The Invention of China

“[A] smart take on modern Chinese nationalism” (Foreign Policy), this provocative account showsthat Chinaand its 5,000 years of unified historyis a national myth, created only a century ago with a political agenda that persists to this day

Chinas current leadership lays claim to a 5,000-year-old civilization, but China as a unified country and people, Bill Hayton argues, was created far more recently by a small group of intellectuals.

In this compelling account, Hayton shows how Chinas present-day geopolitical problemsthe fates of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Seawere born in the struggle to create a modern nation-state. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reformers and revolutionaries adopted foreign ideas to invent a new vision of China. By asserting a particular, politicized version of the past the government bolstered its claim to a vast territory stretching from the Pacific to Central Asia. Ranging across history, nationhood, language, and territory, Hayton shows how the Republics reworking of its past not only helped it to justify its right to rule a century agobut continues to motivate and direct policy today.