My Take | What do we mean when we say the word China?
- The Chinese communist leadership wants to date precisely the Xia, Shang and Zhou eras, but personally I am happy with just the Zhou, from which Confucius said he learned everything
However, Chinese archaeologists have been proudly exploring a huge site at Shuanghuaishu, in central Henan, which they claim proves, once and for all, that China is more than 5,300 years old. Of course, it all depends on what you mean by “China”.
Some writers, when they want to say something disparaging about China, may preface their criticism by calling it “the Middle Kingdom”, with all its connotations of insularity, arrogance and ignorance.
But that’s just a common misconception. To native speakers, Zhongguo today has no connotation of kingdom or empire; it’s just the “Chinese nation”. For them, Zhong means Chinese, rather than “middle”. This modern meaning traces back at least to the early republican period and the May Fourth Movement after the collapse of the Qin dynasty.
In this sense, perhaps you can say modern China is younger than the US and Australia. Bill Hayton, a British journalist, has argued in The Invention of China, that Zhongguo with its borders, citizens and national interests, is a relatively recent concept, dating from a period straddling the turn of the 20th century.
Well, that’s true as far as it goes. But then, you can say the same about the modern unified Germany of Bismarck and Italy of Garibaldi. Or modern Israel (May 14, 1948), which is arguably just 17 months older than communist China (October 1, 1949). Or modern Turkey, which was the outcome of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and of which Hayton himself cited as a parallel example of modern China as a result of the Qin collapse. But except for oddballs, few people would say the European countries were “young”, so why the double standard when it comes to debating China’s age?
One reason, I think, is the perverse motive of countering the contemporary Chinese communist narrative of national unity and longevity: if contemporary Chinese leaders want to claim they have inherited the oldest country in the world, we will show just how young it really is. Certainly, the history of Chinese communism has helped make the meaning and age of “China” problematic.
