Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2018. xv, 201 pp. US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-73714-3.
Ge Zhaoguang, author of What is China?: Territory, Ethnicity, Culture, and History, is a distinguished professor at Fudan University and a prolific author of books on topics related to the intellectual and religious history of China. As the titular question suggests, Ge seeks to explicate: the nature of the Chinese polity, how it has changed over time, how it should be understood today, and more tangentially, how it might or should develop in the future. These are issues the author has been engaging with for some years and a number of topics addressed in this book were previously addressed in his book first published in China in 2011 (Here in ‘China’ I Dwell Reconstructing Historical Discourses of China for Our Time, trans. Jesse Field and Win Fang, Brill, 2017). However, the author’s ideas have developed and occasionally somewhat shifted over time and readers of that earlier book should find this book rewarding as well.
This book primarily consists of an introduction that sets the concept of China in historical context and examines some contradictions inherent to it, plus six chapters, and a brief afterword. Chapter 1 considers the historical evolution and significance of the shift from a China-centred “All-under-Heaven” (tianxia) worldview to one that acknowledges an international order consisting of a China situated amongst “Myriad States” (wanguo). Chapter 2 addresses the borders and the shifting delineations of Chinese territory over time. Chapter 3 examines the historically contingent political relationship between the Chinese state and the non-Han peoples who have at different times and given shifting borders lived both within and without the direct administrative control of China’s political centre. Chapter 4 proposes characteristic features and values of Chinese culture that have remained constant over time. Chapter 5 addresses how China, Korea, and Japan perceived each other in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chapter 6 responds skeptically to both Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, and to Chinese theorists who predict a coming remade China-centric world order based on a new “All-under-Heaven” premise.
Readers of What is China? will find more thought-provoking observations and insights than can be discussed in a short review. There is much to be learned from this critically engaged, liberal-minded, historically informed questioning from within China of Chinese national identity. In this reviewer’s opinion some of the most notable arguments made in this book include: that China’s “history shows us a path of state building that is completely different from what is found in early modern Europe” (63); that the development of a national identity centred around a Han ethical, historical, intellectual, and cultural tradition and one that included “the existence of borders and a consciousness of state sovereignty” (62) can be dated to the Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE); and that this early “trend toward a Han nation-state . . . was considerably complicated by the history of rule by foreign peoples under the Mongol Yuan dynasty and the Manchu Qing dynasty” (63).
Among the chief complexities that render the nature of China’s polity so resistant to easy categorization is the Qing/Republic/People’s Republic transition from what is generally considered an early modern multi-ethnic or multi-national empire to a modern nation-state, and the fact that this occurred while essentially retaining Qing borders and territory. One need only consider the territorial consequences of the similar transitions of the Ottoman or the Austro-Hungarian empires to see how rare, if not unique, China’s experience has been. Chapter 3 largely consists of a superb intellectual history that traces Chinese-language attempts to reconcile the inherent tension between the reconceiving of China as a modern nation-state while retaining the territory and the multi-national demographics of an empire. Among the ideas discussed here are: early Han nationalist calls to “drive out the barbarians”; Japanese justifications for greatly reducing the territory of an ethnically Han nation-state; the idea of “five nations under one republic”; and the idea of a Chinese nationality (Zhonghua minzu) that incorporates all peoples within China.
When a slim book tackles such an ambitious subject some lacuna and shortfallings are inevitable. One is that Ge’s coverage of the intellectual debates regarding the relationship between ethnic nationalities and the Chinese nation ends in the 1940s. Nowhere in this book is any mention made of the Chinese Communist Party’s original fierce denunciation of the Zhonghua minzu concept or its adoption of a system borrowed from Stalin’s Soviet Union of a minority nationality (shaoshu minzu) system. Nor is there any mention of the recent scrapping of that earlier model for the Zhonghua minzu approach. The contemporary promotion of a “Chinese Dream” that promises rejuvenation of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu), for example, simultaneously reflects the official rejuvenation of that concept.
All in all, there is much that recommends this book. Ge writes in clear and engaging prose, and the translator, Michael Gibbs, has done a terrific job rendering the original Chinese into readily accessible English. The author’s familiarity with the relevant major works of Western and Japanese historical scholarship on China allows him, when appropriate, to frame his arguments in response to or in engagement with an internationally diverse set of propositions and insights. Most importantly, What is China? provides English-language readers with access to a thoughtful attempt to answer that question by a respected and influential Chinese scholar.
Richard Belsky
Hunter College, City University of New York, New York