No Such Thing as Chinese

Former Asia Correspondent and author Howard French, who spoke in conversation with Dr. George Koo at the Commonwealth Club in March, spoke about his reason for writing Everything Under the Heavens. He was puzzled as to why the countries in Asia (Japan, Korea, China) did not behave like those in Europe (Germany, France, UK), putting the World War behind them and moving on. (See post one.) 
French discovered that, because of its sheer size, China was in a different ballpark.
"First of all, the thing we recognize in any common map as China is a fairly recent thing. China started out a very long time ago as something called Zhongyuan which is essentially four present-day provinces in Central China near the Yellow River...

China --Ancient boundaries represented in dark red

"So, China was across the breadth of its own history waging what we now think of as internal wars.... But there was no such thing as China back then. There was an empire. There were dynasties...There was the Qing dynasty, the Yuan Dynasty, or the Ming Dynasty or the Song Dynasty, etc.etc. For simplicity’s sake, we call that, 'The Chinese.' "

(In fact the first use of the term came about during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) when the Emperors referred to their subjects as "The Chinese.")

"And China got to be the big China that we see on the map today through a very gradual process of conquest and assimilation and migration and various other things... And, it’s not one constant, steady expansion, by the way. There are setbacks. It expands. It contracts. It expands. It contracts. Then it gets locked into place in effect by the international system whereby large states recognize each other’s sovereignty." 

(To Be Continued. Next: Of Course China Wants a Say)