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CHINA and "The Middle Kingdom"
| Chinese civilisation and culture developed in the middle reaches of the Yellow River Valley, or Zhongliu 中 流 , amongst an ethnic group known as the Huaxia 华 夏 people. Huaxia is one of the earliest names for the Chinese. In the Shu Jing or Book of Documents, one of the early Chinese classics, Chinese people are referred to as "the black-haired people", and China as the "nine districts". | |
| The term Zhongguo 中 国 for China appears for the first time in documents of the Zhou dynasty. Its original meaning was the "central palace", but this was soon extended to mean the "area governed by the central palace", and hence the walled city in which the palace was situated, namely, the capital, and then the "region governed from the capital". This is the meaning of the term as it appears in the Shi Jing or Book of Poetry. China in the Zhou dynasty, eventually broke up into hundreds of feudal kingdoms. Although the Emperor was still nominally in power, the kingdoms surrounding the throne formed an alliance to defend the Central authority against the rebellious outer states, and so were known as the Zhongguo or Central Kingdoms. | |
| By the time of Mencius, Chinese culture had spread from the Yellow River Valley to the central plain, and so Zhongguo in the Book of Mencius and in the writings of the Song dynasty refers to the Central plain or zhongyuan 中 原 . In the first century BC, Sima Qian in his Records of the Grand Historian explained that the Zhongguo or Central States were only one of eighty-one regions. In the standard text for teaching children to read, compiled in the Song dynasty and used up to the end of the Qing dynasty, the Sanzi Jing or Three-word Classic, the term Zhongguo never appears. Instead, the classic explains that the name of the country is named after the ruling dynasty, and changes with it. And so China was known successively as Da Tangguo, Da Songguo, Da Mingguo, Da Qingguo, and so on | |
| The central kingdoms of ancient China had been a collection of independent states, often warring with one another, but sharing a common culture in an area surrounded by peoples of other cultures. As the concept of China as a unitary nation-state began to grow, the term came to express this new developing concept, and the central area of Chinese culture continued to be known informally as Zhongguo, particularly in the nineteenth century, when China was in imminent danger of being dismembered by the West. However, the official name for China throughout the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) remained Da Qingguo. Indeed, to Cantonese-speakers of an earlier generation, China was always spoken of as Tangshan, or "the hills of Tang", and Chinese people were known as Tangren, rather than as Zhongguoren, the term in common use today. The official name for China after the 1911 revolution, became Zhonghua Minguo, (the Republic of China), the name still used today by the government in Taiwan. Today, China is known officially as Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo (the People's Republic of China). In informal usage, both these names are contracted to Zhongguo, just as in English, UK is commonly used as an abbreviation for the official name United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. | |
| However, writers in English on China, often claim that the Chinese have been calling their country Zhongguo or the "Middle Kingdom" for thousands of years, because, they say, the Chinese believe that they live in the centre of the world or universe. | |
| They will often then use this as the reason to explain why, according to them, China has in past centuries isolated herself from the rest of the civilised world while looking upon everyone else as "barbarians", and why her resulting sense of "cultural superiority" makes her refuse even today to accept western norms of civilisation, culture and behaviour. These conclusions are based on an erroneous understanding of Zhongguo, the name by which Chinese today know their country, for the term Zhongguo is a geographical term denoting an area of Chinese culture surrounded by ethnic peoples of a different culture. It has never signified the "centre of the world", let alone "centre of the universe", and has been in use as part of the official name for China only since the early twentieth century. | |
| It is true that the literal dictionary meaning of zhong is "middle", and of guo is "kingdom". But if we are to deduce from this that the Chinese thought and think they live in the centre of the world, then we must accept that the Chinese believe in the literal meanings of the names they give to things, and that they believe, for instance, that: | |
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| In the case of the Chinese name for Australia (澳 大 利 亚), if we were to translate meaning of the characters literally, we would get the phrase, "the bays are big, but the profits are second-rate". | |
| How untenable the English theories, based on a misinterpretation of the name Zhongguo, are can also be easily seen if we think about what our reaction would be, if a Chinese historian were to suggest that Central Park in New York was so named because Americans believed they lived in the centre of the world, and that this was why so many Americans believed in the superiority of American culture and was the basic reason for why America behaves towards other nations as it does. There is also a central region of Japan called Chugoku 中 国 written with the same characters as Zhongguo, yet no one has ever suggested that the inhabitants there also believe they live in the centre of the world. And are we to believe that residents of the suburb of Middleton in Christchurch also think their town is in the centre of the world? | |
