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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 else. Speaking soon after becoming General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2012, shortly before becoming President a few months later, Xi Jinping declared that ‘the Chinese nation has an unbroken history of more than 5,000 years of civilization. It has created a rich and profound culture and has made an unforgettable contribution to the progress of human civilization.’³

Every part of Ge’s ideas, and those contained in Xi’s statement, could be contested – and they frequently are. The ‘5,000-year history’ claim makes as much sense as saying Europe, with all its experience of fragmentation and complexity, has a common root going back to ancient Greece 2,500 years ago. For sure, there are unifying threads; but they are just that: threads. For long stretches, the geographical space we call China today was divided. There were multiple states and empires. As for Han ethnic continuity supplying this area of commonality, in the last 1,000 years, previous Chinese states have been under non-Han rule for over a third of this time. The last imperial dynasty, that of the Qing (1644–1912), was, as historians in recent decades have argued, one ruled by the Manchu group, extending far beyond the historical limits of previous Chinas, and connected to Inner Asia and other geographies through geographical annexation. As historian Timothy Brook argues, the modern centralized Chinese state was as much the creation of the Mongolian conquests of the thirteenth century, and their imposition of rigid rule, as something that links back to the Golden Age of the Tang and is derived from the state ideology adopted then of Confucianism and its highly hierarchical notion of order (608–912 CE).⁴

Despite this huge set of issues, one thing is indisputable. ‘Chinese history’ is seen as an immense source of cultural unity by politicians like Xi. Nor does this just apply to the current Communist leaders. The Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek (1887– 1975), head of the Republican government in power up to 1949 before fleeing to Taiwan, spoke in similar ways in the 1930s: ‘Through five thousand years of alternate order and confusion and the rise and fall of dynasties, our nation has acquired the virtue of modesty, a sense of honour and the ability to endure insult and shoulder hardships.’⁵ Every leader in the People’s Republic, from its founder Mao Zedong to Xi, has repeated sentiments similar to these. Each, however, has chosen to accept interpretations which accorded with his own priorities, recognizing how complex and varied a resource ‘Chinese history’ is.

Mao was the most radical, boldly eschewing much of the heritage of China’s historical and political imperial past by castigating it as feudal and exploitative. Despite this, he still asserted a strong sense of pride in aspects of Chinese literature and culture. Mao’s posture illustrates the ambiguity of this historical legacy – the ways in which it was a source of suffocating restraint as much as of secure identity. ‘Although China is a great nation,’ he wrote in 1939, ‘and although she is a vast country with an immense population, a long history, a rich revolutionary tradition and splendid historical heritage, her economic, political and cultural development was sluggish for a long time after the transition from a slave to a feudal society.’⁶ His successors, Deng Xiaoping (paramount leader from 1978 to the 1990s), Jiang Zemin (President from 1989 to 2003), Hu Jintao (2003 to 2013), and Xi Jinping (President from 2013 to the time of writing), have appealed to ‘traditional’ Chinese culture as something more positive and unifying than Mao appeared to suggest.

The rehabilitation of the past after Mao’s attack has not been easy. The path of modernity since the nineteenth century has involved fierce arguments about what relationship modern leaders need to take to this history, and what sort of resource it offers. The common point is that all eras of modern Chinese history, despite their very different political convictions and attitudes, have been driven by the desire for renewal. Chinese modern history has involved many things: the mission to industrialize, to create national unity, to struggle against colonial interference and achieve national self-determination. But, above all, it has been a history of trying to renew.