I agree with your first paragraph, but would like to add that it came into effect early in the 20th century. After Britons had been migrating for 400 years to the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia.

And liberation didn't come to the Chinese when western ideologies reached it. The first western ideology to reach China was colonialism. Nationalism and communism came in the 20th century, from western educated Chinese like Sun Yat Sun.