What does zhongguo

The Choson Dynasty in Korea, which ruled for almost years equaling the Ming and Qing put together , long has been viewed as the state most clearly modeled on Confucian principles and the closest tributary state of the Ming and the Qing. It is worth quoting at some length from a recent study which writes with reference to 17th century Choson Confucian Song Si-yol, resentful of the Qing conquest of the Ming, that,. For Song, disrecognition of Qing China was fundamentally linked to the question of civilization, and as adamant a Ming loyalist as he was, he also made it quite clear that civilization was not permanently tied to place or people.

Both Confucius and Mencius, for example, were born in states where previously the region and its people had been considered foreign, or barbaric tongyi , and Song argued vigorously that it was the duty of learned men in Choson Korea to continue the civilizational legacy that began with the sage kings Yao and Shun, a precious legacy that had been cultivated and transmitted by Confucius, Mencius and Zhu Xi, and taken up by Yi Hwang Toegye and Yi I Yulgok of Choson Korea.

The term Zhongguo or Zhonghua assumed its modern meaning as the name for the nation in the late 19th century used in international treaties, beginning with the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia in Even if the modern sense of the term could be read into its historical antecedents, it does not follow that the sense was universally shared in the past, or was transmitted through generations to render it into a political or ideological tradition, or part of popular political consciousness.

The author writes with reference to the early 16th century Portuguese soldier-merchant Galeoto Pereira, who had the privilege of doing time in a Ming jail, and subsequently related his experiences in one of the earliest seminal accounts of southern China:.

Pereira found strangest that Chinese[ Zhongguoren ] did not know that they were Chinese[ Zhongguoren ]. When someone from another nation asks you what country you are from, what do you answer? By now there is only one ruler. But each state still uses its ancient name. These states are the present-day provinces sheng. Zhongguo has not been called by such a name over four-thousand years of history.

I do not know on what basis Westerners call it by these names? The official, Zhang Deyi, was right on the mark concerning the discrepancy between the names used by foreigners and Qing subjects. Even more striking is his juxtaposition of Qing and Zhongguo. Only Zhongguo does not. What then was Zhongguo? By the time late Qing intellectuals took up the issue around the turn of the twentieth-century, diplomatic practice already had established modern notions of China and Chinese, with Zhongguo and Zhongguoren as Chinese-language equivalents.

More research is necessary before it is possible to say why Zhongguo had come to be used as the equivalent of China in these practices, and how Qing officials conceived of its relationship to the name of the dynasty.

It is quite conceivable that there should have been some slippage over the centuries between Zhong guo as Central State and Zhong guo as the name for the realm, which would also explain earlier instances scholars have discovered of the use of the term in the latter sense. There is evidence of such slippage in Jesuit maps dating back to the early seventeenth century. It does not necessarily follow that the practice of using Zhongguo or Zhonghua alongside dynastic names originated with the Jesuits, or that their practice was adopted by Ming and Qing cartographers.

Aleni, however, is far from consistent. It was in the in the nineteenth century, in the midst of an emergent international order and under pressure from it, that Zhongguo in the singular acquired an unequivocal meaning, referring to a country with a definite territory but also a Chinese nation on the emergence. It is not far-fetched to suggest, as Liu has, that it was translation that ultimately rendered Zhongguo into the name of the nation that long had been known internationally by one or another variant of China.

A few illustrations will suffice here. It seems perhaps that where reference was to agency, Da Qing Guo was the preferred usage, but this is only an impressionistic observation. More significant for purposes here may be the use of Da Qing Guo and Zhongguo in the very same location and, even more interestingly, the reference further down in the article to Zhongguo ren , or Chinese people.

The extension of Zhongguo to the Hua people abroad is especially signiicant. In its overlap with Hua people, primarily an ethnic category, Zhongguo ren from the beginning assumed a multiplicity of meanings—from ethnic and national to political identity, paralleling some of the same ambiguities characteristic of terms like China and Chinese. Foreign pressure in these treaties— especially US pressure embodied in the Burlingame mission of — played a major part in enjoining the Qing government to take responsibility for Hua populations abroad.

Late Qing intellectuals such as Liang Qichao and Zhang Taiyan who played a seminal part in the formulation of modern Chinese nationalism were quick to point out shortcomings of the term Zhongguo as a name for the nation.

Nearly three decades later the historian Liu Yizheng would offer a similar argument for the use of Zhongguo. The contradiction captures the ambivalent relationship of modern China to its past.

The new discipline of history was one such tool. Others were geography, ethnology, and archeology. And ethnology has occupied a special place in the new disciplines of sociology and anthropology because of its relevance to the task of national construction out of ethnic diversity. It was twentieth century nationalist reformulation of the past that would invent a tradition and a nation out of an ambiguous and discontinuous textual lineage. The appearance of the new genre testified to the appearance of a new idea of Zhongguo , and the historical consciousness it inspired.

The first such accounts available to Qing intellectuals were histories composed by Japanese historians. The history of China is a most glorious history. Since the Yellow Emperor, all the things we rely on—from articles of daily use to the highest forms of culture—have progressed with time. Although there have been periods of discord and disunity, and occasions when outside forces have oppressed the country, restoration always soon followed.

