I

The two ideograms making up Zhongguo first appeared separately as pictorial symbols in Shang oracle bone and bronze inscriptions (c. 1570–1045 bc).Footnote ²¹Zhong took the shape of a tasselled long pole held erect by human hands in the mid-section to signal the Shang king's command over his warriors and subjects. It then acquired a positional value when it was used to designate the middle of the Shang king's three armies and still later, the Shang as Zhong Shang (the Shang at the centre) or the suzerain overlord.Footnote ²²Guo, on the other hand, depicted a square enclosure with a dagger-axe or spear inside it and, subsequently, a walled settlement with military capability. The joining of the two ideograms to form an expression carried at first multiple meanings, which included (1) the capital of the suzerain state; (2) the territories directly under its control; (3) the land within or immediately adjacent to a walled area; (4) a vassal state's domain; (5) a middle-ranking vassal state in power and in size; (6) the vassal states physically located between others; and (7) the aggregate of the suzerain and vassal states. Researchers agree that of all the instances of zhongguo mentioned in the ancient texts produced before the Qin unification (221 bc), the majority conveyed the meaning in (7) to signify the collectivity of the suzerain and vassals, or, literally, the Central States.Footnote ²³

The earliest known application of the term in this sense occurred around 1000 bc when the Zhou state, after defeating and replacing the Shang as suzerain, issued a proclamation, which read in part, ‘The majestic heaven has bestowed the peoples and the lands of Zhongguo on our royal ancestors.’Footnote ²⁴ Zhongguo in this context identified the Central States that had earlier pledged their allegiance to the Shang and, now, to the Zhou. These states, suzerain and vassal, past and present, had mostly evolved from the neolithic Longshan communities (late third to early second millennia bc) scattered across the Yellow River, Huai River, and Yangzi River regions. They were the so-called ‘ten thousand states' (wanguo) mentioned in the ancient sources and could not have been, initially, much larger than extended clans.Footnote ²⁵ War and conquest led to the demise of many states and, eventually, to the rise of one that was recognized by the rest as suzerain. The celebrated Three Dynasties (Sandai) of Xia, Shang, and Zhou (c. 1900–249 bc) in Chinese historiography were three such leading states in succession. Self-labels were adopted for the affiliated whole, like Zhuxia (Many Xias), Huaxia (the Xia land of efflorescence), and Zhongguo, to connote a mutual bond, real or fictive, between the constituents. None, however, prevailed as the exclusive official name. Zhuxia and Huaxia acknowledged a connection to the highly revered, legendary Xia dynasty. The Zhou suzerain actually considered itself the atavistic heir to the Xia, bypassing the Shang, and called its vassals Zhuxia, or Many Xias.Footnote ²⁶ The hua in Huaxia meant ‘flower’ and, by extension, cultural elegance; when joined with Xia, it doubled the felicity.Footnote ²⁷ In contrast, Zhongguo was plain and simple. According to the late Qing scholar Zhang Binglin (1869–1936), it was a label by which the Central States distinguished themselves from spatially distant groups in the four cardinal directions (siyi),Footnote ²⁸ respectively, the eastern Yi, western Rong, southern Man, and northern Di, or, generically, the yi, yidi or manyi (foreigners; barbarians). In this sense, Zhongguo's chief function had been to accentuate an in-group identity relative to the peripheral ‘other’. Keeping an inviolate divide was neither easy nor realistic. Interactions between the Central States and the yi, whether peaceful or hostile, were commonplace and contributed to the dynamics of political, cultural, and ethnic change in North and Central China through to the end of the Zhou era.

Without exception, then, all of zhongguo/Zhongguo's ancient meanings pointed to political life as the overall frame of reference, with each denoting some aspect of it, whether a material or spatial feature of the city-state (territory, location, etc.), the suzerain–vassal totality, or a shared affiliation relative to extraneous groups. None of these meanings went beyond the mundane to evoke a cosmic or cosmological vision. For this reason, arguably, the term was conspicuously absent from the language of hegemony of the Qin state after it had defeated its rivals and established empire on conquered territories. The Qin ruler Ying Zheng (259–219 bc), the self-proclaimed First Emperor (Shi huangdi), was a political realist with a penchant for the supernatural and sublime. He once undertook an expedition to the south-east to forestall a possible challenge to his rule after it was divined that ‘an aura of the Son of Heaven’ (tianzi zhi qi), presumably other than his own, was detected in that direction.Footnote ²⁹ It was but one of his extensive tours of his empire that often culminated in rituals of worship performed to the heaven and earth deities (feng and shan).Footnote ³⁰ Steles commemorated such occasions.Footnote ³¹ Extant inscriptions on these sang the praise of ‘the Qin virtue’ (Qin de) and of the First Emperor's restoration of universal peace so that ‘where there are traces of humans, no one refuses to submit’.Footnote ³² His authority was said to be co-extensive with ‘all under heaven’ (tianxia) or all that existed within ‘the [four] seas' (hainei), ‘the four cardinal directions' (sifang), ‘the four extremities' (siji), or ‘the six points' (liuhe; the zenith, nadir, east, west, north, and south).Footnote ³³ Spatial superlatives all, the language projected the imagined reach of the First Emperor's imperial absolutism. Not once, however, did the stele texts invoke Zhongguo. The omission would have been a curious one indeed if the Qin court had knowingly ignored a term of exploitative potential. A more likely explanation is that Zhongguo, despite the suggestive zhong, had not been customarily employed for grandiose description, whether cosmological or ethnocentric.

