The Invention of China

It is a truism in international relations that any country is well advised to try to understand the motivations of other countries, whether friends, or more importantly, adversaries. And yet rarely has a truism been more frequently honoured in the breach than in the observance. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is only the most recent illustration of that point. Close behind comes the Western world’s seeming surprise at the course that China has taken in recent years.In The Invention of China, Bill Hayton sets out to offer an understanding of China and what motivates its leadership, particularly in international relations. It is puzzling to consider how a country whose recent decades of enormous economic success have been built on globalization and the norms and institutions of the liberal international order (or at least formal acknowledgment thereof), should today be quite so relentlessly sawing the supports from under the ladder on which it appears to stand.Hayton builds on the idea that modern China is an “invention.” He explores this idea through several meticulously researched and highly readable chapters with titles headed by “the invention”: of the Han race, of Chinese history, of the Chinese nation, of the Chinese language and of a national territory (among others). He makes a convincing case that modern China, far from reflecting an unbroken history of several thousand years, is in fact a very recent invention of little more than 100 years duration. But that recent invention, what I term “national reality,” is subsumed in Chinese official thinking, most likely in the thinking of many Chinese people and even in the thinking of many Western commentators under a myth of many millennia confected from the topics the book explores.Hayton’s construct of “invention” or national myth should not be seen as unique to China. Many modern nations are relatively recent inventions – think of modern Germany, for example, which came into existence only in 1871. And national myths can well have a constructive place alongside national reality in forging the bonds that hold countries together.National mythology becomes dangerous when it is compounded with the myths (or occasionally realties) of a fondly recollected time of glory and superiority or of national grievance or both. Hayton explores this phenomenon in China, including the 300 years of the Qing Great State – the “ruler of all under heaven” – and more recently, the national grievance aimed at the West, notably Britain and France from the 19th century and, of course, the United States. It may be ironic that what we think of as the traditional core of the modern Chinese nation spent several hundred years under the rule of Asian foreigners such as the Mongols in the 13th century, later the Manchu (the Qing Great State) and a much briefer but more brutal time under the Japanese in the mid-20th century. But Manchuria has been absorbed in modern China and the Japanese apparently make a less tempting target for grievance than does the West, and the United States in particular.