{"id":361,"date":"2026-07-01T04:11:03","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T04:11:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/housingnewsamerica.com\/?p=361"},"modified":"2026-07-01T04:11:03","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T04:11:03","slug":"who-is-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housingnewsamerica.com\/?p=361","title":{"rendered":"Who Is China?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

To many in the West, China\u2019s rise is an indisputable fact. Commentators celebrate its success in language not seen since an earlier generation of political tourists gushed over Mao\u2019s China: in February, after returning from a visit to the country, the investor and columnist Steven Rattner averred that China\u2019s \u201cmodel of state-directed capitalism\u201d had helped produce \u201cthe colossus that dominates global manufacturing while making extraordinary progress in fast-growing, technology-oriented fields that have long been American led.\u201d The economic historian Adam Tooze declared last year that the country \u201cis the master key to understanding modernity.\u201d Others seem resigned to asking narrow, technocratic questions: Will its military be ready to invade Taiwan next year, or a few years down the road? Can its authoritarian political model provide a stable succession when Chinese leader Xi Jinping dies? Can it overcome sanctions and produce cutting-edge chips? In doing so, they treatthe permanency of the People\u2019s Republic of China as a foregone conclusion.<\/p>\n

Read more Heartland vs. Rimland<\/a><\/p>\n

What\u2019s often lost in these discussions is that the country\u2019s own leadersimplicitly doubt the very concept of their nation. Government officials and many ordinary people vehemently proclaim the sanctity of China\u2019s borders, even as many of its border regions are run under a state of near-martial law. Official narratives, meanwhile, forbid a coherent explanation of how China obtained these lands. As part of a broader intellectual decay, many of the country\u2019s brightest minds have exiled themselves, either through inner emigration and self-censorship or by leaving the country altogether.<\/p>\n

China shouldn\u2019t have much of an identity crisis. It boasts an ancient civilization and culture instantly recognizable around the world. Its intellectual inheritance\u2014rich traditions in martial arts, medicine, philosophy, and religion\u2014is widely admired and imitated in global popular culture and the high arts. But Chinese leaders behave as if they were running an upstart nation with no history\u2014one that has to demand that visitors refer to it as \u201cthe People\u2019s Republic\u201d and repeat that there is only \u201cone China,\u201d located within sacred and immutable borders. The country today \u201cis a multiheaded creature of no certain or reliable identity,\u201d Xu Guoqi writes in his new book, The Idea of China: A Contested History<\/em>. \u201cIf there were a clear or reliable identity, today\u2019s leaders would not be so obsessed with trying to impose one.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the nearly 15 years since Xi took power, in 2012, he has tried to define China by fusing the glories of communism\u2014sacrifice, duty, perseverance\u2014and some elements of traditional culture, especially filial piety and obedience. But by emptying both of these ideologies of their subversive kernels\u2014their emphasis on social justice and the right to disobedience, to name two\u2014Xi has failed to construct a convincing vision of what China stands for. It remains unclear whether Xi\u2019s version of China has any values beyond holding on to the territories of the old Qing empire and keeping the Chinese Communist Party in power, or whether the CCP\u2019s project is capacious enough to accommodate the country\u2019s historical hybridity.<\/p>\n

To Xu, the party\u2019s answer\u2014building a \u201chouse of cards\u201d atop the country\u2019s multifarious history\u2014could be its downfall. In the Soviet Union, a similar attempt to build a modern nation-state on the foundations of an empire fell apart after its leaders could not resolve the inherent contradictions of such a project. The CCP, The Idea of China <\/em>suggests, might meet a similar fate if it does not change course.<\/p>\n

The political and economic success of the last four decades will likely prevent the People\u2019s Republic from collapsing like the Soviet Union. Still, Xu\u2019s book should make one skeptical about the assumption that the China that exists today is the China that will exist long into the future. Instead, Xu reminds readers of the different possible paths China might have taken, and the consequences of its not doing so. At its most powerful, the idea of China was civilizational, helping hold together multiethnic empires and vast territories without extreme violence. But when it relied on force, China became brittle and unstable.<\/p>\n