If the First Emperor had little use of Zhongguo, Zhongguo survived in spite of him. Writers of the following Han dynasty (206 bc – ad 220) applied the term not only to the earlier suzerain–vassal configuration but also to the imperial state that came after it. In his historical and literary masterpiece Shiji (Records of the grand scribe), the court scribe Sima Qian (c. 145–85 bc) employed Zhongguo no less than 113 times.Footnote ³⁴ Since the Shiji reconstructed the general history from the earliest Wudi rulers through the Xia, Shang, Zhou, and Qin to the early Han, many of these instances alluded to the Central States before the Qin unification. Significantly, Sima Qian also called the Qin and Han empires Zhongguo, as if the transition from the pluralistic system to unitary imperial rule or the transfer of power from the Qin to the Han had not fundamentally altered the term's meaning.Footnote ³⁵ This seemingly indiscriminate approach reflected Sima Qian's own profound concern for historical continuity. The Qin and Han were not, to him, really political disjunctures but only sequential episodes of the unfolding drama. This inclusive use of Zhongguo was amply illustrated by individual themes and accounts of Shiji. On the transmission of high culture, Sima Qian heaped the most praise on Confucius's Six Arts (Liuyi) for benefiting Zhongguo's rulers, nobles, and scholars through the ages to the early Han with a balanced regimen for training the mind and the body.Footnote ³⁶ Zhongguo in this sense captured a trans-historical nexus over and above the vagaries of royal and imperial politics. The name was also enshrined in enduring attributes of the physical habitat. ‘Famous mountains and mighty rivers' (mingshan dachuan), like Mount Hua and the Yellow River, had adorned Zhongguo since time immemorial, and in the realm of the stars, the Taibaixing (Venus) had been Zhongguo's ever-present celestial correlate and source of astrological influence.Footnote ³⁷ The name thus signified an earthly site demarcated by timeless features of geography and astronomy. Finally, Sima Qian followed convention in using Zhongguo with respect to the peripheral yi or yidi groups. Of these, the Xiongnu steppe warriors stood out. They had earlier posed such a threat that the First Emperor resorted to pre-emptive strikes and the construction of defensive walls. Footnote ³⁸ Now, in addition, the Han government sought diplomatic alliance with some of the Central Asian states against their common foe. Sima Qian gathered information on these states, allies or not, and recognized some as ‘great states' (da guo) that deserved respect and the prefix Da (Great) to their names.Footnote ³⁹ It was in this relativized political landscape that Sima Qian portrayed Zhongguo as a key regional power from the time of the Central States to the Qin and early Han. In one section of Shiji, Sima Qian actually located Zhongguo not in the middle of the known world (sihai) but off-centre to the south-east.Footnote ⁴⁰

II

Though not necessarily the originator, Sima Qian did demonstrate several of Zhongguo's uses that became standard in the Chinese language. In designating a lasting community from past to present as Zhongguo, Sima Qian confirmed the term's applicability over the longue durée. Later writers with an interest in history beyond a single dynasty or period found this descriptive function even more expedient. In an essay on dynastic defence against external enemies,Footnote ⁴¹ the Ming scholar Zhang Huang (1527–1608), for instance, cited laudable precedents that included the legendary Huangdi (Yellow Emperor) who subdued the savage Chiyou tribe, the emperors of the Tang dynasty (618–907) who repelled the Turkic invaders, and the Southern Song statesman Wen Tianxiang (1236–83) who chose death over capitulation to the Mongols. Zhang ended his reference to each of these examples by intoning, ‘It was all for the sake of Zhongguo (Wei Zhongguo ye)!’ The repeated incantation, thirteen times in all, attested not only to Zhongguo's validity as an identity label since the earliest culture heroes but also to its diachronic durability.

There was the synchronic dimension, as well. Zhongguo was also applicable to the discrete units, or, as it were, cross-sections of history when history was viewed as a continuum. Sima Qian regarded the Qin and Han each as Zhongguo, as he did the earlier Central States. The reigning power at a given time could thus be signified not only by its dynastic or period title but also, alternatively, by Zhongguo. Chinese sources from the Song dynasty (960–1276) identified the Khitan Liao state (907–1125) to the north as ‘foreign country’ (waiguo) or ‘northern dynasty’Footnote ⁴² while calling the Chinese state to the south the Song or Zhongguo.Footnote ⁴³ In the Chinese translation or Chinese version of the early border and trade treaties signed with Czarist Russia (c. late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), the Qing dynasty often appeared in the text as Zhongguo, or Zhong for short.Footnote ⁴⁴ As diplomatic contact with Western nations increased after the Opium War (1839–42), the Qing government sometimes addressed itself as Zhongguo (or Zhong) in official documents.Footnote ⁴⁵ Late in the nineteenth century, in the formal credentials that the Guangxu emperor (r. 1875–1908) personally drafted for the minister designate to Japan, Da Qing Guo (the Great Qing State) appeared only once in the preamble and Zhongguo twice in the main text to denote the selfsame ‘us' or ‘country’.Footnote ⁴⁶ By then, the mutual substitution between Zhongguo and the dynastic (or period) name had been a well-rehearsed practice for 2,000 years.

