What Is China?: Territory, Ethnicity, Culture, and History

Description

Chinese natives rarely attempt to explain their country to outsiders; everything they know is China, and everyone they know is Chinese. China is so all-absorbing that the idea of helping foreigners understand its customs, traditions, and history seems pointless. In this book, Ge Zhaoguang has undertaken the task of explaining China to foreigners. He examines the historical and cultural background of China's emergence as a major world power from a Chinese perspective. Ge argues that the meanings of China and Chinese culture regularly change and avoid a single definition, and that honest discussion of these different meanings and how they arose give us a better route to understanding both historical and contemporary China. He puts forward his solution as an alternative to what he sees as writings that are too eager to deconstruct and perhaps dismiss the idea of China as a historical entity altogether. By offering a general scholarly overview of China, Ge's book begins to overcome the disjunction between American knowledge about China and Chinese understanding of the country.--;Introduction: On the historical formation of "China" and the dilemma of Chinese identity -- Worldviews: from "all-under-heaven" in ancient China to the "myriad states" in the modern world -- Borders: on "Chinese" territory -- Ethnicity: including the "four barbarians" in "China"? -- History: Chinese culture from a long-term perspective -- Peripheries: how China, Korea, and Japan have understood one another since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries -- Practical questions: will cultural differences between China and the West lead to conflict? Introduction: On the historical formation of "China" and the dilemma of Chinese identity -- Worldviews: from "all-under-heaven" in ancient China to the "myriad states" in the modern world -- Borders: on "Chinese" territory -- Ethnicity: including the "four barbarians" in "China"? -- History: Chinese culture from a long-term perspective -- Peripheries: how China, Korea, and Japan have understood one another since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries -- Practical questions: will cultural differences between China and the West lead to conflict?