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The Invention of China

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A provocative account showing that "China" - and its 5,000 years of unified history - is a national myth, created only a century ago with a political agenda that persists to this day.

China's 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 China's present-day geopolitical problems - the fates of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea - were born in the struggle to create a modern nation-state. In the late 19th and early 20th 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 Republic's reworking of its past not only helped it to justify its right to rule a century ago - but continues to motivate and direct policy today.

©2020 Bill Hayton (P)2020 Tantor 19th Century 20th Century Asia China Modern Imperialism Self-Determination Imperial Japan China Politics Chinese Politics
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This is, very simply, the best book to understand China. The author makes a persuasive case that, though some of the elements of modern China's view of itself are of "ancient" origin, the narrative in which they are presented comes from attempts to fit them into a worldview which was imported from Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Imperial "China" had no defined territory, no national identity, no concept of sovereign states and no common spoken language. The book is a marvellous account of how China borrowed or invented all of these and more, then projected them into the past. What's more, the tone of the book is humorous in an understated way, thanks to its matter-of-fact accounts of the activities of nationalists who took themselves extremely, extremely seriously. The story in the last chapter of how China's current aggression in the South China Sea is the result of translation errors and shoddy mapmaking in the 1930s is a particular highlight.

It's very unfortunate therefore that, though the narration is clear, well-paced and emotionally appropriate, the narrator's Chinese pronunciation is execrable: not just accented but completely incorrect, eg. pronouncing 会 (hui) as "hwee" and 史 (shi) as "shee". In a book where almost every sentence contains Chinese terms, often discussing those very terms at length, this is unacceptable. As a proficient Chinese speaker I could generally work out what he was trying to say, but the lack of any attempt to ensure correct pronunciation was a constant irritant.

Best book about China, dreadful pronunciation

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This book is a fascinating account of the artificiality and dubious origins of many concepts on which the present-day PRC builds its national mythologies. However, I am dumbfounded by the publishers’ decision to recruit a reader who clearly does not speak any Chinese and cannot pronounce a single name or term correctly. For this book, which spends considerable time analyzing Chinese terminology, it’s a complete disaster. The reader clearly did his best otherwise, but as a result, I can only recommend this audiobook if you have a paper copy on hand simultaneously.

A brilliant book but a flawed reading

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The Book is excellent when it touches the historical events, however there is a problem and it is a problem with some recent books, as soon as it goes into political and idelogical watters it loses everything.


All in all I would recommend this book

Good book, made for Obama's crouwd

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Strongly recommended read for anyone fascinated about China and its history. Well-researched, and puts multiple parallel developments in historical context. It’s a long book that I could have listened longer.

Great book about history of China since Opium Wars

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