Where the synchronic and diachronic intersected, a third function of Zhongguo resulted. In presenting rulers and reigns since antiquity in chronological order, Sima Qian delineated an open-ended series subject to future accretions. Later writers who worked with a similarly long or longer time span had to decide for their own purpose how to schematize the past and what to include in it. Since historical significance had to be prioritized, not every regime or claimant to power could be accorded equal attention, especially when political fragmentation had allowed rival states to co-exist or when, from the Chinese standpoint, non-Han rulers had seized control. The exercise gave rise to the discussion and, occasionally, debate on ‘legitimate succession’ (zhengtong) in Chinese historiography and political thought.Footnote ⁴⁷ To Zhang Huang, cited above, the selfless courage to confront an external enemy, ‘for the sake of Zhongguo’, was crucial for inclusion, as was, by inference, the effort to preserve the Han Chinese ethnicity. The Ming scholar and loyalist Wang Fuzhi (1619–92) would have agreed. In his voluminous writings, Wang seldom concealed his contempt for barbarians (yidi), who were, in his opinion, intrinsically incompatible with Zhongguo and, therefore, undeserving of its land and name.Footnote ⁴⁸

Others upheld a different yardstick. The Song compilers of the history of the politically divisive period of the Five Dynasties and Ten States (Wudai shiguo, 907–79) produced two major works that are now known, by order of their completion, as the ‘old’ (jiu) and ‘new’ (xin) Wudai shi (History of the Five Dynasties).Footnote ⁴⁹ Both titles named the entire era after the northern states rather than those in the south. As Ouyang Xiu (1007–72) of the ‘new’ history put it curtly, ‘The [southern] Ten Kingdoms were not possessed by Zhongguo.’Footnote ⁵⁰ The bold statement expunged from Zhongguo a substantial portion of the imperial domain formed since the Qin and Han empires and, more notably, eschewed ethnicity as a factor. For the period in question, the north had fallen to leaders of nomadic descent whereas the south had remained mostly in Han Chinese hands. Nor was Ouyang, a Confucian scholar, persuaded in his judgement by political morality. In fact, he was appalled by the immoral many who had governed the north.Footnote ⁵¹ What disposed him, and colleagues of the ‘old’ history before him, to favour the north over the south as the mainstay of Zhongguo was political geography. The Five Dynasties had control of the Central Plain (Zhongyuan) along the lower Yellow River valley, a region long revered in Chinese lore as the cradle of civilization. Whoever occupied it for any significant length of time, as the Five Dynasties did, would be recognized as a proper heir to its legacy.Footnote ⁵² All other factors paled in comparison. It was by this criterion also that the status of the later non-Han empires of the Mongols (Yuan) and Manchus (Qing) was mostly resolved. Demurrers aside, Chinese writers generally agreed that by virtue of their command over the Central Plain, the Yuan and Qing were legitimate successors to Zhongguo, both in power and in name.

Conversely, rulers of minority descent found it politically advantageous to be identified with Zhongguo. As the court minister Xu Shilong (1206–85) advised the Mongol ruler Kubilai Khan (1215–94), ‘Now that Your Majesty is master of Zhongguo, you should do things the Zhongguo way.’Footnote ⁵³ To abide by the ‘Zhongguo way’, if only for reason of political expediency and nothing more, Kubilai followed the Chinese practice of adopting a dynastic name and called his massive empire Yuan. The choice, as he explained, surpassed all previous Chinese dynastic titles in intent and purpose.Footnote ⁵⁴ Whereas major dynasties like the Qin, Han, Sui, and Tang were each named after some aspect of their founders' personal or family background, like a birthplace or a power base, Yuan was adapted from the Confucian classic Yijing (Book of changes) in an appeal to the primal energy that permeated and vitalized all things. Unlike his Chinese predecessors, so he claimed, he was more concerned with his subjects' well-being than his own immortalization in a name. The Manchus who founded China's last Qing dynasty were faced with a similar dilemma. The Yongzheng emperor (r. 1723–35) thus took the opportunity of pronouncing judgement on Zeng Jing's (1679–1735) anti-Manchu activities to register his point.Footnote ⁵⁵ Zhongguo, he argued, had never been a stagnant country but one capable of change and growth. Geographical regions, once shunned as cultural backwaters, had been annexed to create provinces like Hunan, Hubei, and Shaanxi, and their inhabitants, once despised as savages, absorbed into the subject population. The Manchus had hailed from a region adjoining China's north-east, like a ‘native place’ (jiguan) in Chinese society, and were neighbours, not strangers. They later merged their Qing state with the Ming dynasty to form the Qing empire, giving proof, once again, to the Chinese pattern of dynastic renewal. Under Manchu leadership, ‘Zhongguo's borders have expanded far and wide, truly a blessing to Zhongguo's officials and people.’Footnote ⁵⁶ By invoking Zhongguo in rapid succession, Yongzheng was professedly as proud of his forebears' military conquest as he was pleased with Manchu accession to imperial China. Dynastic legitimacy was secured on the synchronic and diachronic fusion of the Qing empire and historical Zhongguo.

