These two works are short, conversational books intended for audiences—academic and beyond academia—that seek to grasp China as a historical entity. The crucial problem they grapple with is the relationship between pre-national, pre-twentieth-century, mostly imperial, China and the Chinese nation-state since its formation in the twentieth century. This has been a vexed question over the last several decades, since the critique of the nationalist narrative of history and what came to be known as “methodological nationalism” began to emerge globally. If the post-war United Nations era reinforced and globalized the national narrative as the commonsensical way of understanding history, the emergence of essentialist narratives of new nations claiming sovereign authenticity rooted in a long-established identity, particularly after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, jolted scholars into recognizing the constructed nature of “nation.”

Perhaps China remains a special problem in this context because it is a global power and has, as Chinese nationalists argue, an older state tradition than any other in the world. To be sure, the length of a state-building tradition is perhaps only peripherally related to the kind of state and state–society relations that are found in the modern nation. Indeed, Gregory Lee's China Imagined takes great care to spell out the distinction between imperial, pre-imperial, and national state formations. Nonetheless, the Chinese argument of a long, continuous, and glorious national history powers a drive by the nation-state to “recover” its global centrality.

Ge Zhaoguang's What is China is a sequel to his Here in ‘China’ I Dwell (Zhaizi Zhongguo). These titles themselves suggest the quest for identity and stability that the author seeks for his countrymen at a time when critical knowledge about nationalism is pervasive. The six principal chapters in the book discuss the notions of tianxia, the territorial extent and depth of the late imperial state, the status of “barbarians” and borders, the peripheral polities of imperial China and the formation of the modern nation-state under conditions of foreign invasion, especially the Japanese invasion.

Periodically, and especially towards the last pages of the book, the author rails against those ultra-nationalists and neo-traditionalists who glorify China's ancient civilization and imperial power, combining real historical achievements with mythic claims and unverifiable knowledge. At the same time, he discloses a placatory view of such nationalists, recognizing that they have had to suffer much ignominy and disrespect as victims of imperialist oppression and Orientalist or neo-Orientalist Sinology. But he finally recognizes that the danger they pose is greater than the psychological wounds they have suffered.

This kind of ambivalence prevails in the scholarly or intellectual dimensions of the work as well. There is not much original research in this work that is not known in Chinese or even the English and Japanese literature on Chinese history; nor is the interpretation particularly novel. Ge's tendency is to present two opposing narratives or interpretations of a particular topic and identify with a slightly inflected version of one or the other, while recognizing the important contributions of the other school. Thus for instance he writes of the Japanese historians of the Mongol era or of the New Qing History, that while they have real scholarly value, “they might go to another extreme … and fail(s) to address whether or not Han culture still had major significance for the entire Great Qing Empire” (p. 17). Ge wants to have the Han nationality at the center of a multi-national state, but he does not seem to recognize that this tension has bloodied the battlefields of history.Footnote ¹

In China Imagined, Gregory Lee approaches the same epistemological disjunction in history in a reverse way, as in a mirror. He seeks to deny the authoritative claims made by Chinese nationalists on the foundation of historical continuity. He aims to demonstrate the vast chasm between national China and pre-national China. Struggling perhaps to reach beyond the prison-house of the national langue, he uses the expression China-before-China to refer to the pre-national. Like Ge's, this is not a book based on original research, but Lee is best when he reveals the chasm through the language and texts before and after the divide. He presents close analyses of the differences in syntax, punctuation, and deixis, whether through poetry or in propaganda. Combining these differences with a changed relationship to dialect, region, and class we see how the two eras belong to different worlds.

Lee also seeks to show the workings of a West–East collusion in this formulation of the gap. He argues that the Orientalist Sinology of the West created China-before-China as the essential and authentic China, elevating its high, literati culture and ignoring the dynamic realities of the past and, not least, in the present. He argues that it is this essentialization that has incongruously contributed to the Chinese nationalist imaginary of its great mission.

While the disjunction may be a new issue in twentieth-century Asian nationalism, the problem appeared as early as the dawn of modern nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe. The mythic character of national unity is not only necessary to assert the glory of sovereign power, it is required to continuously suppress dissent, some of which is a product of nationalist ideology itself. In 1862, Lord Acton—doubtless from an aristocratic perspective—declared that the “worst enemy of nationalism is the theory of nationalism.” Twenty years later, in his lecture, “What is a Nation,” Ernest Renan insisted that the nation be seen less as a historical evolution of material and cultural commonalities, and more as a “spiritual principle” based on a “daily plebiscite” entailing a “necessary forgetting” of divisions and enmities. Renan recognized that the diversity of “origins” or connectedness could cut in different ways. He was reflecting the problems of French unity, encountered among other matters in the Franco-Prussian War, the dispute over Alsace-Lorraine, and the Dreyfus Affair.

Ironically, what Renan refers to as “necessary forgetting” may have been sufficiently forgotten only before the bite of ideological nationalism. The moment the theory of nationalism appeared such memories were “remembered” with a vengeance. We only need to think about the 1911 Republican Revolution in China, when (Outer) Mongolia walked away from the fallen Chinese Empire and the Manchus, and the Uighur Muslims and Tibetans tried hard to do the same. The solution at that time was sought in the Republic of Five Nationalities, a global innovation to be sure. As Edward Rhoads has shown, the Manchu and reformist contributions to this solution were critical. Whether or not the more radical Han leadership of the national movement was committed to this federated structure is highly debatable. At any rate, the view of Ge and many others is that it was the threat of foreign, especially Japanese, imperialism that necessitated the incorporation of the vast frontier regions of the Qing Empire into the nation-state.

Ge seems to be comfortable with the position that it was logically and morally justified for the state and intellectuals at a time of imperialist threat to make these regions and communities a part of “China.” His close analysis of the transformation of Gu Jiegang's views regarding frontier groups after 1937 from myth-buster to myth-maker is a case in point. While the imperial threat is invoked as an explanation, there is no analysis of the historical and political implications of such a transformation and its consequences for both Han nationalism and resistance to it in the peripheries. National mobilization may have been the only means available to defend against more powerful imperialist nationalisms. But whence the imperative to homogenize the plurality for greater resources and glory? While Ge understandably rejects the project of “rescuing history from the nation,” he seems to actually want to rescue the nation from its troubled and troubling histories.

The spread of critical historical awareness has driven a wedge between history as an instrument of power and one that seeks to challenge that usurpation by revealing the different realities and dimensions embedded in it. Beyond the smug deconstruction of power, the critical role of historical analysis is enhanced when we offer different possibilities contained in those realities that can shape a more just present.