China’s Xinhua news agency has reportedly issued a list of words and phrases that cannot be used in its media.
The list apparently includes the phrase “Republic of China,” or “ROC,” which is entirely reasonable.
First, from a subjective point of view, China has already published its official version of the history of the ROC, according to which the ROC ceased to exist long ago.
Second, it is also reasonable from an objective point of view.
To understand why, one must go back to an ancient question: Since ancient times, Chinese have not known what to call their own country.
In his essay On the Source of China’s Weakness, published in 1901, Chinese reformer Liang Qichao (梁啟超) wrote: “One of the strangest things about China is that, having existed in the world for thousands of years with tens of millions of inhabitants, up until today it is a country without a name.”
Liang said the problem was that, since ancient times, Chinese had not been able to distinguish between their country and the wider world.
In the traditional Chinese view of the world as tianxia (天下), or “all under heaven,” the word zhongguo (中國) — which is the modern Chinese word for China — has three meanings:
First, it meant it was the center of the world; second, it was the one and only civilization, while all around it were barbarians; and third, it signified the legitimate government that was mandated to rule over tianxia.
When external ethnic groups moved in to the central plain, or zhongyuan (中原) — also called zhongguo — they would become rivals to the ethnic Han regimes south of the Yangtze River, both claiming the title of zhongguo.
The term zhongguo, as used in ancient Chinese texts, was not the name of a country, and it was generally synonymous and used interchangeably with various other terms, such as zhonghua (中華), zhongyuan and zhongtu (中土).
From ancient times until quite recently, zhongguo was never the name of a country.
The various dynasties all had national titles, but those titles were only dynastic periods and partitions of tianxia, not the name of a country covering tianxia in its entirety.
Thus, the Han Dynasty cannot be called the country of Han, nor can the Tang Dynasty be called the country of Tang.
Yes, there was a state of Tang, but that was the Tang state of which Li Yuan (李淵) was given the feudal title “Prince of Tang” before he gained power over tianxia and founded the Tang Dynasty, becoming its first emperor with the title gaozu (高祖).
That state of Tang was a vassal state whose status was similar to that of the state of Qin during the Spring and Autumn Period.
Not until the late Qing Dynasty, when the great powers started invading China, did the Chinese realize that there was a world beyond tianxia.
It was only then, as tributary relations gave way to treaty relations, that Chinese government officials had to think about what to call their country in the text of the treaties it signed.
The 1842 Treaty of Nanjing was the first treaty with a Chinese-language version in which China called itself the Great Qing, but it also called itself zhongguo in the same document. In other treaties that followed, it went on using a mixture of names, including zhonghua and the Great Qing Empire.
As for ordinary people, the majority Han were clear that the Great Qing was just a dynastic period established by a different ethnic group — the Manchu — so they did not want their motherland, whose history included the golden ages of the Han and Tang dynasties, to be permanently named the Great Qing.
So Han people were at first pleased when Japan called China by the classical names of Shina (支那) or Shintan (震旦), taken from the Chinese translations of Indian Buddhist sutras, and Liang Qichao used the same two characters in his pen name “Chinese youth” (支那少年).
Unfortunately the term Shina, which was an elegant name in the eyes of Japanese Buddhists, took on negative connotations because of Japan’s invasion of China.
As to why Chinese eventually chose zhongguo as the nation’s name, the first and less crucial reason is that the Qing Nationality Law of 1909 called the country zhongguo in an official legal document.
The second and more crucial reason for zhongguo taking on its modern meaning was the establishment of the ROC (Zhonghua Minguo, 中華民國), officially incorporating the term zhonghua — with its geographical and cultural connotations — into the national title, whose concise form is Zhongguo.
This same, concise name was taken up by the People’s Republic of China when it was founded in 1949.
China’s escape from the concept of tianxia and adoption of an official national title can be compared to Copernicus’ revelation that the Earth is not the center of the universe, so why would China allow Taiwanese to claim the splendid title of ROC?
We should know our place. Let us give the Republic of China back to China and give our nation a new name all of its own.
Christian Fan Jiang is a media commentator.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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