The invention of "China"
187 1 A late Qing official in Paris was dissatisfied with the name given to China by Europeans and Americans: "For decades, Westerners have known that China was called the Qing Dynasty and China. Why did they still use' China',' China',' La Chine' and' zhina'? Besides, China has never had such a name since ancient times. I wonder why westerners named it? "The official named Zhang Deyi is undoubtedly right. He realized the differences between foreigners and Qing people in naming China. What's even more surprising is that he juxtaposed Qing with China. Although "China" here refers to "Qing Dynasty", there is no corresponding index, although the word is very old ("from ancient times to the present").
Only a few years after Zhang Deyi wrote down his dissatisfaction, Huang Zunxian, a famous Hakka diplomat and scholar, wrote: "If English is French, it will have the name of a country. There is none in China. " Twenty years later (1900), Liang Qichao added, "The strangest thing about China is that hundreds of billions of people in the world have been founded for thousands of years, and so far no country has a name." "China" is not a country name; Its name has not been announced. So what did "China" mean at that time, and why did it become the name of a country only ten years after Liang Qichao said "the nameless country"? In this nameless country, people prefer to call their country by dynasty, which is a fatal feature that prevents them from naming their place of residence.
The concept of "China/China" with a history of 5,000 years has been deeply rooted in the consciousness of contemporary people, so that it is hard for us to imagine the pain that its namelessness has brought to Liang Qichao, Zhang Taiyan, Yang Du and many contemporary intellectuals. Their generation is the last generation of thinkers in the Chinese Empire and the first generation of nationalists in China. The analysis made by this generation surprised even keen scholars. In the recent/Kloc-A Study of Cross-Language Communication in China in the 9th Century, Liu He inspected "China Construction in the Formation of the Modern World". When Liu He translated Zhang Deyi's words, he translated "China" into "my country". Although there is nothing wrong with this translation, it is misleading, because as the word "country" implies, Liu He's translation refers to the terms used by Zhang Deyi, that is, this land and people. There is a tendency to interpret the word "China" from the 20th century to the earlier period: Victor H. Mair, an outstanding linguist, refused to use "China" to refer to the past in a recent article and chose the phrase "the heart of East Asia". 19 1 After the founding of the Republic of China, "China" became the name of a nation and a country. Before that, Mei's statement seemed to be closer to the original meaning of "China".
Liang Qichao and his contemporary nationalists are different from Zhang Deyi not only because the latter is an honest official, but also because the former has an anti-Qing stance. Slightly exaggerated, the real difference between the two is the difference between two different historical consciousness about the world. The Qing people didn't think of themselves this way out of compulsion. Not only for officials, but also for ordinary people, the name of government is the name of the country. Overseas Chinese use dynasties to calculate time; /kloc-The plaques in Chinese temples in Southeast Asia in the 0/9th century are all marked with the dynasty (Qing Dynasty) and the year number of the emperor (usually Guangxu). In the following decades, the word "China" was gradually upgraded to the name of the country and regime, which was also the history of political consciousness transformation in this period; At that time, the concept of nation-state replaced the concepts of empire and dynasty, and the word "China" began to represent a nation-state, whose history covered all the time. Before that, history was recorded by the change of dynasties. When nationalists like Liang Qichao examine the old usage of the word "China" with the "new national teleology", what they see is not a consciousness that originated from different worlds, but a historical and political consciousness that predecessors lacked, that is, the failure of historical and political consciousness. In the same article quoted earlier, Liang Qichao pointed out three failures that led to the weakness of the country: I don't know the difference between the country and the world; I don't know the difference between the state and the imperial court; I don't know the relationship between the country and the people.
The transition from Qing Dynasty to "China/China" was accompanied by the invention of China as a nation-state. Renaming is part of a larger process, which mobilizes various disciplines, including history, geography, archaeology and ethnology, to build a nation-state. The word "China" will acquire different meanings with the later revolutionary process, and different opponents have different understandings of it. This process continues in some ways, although it is very different from what happened a century ago.
Historians and linguists in China in the 20th century tried to find the origin and significance of the word "China". According to a complete survey, which lists the usage of the word "China" for 20 pages before the unification of Qin Dynasty, Wang defined five meanings of the word "China" before19th century:
(1) Shi Jing; (2) Within the territory of the country; (3) fields in summer; (4) Medium-sized countries (smaller vassal countries in Zhou Dynasty, known as "the world" in Zhou Dynasty); (5) the country with the central government.
None of the above meanings refers to the modern nation-state. In the two thousand years after the beginning of the imperial period, the word "China" has lost its importance. Usually refers to the center of the dynasty, or used to distinguish the territory of Huaxia and nomadic tribes in the northern grassland (ironically, Huaxia is a tribal alliance between the north and the northwest, which originated from non-Han people, but was used by people in the Central Plains as their own address, such as "China" or "Midsummer"). In the aforementioned research, Liu He investigated the language experience of the Qing Dynasty and the hegemony of Europe and America, which led to the drastic changes in the meaning of words with a long history, thus resulting in the equivalent of "China" in English (and other European languages) and Chinese today, especially the name that people living there used to call their country today-China. This also means that the residents there, "China people", have the status of "China people".
Liu He proved the above changes by tracing back to the change of the meaning of the word "one". It originally meant "exotic", but from 1830, it began to mean "barbarism". This change is to fulfill the treaty obligations, and to finalize the meaning of the text. This time, the British signed a treaty with China. The rigidity of the meaning of "foreign" also limits the internal meaning of words, and causes the distinction between China people and foreigners, which will not only bring serious diplomatic consequences, but also put China at the core of civilization. Because the word "China" literally means "a country with a central government". Joseph Richmond Levenson described the changes in19th century as "from the world to the country", which shows that China's spatial self-awareness has shrunk from "the world" to one of the nation-states. But this brand-new usage also contains an extended side. In the18th century, the word "China" changed from a highly localized space concept corresponding to the imperial center or a "primitive" civilized space concept to a national territory concept, covering all fields of people and countries in China today.
