 Good evening. My name is Steve Tsang, I'm the director of the Soros China Institute. Welcome to this webinar we have at the Soros China Institute. And we have a very interesting and to some people controversial subject for discussions today. And the subject is the invention of the Han race. I can see that some people may have issues with whether the use of the word Han is appropriate or whether the use of the word race is appropriate. But either way, I think it's going to be a really interesting subject for discussion. And the speaker is somebody who has done phenomenal amount of work investigating these subjects and done work dealing with China and East Asia regions more generally. And he is of course, Bill Hayton of the Chatham House and the BBC. He is both an associate fellow with the Asia Pacific program at the Chatham House and also a working journalist with BBC News in London. He's also the author of three very fascinating books. And if you are not familiar with them, I suggest that you may like to do so. His first book was Vietnam Rising Dragon, which was first published by Yale University Press in 2010. His second book is the South China Sea, The Struggle for Power in Asia, which came out in 2014. And his latest book is the invention of China, which has just been released. And if I'm understanding it correctly, this talk is based very much on the research for the new book. So over to you, Bill. Great. Thank you very much indeed, Steve. Thanks to you and to the staff at the SOAS China Institute, who do such great work. And if it wasn't for the library at SOAS, then this book wouldn't have come into existence. So I guess my indirect thanks to everybody who labors in the library at SOAS. And I look forward to it being open again soon so I can go back and borrow some books. Now, I'll talk a little bit. I mean, the reason I came to write this book and I freely admit I'm not by training a China expert. I am somebody who worked initially on Southeast Asia in Vietnam, then grew interested in the South China Sea disputes. And in the course of that, I came to understand that the Chinese claim making in the South China Sea was not so much an assertion of old knowledge but the creation of new understandings. And that led me to writing this book on the invention of China when I try and look at the historical process of nation building. I mean, you can use different terms nation building construction of a nation I chose invention of China, simply because I thought construction of China felt a bit too much like civil engineering. But my argument is that the modern idea of China, the version of China that China presents to the world was constructed or invented in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And just as importantly, I argue that the vision was and is a hybrid vision. It's not authentically Chinese whatever that means. It was primarily constructed outside the country by people who were exiles or sojourners, or in some places some cases simply foreigners. So to abbreviate a long story considerably. Excuse me, sorry, I thought I was at the beginning but I'm at the end. So I'll just go back to begin to abbreviate a story very quickly. Europeans had over many centuries, developed strong ideas about a place in the East, which they called China or perhaps Cathay. These are ideas based on scattered reports of missionaries or travelers diplomats, mercenaries and many others. And these two stories that have been embellished filtered through European worldviews and taken on a life of their own. And these ideas were then taken back to Asia by a new generation of missionaries traders diplomats and so on in late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were adopted in a whole or part and adapted by reform minded intellectuals eager for both explanations of the world and guides to salvation. And a loss of this work was being done by people who were outside in Japan or in Southeast Asia or in North America. People like Timothy Richard, Liang Tichao, Zhang Bin Lin, Yan Fu people were going to come across in the talk today. So let's take quite clearly from the outset that this is a work of synthesis I've made use of a new generation of research and written a narrative that just tries to bring these insights to a wider audience. So the work of Frank Decotta, James Leibold, Julia Schneider, Lydia Liu, people involved in the new Qing history debates and the critical hand studies book. That's work has all been very important to me and what I'm trying to do here is to craft a kind of narrative from their work that brings their insights to a wider audience. That's the end of the story. And then I'll go back. In short, I'm going to argue that the hand race the idea of a hand race was invented by Zhang Bin Lin, a man who later adopted the name Zhang Tian in his, what he called the book of urgency, which was published in 1900. Zhang Bin Lin first to use the term hand race and zoo in its political meaning, political meaning and also among the first to use Zhong Zhu as the translation for the English word race. And this is him here in his suitably Japanese outfit. He did so for political expediency. Zhang Bin Lin needed arguments to advance the cause of revolution against what was then the dominant reformist political movement. To do so he created a powerful set of myths that have endured to this day. And he's not alone in inventing new words. This was part of a wider process of nation building taking place in the late 19th century. And in the process these nation builders were advised obliged to reimagine the history of the state and its peoples and how they related to one another. I wrote a few words. These words that were deliberately coined or invented during this period in order to translate foreign concepts into the Chinese language, but also to enable a new way of thinking about chineseness itself. I could argue and I argue in the book that these words helps to invent modern China, and three key words in that process were those for race, nation and territory. They exist or exist in their modern sense in Chinese before 1890 they were coined by men such as