Over the past century, China has solved its material shortcomings, emerging as a global economic and scientific powerhouse. But its national identity remains as troubled as it was when the first Chinese nation-state was founded. This presents the world with a worrying question: whether a country that is so uncomfortable in its own skin can be a pillar of stability as so many hope, or whether it is more likely to become a source of global instability, projecting its anxieties and neuroses onto the rest of the world. Beijing claims to aspire to the former, but its actions at home and, increasingly, abroad suggest it may be headed toward the latter.<\/p>\n

WHAT\u2019S IN A NAME<\/h3>\n

Part of the confusion over China\u2019s identity originates in its history as a cultural rather than a political idea. The Chinese word for China is zhongguo<\/em>, or \u201cmiddle kingdom.\u201d Zhongguo<\/em> is an ancient term, but until the nineteenth century, it had almost never been used to describe the country that outsiders called China, Cina, Cathay, or Kitay. Instead, Chinese officials and writers called their lands by the name of the dynasty that ran it: the Great Qing or the Great Ming, for example. When they referred to their ancient civilization, they used different terms: huaxia<\/em> or zhonghua<\/em>. Those terms rarely changed over the centuries, but the name of the territory varied depending on who was in power because it was the ruling family that controlled the lands and could call it what they wanted.<\/p>\n

Europeans of the early modern era were perplexed by this state of affairs. In the sixteenth century, for example, Galeote Pereira, a Portuguese soldier-merchant, wrote: \u201cWe are wont to call this country China, and the people Chins,\u201d but local people said they had never heard of any such name. Matters came to a head in the nineteenth century, when the rise of the modern nation-state forced the ruling Qing dynasty to deal with other countries as equals rather than as barbarians or vassals. Outsiders might have called the Qing\u2019s territories \u201cChina\u201d or some similar variant, but the empire\u2019s officials rejected the term. In their eyes, there was no country of China; there was only the Great Qing, and some of their diplomats insisted\u2014unsuccessfully\u2014that foreigners call them by that name.<\/p>\n

For Liang Qichao, the most famous reformer of the early twentieth century, this confusion was shameful. Even though Chinese people had a long history, he lamented in a 1901 essay, \u201cto this day they do not have a name for their country.\u201d He rejected the name \u201cChina\u201d because it derived from the country\u2019s first dynasty, the Qin. (The word \u201cChina\u201d likely ventured into European languages in the sixteenth century through the Portuguese borrowing of a Persian term, which itself came from a Sanskrit word derived from the Qin dynasty.) Using it meant using the same name for the country that one royal family called its territories two thousand years ago. It made about as much sense as using the dynastic names Tang, Song, Ming, or Qing to describe the country\u2014these were just names bequeathed by rulers. In the end, Liang figured that \u201cChina\u201d would have to do. But until the fall of the dynasty, a decade later, officials rejected it.<\/p>\n

The same question continues to linger a century later. \u201cThe People\u2019s Republic\u201d is little more than mid-twentieth-century communist nomenclature, emphasizing that China is a communist state. Simply referring to the country as \u201cChina\u201d could imply that others might rule it.<\/p>\n

BORDER PATROL<\/h3>\n

The Chinese government does take pains to show itself as a multicultural state in the same way that many countries make a pageantry of different races and cultures in their public messaging. When China applies to the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization for certain cultural practices to be recognized as \u201cintangible cultural heritage,\u201d it always includes minority cultural practices, such as Mongolian throat singing, Tibetan opera, or Uyghur Muqam musical suites. That can\u2019t, however, mask the fact that these cultures are almost all in borderlands that were not part of China for most of its history. In fact, Chinese dynasties never controlled the territories that today make up the three northeastern provinces often collectively referred to as Manchuria (Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang), rarely controlled any parts of Mongolia, and only occasionally sent expeditions to Tibet or the parts of Central Asia now called Xinjiang. Control, when it happened, was the exception, not the rule.<\/p>\n

