Why Is China Called the “Middle Kingdom,” or “Zhongguo”?

Welcome to Foreign policyChina’s summary.

Last month, we published a brief history of the Chinese Roman language – and why the Americans in particular offend the name of Chinese President Xi Jinping. It was so common that this week we decided to dive into another linguistic rabbit hole.

What is in the name?

There are two types of facts that every news knows about China: one, its Chinese name, ZhongguoThe “Middle Kingdom” and two means that this name reflects China’s faith on the centrality of global affairs.

None of these ideas is completely incorrect, but there is a more complex history behind them. (As it was always, I am very debtor to Endymion Wilkinson’s Magistration Chinese history: new evidence For information here.)

The names, empires and countries can be slippery to select them over time, and China is not an exception. We think about the Roman Empire as it ends in the fifth century in part because historians later invented the name “Byzantium” to describe the condition of the successor that ruled from Constantinople until 1453. But no Byzantine themselves called it this way; They called themselves RomoyAnd this means “Romans” in Greek.

In China, successive empires from Zho early in 1046 BC gave themselves by claiming that they were inherited for one theory, regardless of whether it had toppled its predecessor as Cheng did with Ming, or aspire to be the heirs of previous empires as he did.

The emergence of the nation -state as the basic unit of political geography in the nineteenth century led to the Chinese subscription in the period after it was too late that China was one nation for thousands of years. But the entity that we call China today was a more flexible idea, and a visualization of the joint cultural heritage that continued through many different political arrangements and rulers.

The traditional Chinese system is generally not referred to as Zhongguo until about the sixteenth century. In its first use, up to 3000 years ago, Zhongguo meant “central plains states”, referring to the yellow river basin where the first kingdoms that would eventually know the Chinese civilization appeared.

For most Chinese history, Zhongguo was usually used to mean “the capital” or “the area around the capital”, but sometimes it meant “Chinese civilization as a whole”. During the warring countries from 475 BC to 221 BC, the competing kingdoms believed that they were involved in one heritage, even when they fought bitterly.

But with the passage of time, what was included in the Chinese world was expanded with the growth of successive empires in its scope. For example, it would have shocked most of the Confucius contemporaries in the warring countries to think about the people of Jonah, which was eventually captured in the thirteenth century, as belonging to the Chinese world.

The Chen family eventually appeared as a winner in the era of warring states in 221 BC, and the unification of the region under a joint base. Their empire lasted only 19 years, but their successors, Han (202 BC to 220 AD, with a summary of 9 AD to 23 m), strengthened the idea of ​​one unified case that will be presented forward by subsequent empires.

Even in the long periods that the region was divided between many rulers, the idea of ​​joint heritage continued. So what did people call the empire they lived?

For the largest part, they used the name of the ruling family at the time. If they lived in the eleventh century, they called their homeland a “song”, if they lived in the fifteenth century, they called it “The Great Ming”, and so on.

Sometimes, those names remained after the life of the family. Han’s legacy was so strong that their name became synonymous with China and the Chinese people. They are the root of the modern term “Han Chinese”, as well as for Chinese personalities (HanziThe wide term for Chinese languages ​​(Hanio).

Several other terms have been commonly used for thousands of years to refer to the heritage that extended beyond today rulers, such as JiuzhouIn the sense of “nine provinces” – a graphic method to refer to the original yellow river. In southern China and its neighbors, TangAfter the empire that ruled from 618 to 907, it was synonymous with the land and people even after the collapse of the Tang Empire itself.

The term was very common Tianchia (“All Under Under Heaven”), which can refer to everything from the heavenly system to Chinese civilization to a geopolitical system with China in its position, or Tiancho (“The Heavenly Empire”). In the nineteenth century, the translation of the term has often led the Europeans and Americans refer to the “Heavenly Empire”, or the Chinese people called “heavens”.

But the first name of the Chinese as a people, which preceded the Han Empire, was Hua, a term literally means “flower” or “flowers” but in practice it means almost “civilized”. He identified them against the so -called barbarian peoples who lack the common heritage of philosophy, ideas of kings and governance, and the written language that united the elite warring states.

Hua led to the word HuaxiaAlmost the “civilized world” – perhaps the most common historical term to refer to Chinese civilization. I merged with Zhongguo, it gives us the word Chongoa Today, there is a more accurate way to refer to the used China, for example, in the official name of the People’s Republic of China (Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo) And the Republic of China (Zhonghua Minguo). They are distorted (“Different Hawa”) and Zhuxia (“Various Chia”, after an ancient, maybe legendary empire) was also synonymous with “Chinese civilization”.

Does these names mean a feeling of superiority over the rest of the world? In the historical context of East Asia, certainly. The Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese kingdoms were sponsored and exploited by Chinese empires, although they tried to design themselves on the Chinese system. The non -governmental peoples were on the northern Chinese steps, stereotypes, invaded and fear by Chinese rulers.

All of this has become more complicated – in a way that I will return to a brief later in China – when these northern powers succeeded in invading and invaded the Chinese world, as in the Mongol Yuan Qing Empire, or when rulers in Japan or Vietnam claimed that they are now the true heredity of Chinese traditions.

Ironically, the adoption of Zhongguo was widely came in one of the weakest points in China. Cheng began to use it in the state documents from the first years of their rule in the seventeenth century, as they began interacting with other international empires.

The Nerchinsk Treaty (1689), which divided Siberia and Central Asia between the Russian Empires and Cheng, was in five languages, in line with the Multi -Cultural nature of Manchu’s rulers in Qing. Use each version a different name for China, but the Chinese language used Zhongguo, which helped to put a precedent that this is the appropriate term for the international stage.

However, by the nineteenth century, the name of China is no longer just a political or geographical issue, but it is a geopolitical issue.

Chinese intellectuals were completely aware of the relatively low position of China in the global ranking, which was controlled by European empires at that time. Especially after the near recovery of Cheng’s rule after the 1860s rebellions, China’s place was very fragile, and European powers were bending from its territory from Siberia to Hong Kong.

One of the problems, as they saw, was that the country has a name for foreigners, but not a single name that those use at home. “The greatest shame is that our country has no name. The names that people usually think, such as Xia, Han, or Tang, are all the nicknames of strange strains,” wrote the famous reformer Liang Chaario in 1900.

The answer they settled was Zhongguo, which was already normalized in Cheng’s documents but was almost internationally adopted by the twenties of the twentieth century, along with the term Zhongguoren (Chinese people) to include both Han and the other peoples of China.

Zhongguo’s unit was especially important after the end of Cheng in 1911, when China collapsed to the rule of local warfare. Away from being a sign of arrogance, it was an expression of hope; Amid the death of millions of people in the civil war, then the horrors of the Japanese invasion, it was suggested that one Chinese state appear again.

Today, that country exists – at least.

The presence of Taiwan with the continuation of other China in the Beijing Association. The Taiwanese themselves are deeply and mysteriously divided their relationship with Chinese heritage, as the polls show. One of the ways they express this is to refuse to define themselves as Zhongguoren, which is now seen as ancient style and the sign of the main righteous sympathy.

For the Taiwanese, the presence and evaluation of the joint cultural heritage does not mean that they should bend the knee to Beijing.