Empire or nation-state? This question has driven much argument in Chinese academic circles. These arguments take more than one form, however. The political view of China as a nation-state has focused very much on the question of sovereignty and international relations. But there is also a claim about Chinese culture and national identity: the question of what China is vis-à-vis what it means to be Chinese. Is the idea of China one of empire or nation-state? It is this latter question that Wang Hui seeks to answer in The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, an abridged translation of the first two volumes of Xiandai Zhongguo sixiangde xingqi (published by Sanlian Shudian in 2004).
His answer: this question doesn’t make sense.
While empires are vast territories comprising multiple cultures, languages, and regions, often consolidated through conquest or colonization, a nation-state is characterized (in conventional wisdom at any rate) by a relatively homogeneous identity, typically founded on shared language, culture, history and territory. This conventional view derives in large part from European history where there is a pretty clear linear transition from empires to nation-states, and some have tried to force China into this mold by arguing that an early system of centralized administration appeared long ago in Chinese history, and this system is better characterized as a nation-state not as an empire.
Wang argues that both attitudes are mistaken: throughout its history, China has exhibited features of both centralized imperial governance over diverse peoples and territories, and the cohesive cultural and territorial identity associated with nation-states, challenging the strict binary categorization. He extends this criticism to the binary between centralized administration (junxian) and enfeoffment (fengjian), terms which were more commonly used than empire and nation-state by Confucian scholars and the gentry elite from the Song to Qing dynasties.
We don’t need to get rid of such concepts, Wang says, but need to appreciate that they are not in binary opposition, at least when it comes to Chinese history. By dissolving these binaries, he argues, we can view history in the way that the ancient Chinese did, “interpreting history from its internal perspective and horizon (neizai shiye).” This internal perspective is produced in dialogue with contemporary times—neither using antiquity to interpret modernity nor using modernity to interpret antiquity.
Rather than characterizing China as either empire or nation-state, Wang prefers to describe it as a “transsystemic society” (kuatixi shehui), one in which cultural systems are not just coexisting, like Fei Xiaotong’s idea of “plurality and unity” that he expressed in the Tanner Lectures at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1988. Instead, these diverse systems link together and interrelate. Those aspects of the system that are distinct (yuan) or unipolar (yiji) are weakened, the dynamics of movement between the different systems are foregrounded, and the essential multiplicity (duo) of the one (yi) is emphasized in a transsystemic society. “Systems do not exist in isolation from one another but are interpenetrating,” says Wang. In short, all the different cultural systems that constitute China interact with one another bilaterally and multilaterally. The vitality and continuity of China is to be found in its continuously becoming China (Zhongguohua) by overcoming the contradictions and conflicts of interrelated systems.
Becoming China does not mean becoming Han (Hanhua). Both are translated as “sinification” because, “under the influence of early modern European nationalist knowledge, the Western idea of China was marked by ethnonationalism.” As a result, whenever becoming China was translated into other languages as “sinification”, they did not distinguish between becoming China and becoming Han, equating the one with the other.
The process of becoming China is mistakenly thought of as one in which the Han assimilated other cultures, but this completely ignores that different peoples and cultures have all served important functions in Chinese history, and that the rulers of dynasties like the Yuan and Qing were not Han. To understand becoming China, we must move beyond the conceptual framework of ethnonationalism, which Wang takes to be a Western way of looking at nations. One of the objectives of the book is to separate from the West in this way.
Becoming China is not a single process of integration or a unilateral conquest but a complex relationship of recognition. China did not just grow outwards but also brought other cultures in. Wang sees in Chinese history the integration of geography, bloodlines, customs, habits, language, culture, and politics which cannot be equated with merely becoming Han.
Moreover, becoming Han is passive, but when the northern peoples entered the Central Plains they actively sought to establish their legitimacy on the genealogy of the Chinese dynasties while maintaining their own national identity. Becoming China is a process that unites change and plurality in the very concept of “China”, whereas “Han” is not a concept that changes in the same way because it is fixed in ethnicity.
Wang is making the point that becoming China doesn’t imply that China is monolithic. It consists of many systems open to one another that intermingle and its political unity is premised on its transsystemicity (kuatixi xing). The Qing grand unification was centered on Confucianism but it did not attempt to homogenize Confucian culture. On the contrary, the Qing dynasty was a transcultural, transreligious, transcivilizational, transsystemic society: it both contained multiple systems and formed a flexible, resilient society. For the Central Plains, Mongolia, Tibet, Muslim areas, or southwestern frontier regions, the emperor derived his legitimacy simultaneously from the unique internal standards of different cultures, obtaining a multiple and unified identity as emperor of China as well as a Mongolian khan, a Manchu patriarch, and a Tibetan reincarnation of Manjushri. At the same time, the emperor was also what Marshall Sahlins called a “stranger king”: a foreigner who ruled indigenous peoples whose legitimacy, bizarrely, was in part derived from his foreignness.
In the end, the emperor was not just the ruler of one region; the transsystemic nature of his identity was the source of legitimacy for the entire empire. This is why, argues Wang, when we discuss the synthesis and unification of cultural and political boundaries involved in becoming China, we need to redefine “culture” (wenhua) or “civilization” (wenming) in a more nuanced way: rather than simply equating it with religion, language, or ethnicity or other single key elements, we ought to understand Chinese culture and civilization as a transsystemic society that is a compound of everyday life, customs, beliefs, values, rituals, symbols and political systems. What Wang speaks about in the book, and the reason why it is called the rise of modern Chinese thought, is a political culture that can integrate Confucian tradition, Tibetan Buddhism, Islamic culture, and other systems to achieve a certain unity between cultural and political boundaries, thus continuously expanding the connotations and denotations of the concept of China. Far from a history of Chinese philosophy, it is a history of China—the very idea of China—told in intellectual and cultural terms.
Before it was translated into English, the book had already received a surprising amount of attention in anglophone scholarship in the form of lengthy review articles and critical discussions, many of which predicted that it would shake the unconsciously held misperceptions of China, ancient or modern, held by Western readers. However, at eleven hundred pages for just the first two of four volumes (and an abridged version at that too), it will likely prove too long and too challenging.
The French economist Thomas Piketty had a similar problem. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and Capital and Ideology were substantial books that received a lot of attention from academics, but they each ran around a thousand pages long. To make his work more accessible, therefore, he wrote A Brief History of Equality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022) which was, in turn, much more widely read not only within the academe but by members of the general public too.
Fortunately, there is already a shorter version of The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought: the general introduction (daolun) was published separately a decade ago as China from Empire to Nation-State. Regrettably, it is no more accessible. The problem with Wang Hui is that he’s an academic through and through. If he’s to appeal to more than merely senior Sinologists—and I mean senior, because no undergraduate or even graduate student is going to read a book not only so long but so dense—then he needs to write something that can appeal to every man and his dog with an interest in China. Maybe he doesn’t intend to appeal to so many people: it’s not like he says anywhere that he is writing for popularity, and none of his works are trade books by any extent of the imagination. Nevertheless, numerous Sinologists who reviewed the original Chinese work were of the view that the availability of a translation would influence Western perceptions of China. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to be the case, not because the arguments are without merit, but because it’s quite hard to get through. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to be the case.