The discussion so far has not lent support to Williams's view that the name Zhongguo betokened Chinese ‘vanity’ and ‘ignorance’. A caveat is in order. It is not argued that, unlike other traditional societies, China had been singularly devoid of ethnocentric biases, but only that Zhongguo was not a term customarily employed in their articulation. There were indeed Chinese writers who may be cited to corroborate Williams. In the famous account of the Han court debate (81 bc) on ‘salt and iron’ (yantie; fiscal and economic policies), a participant described Zhongguo as the land situated ‘in the middle of heaven and earth where yin and yang interacted [in perfect accord]’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Zhongguo thus indicated the unique, privileged space or passage between the celestial and terrestrial realms, not unlike the ‘cosmic axis' that Mircea Eliade has found so widely celebrated in ancient creation myths.Footnote ⁵⁸ Others also harped on this cosmographical mystique. To the early Song Confucian purist Shi Jie (1005–45), ‘The heaven is above, and the earth, below. Positioned between heaven and earth is Zhongguo, and in the periphery are the four wild tribes (siyi).’Footnote ⁵⁹ Shi Jie was so distraught at the popularity of what he decried as vile ‘foreign’ religions like Buddhism and Daoism that he called for their containment or, better still, eradication. Only then, he argued, ‘will Zhongguo remain Zhongguo; the four wild tribes will remain the four wild tribes'. To the Tang scholar Huangfu Shi (c. 777–c. 835), a more flexible interpretation was feasible: ‘Propriety and righteousness make Zhongguo what it is, and the absence of these makes the barbarians (yidi) what they are. Does [Zhongguo] have to be affixed to one place?’Footnote ⁶⁰ Zhongguo in this sense captured a moral idea that transcended the constraints of space and time.

The ethnocentric overtones of these statements were unabashedly pronounced. Notice, however, that Zhongguo as employed in these instances did not stand on its own but always alongside a special elucidation of the character zhong. Shi Jie took zhong to suggest literal centrality in all of heaven and earth whereas Huangfu Shi settled for a metaphysical description. From these varied uses, Zhongguo acquired nuances, which were add-ons rather than original, core, or conventional connotations. Since zhong was open to interpretation, embellishment was, in principle, limited only by the imagination. Efforts to contrive meaning persisted into the twentieth century. In his pioneering work on China's cultural history, Liu Yizheng (1880–1956) wrote: ‘During the Ages of Tang and Yu [King Yao and King Shun], zhong was chosen to be the name of the country because the sage kings clearly understood excess to be a human folly and resolved to govern people and to manage affairs according to the golden mean (zhongdao).’Footnote ⁶¹ Liu gave the name an unmistakable Confucian twist, but it was not grounded in etymological or historical evidence. Yao and Shun were legendary figures of undetermined historicity and were credited with a one-time invention of what had evolved, by Liu's time, over several millennia through competing and adaptive uses. Of and by itself and without a descriptive elaboration on zhong, Zhongguo had mainly served as an identity label, not of a heaven-blessed, cosmically pivotal site on earth but of a secular state and community that had repeatedly proved susceptible to the forces of internal and inter-state politics.

III

The primary and secondary functions of Zhongguo may now be established. Through the glass of translation darkly, Williams saw what he needed to see in order to locate China in the nineteenth-century human landscape. His explanation of the name depicted a country that was civilized but inferior to Western nations, an image that readily lent itself to manipulative interpretation to furnish the kind of justification often noted in Western activities in late Qing China, from proselytization to education, from philanthropy to exploitation. However, Williams could have done better. As a Sinologue, he had the language facility for explaining Zhongguo in terms of actual usage in Chinese sources instead of relying on conjecture or the literal meaning of zhong. As the United States representative in Beijing, he was in proximity to witness the Qing practice of addressing itself alternatively as Zhongguo (or Zhong) in documents like treaties. Surely, Western governments, including the United States, would not have acquiesced if Zhongguo (or Zhong) had been persuasively or even conclusively shown to convey Qing pretences about its place in the world. At issue, then, was not that the Qing state had no ethnocentric ambition of its own but only that Zhongguo was tangential or irrelevant to its expression. Other epithets were in place. It was not by chance or out of sheer frivolity that Western reports sometimes called Qing subjects Chinamen, ‘Celestials'.Footnote ⁶² The Qing court's tendency to proclaim itself the Celestial Dynasty (Tianchao) was largely to blame.

Williams's relevance does not end with this query of his remarks but goes on to illuminate several late Qing (c. 1860–1912) instances in which Chinese writers disputed the name. A rare, if not unprecedented, occurrence since Zhongguo first came to designate the ancient Central States, the late Qing challenge did not issue from some internal dialectics of language use but from an awareness of foreign misgivings. The source of these was not identified, ascribable only to some unnamed ‘foreigner’ or ‘foreigners' (wairen), but Williams was a distinct possibility. His Middle Kingdom was available to Chinese readers of English and even adopted, according to his son and biographer Frederick Wells Williams, ‘as a text-book in some Anglo-Chinese educational institutions'.Footnote ⁶³ While causal influence cannot be ascertained, Williams's comments on Zhongguo may be taken to exemplify the kind of impetus that bestirred the Chinese writers. The episode not only appended an interesting footnote to the name's long history but also offered a glimpse into a prominent mode of discourse as the Chinese of the late Qing period, and, thereafter, pondered the fate of their country.

