geography. For years, the west of the country, particularly Sichuan province, had been at the outer edge of what was considered to be China, and had never been properly under Nationalist control. Now it was the center of government operations while the eastern heartland was under occupation. Rather as the invasion of another borderland region, Manchuria, in 1931, had helped to stimulate a much stronger sense of centralizing nationalism, the forced move west turned the government’s mind to solidifying
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