Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
Last month, we published a brief history of China’s language Romanization—and why Americans in particular mispronounce the name of Chinese President Xi Jinping. It was so popular that we decided this week to take a dive down another linguistic rabbit hole.
What’s in a Name?
There are two factoids that every pundit knows about China: One, that its Chinese name, Zhongguo, means “Middle Kingdom,” and two, that this name reflects China’s belief about its centrality in world affairs.
Neither of these ideas is entirely untrue, but there is a more complex history behind them. (As ever, I am deeply indebted to Endymion Wilkinson’s magisterial Chinese History: A New Manual for information here.)
Names, empires, and countries can be slippery to define over time, and China is no exception. We think of the Roman Empire as ending in the fifth century in part because historians later devised the name “Byzantium” to describe the successor state that ruled from Constantinople until 1453. But no Byzantine ever called themselves such; they called themselves Romoi, meaning “the Romans” in Greek.
In China, successive empires from as early as the Zhou in 1046 B.C. legitimized themselves by claiming to be the inheritor of a single polity, regardless of whether they had just toppled their predecessor as the Qing did to the Ming, or aspired to be the heirs of previous empires as the Sui did.
The emergence of the nation-state as the basic unit of geopolitics in the 19th century led Chinese intellectuals to claim in hindsight that China was a single nation that endured over millennia. But the entity we call China today was a much more fluid notion, a perception of shared cultural heritage that persisted through many different political arrangements and rulers.
The traditional Chinese polity wasn’t generally referred to as Zhongguo until around the 16th century. In its first usage, as far back as 3,000 years ago, Zhongguo meant “the states of the central plains,” referring to the Yellow River basin where the first kingdoms that would eventually define Chinese civilization emerged.
For most of Chinese history, Zhongguo was commonly used to mean “the capital” or “the area around the capital,” but sometimes it meant “Chinese civilization as a whole.” During the Warring States period from 475 B.C. to 221 B.C., the contending kingdoms believed themselves to share a single heritage, even as they fought bitterly.
But over time, just what was included in the Chinese world expanded as successive empires grew in scope. For instance, it would have shocked most of Confucius’s contemporaries in the Warring States to think of the people of Yunnan, eventually captured in the 13th century, as belonging to the Chinese world.
The Qin dynasty eventually emerged as the winner of the Warring States era in 221 B.C., uniting the area under a shared rule. Their empire lasted just 19 years, but their successors, the Han (202 B.C. to 220 A.D., with a brief interregnum from 9 A.D. to 23 A.D.), solidified the notion of a single unified state that would be carried forward by later empires.
Even in the long periods when the region was divided among many rulers, the idea of a shared heritage persisted. So what did people call the empire they lived in?
For the most part, they used the name of the ruling dynasty of the time. If they lived in the 11th century, they called their homeland “Song,” if they lived in the 15th century, they called it “the Great Ming,” and so forth.
Sometimes, those names lingered beyond the life of the dynasty. The legacy of the Han was so powerful that their name became synonymous with China and the Chinese people. They are the root for the modern term “Han Chinese,” as well as for Chinese characters (Hanzi) and the broad term for the Chinese languages (Hanyu).
Several other terms were commonly used over the millennia to refer to a heritage that extended beyond just the rulers of the day, such as Jiuzhou, meaning “the nine provinces”—a figurative way of referring to the original Yellow River region. In southern China and its neighbors, Tang, after the empire that ruled from 618 to 907, was synonymous with the land and the people even after the Tang Empire itself collapsed.
One very popular term was Tianxia (“all under Heaven”), which could refer to everything from the celestial order to Chinese civilization to a geopolitical order with China at its center, or Tianchao (“the Heavenly Empire”). In the 19th century, the translation of the term led to Europeans and Americans often referring to “the Celestial Empire,” or Chinese people being called “Celestials.”
But the first name for the Chinese as a people, predating the Han Empire, was the Hua, a term that literally means “flower” or “blossom” but in practice roughly meant “civilized.” It defined them against the so-called barbarian peoples who lacked the shared heritage of philosophy, ideas of kingship and rule, and written language that unified the elite of the warring states.
Hua led to the word Huaxia, roughly the “civilized world”—perhaps the most common term historically to refer to Chinese civilization. Merged with Zhongguo, it gives us the word Zhonghua today, a slightly more refined way of referring to China that is used, for instance, in the formal name of both the People’s Republic of China (Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo) and the Republic of China (Zhonghua Minguo). Zhuhua (“various Hua”) and Zhuxia (“various Xia,” after a probably mythical ancient empire) were also synonyms for “Chinese civilization.”
Did these names imply a sense of superiority to the rest of the world? In the historical context of East Asia, definitely. The Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese kingdoms were patronized and exploited by Chinese empires, even though they tried to model themselves on the Chinese system. Nonstate peoples on China’s northern steppe were stereotyped, invaded, and feared by Chinese rulers.
All this got more complicated—in a way that I’ll return to in a later China Brief—when those northern powers successfully invaded and conquered the Chinese world, as in the Mongol Yuan or the Manchu Qing Empire, or when rulers in Japan or Vietnam then claimed that they were now the true inheritors of Chinese tradition.
Ironically, the widespread adoption of Zhongguo came at one of China’s weakest points. The Qing had begun using it in state documents from the early years of their rule in the 17th century, as they started to interact with other global empires.
The Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689), which divided up Siberia and Central Asia between the Russian and Qing empires, was written in five languages, in keeping with the multicultural nature of the Qing’s Manchu rulers. Each version used a different name for China, but the Chinese-language one used Zhongguo, helping set a precedent that this was the appropriate term for the international stage.
By the 19th century, however, China’s name was no longer just a political or geographical issue, but a geopolitical one.
Chinese intellectuals were acutely aware of China’s relatively low status in the global order, which was dominated at the time by European empires. Especially after the near-collapse of Qing rule following the rebellions of the 1860s, China’s place in that order was highly shaky, and European powers were carving pieces off its territory from Siberia to Hong Kong.
One problem, as they saw it, was that the country had a name to outsiders, but not a single name used by those inside. “Our greatest shame is that our country has no name. The names that people ordinarily think of, such as Xia, Han, or Tang, are all the titles of bygone dynasties,” wrote the famous reformer Liang Qichao in 1900.
The answer they settled on was Zhongguo, already normalized in Qing documents but adopted almost universally by the 1920s, along with the term Zhongguoren (Chinese people) to include both the Han and the other peoples of China.
The unity implied by Zhongguo was particularly important after the end of the Qing in 1911, when China collapsed into rule by local warlords. Far from being a sign of arrogance, it was an expression of hope; amid the deaths of millions of people in civil war, and then the horrors of Japanese invasion, it suggested that a single Chinese state would emerge again.
Today, that state exists—almost.
Taiwan’s existence as another China continues to rankle Beijing. Taiwanese themselves are profoundly divided and ambiguous on what their own relationship to Chinese heritage is, as polling shows. One way they express that is by refusing to define themselves as Zhongguoren, now seen as old-fashioned and a marker of mainland sympathies.
For Taiwanese, having and valuing a shared cultural heritage does not mean they have to bend the knee to Beijing.
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