The first example came from the unlikely province of Hunan that had acquired an ill repute for xenophobia in the second half of the nineteenth century. As late as April 1897, the British consul Pelham Warren at Hankow (Hankou) in the neighbouring province of Hubei reiterated what was a typical complaint: ‘Hunan, and Ch'angsha, in particular, is the centre from which radiate all troubles in the Yangtze valley.’Footnote ⁶⁴ Ch'angsha (Changsha) was Hunan's capital; the Yangtze (Yangzi) valley was a region of vital economic and political interests to Britain; and by ‘troubles', he meant violent incidents against foreign traders and Christian missionaries. Western observers generally agreed that Hunan's ‘isolation and exclusiveness' were the problem and that the ‘force of Christendom’ should be employed to open it to treaty contact.Footnote ⁶⁵ So entrenched was this opinion that the change being introduced in Hunan since China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) went largely unnoticed. The province's officials and elites had taken steps to educate the population on current affairs and on the need for peaceful co-existence with foreign countries. Then, in late 1897, as the Scramble for Concessions set off by the Western powers and Meiji Japan threatened the partition of the Qing empire, Hunan responded with a quickened pace of reform. Some of its leaders harboured the hope of devising ‘some measure of [Hunan's] survival in the event of [the dynasty's] doom’ (wang hou zhi tu).Footnote ⁶⁶

One of the new projects initiated at this time was the publication of the daily Xiang bao (Hunan news), which carried news, government bulletins, articles, and miscellaneous pieces.Footnote ⁶⁷ On 6 April 1898, a long poem appeared under the title ‘A ballad to awaken the age’ (Xingshi ge). Contributed by Pi Jiayou, son of the renowned classical scholar Pi Xirui (1850–1908), it comprised 276 verses in a style that resembled the seven-character sub-genre (qiyan) of traditional poetry. However, unlike the classical form that tended to favour ornate language and subtle imageries, Pi's poem contained mostly plain rhymed lines with a simple message: Hunanese must learn to tolerate other races (zhong) and, in particular, Westerners, who might look odd, even frightful, with their high nose bridges and deep-set eyes but who were just as human in mind and heart as Hunanese. Hostilities against them, whether as barbarians or as ‘sons of the devil’ (guizi), would only provoke retaliation and wreak havoc on the province and the country. To get at the heart of the anti-foreign sentiment, Pi took aim at the Sinocentric worldview and targeted the name Zhongguo:Footnote ⁶⁸

In short, the poem was a spirited effort to alert readers to emergent circumstances that had rendered the received wisdom about their country and the world obsolete. Yet, its effectiveness was unclear. In debunking the Sinocentric myth, Pi seized upon only a facile, secondary meaning of Zhongguo for attack, and this deviation from common usage was not readily conducive to reader empathy and support. His intended audience also remained vague. The casual reader was likely to find the poem too long for focused attention, whereas literati of the old school were certain to frown on its lowbrow qualities. To some readers, the earth's ‘roundness' was hardly news. As one of the Xiang bao editors Tan Sitong (1865–98) pointed out in his own essays several years before, ancient Chinese sources and earlier scholars like the Northern Song philosopher Zhang Zai (1020–77) had already mentioned or discussed at length the earth's spherical shape.Footnote ⁶⁹ Finally, readers who were receptive to new ideas had little to gain from it. References to the world map, to world geography, and to racial types were staple information found in contemporary discussion and publications on so-called ‘new learning’ (xinxue).Footnote ⁷⁰ Largely to convert the converted, Pi's poem would have met the fate of newsprint oblivion if the classical scholar Ye Dehui (1864–1927) had not decided to take it to task. Ye did not confront the poet directly. Instead, in true patriarchal fashion, he approached the father, Pi Xirui, whom he had known for years.

Ye explained in a letter that he did not condone violence against Westerners; nor did he, for reasons of race and culture, embrace them indiscriminately.Footnote ⁷¹ The young poet erred in seeing only sameness in human types and not the vital differences that defined and distinguished them. Unlike the Manchus and Han Chinese who belonged to the same Yellow Race, Westerners were of a separate race and must be kept, on that account, at arm's length. Quoting the four lines of Pi's poem cited above,Footnote ⁷² Ye defended both the idea and the name of Zhongguo. He argued on the strength of some unspecified ‘European word’ (‘Orient’ or some European variant?) that Westerners had long acknowledged Asia (Yaxiya) to be located in the earth's east and south and the first to witness sunrise every day. Zhongguo was situated where these cardinal directions intersected in Asia, a geographical fact that bestowed on it an unparalleled advantage over all other countries. There was more. According to the ancient Chinese theory of Five Phases (Wuxing), the cardinal directions of east and south corresponded with the seasons of spring and summer and the attributes of birth and growth. When viewed jointly through the racial categories and the Five Phases, Zhongguo's premier status became even more evident. Since the Yellow Race matched the colour of the Earth Phase (Tu), which signified the focal point of the terrestrial and celestial realms, it followed that Zhongguo had to be the unique hub on earth: ‘When heaven and earth first parted in primordial times, the people of Zhongguo (Zhongren) were destined for the position of centrality’, and the name encapsulated it all.

