W Hat Is China?

W h a t Is C hina? 9 % WHAT IS China? £ l % % Territory, Ethnicity, Culture, and History W G E ZHAOGUANG Translated, by MICHAEL GIBBS HILL THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2 0 1 8 Copyright © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved P rinted in the U nited States o f America First printing of this book was aided by a grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation *°r International Scholarly Exchange. FlrStP^ I l hed in.G^ neSeâsH^ ^ h o n gguo;Jiangyu,minzu, w y u ts I m . ^ XfbSSflg*) y O xford University Press (China) Ltd., Hong Kong, 2014. Libr, of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ge, Zhaoguang, 1950_ author. | H ill, Michael Title-Wi, • (Mlchacl Gibbs), translator. G eZ h a m a? : êrÛO^y, culture, and history/ Zhaoguang; translated by Michael Gibbs Hill Description- Ca^h He Wei 2honSS“°- English University Press, *aS8achuse“s = The Belknap Press ofHarvard Identifiers: LCGM <> U^CS bibliographical references and index. Subjects: LCSH: China—FT^ ^ 9 ^ |ISBN 978o674737143 (alk. paper) Chinese Attitudes. I ChinTT characterîcs, Chinese. | I Ghina-Civihzat,on. | China-Boundaries. | Classification- LCC LC record available ? G44913 2018 1 DDC 9 5 > - to 3 a ltps://lccn.Ioc.gov/2017035842 CONTENTS Preface vii Translator’s Introduction lx Introduction: On the Historical Formation of “China” and the Dilemma of Chinese Identity 1 1. Worldviews: From “AlI-under-Heaven” in Ancient China to the “Myriad States” in the Modern World 28 2. Borders: On “Chinese” Territory 5° 3- Ethnicity: Including the “Four Barbarians” in “China”? 64 4- History: Chinese Culture from a Long-Term Perspective 95 5- Peripheries: How China, Korea, and Japan Have Understood One Another since the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 122 6. Practical Questions: Will Cultural Differences between China and the West Lead to Conflict? U4 Afterword *49 Notes z53 Index *93 PREFACE This short book discusses several questions: What is “China”? How did modern China emerge from ancient China? What challenges does this “Middle Kingdom,” with its many national groups, complex cultures, and vast territories, now face? (Here I should point out that, with the excep tion of Chapter 3, a Japanese version of this book was published in Feb ruary 2014 by Iwanami Shoten under the title Chugoku saiko: Sono rydiki, minzoku, bunka [Rethinking China: Its territories, peoples, and cultures] as part of their Iwanami gendai bunko series.) A discussion of these questions must also take up several important keywords related to “China.” They include worldviews, borders, ethnicity, history, peripheries, and practical questions. The questions related to each keyword can be summarized as follows: First, did ideas from ancient China about “All-under-Heaven” become the worldview of modern China? If not, how might that happen? This problem involves how China in the present day understands the traditional tribute system and how it approaches the modern international order. Second, did the “frontiers become the borders of modern China? If not, how might that happen? This discussion can help us to understand a wide variety of debates about national territories. Third, as China has moved since the early modern Vlll Preface period from the worldview of “All-under-Heaven” to a view that recog nized the myriad states (wanguo) across the globe, how has it brought the “Four Barbarians” (si Yi) (a discussion of the translation of this term is contained in the Translator’s Introduction) into China and worked to bring a structure to a vast China and Chinese nation? This discussion can help us to understand why Chinese people still hold ideas about a so-called greater China. It can also help us to understand why many scholars feel forced to discuss the history of various national groups in China solely in terms of Sinicization or acculturation. Fourth, how did what we now call Chinese culture take shape across history? Is this Chinese culture singular or multiple? Fifth, when in the early modern era did the sense of mutual trust between China and its peripheries- especially other countries in East Asia-disappear? How did the states of East Asia begin to grow apart from one another? This discussion will help us to gam a new understanding of international relations against the backdrop of the larger transformations of early modern East Asia. Sixth, I ask, from the perspective of cultural conflicts: Will the cultural re sources of traditional China become a force for reason that will bring global peace and regional stability? Although all of these questions are discussed in relation to “China ” it is also the case that, when we discuss China, we also touch on its neigh bors in Asia, such as japan and South Korea (as well as North Korea and Vietnam) and even, at times, the Western world. Living in this mutually connected and interdependent world, we hope that reflections on history W11 lead to rational thinking that will restrain deeply