Liu He's analysis reminds us that, just like the word "one", "China" has finally become singular, corresponding to "China" in Chinese. Although it was still resisted by many honest officials or intellectuals in the19th century, it gained a realistic position in the use of foreign languages. When the word "China" first appeared in the late Zhou Dynasty (about 1000 BC), it referred to many kingdoms and was often used in the plural-"central country". The materials provided by Liu He prove that in the19th century, many intellectuals and officials in China still understood this word. However, in the course of the19th century, faced with the emerging international order and its pressure, "China" became singular, referring to a country with definite territory and the Chinese nation in the process of formation. According to Liu He, this meaning is the product of "cross-language encounter", which injects new meaning into ancient words.
By the1860s, these usages had entered the diplomatic documents of the Qing Dynasty. It can be seen that the two words "China/China" were linked together in the translation of international treaties in this period and became equivalent words, referring to both a territory and a country based on this territory. The word "China" appears more and more frequently in official documents, especially when the word "China" is mentioned in foreign documents, and it can almost be used interchangeably with "Great Qing Dynasty". No longer refers to the "central country"; When it is used to describe a single sovereign entity, China, the historical witness of this word disappears (and is finally forgotten). Liu He's statement is not far-fetched. It is the process of translation that finally makes "China" the name of a country, and since then this country has been recognized by the international community with various variants of "China".
A few more examples will suffice to illustrate the problem. The Chinese version of Elements of International Law by Henry Wheaton was first published in 1864. The map of the world uses the Chinese character "China" to represent the area of China today, and "Great Qing Dynasty" is still used as the official title of the Qing Dynasty. For example, Article 19 of 1869 China-Peru Trade Treaty refers to the signatory countries as "Great Qing Dynasty" and "Great Secret Country". Without a more in-depth and systematic analysis, it is difficult for us to know what determines the choice of address. It seems possible to use "Qing" more when guiding institutions, but this is only my impression. It is more important to compare the "Great Qing Dynasty" and "China" used in the same place, and it is more interesting to inspect the places where "China people" are mentioned in the treaty.
It is also worth emphasizing that the first word of a name is used to represent the full name (for example, "Zhong" means "China" or "Secret" means "Peru"), which introduces another layer of abstraction. The country is represented by the first syllable of the name, and all the specific references are integrated into the pronunciation, so this syllable unambiguously refers to an entity-China. Compared with the frequent use of "China" in official documents and memos, the reference to "China people" is more telling. In the document 1860s, when referring to China people at home and abroad (such as "Guangdong Huamin"), "China people" and "Huamin" are still the most common usages. However, the document is also full of references to "the people of China" and "the workers of China", and at least once mentioned "the Chinese in Peru". This at least shows the emergence of the concept of China people's de-territorialization, which requires "China" as a country to recognize China people outside its territory and be responsible for them.
When intellectuals in the late 20th century began to pay attention to this issue, the modern concepts of "China" and "China" had been established in diplomatic practice, and the corresponding words in Chinese were "China" and "China people". More research is needed to explain why these practices use "China" as the corresponding word of "China". However, if Liang Qichao's solution is regarded as a typical example at that time, it should be for practical reasons to finally use this word to call this nation. In the passage quoted above, Liang Qichao said that the existing dynastic institutions and foreign ideas (China, Cathay Pacific, etc. ) can't provide another way to name my history. "Nothing has been realized ... He wrote that this book is called" History of China "because the term is" we are used to it verbally ". About thirty years later, historian Liu Yizhi provided similar evidence for the use of the word "China". Recently, a historian believes that the change of the meaning of the word "China" is both a break with the past and a continuation of the past. This contradiction captures the contradictory relationship between modern China and its history.
Naming a country is only the first step in "inventing China". A more challenging next step is to understand the territory, people and history of China. Liang Qichao's New History published in 1902 tried to achieve this goal. As the new concept of "China/China" is the product of the encounter with European modernity, and European modernity also provides a tool to achieve this goal, the discipline of new history is one of the tools. Other tools include geography, ethnology and archaeology. Long before the Republic of China replaced the Qing Dynasty, history education began to play a role in cultivating "new people" and is still very important today. Equally important is geography, which tries to bring a new consciousness about "China" space. At the same time, archaeology takes the origin of "China people" back to the older past. On the other hand, ethnology occupies a special position in the emerging disciplines of sociology and anthropology, because it is related to the task of national construction from the perspective of ethnic diversity.
However, the investigation of history is still full of contradictions. One of the most important points is the ethnic composition, which is related to how to transform the "world" into a homogeneous nation-state. The brand-new "China" consciousness regards China as the unity of biology and culture, which conflicts with the historical facts of multi-ethnic empires in the past. The national consciousness not only fails to confirm the homogeneity of the nation, but also endows the national space with nationality. Since the AD1980s, the issue of "the Chinese nation" has once again become the research object of scholars, this time caused by Fei Xiaotong's description of China's "pluralism and unity". Fei Xiaotong distinguished between "national freedom" and "national consciousness", which is the continuation of Marx's division of class consciousness. To some extent, consciousness plays a key role in bringing consistency to an incomplete entity. Fei Xiaotong's distinction not only shows the connection between the present and the past, but also points out the difference between the present and the past.