To Ye's credit, he tried to play fair and engaged debate on his opponent's terms. There was no lack of fashionable ‘new learning’ jargon in his argument, which he otherwise would have eschewed. In venturing out from his comfortable niche in classical studies, however, he ended up all over the place. Most notably, while he acknowledged the earth to be of spherical shape, his world map remained, ironically, a two-dimensional, Eurocentric surface. To assign Asia and China to what he considered the superior location in the earth's east and south required a fixed vantage point from which to survey the continents, and it had to be in Europe. (The still current expression ‘Far East’ perpetuates a similar bias.) In juxtaposing the Western classification of race and the Chinese theory of Five Phases as dual proof, he bordered on the mystical. How he stood nineteenth-century racial and racist thought on its head by thrusting the Yellow Race to the forefront of humanity was nothing short of a stroke of misguided genius. Ultimately, his evidence defied verification, and his logic, or illogic, merely served his effort to refurbish the Sinocentric edifice. An embellished zhong was his key, and China's literal and symbolic centrality, his overarching design.

Pi Xirui replied, and in his usual mild manner, gently disagreed.Footnote ⁷³ The clash between friends soon submerged in the larger conflict that was breaking out in Hunan between elite factions over the politics and scope of reform.Footnote ⁷⁴ Where the controversy over Zhongguo is concerned, the engagement lacked depth and sophistication. Ye Dehui wrote with contrived pedantry, and Pi Jiayou censored only a trivial meaning of Zhongguo in combating Sinocentrism. Even then, Pi's commitment seemed half-hearted. To practise what he preached, he should have shunned all use of the name except in remonstrance. Yet, in six other verses of the same poem, he invoked Zhongguo, not to expose its cartographic fallacy but simply to identify historical or contemporary China. His father, Pi Xirui, who had helped polish the poem before it was sent to Xiang bao, also employed Zhongguo in this sense in his public lectures given at the Nanxue hui (Society for Southern Learning),Footnote ⁷⁵ another reform project in Changsha. Surely, both father and son did not intend, in these instances, to reassert China's centrality in the world. Their inconsistency can only be explained by their oscillation between Zhongguo's primary and derived functions. As shown in the poem, however, their wavering ended overwhelmingly still in favour of conventional usage by a ratio of six to one.

Two other writers who questioned the name were also involved in Hunan's reform, though the disparate timing of their written views on the subject suggests more a shared opinion than a chain of influence. Before he was appointed acting provincial judge to Hunan in 1897, Huang Zunxian (1848–1905) had served as ‘secretarial attaché’ (canzan) on the first Qing legation to Japan in 1877–82. While there, he began a book-length study of the host country. In the section on Japan's foreign relations, those with China since antiquity were the first to be examined. Instead of starting his account at once, however, Huang digressed into a name search for China for an astonishing and enigmatic reason: ‘When we survey nations around the world like England and France, we find that they all have a name for the whole country; only Zhongguo does not.’Footnote ⁷⁶ There were indeed names, but none was found satisfactory. Traditionally, neighbouring countries had called China after particular dynasties like the Han and Tang even after these dynasties had long vanished. In addition, Japan had referred to the Ming dynasty as Nanjing because of the southern location of the first Ming capital. Other names were available, such as Zhendan and Zhina (Sanskrit), Zhina (Japanese), Chaina (English), and Chaineng (French). Given their foreign origins, they were patently inappropriate for the Chinese to adopt. Huang next turned to Zhonghua (Central land of efflorescence) by which, he noted, the Qing government sometimes called itself in diplomatic contact, but it was a contentious practice. Foreigners took the two characters zhong and hua (‘central’ and ‘efflorescence’) for an ill-concealed Qing attempt at self-elevation and others' degradation. Huang disagreed. In response, he defended not only Zhonghua but also, without warning, Zhongguo, which he already invoked in his opening statement. In ancient times, Zhonghua (and Zhongguo) identified a land that had surpassed all other countries (wanguo) and the peripheral Man, Yi, Rong, and Di groups in cultural achievement. Europeans recognized this by coining the term Yaxiya (Asia) to liken the continent where China was located to ‘morning’ or ‘rise of the morning sun’. Assured of their superiority, the Central States had called themselves Zhongguo and disparaged all others as yi or yidi. This was then; times had changed. Zhonghua (and Zhongguo) and yi (and yidi) had long since shed their value-laden connotations to become neutral terms. While Zhonghua no longer privileged China, yi also ceased to deprecate foreigners. Having cleared Zhonghua and Zhongguo of biases in contemporary parlance, Huang decided, rather unexpectedly, to discard both for another name. It was Huaxia (the Xia land of efflorescence), shorn of the problematic zhong and once a fond reference to ‘the Nine Regions established by the Great Yu’ (Yuyu jiuzhou), who reputedly founded China's first Xia dynasty.

For a contextually complex problem, Huang's solution was inordinately brief. His concurrent use of Zhonghua and Zhongguo, without so much as a word of clarification, was confusing. He seemed to think of Zhongguo as the object (signified) and Zhonghua as its name (signifier), but what was Zhongguo if not also a name by which he identified his country – and Japan's historical neighbour – in the first place? His lament over Zhongguo's namelessness was, therefore, self-contradictory. He was also hasty in announcing that hua and yi were no longer the emotionally charged terms that they once were. Westerners in late Qing China, ever wary of native xenophobia, would have found his assurance dubious, while a neo-traditionalist like Ye Dehui of Hunan was entirely capable of reinventing the hua-yi dichotomy in racial terms. In the end, Huang was more anxious to placate foreign sensibilities than to stand by his own conviction. After absolving Zhonghua and Zhongguo of suspicion in contemporary use, he abandoned both for fear that any name with zhong would still give offence. His choice of Huaxia, which harked back to a pre-Qin sense of community and the mythical Great Yu, was nonetheless an anachronism. Japan had never entered into historical contact with a country officially known by that name.