| In fact, to most Chinese, Zhongguo, like the names of all the countries cited above, is just a place name. Chinese attach no more importance to their literal meanings than we do to names of countries like Greenland, to place names such as the Mediterranean (from Latin medius = middle; terra = earth), or to a personal name such as Rose Ramsbottom. | |
| The erroneous idea that many writers in English have that Chinese people believed themselves for thousands of years to live in the centre of the world or universe seems to date only from the nineteenth century. Before this, no major European writer on China appears to have paid much attention to the literal meaning of the term "middle kingdom". But it had become such a well-established myth by the beginning of this century, that an English-speaking missionary , used it as the title of a major work on China. And it now seems de rigueur for almost every report on China that appears in our popular media to cite it as an incontrovertible fact that is still true today. | |
| Yet, as early as In 1855, over one and a half centuries ago, the French scholar Huc had already explained: | |
He then goes on to say: |
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| Yet, after over 150 years, "this absurd idea" is as persistent as ever, apart from a few isolated voices such as that of Professor Mair of Columbia University who wrote in 1994: | |
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| The contemporary emphasis by English-speaking observers on China as the Middle Kingdom, is dangerous, because it stops us from trying to understand the real reasons for China's unwillingness to accept every idea that we in the West have to offer her. Instead we prefer to put her refusal down not to the possibility that our ideas might be inappropriate to the Chinese situation, but to a Chinese "traditional xenophobia" governed by snobbish feelings of cultural superiority towards western "barbarians". We then go on to invent a special term "sinocentrism" to denote this attitude, as if ethnocentricity were a peculiarity of Chinese culture unknown in other cultures such as our own. Unfortunately, this is not the case. | |
| In ancient times, the Romans saw themselves as being at the centre of the orbis terrarum or "circle of lands". Caesar and Cicero already wrote about their world as being in the "mediterranean regions". For the Greeks, on the other hand, the navel of the world was marked at Delphi by a conical stone called the "Omphalos". In our own day, many NZ'ers, convinced that New Zealand is the best country in the world, often have nothing but contempt for the "wogs", "poms" and "yanks" they meet in their travels overseas. After all, they know that New Zealand is "God's own Country", even though Americans may claim otherwise. Many Englishmen are equally convinced that the "jungle begins at Calais", and no one denies that many Jews even today believe themselves to be the "Chosen people". | |
| Yet the idea that the Chinese think themselves superior, because for thousands of years they have believed their country to be at the centre of the world, is so widespread, that it is perpetuated even in reputable school textbooks. In Hanyu, one of the most widely used school textbooks in Australasia, we read : | |
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| The equally influential set of textbooks Ni Hao! states categorically: | |
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| Of course, some Chinese, like the inhabitants of other formerly great empires, undoubtedly do think that they are the most highly cultured people in the world. But this arrogance cannot be taken as a universal Chinese attitude that can be presented as a major motivating force of Chinese history and of Chinese behaviour throughout her five thousand years of history. Not only does this view ignore nearly a thousand years of Buddhist influence from India; the influences that came via the silk route from Central Asia, Persia, and even further afield; and the long periods of Chinese history when China was governed by non-Chinese dynasties; but observers who take this view seem not to have noticed, that for many Chinese today, the humiliations and defeats of the past 150 years or more, followed by civil war, unrest and turmoil, have made many Chinese feel acutely inferior. The older generation can console itself with the thought that, "Well, at least, we had a glorious past". Younger people, however, often feel that, "the past is a heavy burden" that must be cast off, and Chinese traditions modernised or Americanised as quickly and as far as is possible. So that most Chinese today are suffering not from a "superiority complex", but from an acute "inferiority complex", though this is sometimes disguised as a "superiority complex". But most English-speaking observers seem not to have noticed this. | |
Footnote: All these names are in fact phonetic
approximations to the corresponding foreign name. Thus:
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This page last revised: 19 December, 2001