From a book review by Ian Johnson in Foreign Affairs…
…the country’s own leaders implicitly doubt the very concept of their nation. Government officials and many ordinary people vehemently proclaim the sanctity of China’s borders, even as many of its border regions are run under a state of near-martial law. Official narratives, meanwhile, forbid a coherent explanation of how China obtained these lands.
…Chinese leaders behave as if they were running an upstart nation with no history—one that has to demand that visitors refer to it as “the People’s Republic” and repeat that there is only “one China,” located within sacred and immutable borders. The country today “is a multiheaded creature of no certain or reliable identity,” Xu Guoqi writes in his new book, The Idea of China: A Contested History. “If there were a clear or reliable identity, today’s leaders would not be so obsessed with trying to impose one.”
…It remains unclear whether Xi’s version of China has any values beyond holding on to the territories of the old Qing empire and keeping the Chinese Communist Party in power, or whether the CCP’s project is capacious enough to accommodate the country’s historical hybridity.
…the rise of the modern nation-state forced the ruling Qing dynasty to deal with other countries as equals rather than as barbarians or vassals. Outsiders might have called the Qing’s territories “China” or some similar variant, but the empire’s officials rejected the term. In their eyes, there was no country of China; there was only the Great Qing, and some of their diplomats insisted—unsuccessfully—that foreigners call them by that name.
…The basic idea is that all people who have ever lived inside the current boundaries of the People’s Republic are now and always have been “Chinese.” This applies, most absurdly, to conquering foreign military leaders, including Genghis Khan, whose mausoleum is found in the current region of Inner Mongolia. There, officials lionize him as “a great man of the Chinese people.”