And precisely because the frontiers were absorbed into the unity of China, foreign groups were assimilated. Does not the constant development of the frontiers show how the beneficence bequeathed us from our ancestors exemplifies the glory of our history? However, that which is not forgotten from the past, may teach us for the future. Only if all the people living in China love and respect our past history and do their utmost to maintain its honor, will the nation be formed out of adversity, as we have seen numerous times in the past.

Readers of history know that their responsibility lies here. Of all the things I am ashamed of, none equals my country not having a name. It is commonly called ZhuXia[all the Xia], or Han people, or Tang people, which are all names of dynasties. Foreigners call it Zhendan[Khitan] or Zhina[Japanese for China], which are names that we have not named. If we use Xia, Han or Tang to name our history, it will pervert the goal of respect for the guomin[citizens].

If we use Zhendan, Zhina, etc. Calling it Zhongguo or Zhonghua is pretentious in its exaggerated self-esteem and self-importance. To name it after a dynasty that bears the name of one family is to defile our guomin. It cannot be done. That is even worse. None of the three options is satisfactory. We might as well use what has become customary. Liang was far more open-minded than many of his contemporaries and intellectual successors. The new nation demanded a new history for its substantiation.

Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation and it is for this reason that the progress of historical studies often poses a threat to nationality. Historical inquiry, in effect, throws light on the violent acts that have taken place at the origin of all political formation, even those that have been the most benevolent in their consequences.

The quest for a national history set in motion in the late Qing has likewise been beset by the same struggles over memory and forgetting that have attended the invention of nations in the modern world.

Similarly as elsewhere, the same forces that spawned the search for a nation and a national history transformed intellectual life with the introduction of professional disciplines, among them, history. These divisions were manifest by the late thirties in conflicts over the interpretation of the national past among conservatives, liberals and Marxists, to name the most prominent, all of whom also had an ambivalent if not hostile relationship to official or officially sanctioned histories.

What was no longer questioned, however, was the notion of Zhongguo history, which by then already provided the common ground for historical thinking and inquiry, regardless of the fact that the most fundamental contradictions that drove historical inquiry were products of the effort to distill from the past a national history that could contain its complexities.

But these gestures toward multi-culturalism has not stopped successive nationalist governments or the histories they have sponsored from claiming Tianxia as their own, or even extending their proprietary claims into the surrounding seas. It is about present-day China in relation to the world, and in relation to itself—to its past and to its neighbouring peoples in particular.

Its critique of external orientalism conceals and masquerades a nationalism; it is an alibi for nationalism and empire. Critical historians have not hesitated to question these claims. Our racial self-confidence must be based on reason. We must break off every kind of unnatural bond and unite on the basis of reality.

It may be unreasonable to expect that they be placed in quotation marks in writing to indicate their ambiguity, and even less reasonable to qualify their use in everyday speech with irksome gestures of quotation. It should be apparent from the Chinese language names I have used above , however, I believe that we should be able to use a wider range of vocabulary in Chinese even in popular communication to enrich our store of names for the country and for the people related to it one way or another.

Is the concern with names otherwise no more than an esoteric academic exercise? I think not. Three examples should suffice here to illustrate the political significance of naming. In the PRC maps that I am familiar with, these seas are still depicted by traditional directional markers as Southern and Eastern Seas.

Their foreign names, South China Sea and East China Sea are once again reminders of the part Europeans played in mapping and naming the region, as they did the world at large, with no end of trouble for indigenous inhabitants.

The names bring with them suggestions of possession that no doubt create some puzzlement in public opinion if not bias in favor of PRC claims.

They also enter diplomatic discourses. Today Xi Jinping seems eager to redefine China once again, this time as a nation-state. All of these are Western terms suited to the modern world. Drawing on pre-modern Chinese history and philosophy, the emerging Chinese School of international relations is, however, developing a new terminology of Confucian relationality. Zhao sees the tianxia understanding of a unified world as the basis for a new form of globalism.

The concepts of the central state or states zhongguo and of a world-system based on universal values tianxia are useful additions to our terminological toolkit for understanding the world. They may apply to historically-existing world-systems for which Western vocabulary is inadequate, or they may indeed apply to the new world-system form that is emerging from contemporary globalization. China is certainly a key component of the twenty-first century world. Its philosophical heritage is indispensable for interpreting Chinese history to that world.

Featured image credit: Building water historical by danist Public domain via Unsplash. Salvatore Babones is an American sociologist, professor at the University of Sydney, and an expert in the areas of Chinese and American economy and society. Our Privacy Policy sets out how Oxford University Press handles your personal information, and your rights to object to your personal information being used for marketing to you or being processed as part of our business activities.

We will only use your personal information to register you for OUPblog articles. Or subscribe to articles in the subject area by email or RSS. I think that the rest of the world will have to take more and more note of China. It certainly offers a clear lesson about the effect of improved literacy, which most Anglophone countries still fail to appreciate.

It was originally designed by Zhou Youguang for helping children learn to read traditional Chinese writing, but it is now also used for typing on electronic devices and may gradually replace traditional Chinese writing altogether.

Perhaps they too should be trying harder to find new ways of reducing it? Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics Substantive, peer-reviewed, and regularly updated, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics combines the speed and flexibility of digital with the rigorous standards of academic publishing.

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