Zhang Bin Lin and the reformer Liang Jichao. So now to the story. So I'm going to start from the position that there is no such thing as race. There are no clear biological divisions between groups of human beings that allow us to divide white from yellow or Han from Korean. The ideas did exert a strong influence over politics in both Europe and Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And a key reason why these ideas were so strong was the writing of a man called Herbert Spencer, a British scientist and founder of what became known as social Darwinism. So I took ideas from Charles Darwin and John Baptiste Lamarck about the effects of evolutionary pressures upon individuals and applied them to entire groups. It was he, not Darwin who coined the term survival of the fittest, but they're almost forgotten today among the general public. In the closing decades of the 19th century he was among the most famous European figures in the world, and he was particularly influential in Japan, at least 32 translations of Spencer's works were published in Japanese between 1877 and 1900. So before we get into the narrative though we need to understand what the word Han meant before 1900. The first summary I've found comes from Xiaoyun Yang, history professor at Denison University, and he writes, before the 1900s, Han only became the official Ethanim, the name for an ethnic group for the native majority of Zhongguo and he's trying to avoid using the word China here here, Zhongguo China in regimes ruled by certain barbarian peoples. So he's talking about people who live outside China proper what you might call the lowlands the central plains. So the Han Ethanim actually emerged originated from the Shanbi, who continued to call Zhongguo Han after the end of the Eastern Han dynasty in 220 AD. And then they reintroduced this label in the fourth and the fifth centuries, where it is into a place where it had been out of use for one or two centuries. This was then abandoned before, but not before spreading spreading to the Qitan another group, and then from the Qitan to the church and and finally from the church and to the Mongols and the Manchus. In other words, what he's saying is that the name Han was a term used by people who were not Han to describe people who lived on the other side of some notional ethnic boundary. So Han was not a term used by the people who were called Han. They generally called themselves Hua, a word that we might translate as civilized Hua people lived in cities. They were not characters and recognized an emperor, but the term wasn't a fixed ethnic name. It could delineate civilized from barbarian insider from outsider, but its meaning was flexible enough to include those barbarians who chose to become civilized. So another way of saying what Han meant was basically it meant the people over there, the people on the other side of the mountains, who are who are not like us that was the meaning in the term before 1900. So the purpose of the barbarian outsiders to invade the land of the Hua were the merchants who renamed themselves the Manchu, the Manchu, and then declared the establishment of the Qing great state before invading the Ming realm in 1644. And here I'm borrowing Timothy Brooks idea of the great state, a dug wall as a explicitly as a Mongol way, an inner Asian form of rule that was adopted and adapted by both the Ming and the Qing. Samuel Crossley has used the term simultaneous rule to describe the way the Qing used different techniques to rule different regions. This was a framework in which five constituencies, Manchu, and Mongol Muslims and Tibetans, each defined by the writing scripts they used, and each corresponding to a particular territory could coexist within the great state while maintaining their own different beliefs and systems of rule. So the emperor could publicly practice Buddhism and appear to be a magnanimous leader of the Tibetans. He could also appear as a baile to the Manchu and as a Khan to the Mongols. When it came to the Han he could appear as a civilized Confucian ruler, part of the Hua, the system was flexible enough for each group to feel autonomous, yet part of the whole. The Qing who introduced the idea of Han for the inhabitants of the conquered 15 provinces of the Ming. It was their way of dividing the population between the rulers, the man, and the ruled, the Han. The boundary though between the two was not formally defined but was based upon their members ancestry. The Qing ruled through a set of military units known as banners, one set for Manchus, one for Mongols and another for loyal settled people. The latter group were named Han Jun. Collectively, the members of the banners were called Qi, the military were Qi, and everyone else was called Min or people. The boundary between these between these two groups was more formally marked and police. Pamela Crossley has argued that under the Qianlong Emperor towards the end of the 18th century, the Qing great state moved towards an overt racial categorization of subjects, and the term that it chose to use was zoo. She argues that the best English translation for the word, which is often translated as lineage, but Pamela Crossley argues that in this use the best translation is race, since it carried within it the idea of an immutable genealogically determined identity with fixed cultural psychological and moral attributes. And as late as the 1900s, Manchus were obliged to live in separate usually walled districts of cities so here's a map of Beijing dating from the early 20th century and you can see the Tata city is defined as being different from the Chinese city. And here's a photograph here and you can see the wall between the Manchu part of the city and the Chinese model city and the battlements are facing outwards. This is the inside that's the outer city. So as late as the 1900s Manchu were living in separate still living in separate usually walled districts of cities they were formally banned from engaging in trade and into marriage between the chief the banners and the men was forbidden. So by the second half of the 19th century, Han had a meaning