I am still in the early pages of Bill Hayton's The Invention of China - one of the very few non-fiction books I have read in recent years that does not boast a long, wordy sub-title: the title itself is entirely self-explanatory - and I have already discovered several erroneous tenets of conventional wisdom, or at least personal assumptions and misapprehensions.
It should come as no surprise, I suppose, that China does not call itself "China", in much the same way as Germany does not call itself "Germany", or Greece "Greece". The label is a European one, although nevertheless one whose origins are surprisingly hard to pin down. Even the early Portuguese and Italian explorers of the 16th century did not encounter a place valled China. They were introduced to a state called Tamen or, in more contemporary spelling, Da Ming, literally the "Great Ming", i.e. the country of the Ming Dynasty.
Very few years later, other European explorers reported the name of this fabled land as Ciumquo or Ciumhoa, which would be spelled today as Zhong guo or Zhong hua, literally meaning, respectively, "Central State" and "Central Efflorescence" (with the sense of "Civilization"). And this is what the country is usually referred to today by Chinese people, the two names having a similar official/unofficial duality as "United Kingdom" and "Britain", or "United States" and "America". These labels have been found applied to various parts of what we now consider China for some 2,500 to 3,000 years, although with various different connotations: as a geographical place, as a culture as a political system, etc, and never continuously. So, the common claims by China of a unified civilization and state extending back 3,000, even 5,000, years, are fanciful at best.
The Song Dynasty, for example, called their home Da Song Guo (the "Song Great-State"), and the Ming Dynasty referred to it as Da Ming Guo (the "Ming Great-State"), each with different borders, different cultures and philosophies. The terms Zhong guo and Zhong hua were only really revived in China in the late 19th century in an attempt to reinvent itself and to stoke nationalistic fervour. And various other phrases were also widely used over the centuries, including Shen zhou ("spiritual region"), Jiu zhoi ("nine regions"), Zhong ru ("central land") and Tian xia ("everything under heaven").
So, where then does the European name "China" come from? It is often thought to relate to the Qin Dynasty (pronounced "chin"), originally just a small fiefdom in the northwest of current China in about 1,000 BCE, which came to occupy most of the central Chinese plains over the succeeding centuries, arguably becoming the first dynasty to unify the core territory of modern China, before being overthrown by the Han Dynasty in the 3rd century BCE. But it should be noted that even under the Qin Dynasty, the region was never referred to as "Qin" or "China".
Sanskrit documents from India in the 5th to 4th centuries BCE talked about a place to the east called "Cīna"; the Greco-Romans referred to the area as Sina or Sinae; a mountain people from the southeastern part of modern China were referring to themselves as the "Zhina" as long ago as the 5th century BCE; the Manchu-speaking Qing (pronounced "ching") Dynasty from northeastern China came to the fore in the 17th century and gradually formed the territorial base of modern China; 17th century Latin texts talked about the "Imperiii Sinici", referring to the Qing empire. There are many alternative theories for the European name (and the origin of the "Sino-" prefix), no one of which is definitive or wholly convincing. What is certain is that China never called itself "China".
Most of Chinese history consists of centuries of warring states, bloody internecine power struggles, and invasions and assimilations by "barbarians" of various ethnicities. Any notion of a unified, benevolent state bringing civilization to the barbarian masses, and ruling in peace and harmony for thousands of years, is, of course, a convenient fiction for the demagogues and political spin doctors of the modern Chinese state (and interestingly one that only arose, even in China, in the early 20th century). There is just one "official" language throughout China's territory (Mandarin, or putonghua - another early 20th century development), but in reality an estimated 400 mutually-unintelligible languages, as opposed to dialects, are used. It is no more accurate than to say that the European Union has ruled over a united Europe for centuries. Indeed, unity was the exception and not the rule in the region's real history.
And "China"? Well, it never really existed.
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