More typical were the borders of China\u2019s penultimate dynasty, the Ming (1368\u20131644), which encompassed lands from roughly today\u2019s Beijing in the north to Hong Kong in the south, and from the eastern coastal areas to the Sichuan basin in the west. On older maps of China, Westerners called this \u201cChina Proper\u201d because it was where almost all Chinese people lived and where the country\u2019s battles, fables, myths, and stories had arisen. It accounts for more than 60 percent of China\u2019s current territory.<\/p>\n

Read more Why America Gets Africa Wrong<\/a><\/p>\n

China\u2019s borders ballooned under the Qing. The dynasty was run by the Manchu, who conquered the Ming dynasty in the seventeenth century, and then combined their knowledge of the borderlands, the economic power of the heartland, and the new technologies of modern firearms to create a military juggernaut. The Qing almost doubled the territory the Ming had controlled, absorbing Mongolia, Tibet, and huge swaths of Central Asia, which they called Xinjiang, or \u201cnew border.\u201d Eventually, after the Qing fell, in 1912, the Manchu areas near the Korean Peninsula, along with the rest of the empire, became part of the Republic of China, putting them under the control of ethnic Han Chinese. In 1949, the republic\u2019s armies lost the civil war and fled to Taiwan; the CCP inherited the republic\u2019s borders minus the province of Outer Mongolia, which broke free, became a Soviet satellite, and is now the independent country of Mongolia\u2014the only minority region that was able to escape the old empire.<\/p>\n

China shouldn\u2019t have much of an identity crisis.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Before they took power, Communist Party leaders had said the lands the Qing had conquered should choose their own way\u2014and independence was fine. Communist leader Mao Zedong, for example, favored independence not only for Mongolians and other minorities but even for his home province, Hunan. In these early years, Mao was inspired by the twin New Culture and May Fourth Movements, embodiments of the seminal intellectual awakening advocating rationalism, liberation, and self-determination, from which the CCPsprang in 1921. Chen Duxiu, one of the party\u2019s principal founders and a luminary of both movements, recognized that democracywas as important to the project of Chinese modernization as technological progress.<\/p>\n

These ideas were only partly adopted by the Nationalists (who ruled from 1912 to 1949), and then mostly rejected by the CCP. Once in power, it adopted the republic\u2019s borders, offering the border regions only a token form of autonomy and recognition of their cultural heritage: a minority might be named the formal head of the region, while the Communist Party secretary\u2014who wielded the real power\u2014was usually Han Chinese.<\/p>\n

The twists and turns in central control over China\u2019s peripheries have never quite been resolved; they have simply assumed new form under the CCP. Festering wounds in the national psyche, they help contextualize movements for independence in Taiwan and autonomy in Hong Kongand their repressionat the hands ofa government that hasall but abandoned its enlightenment-style roots.<\/p>\n

A BRUTAL PAST<\/h3>\n

Linguistic and geographic instability contributedto political instability. One corrective to this problem of national definition might be some sort of political manifesto for the country\u2014in other words, a constitution. But as Xu points out, China has churned through numerous documents that in form were constitutions but in effect were \u201cregulatory legislation, provisional documents, a set of guidelines, or simply lip service that the rulers tweaked and rewrote to better serve the regime.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unstable political structures have in turn produced political violence. \u201cBecause the political culture had not yet stabilized into a system of enduring institutions,\u201d Xu writes, leaders from Chiang Kai-shek, through Mao and Deng Xiaoping, to Xi today have \u201crelied on military intervention to solve political issues and crush dissent.\u201d Chiang launched large-scale military operations to crush opponents, especially the Communists, and unite the country. After a four-year civil war brought them to power in 1949, the Communists killed, by some estimates, two to three million people in an attempt to eliminate the country\u2019s landed gentry, and several million as a result of other political campaigns in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Mao\u2019s successor, Deng, used military force to put down student protests in 1989 and oversaw violent \u201cstrike hard\u201d anticrime campaigns that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of social outcasts. Xi has violently suppressed Chinese civil society, especially in minority regions, and continues to conduct military purges.<\/p>\n

