Take the example of the United States. Fundamental to any understanding of American behaviour over the last three centuries is that this was a country established by European settlers [705] who, by war and disease, largely eliminated the indigenous population of Amerindians; who, having destroyed what had existed before, were able to start afresh on the basis of the European traditions that they had brought with them; who engaged in an aggressive westward expansion until they came to occupy the whole of the continent; and who were to grow rich in large measure through the efforts of their African slaves. [706] Without these building blocks, it is impossible to make any sense of subsequent American history. They help us to understand the basic contours of American behaviour, including the idea of the United States as a universal model and the belief in its manifest destiny. It is clear that race and ethnicity are fundamental to this picture. Consciously or unconsciously, they lie at the heart of the way in which people define themselves and their relationship to others. [707]
This more cultural approach is, if anything, even more important in China’s case because it has only very recently come to see itself as a nation-state and engage in the protocol of a nation-state: most Chinese attitudes, perceptions and behaviour, as we saw in the last chapter, are still best understood in terms of its civilizational inheritance rather than its status as a nation-state. If we want to comprehend how China is likely to behave towards the rest of the world, then first we need to make sense of what has made China what it is today, how it has evolved, where the Chinese come from, and how they see themselves. We cannot appreciate their attitude towards the rest of the world without first understanding their view of themselves. Once again, history, culture, race and ethnicity are central to the story.
China, or at least the land mass we now call China, was once, like any other huge territory, occupied by a great multitude of races. [708] Today, however, China sees and projects itself as an overwhelmingly homogeneous nation, with over 91 per cent of the population defined as Han Chinese. True, the constitution defines China as a unitary, multi-ethnic state, but the other races compose less than 9 per cent of the population, a remarkably small percentage given its vast size. A tourist who visits the three great cities of Guangzhou in the south, Shanghai in the east and Beijing in the north-east, however, ought to have no difficulty in noticing that there are very marked physical differences between their inhabitants, even though they all describe themselves as Han Chinese. While Beijingers are every bit as tall as Caucasians, those from Guangzhou tend to be rather shorter. Given that modern China is the product of a multiplicity of races, this is not surprising. The difference between China and other populous nations has not been the lack of diversity, but rather the extraordinary longevity and continuity of Chinese civilization, such that the identity of most races has, over thousands of years, been lost through a combination of conquest, absorption, assimilation, intermarriage, marginalization and extermination.
