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1 China’s Arduous March to Modernity

      Chinese history is long and complex. It is a story that splits into many different themes and plots. Trying to understand China without having at least some knowledge of this historical background is, nevertheless, impossible. This is particularly true today, when current Chinese leaders daily appeal to the glorious, unique past of their country as a source of their authority and power in the present. The complexity of this history, however, means that there are many different interpretations and meanings that can be harvested from it. This book aims to present at least some of these, and show why they are important.

      Despite China’s global prominence in the twenty-first century, these Chinese histories are not well known by people in Europe or the United States (broadly what we can call ‘the West’). This lack of knowledge is compounded by the politicized way that China’s history is told within the current People’s Republic of China (PRC). This book aims at helping to rectify this situation, giving those with no specialist engagement with China a workable outline by which to make sense of this vast story.

One aim of this book is to demonstrate that, however marginal China may have seemed in much of the period since the mid-nineteenth century, for a country and a culture accounting for a fifth of humanity, its story is a global one. It was an aberration that so little of this story was known outside of China. What we are witnessing now is a long-overdue correction to this imbalance – something that should have been done earlier.

What is China?

Before grappling with Chinese history, we have to ask a more fundamental question: what is China? Shanghai-based contemporary academic Ge Zhaoguang acknowledges that the answer to this question is intimately linked to historical issues. Speaking to the debate about whether the current PRC has grown from what has been called a ‘civilizational state’ based on cultural influence not tied to particular geographical boundaries, or is a real empire exercising hard territorial power, he proposes a number of orientating ideas. The first of these is that ‘even though China’s borders have often changed, the central region has been relatively stable, becoming very early on a place with a commonly recognized territory and unified politics, nationality, and culture: this region also comprised a historical world.’¹ He also argues that Han (dominant ethnic group) culture, for all its diversity, ‘extended across time in this region, forming a clear and distinct cultural identity and cultural mainstreams’. Supplementing this was ‘a traditional Chinese world of ideas’, and the sense of ‘cultural continuity’. This mixture of geography, culture, ethnicity, and belief systems created an organic whole, something that can link the earliest dynasties for the Qin two centuries before the time of Christ, to the Tang from the seventh century, and the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing imperial eras that covered the millennium from 960 up to 1911.

      The distinctive result of this is that ‘“China” has had both the characteristics of a traditional imperial state and aspects that resemble early modern nation-states; it has resembled both a modern nation-state and a traditional civilizational community.’² Despite the efforts of the post-modern deconstructers, for Ge ‘China’ is a definite thing, and it has cohesiveness, continuity with past entities occupying broadly the same geographical space and ethnic, cultural, and ideological components. It is far more than a geographical idea. Chinese leaders today echo this when they claim that their country, despite being founded in its current guise in 1949, has a continuous civilizational integrity stretching back further than anywhere

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