To a remarkable degree, Liang Qichao (1873–1929) found himself in a similar quandary. As editor of Shanghai's influential ‘new learning’ periodical Shiwu bao (The Chinese progress [sic]), Liang was invited to Hunan in late 1897 to take charge of some of the new programmes, including the publication of the daily Xiang bao. After his brief sojourn there and his ill-fated involvement in the Hundred Days Reform in Beijing (1898), he sought refuge in Japan where, as one of his many projects, he contemplated writing a history of China. The undertaking was prosaic enough, but Liang's approach was innovative. In a preliminary essay, he set down the guidelines for it. Instead of treating Chinese history as a self-contained saga, he placed it in the context of comparative world history. Like Huang Zunxian, only more passionately, he puzzled over China's name, ‘What I feel most ashamed about is that our country does not have a national name of its own.’Footnote ⁷⁷ He reviewed the names available and dismissed, for the moment, all of them. Individual dynastic names were tied to specific periods and too constrictive for the whole span of Chinese history. Names from foreign sources, though plentiful, could not be appropriated for the obvious reason of pride. Again like Huang, Liang came upon Zhonghua and Zhongguo but was instantaneously reminded of the foreign criticism. Since the name issue had somehow to be resolved if he was to proceed with his work, he declared, with manifest reluctance, that he had ‘absolutely no choice’ (wang wu de yi) but to resolve, ‘on the basis of what we have been verbally (koutou) accustomed to all along’, to retain and use Zhongguo.

Liang's equivocation was baffling, to say the least. In his prolific output of essays since the mid-1890s, he had seldom, if ever, hesitated to employ Zhongguo in historical or contemporary reference. Even his quibble now ended abruptly in a surprise about-face. Like Huang Zunxian and Pi Jiayou, he stumbled over clumsy steps in the polemic dance. Conventional language use allowed Zhongguo to flow effortlessly into the stream of consciousness, not for Chinese flattery, as Williams surmised, but to identify, without fanfare or pretence, a collective identity. So customary was this use that justification was superfluous, whereas objection was hard to sustain. In all three instances, the writers faltered. Liang Qichao first dismissed the name but quickly recanted to retrieve it. Huang Zunxian appeared unaware of self-contradiction when he bemoaned Zhongguo for not having a name. Pi Jiayou ridiculed the name for its cartographical absurdity but employed it freely elsewhere as a simple identifier. As if in schizophrenic mode, they exhibited opposing tendencies as they repudiated cultural resources from which they continued to draw in discourse.

The late Qing writers were keenly aware of the breakdown of the traditional worldview under the impact of international circumstances. Pi emphasized spatial relativity as the reason why China could no longer claim physical centrality on the earth's spherical surface. Huang appealed to the shared norm of ‘nations of the earth’ (diqiu ge guo) when he declared nameless Zhongguo to be the odd exception. In prefacing his historical narrative, Liang deferred to the ‘universal principles of the world’ (shijie zhi tongyi) when he tackled the problem of naming. Their language was replete with the rhetoric of global convergence and global unity, one that was quaintly reminiscent of the ‘great community’ (datong) depicted in a well-known passage in the Confucian classic Liji (Book of rites).Footnote ⁷⁸ The similarity may have eased Chinese receptivity, beyond the inevitable, to the new world order, or the euphemized ‘family of nations', but did not obliterate the stark contrast between the two. Whereas the Confucian construct postulated meritocracy, altruism, and social cohesion as the building blocks of the one-world utopia, nineteenth-century geopolitics was driven by Social Darwinist, or more precisely, Spencerian, dynamics in the contest for survival. From the Confucian vision, however, the Chinese writers derived hope for their country and the world and saw in the heralded oneness the promise of wealth and power and, ultimately, of justice and equality for all nations. China was indeed lagging behind but could catch up by emulating Western countries.

Mao Zedong hinted at this turn of the Chinese mind when he wrote in 1949 that after China's defeat in the Opium War (1839–42) and before the rise of the Chinese Communist Party (1921), ‘progressive Chinese…had looked to the West in search of truth (xianjin di Zhongguo ren…xiang Xifang xunzhao zhenli)’.Footnote ⁷⁹ For ‘truth’ to be truth in the conventional sense, it had to be universally valid. Western trends and practices were upheld and even adulated as embodying the cultural benchmark of the global age. Western criticisms, in particular, were taken seriously, and on the one issue of name, those pertaining to Zhongguo came to the fore. The late Qing writers reacted against the name not because of known problems with its established use but because of foreign disapproval, which they now appropriated as their own. Of the three writers mentioned, Huang Zunxian was the most accommodating and bent over backwards, so to speak, to comply by rejecting all names with the character zhong. Liang Qichao did not go as far but still gave notice of the foreign objection. The tendency to value and to incorporate the Western viewpoint has since formed a familiar feature in the Chinese discourse of change. What was noted earlier in this article as a ‘diagnostic Orientalism’ and ‘therapeutic Occidentalism’ was thus afforded a pathway into Chinese consciousness and fashioned a double-sided mirror in which to see what China was and what China could become. At one level of intellectual exercise, then, the distinction between modernization and Westernization was a tenuous one.