as part of a classification system within the Qing bureaucracy, a bit like the British rulers of India say calling the people natives. So this was a situation when a man called Huang Zenshan, a hacker from Guangdong later to become famous as a reformer and a poet, arrived in Tokyo in late 1877. He was part of the first Qing diplomatic delegation to take up residence there. Huang had got the job partly because of his connections with the statesman Lee Hong Zhang and regarded himself as an ally of Lee's reforming efforts within the self strengthening movement of the late Qing. And to this end, Huang became a keen observer, occasional supporter and sometimes critic of a new movement in Japan called the freedom and people's rights movement. This was a coalition of merchants and wealthy farmers who were demanding emancipation from the old feudal ways and greater rights for individuals. Huang read and commented on the European tracks, they translated and published, which included the work of Herbert Spencer, Herbert Spencer the social Darwinist and man who saw politics as a struggle between racial groups. In the spring of 1879, Huang also became a social Darwinist, and in his poetry he coined the word John or breed as an equivalent to Spencer's use of the English word race. In the spring of 1879, Huang presented a collection of 154 poems plus various commentaries on Japan's apparently miraculous modernization to the Songli yamen the not quite foreign ministry of the Qing was published by the China's College that winter, but more importantly was republished by the Hong Kong based Chinese language newspaper that should one rebound edited by Wang Tao one of the most prominent excel performers of the period. So Huang's views began to reach a wide audience. One of the first poems in the collection describes the Chinese and Japanese as being of the same culture and the same race, Tong Wen Tong Zhong. The Chinese version of a Japanese expression, implying that the two people should resist the whites together, but when though it had a different meaning that the Japanese would descended from the Chinese. The cutter has observed, John originally meant seed or breed when applied to plants or animals. Huang used it to refer to different kinds of human being. In another poem written in Japan but only published later, he explicitly referred to the yellow race in a criticism of imperialism. In his poem cherry blossoms he wrote the Western nations become stronger and more aggressive they enslaved blacks and gradually got around to the yellow race. Huang's next stop on his diplomatic career would make his thoughts on race even more pessimistic. He came to believe that competition, not cooperation was the natural international order, and that only the 50s will survive. In March 1882 he became the Qing console in San Francisco, the time of race riots and discrimination against ethnic Chinese. In 1885 he resigned in despair and returned to Beijing. There he met many of the reform-minded intelligentsia and passed on the ideas of social Darwinism to them. He spent the next three years working on his treatises on Japan, finally presenting it along with a recommendation from Li Hong Zhang to the Zhongli Yamen in 1888. However by then the Yamen was under control of conservatives and they were not interested in propagating the book's message that the Qing Empire had to follow Japan's example and undergo radical change. Huang consoled himself by long discussions with junior officials and scholars who were sympathetic to his ideas on reform, including a 30 year old Kangyue Wei. In this way many of Huang's ideas about social Darwinism and the racialized world came to be part of the orthodoxy of the reform movement that would develop over the following decade. It was only in the aftermath of the 1894-5 Sino-Japanese War that Huang became a prominent figure. In 1996 he founded a reformist newspaper, Shi Wu Bao, the current affairs paper, and appointed a young cottageer of Kangyue Wei, a man named Liang Tichao to be its editor. Liang Tichao goes on to be far more famous than all of them, the father of Chinese journalism and if you're asking probably them personally did more than anybody to quote, invent the Chinese nation. After that magazine was inaugurated, Huang was summoned to a private audience with the emperor. The emperor asked him to explain how Britain and Japan have become stronger than the Qing and Huang took the opportunity to preach the necessity of new policies. In February 18, excuse me, in February 1898, the 17 year old emperor asked to read copies of Huang's treatises on Japan, and in June the emperor issued a decree declaring the beginning of what became known as the Hundred Days Reforms. Then in September, a palace coup forced the reformers to flee into exile, and Huang retired to the countryside at the end of the Hundred Days Reforms. But in retrospect, Huang did more than anyone to introduce the idea of race into the reform movement. The next figure in the story is Yan Fu, who joined the Fuzhou Naval Shipyard as a teenager. Benjamin Elman has called the shipyard the leading industrial venture in late Qing China, and it introduced a wave of new technologies and new ideas into the great state. Yan Fu graduated into the Qing Navy in 1871, and after six years as a naval officer, he was sent for further study at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, London, where this picture was taken. Yan opted to spend a second year at the college rather than join the crew of a British warship, as his contemporaries did. It seems that he preferred to make the most of the opportunities to read and then learn what was available in London. He wanted to understand how Britain had become strong, and he found the answers in Herbert Spencer. In 1881, Yan read the study of sociology. The entire book is predicated upon Spencer's racialist ideas. But after returning to China to the Qing Great State, Yan seems to have languished during the 1880s and early 1890s. Although he had actually been hired by Li Hongjiang to work at the Northern Naval Academy in Tianjin, becoming its superintendent