a bonobo humanity?

”On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“

Vladimir Putin

China as it might have been, around 30 BCE

Since retirement I’ve been helping out with English conversation groups and such, helping people from China, Japan, Taiwan, Columbia and even France (my almost-second language is French) to get more of a handle on our language, but recently one Chinese attendee caused a bit of a ruckus when she told a woman from Taiwan, whom I knew well and whose children I’d recently tutored, that ‘Taiwan is not a real country’. Sound familiar?

So there were a few immediate responses, and the Chinese stirrer, who I would guess to be in her mid-twenties (I’m not sure if that’s relevant), pointed out that Taiwan’s nationhood wasn’t recognised by the UN. I piped up with the obvious remark that the UN would be concerned about China’s reaction to such recognition, to which the stirrer responded with a smug grin, saying ‘yes, exactly’, whereupon my co-convenor of the group quickly changed the subject. At the end of the session, the Community Centre’s co-ordinator, aware of the teacup-storm, asked me what could be done to prevent this sort of thing escalating – should this woman be given a bit of what-for? That was some weeks ago, and the young woman hasn’t been seen since.

I found this little contretemps fascinating of course, as well as disturbing. How do countries become ‘real’? Are any countries actually real? Aren’t they all just human inventions? But then so are computers, and they’re surely real, in spite of having no existence 200 years ago, just as countries had no existence 2000 years ago, and most are no more than a few centuries, or decades, old. I’ve been reading God’s War, Christopher Tyerman’s monumental, and sometimes tedious, history of the crusades – sporadic bloody misadventures waged by Christians of all types and all levels of fervour and belief, against ‘heathens’, ‘pagans’, ‘Saracens’ and other others, from the 11th to the 15th centuries. It was bloody hell, but what makes the book tedious is something I can’t really blame Tyerman for. Hundreds of more or less pre-European principalities, bishoprics, duchies, demesnes, fiefdoms and their hereditary or usurped heads, and the eastern sultans, emirs, atabegs and khans, are mentioned in passing or (rarely) in detail, and it’s quite bamboozling from a modern European or Levantine perspective. There’s no France, Spain, Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, etc, and if Tyerman were to go into detail about where all his locations are in respect to modern counterparts, his 900-odd page book would have to be about twice as long (he does provide some maps, but they don’t help much). 

The story of the formation of countries is largely one of rape and pillage and ‘might is right’. Thereafter, the victors establish a kind of nationalist pride by presenting to themselves and to the world a more or less distorted view of their history. There are of course other, very different types of nation formation, as is the case with Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and the sub-Saharan African nations, to name a few. Broadly speaking, these are the product of colonisation, a more or less euphemistic term for land-grabbing and more or less successful cultural demolition. 

So I thought I  might look at one example of the blood-stained formation of nations, and since all this started with the ‘Taiwan isn’t a real country’ woman, China has struck me as the ideal choice.

Chinese culture goes back to a time before the Chinese nation, or indeed any nation, existed. Of course this isn’t surprising, the same can be said of Aboriginal culture here in Australia, the native cultures of the Americas, and of Africa, the Middle East and so forth, and so actually pinpointing when China first became a country or nation – really quite a modern concept  – may not even be possible. The difficulties are obvious from Wikipedia’s opening lines on the subject:

The history of China spans several millennia across a wide geographical area. Each region now considered part of the Chinese world has experienced periods of unity, fracture, prosperity, and strife.

Note the phrase ‘now considered part of the Chinese world’. Without going into all the pros and cons of that world, the word ‘Chinese’ could be replaced with ‘French’, ‘German’ ‘English’ ‘Spanish’ and more. Consider the Almoravids of al-Andalus, which once covered most of Spain and Portugal, or the Norman conquest of England, and the endless battles for control of north-eastern Europe, long before the existence of Germany, Poland or the Baltic states. And that ‘Chinese world’ was once as multilingual as Europe is today (there are in fact some 300 languages spoken in today’s China, not a fact that its government likes to advertise). 

So when exactly did China become a ‘real country’? Chinese language dates back to 3,000 years or more, but countries weren’t a thing back then. Think of an even older language, like 5,000 year-old Sumerian. Sumer, located in and around modern-day Iraq, was no more a country then than was China 2,000 years later. What we had in those early millennia were expanding, contracting and conflicting dynasties, throughout Eurasia. There were of course no borders, there were power centres of varying magnitudes, with the power dissipating as it radiated outwards, and much conflict in the intersections. These power centres were associated with dynasties, such as the Tang and the Song, and the Ming dynasty established by the all-conquering Mongols. Certain cultural and religious beliefs and practices, such as Taoism and Confucianism, connected people of the region covered roughly by modern China, just as Christianity connected much of western Europe from the 12th and 13th centuries. 

It wasn’t really until the 20th century that China had anything like the clear borders that it arguably has today. The last dynastic empire was that of the Manchus, the Qing dynasty, which came to an end in 1912. During its 280 year hegemony the territory controlled by the Chinese almost doubled, just another example of power and violent suppression radiating outwards. However, the regime was seriously weakened by the Taiping rebellion (1851-64) in which some 20 million lives were lost. After a military uprising, the ‘Republic of China’ was declared in 1912, with Sun Yat-sen, briefly, as its head. This was far from bringing peace and territorial certainty to the region however, and rebellion, conflict and suppression on its western borders – the 1950 military occupation and annexation of Tibet being a powerful example – continues to this day.

So that’s China, and the story of its ‘territorial integrity’ continues, as is the case with Russia and other power and land-obsessed nations – including today’s USA it seems. 

So nowadays, the legitimacy of a nation supposedly, or arguably, depends on the UN, obviously a very recently constructed organisation, the international support for which is varied. But the term has gained its own air of sanctity and power. This is why we nowadays hear of the Sioux nation or the Cherokee nation and the 250 or so Aboriginal nations of Australia. And so it goes, and it’s hard to make sense of it all. What we can be fairly sure of, though, is that when somebody starts going on about X not being a real country, they’re spoiling for a fight. 

References

The Han Dynasty of Ancient China

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China

Christopher Tyerman, God’s war, 2006