The dispute over the name was a telltale sign of a contemporary effort to reimagine country and the world when Qing China, crisis-ridden, seemed poised for some kind of cataclysmic change. Naming or a rectification of name at this juncture was deemed by some symbolically fitting, like a christening act before an auspicious start. What form this start would take was unclear. For the three writers in question, it would have to entail modern nationhood for China, one that was demarcated by distinct political, racial, and territorial boundaries, and the abandonment of the antiquated notion of country as the cultural hub in ‘all under heaven’ (tianxia).Footnote ⁸⁰ Their queries about Zhongguo may, therefore, be seen as an expression in contemporary Chinese discourse on nationalism.Footnote ⁸¹ The anticipated change came soon enough. In 1912, the Qing dynasty fell in the wake of the revolution that broke out the year before; thirty-seven years later, in 1949, the Communist victory ushered in the promise of sweeping national reconstruction. On both occasions, new names were adopted, respectively, the Republic of China (Zhonghua minguo) and the People's Republic of China (Zhonghua renmin gongheguo). Both names contained time-honoured and novel elements. Zhonghua originated in the great depths of Chinese history, and the embrace of republicanism drew inspiration from the American/French or Soviet Russian precedent. Through all the political turmoil, Zhongguo remained steadfast in official and popular use as the short form of the country's name. Signification again shifted, and fresh nuances accrued, but none pertained to the quest of a Sinocentric revival.Footnote ⁸² To this day, the Beijing government has continued to uphold its conception of ‘one Zhongguo (China)’ (yi ge Zhongguo) as a non-negotiable principle in its project of national reunification.Footnote ⁸³

IV

From its ancient origins to contemporary use, Zhongguo has traversed an etymological path co-extensive with China's recorded history. This article has reviewed some of its more salient features: how the name first began as a generic label for some material or organizational aspect of the ancient state; how it then gravitated toward connotations of political community, whether the suzerain–vassal hierarchy of the Central States before the Qin unification or the imperial system established thereafter; how it was employed interchangeably with the dynastic or period title to denote a past or present reigning power or applied broadly to the cumulative body of Chinese traditions; how it contributed to the discussion and debate on ‘legitimate succession’ in Chinese historiography and political thought; how it provided rulers of non-Han descent with a symbol of identification with the subject population; how it did, on occasion, give rise to the ethnocentric imagination; how Western observers in China took or mistook Zhongguo for an expression of Chinese arrogance and how awareness of this foreign criticism motivated a Chinese reaction against the name; finally, how Zhongguo has endured the post-imperial vicissitudes to persist, in official and popular use, as a collective label of choice.

All in all, the name's great resilience through history stemmed not from any rigid or closely guarded definition but from a descriptive flexibility. Exactitude in meaning or reference was hardly a verifiable or enforceable requisite. Writers spoke of Zhongguo, but not all in the same sense. Some like Ouyang Xiu of the ‘new’ Wudai shi associated it with the political regimes that had control of the North China Central Plain; others thought of it as coterminous with the idea, if not the reality, of empire formed since the Qin and Han. Where their views varied, the differences did not diminish what they shared in common, or what Wittgenstein has called ‘family resemblance’, in delineating facets of the Chinese historical profile. For this reason, it is futile to refute, as supporters of Taiwan's independence do,Footnote ⁸⁴ Beijing's ‘one Zhongguo principle’ on historical or territorial grounds. Beyond its occasional rhetorical excesses, Beijing's approach is consistent with past uses of the name in conjuring a sense of collective identity based on invented or reinvented traditions and as such, in the context of contemporary history, inscribes a signature sentiment of modern nationalism.

What was once ridiculed as a token of Chinese conceit is now widely and officially recognized. Even Beijing's position on ‘one Zhongguo’ has been elevated to a sovereign goal since the People's Republic was admitted to the United Nations in 1971. This turn of events attests to China's improved international status both during and after the world conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s but has not, due to residual resistance in ‘China watch’, reached completion. While epithets like ‘chinks', Celestials, and Chinamen are no longer considered polite or acceptable language, the attempt to capture China and the Chinese in obsolete images proves tenacious. Imperial metaphors like ‘dynasties' and ‘emperors' have been applied to post-1912 China as if the regimes and leaders since the Qing collapse were largely political anachronisms. The People's Republic today is sometimes called ‘Communist China’, a Cold War relic more evocative of Mao Zedong's radical politics than of the ideological and economic transformations that have set in since Mao's death in 1976. The English rendition of Zhongguo as Middle Kingdom still weighs heavy with interpretive baggage. In his recent memoirs on China diplomacy, Henry Kissinger emphasizes Middle Kingdom's ethnocentric purport as key to both China's ‘traditional context’ and future ‘world role’.Footnote ⁸⁵ When Matteo Ricci's (1552–1610) famous world map was on display at the Library of Congress in early 2010, it was reported: ‘[A]t its very center stands the “Middle Kingdom”, as China called itself’Footnote ⁸⁶ whereas visual evidence shows ‘its very center’ to be a vast expanse of water (the Pacific Ocean) rather than Ming China where the Jesuit missionary had lived and worked.Footnote ⁸⁷ Stereotypes die hard, and names can be their life source. As language tools of objectification, names can enhance, as they can impede, understanding.