The government tries to paper over almost every aspect of this history by rewriting the record to make it seem as if the Communist Party has ruled China benevolently since 1949, its Han and ethnic minority subjects living in complete harmony. The basic idea is that all people who have ever lived inside the current boundaries of the People\u2019s Republic are now and always have been \u201cChinese.\u201d This applies, most absurdly, to conquering foreign military leaders, including Genghis Khan, whose mausoleum is found in the current region of Inner Mongolia. There, officials lionize him as \u201ca great man of the Chinese people.\u201d<\/p>\n

SUFFERING FROM SUCCESS<\/h3>\n

The Idea of China<\/em> is eminently readable and covers a collection of issues as varied as China\u2019s role in World War I\u00a0and how the state views sports. Xu\u2019s evident ease working across subjects prompts comparisons to Jonathan Spence, the Yale historian who paired macro-level histories of the country with idiosyncratic examinations of narrower but revealing subjects: the story of an ordinary woman\u2019s death in imperial China is one of his classics. The Idea of China<\/em> is an effort at the broad-brush portrait, but unlike Spence\u2019s doorstop, The Search for Modern China<\/em>, Xu\u2019s book is more of an urgent intervention in contemporary debates about China than a comprehensive historical overview.<\/p>\n

Xu is clearly disappointed with how China has turned out. He grew up in rural Anhui Province during the Mao era and came of age at the start of the reform era, when China opened to the world. He studied at Harvard, taught in the United States, and for nearly 20 years has lived and taught in Hong Kong. (The territory\u2019s demise as a center of free-thinking and judicial independence is a leitmotif in the book.) He bemoans how the very idea of China has become tarnished in many parts of the world, a decline he attributes to elites\u2019 centurylong search for national wealth and prosperity rather than an inclusive political system. The CCP, in its dual commitment to economic growth and suppression of dissent, epitomizes these priorities. WhileRattner and Tooze travel to China to marvel at Xiaomi auto factory floors and miles of high-speed rail tracks, inspiring Chinese figures such as the documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming are banned from leaving the country.Butit is hard not to read parts of the book, including a vividly rendered chapter on Zhang Pengchun, the Mencius-quoting diplomat sent by Chiang to the United States and Europe in 1945 to help draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as proof that Chinese culture is not only compatible with a more open political system but contains the seeds of one.<\/p>\n

Mostly, The Idea of China<\/em> is about missed opportunities. The failure, after the Qing fell, of Chinese leaders to heed the insights of New Culture and May Fourth was one. The CCP\u2019s successful pursuit of national prosperity may temporarily shield it from the worst consequences of this refusal. But it has left China hobbled by the same problem that has plagued it since it moved from traditional empire to nation-state: a political system that ultimately relies on violence to coerce its heterogeneoussubjects.<\/p>\n

Prosperity insulates all political systems from hard decisions. That has been the case in China since the ultraviolence of the Mao era gave way to the more rational decision-making and accompanying affluence of the past half century. With growth and faith in the future now flagging, the Xi administration\u2019s answer\u2014injecting token elements of traditional culture to bolster legitimacy\u2014is little more than a clich\u00e9d response drawn from the standard playbook of authoritarian leaders around the world. But under wiser political leadership, the \u201cidea\u201d of a China with a hugely rich, diverse, and multicultural past could be a source of strength rather than insecurity. This idea, of a complex China that far transcends the narrow constraints of the People\u2019s Republic of China, will endure.<\/p>\n

Read more Extreme Weather Will Upend U.S.-China Competition<\/a><\/p>\n

Loading…