Reading from a postcolonial perspective the historical experience of a French educational establishment for Chinese youth in the nineteen twenties (the so-called Institut franco-chinois de Lyon), this paper highlights the coincidence between the inscription of China in global modernity and the spread of Chinese national imaginary. It tries to question the discursive connection between the Western colonial project of “civilizing mission” applied here to the scientific education of new Chinese elite and, in this context, the shaping of a peculiar Chinese national subject. This article understands this institution as an utopian synecdoche of China being simultaneously dressed in the clothes of Chineseness and (Western) modernity. In this training school where students endeavored to become intellectuals and scientists fashioned by the methods, the values and the epistemologies of the French academic realm, in this place where students become familiar with ‘modern’ leisure and sports like football, tennis, cinema, snooker and so on, between those walls where students have to learn how to behave as ‘civilized/westernized’ modern (wo)men, China as a cultural, ethnic and national identity referent is paradoxically constantly mentioned in the discourse of both the students and the initiators of this educational institution. The experience of this institute appears to be a relevant case study to shed light on the intimate relationship between the feeling of nationality and the desire to become modern.