Traditional Western political theory has been at pains to draw a firm and categoric distinction between agrarian-based dynastic regimes and nation-states. China, which has adopted many of the key characteristics of a nation-state while remaining essentially a civilization-state, confounds these kinds of traditional distinctions, as the lines of continuity between the Celestial Kingdom and modern China as a civilization-cum-nation-state indicate. [743] Thus imperial China already enjoyed, in elemental form, some of what we understand, in a broader comparative context, to be the crucial building blocks and incipient characteristics of a nation-state. In Confucianism, for example, it possessed a state ideology par excellence, by far the most advanced of its time, which imbued the outlook of the elite and also influenced the wider population. [744] The mandarin bureaucracy – schooled in the precepts of Confucianism, devoted to the idea of service and endowed with a powerful credo of administration – was the most sophisticated civil service of its time. And the country already enjoyed a shared written language: many dialects may have been spoken across China, most of which could be understood only by their own speakers, but all the spoken versions shared a common written script and this acted as a source of affinity, identity and cohesion across the population. [745] Finally, Sinocentrism – the idea of the Middle Kingdom, the view that China was the centre of the world, the belief that Chinese civilization was the most advanced in the world – provided what might be described as a primordial form of patriotism. [746] This was not the kind of patriotism that we associate with the nationalism of the modern nation-state, but rather a belief in their own universalism, the relevance and applicability of their culture to all peoples and societies, and its inherent superiority in relation to others. Implicit in this feeling of pre-eminence, as we shall see, was an inchoate notion of racial, as well as cultural, superiority, such that the two became intimately entwined.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, under growing threat from the European powers and Japan, the Qing dynasty was increasingly obliged to operate according to the rules of a nation-state-based international system. The haughty view that it had previously maintained of its elevated role in relation to that of other states foundered on the rock of European superiority. The ‘land under Heaven’ was brought down to earth. The Middle Kingdom became just another state, now with a name, China, like any other. An elite and a people schooled in the idea of their cultural superiority entered a prolonged crisis of doubt, uncertainty and humiliation from which, a century and a half later, they are only now beginning to emerge. China, besieged by foreign powers, was forced to begin the process of defining its frontiers with the same kind of precision as other states, though such was the length of these borders and the number of its neighbours that even today those with India remain unresolved.
