What is China?

My name is Kerry Brown,

professor of Chinese studies at King's College,

London associate fellow at Chatham House,

the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

What is China? So it seems a very, very simple question.

China is a country.

It's the world's

third largest country, so it has extensive borders with 14 other countries,

and it is,

at the moment the world's most populous country with 1.4 billion people.

So it seems fairly straightforward.

It's a geography.

But in fact, China is also a place with a very distinctive history

and that history is not a straightforward one.

Nor is there a singular Chinese history. There are Chinese histories.

Chinese leaders today say that their country

has 5000 years of continuous historic presence,

but in fact many people would say that that's not accurate.

In fact, China was unified under the first emperor,

Qin Shi Huangdi

in the year 2020 BC,

and this is taken as the start of a unified entity at that time called in China.

The terracotta warriors in Xi'an, central China,

where many, many tourists go every year,

is a place where this emperor was buried,

and historian Sima Qian

in about the time of Christ said

that the emperor was a great dictator, unified China

and in many ways he left the impact or the imprint of this unified country.

Until today.

However, after that time

there were many, many periods between major dynasties

when China did not exist as a single entity

and it certainly didn't exist in the geographical form

that it has today as the People's Republic of China

in the Han Dynasty.

From around about the second century Christian era,

before Christian era to the second century after the Christian era

was a period of relative unity,

but in a space which was much smaller than the China that exists today,

then there was a couple of centuries in which China was disunited,

or the entity that we call China, which it exists as different kinds of small states,

many of them actually warring with each other.

And so this fragmented period is not really one, which,

you could say belongs to a singular geographical entity.

Was different geographies, different political systems in different spaces.

The Tang Dynasty is taken from the seventh century to the 10th century as the peak

of what we call a cosmopolitan empire.

But you couldn't say that the Tang really had settled borders.

It was a space in which there was a kind of concentration around Xi'an.

At that time, it was called Chang in perpetual peace, the city of perpetual peace.

This was a city which was sort of the cultural centre,

the sort of zone zero of this kind of cultural empire.

But as you got further away from San,

you've got more and more into spaces which were more hybrid

and which were not so easily categorised as culturally Chinese.

The Tang Dynasty after its collapse led to

another period of instability for about a century.

And then we have the Song Dynasty

from about the beginning of the 11th century

into the period of the UN and the Mongolian invasions

around about the end of the 13th century.

And then really we have the modern period of the pre modern period from the Ming from

13 67 the king from 16 44 and then the People's Republic of China from 1949.

Despite the fact that these dynasties were quite long lived, at least the first two,

they were also not really straightforward.

The current entity that is the People's Republic of China.

Its borders were really settled mostly by the middle of the king

in around about the middle of the 17th century,

in which spaces like Tibet and Xinjiang

were appropriated into a Chinese cultural territory.

So in terms of just space,

what is China is not an easy question to answer.

It's been different things with shifting borders

over a long, long time.

The current government of China says, though,

that this continuity is supplied by the fact that China has been a civilisation.

It doesn't need

settled borders for that it can have a kind of fluidity.

And so if we say China is a continuous civilisation,

that's the usual way in which this is referred to.

Then there is continuity.

But it isn't entirely clear what that's based on.

It's not ethnic continuity, because China is a multi ethnic state now,

and there have been different forces

in the histories of China up until the current day,

the Qing Dynasty, for instance,

was a period in which the Manchu,

who are an ethnic minority not entirely similar to the hand,

were dominant.

That Mongolian era obviously was when

Mongolians around changes. Han

and Kubla Khan

were dominant.

And so this is not just a story about ethnic continuity.

And of course, there are many, many arguments about whether

the dominant hand of today 92% of the Chinese population are also cohesive.

As an ethnic group, there are many differences amongst even the hand.

So if it's not ethnic continuity

but its cultural continuity, what are we really referring to?

Possibly in a place which is so rich in diversity,

geographically,

in terms of the appearance of people in terms of the behaviour of people,

the food that people eat

and the kind of ways in which they identify.

The one thing you can say is maybe a tangible

point of continuity

is written language.

We can say that from the earliest period

around about the time of the first Emperor. In fact, even before

in almost the semi mythical Shang Dynasty

several centuries before that,

over 3000 years ago,

there were definite evidence. There's definite evidence

of writing,

which can be still read today on what we

call Oracle bones bones used in divination ceremonies in

which you have inscriptions of Chinese characters which are

still able to be read to this time.

If you go to the Amazing Palace Museum in Taipei,

you can see bronze statues, bronze urns,

which have writing on them from over 3000 years ago, which

largely can still be recognised. Some characters might be unfamiliar,

and the meaning of the words,

because it's in a different kind of set up grammatically, are not so easy to follow.

But largely it can be read in ways which will be very tough

for a European today to be able to read languages before

Greek and Latin.

And so we can say in a sense, this one, um, commentator did that.

China today is almost like the empire of the sign, the empire of the language.

It is this incredible written language of characters,

maybe 6 to 7000 characters in daily usage and many,

many war that can be used in literary Chinese,

more esoteric forms of Chinese writing,

which is the great kind of provider of cohesion.

This is not about the spoken language because that can

differ according to the area one is in in China

and some language, some dialects are completely

incomprehensible to people from elsewhere in China.

But the language is certainly the great unifier.

And with literacy levels of over 99% today in China,

you could say that the heart of the question of what is

China is the follow up question of what is Chinese Chinese language.

And there there is a high degree of unity

and a high degree of identity from that language.

The final thing you can say about what is China

is that it's also

a worldview

Chinese and China have

intellectual histories to,

and those have been very hybrid.

So we have,

as in Europe, Christianity being a dominant force, making people's worldviews

in China a kind of diversity of belief systems from Confucianism and

the time of the warring states 500 years before the Christian era

and right up till today to Buddhism,

which spread across the Tibetan Plateau plateau from

India in the 8th and 9th centuries.

Daoism, which is a very ancient belief form about the power of contradictions.

That kind of yin and Yan,

which was influential from the earliest times, gain until today

and then in modern times, Marxism, Leninism and a whole group of other belief forms.

You could say therefore, that China is the empire of the sign.

But it's also an intellectual space which is

extremely hybrid and diverse.

These give China

its complexity,

its richness, its diversity

and its dynamism.