Nationality emerged with the establishment of the world system formed by western modern nation-state. It is a legal concept based on the principle of national sovereignty and sovereign equality, which is used to distinguish different nationals or citizens. In modern China, historically, the first nationality law, which was named as Nationality Ordinance, was enacted by the Qing government. The direct incentive to draw up Nationality Ordinance was the desire of the Qing government to provide extended protection for overseas Chinese. This historical background determined that the majority of the academic researches in legal circle about it focused on the relationship between nationality law and Chinese from a single perspective of overseas Chinese affairs policy. However, from the historical perspective of legal history, the enactment of the first nationality law marked the beginning of the transformation of Qing Dynasty from a traditional dynastic state to a modern nation-state, which might have a more profound significance. From the perspective of state construction, the construction of national identity is a crucial part of modern state construction. The significant difference between the modern states and the ancient states is that the modern states have a unified central government, defined national territory and a legible national identity. In traditional Chinese cognition, people only know Tianxia, but do not understand the meaning of state; internally, they claim themselves to be subjects rather than citizens. Nationality legislation is concerned with the legal qualification of modern national identity. In this sense, the enactment of Qing Nationality Ordinance could be regarded as a landmark event of the national construction in modern China. At that time, out of passively adapting to the political operation logic of modern state and considering to actively solve the ruling crisis, the late Qing government tried to legislate national identity in the trouble of internal and foreign affairs. However, without construction of a necessary national stability, this legislative attempt was doomed to fail under the background of unresolved existential crisis. The substance of this ordinance was still far from the mature nationality law of modern countries as well. Although the legislative attempt of Qing Nationality Ordinance was not successful, it objectively promoted the germination of modern national identity consciousness. In China, the household registration system is always be used in field of population management and people only have the identity under a household identity rather than having the identity as an individual. The nationality law would provide authority and legitimacy to individual identity. From household registration to nationality, from subject to citizen, the traditional Confucian ethical order was replaced by the modern legal logic of rights and obligations. Qing Nationality Ordinance was not only concerned with the establishment of the legal identity of the Chinese, but also carried a foreshadowing of the rise of the modern Chinese state.