felt nationalism and lead to mutual accommodation and respect. I hope that this book will allow me to discuss with readers some of the great questions that affect Of course, I must also say that, as a historian, my discussion of these ues will always begin from a historical perspective. This is because I hope to achieve what I mention in the Introduction: to apply a knowledge W ory to understand oneself and to apply a knowledge'of history to arnve at common ground with neighbors on our borders. TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION The question raised by this short book, What Is China?, matters more each day. The lines dividing what or who is or is not part of China or Chi nese culture or civilization have anchored politics and ordered history in East Asia for centuries. This last statement draws a simple, pointed question: How do we de fine “China” and “Chinese”? Since the boundaries of the People’s Re public of China, the largest of the states that lay claim to a shared history with imperial China or to what is called Chinese culture, draw together numerous peoples of different ethnicities, faiths, and mother tongues, how do we make sense of this combination of different groups in the twenty-first century? Ge Zhaoguang argues that the meanings of China and Chinese culture regularly change and avoid a single definition, and that honest discussion of these different meanings and how they arose gives us a better route to understanding both historical and contemporary China. He puts forward his solution as an alternative to what he sees as writings that are too eager to deconstruct and perhaps dismiss the idea of China as a historical entity altogether. Ge’s wide-ranging discussion will appeal to readers interested not only in Chinese history or Asian studies hut also international relations, global history, and current affairs. What X Translator’s Introduction Is China? is the third book by Ge that has been translated in English; the present book and other writings have also been translated into Japanese. What Is China? takes up many of the points Ge discussed in Here in “China” I Dwell {Zhai zi Zhongguo, 2011) but addresses a wider audience.1 Several of the chapters began as lectures and take a more conversational tone. The political sensitivity of the questions taken up in What Is China?— even in historical scholarship—made headlines in the spring of 2015, when a long article published in an official journal of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences attacked the so-called New Qing History, taking par ticular aim at scholars from the United States who have written histories of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) that emphasized the interplay of ethnicity, language, and politics during the roughly two and a half centuries of Qing rule-2 Many of these researchers used not only Chinese-language archival sources but also sources in Manchu, Mongolian, and other languages. Their scholarship challenged many received truths about China from the seventeenth century down to the present, including the idea that the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty had assimilated into Chinese culture or, more to the point, were assimilated by Chinese culture—to a high degree. The debate over the New Qing History shows how the legacy of Qing rule continues to touch on sensitive political issues, especially the status of Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Tibet, and the connections between the people who live there and the countries of Central Asia and the Middle East. As the PRC moves to increase trade and interaction with Central Asia and the Middle East, these issues will persist. Ge Zhaoguang answers the question What Is China? through the same means that have made him a renowned and widely read historian, namely his use of an astonishing range of sources that go beyond the usual con fines of intellectual history (or sixiang shi) as it was practiced in China from the time ,t emerged in the first half of the twentieth century as a free- i n t e t T T r 80"7 °f S“ y WOTk- GC HaS argU6d f° r SOme th * tellectual history ,n China should take greater account of writings and almanTc!'"d \ d °UtSi<le eStablished such as imperial almanacs and calendars, manuals for builders and the trades, and espe- Translator’s Introduction xi What Is China? also makes no secret of Ge’s impatience with the way so-called Western theory, especially histories and critiques of the nation state, have been used in studies of China written in English, Chinese, and other languages. The arrival of different waves of theory and concep tual frameworks in Sinophone academic institutions has been discussed extensively.4 Here it is enough to say that Ge focuses on writing histories of China that engage with North American, Western European, Japanese, and other theories and conceptual categories but do not necessarily need to take those ideas as a starting point.

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