in 1890, he seems to have thought the whole self strengthening approach was a waste of time. He was depressed and opium and bitterness. It was defeat in the Sino-Japanese War that spurred him interaction. In early 1895, following the defeats in the Sino-Japanese War, a new journal established by reformers in the city of Tianjin gave Yan the space to publish four essays in rapid succession, introducing readers to Herbert Spencer's ideas on race and social Darwinism. Yan Fu borrowed Huang's and Xi'an's idea of the Yellow Race and told his readers that Manchu and Han and Mongol people were all part of it and that they needed to unite to fight off the whites. In the words of James Pusey, Yan Fu brought in Darwin, not for scientific reasons, but as a Western witness to the necessity of change. When Yan wanted reform and just as in Japan a decade earlier, Spencer's ideas gave him grounds to argue for it. But there was a major difference between Spencer in Japan and Spencer in Yan Fu's writing. The Japanese reformers liked Spencer because Spencer used Darwin to justify his ideas about the struggle for survival between individuals. Yan Fu took the idea of the struggle for survival, but turned it into a struggle between groups. Yan Fu's essays entitled On the Origin of Strength and published in early March 1895, he argued, if we want to resist our foreign enemies, we must establish a parliament of the capital and let each province and county elect its own officials. In Yan's view, the only way to make the people willing to fight for the country and defeat its enemies was to give them the power to direct it. The big question was therefore, who were the people? In response to the question, Yan borrowed the idea of the yellow race from Hwang's and Xi'an. He complained that the Manchus had ruled the great state as a separate elite ever since their conquest in 1644, and argued that in the face of the existential threat from the white race, that needed to change. He gave the opinion that despite the Qing elite's deliberate strategy of keeping themselves apart from the majority of the population, they were in fact part of the same people, the same race. This quote was, now on earth there are only four great races, the yellow, the white, the brown and the black. The man, the Manchu, the Mongol and the Han are all of the yellow race. China, and he uses the word Zhonguo from old, has been ruled by one race only. It has never actually fallen to an alien kind. So he's discounting the idea that the Qing are, you know, being Manchu have come in and invaded our alien, he's basically saying we're all part of the same yellow race, so therefore we're all part of the same big people. The word that Yan chose for race was the same as the one used by Huang Zhong. He used it to argue that the social barriers between man and Han had to be torn down. In 1897, Yan founded two journals in Tianjin, a daily and a weekly to spread his ideas. In 1898, his translation really a paraphrasing of an 1893 lecture by the British social reformer Thomas Huxley, Thomas Huxley called on evolution and ethics was published in Chinese as Tianyuan Lun on evolution. Huxley was actually Huxley himself was actually strongly opposed to Spencer's individualism and emphasized instead group solidarity. He was more emphasized in Yan's rendering of it. As Frank Decutta points out, Yan took Spencer's ideas of competition and Huxley's ideas of cooperation, and inflected both with his own ideas about race to argue that Western science told us that the yellow race is locked in a death struggle with the white race, and would end up in the same state as the black race on the red race, unless it instituted political reform. Now Yan Fu's writings became extremely influential. They came to be seen as the authentic representation of Darwinism in China for many years. In fact, it wasn't until 1919, 20 or so years later that a full translation of Darwin's origin of species was published in Chinese. In the meantime, it was Yan Fu's renderings of the interpretations of Darwin by Huxley and Spencer that set the terms of the debate, both reformists such as Yan Chow and revolutionary such as Sun Yat-sen. In the words of James Pruzzi in his study Darwin in China, the way Yan Fu wrote about race helped open the door for a generation of unpleasant racial thinking. The next participant in the story is the man who changed the terms of discussion from the yellow race to the Han race. Zhang Binlin started as a classical scholar, then became a reformist writer after the 1895 defeat by Japan. In 1898 he'd actually written a summary of Yan Fu's translations of Herbert Spencer. Professor Chao Kai-wing has observed that before 1899 Zhang Binlin's characterisation of China's struggle against European powers was primarily based on the idea of a war between the white and yellow races. So basically Zhang shared the same views on race as Huang Zun Xi'an and Yan Fu. However, the box arising and its international suppression in 1900 turned him into a revolutionary. In May 1899, writing from the safety of Japan, and then Shanghai, he penned an article referring to the Emperor, the Guangqiu Emperor as the guest emperor, highlighting the barbarian origins of the Qing. And in early 1900 his book of urgency or Tushu, the book I showed you at the beginning, explicitly called for the overthrow of the Manchu government. But Zhang Binlin had an ideological difficulty. The conclusion attitude shared by the court and the reformers was that political legitimacy came from an enlightened culture and that anyone including barbarians could become Hua by adopting that culture. Manchus could be Hua just as much as Han. But having decided that the Manchus were the problem, Zhang needed a basis for an argument against culturalism. He found it in a fourth century BC historical commentary called the Zhou Zhuang, which according to Zhang demonstrated that bonds of kinship were more important than culture. Since barbarians were not of the same type, they could not have the same loyalties as the Han. And he adopted the word Zhu, meaning lineage, as the important marker of difference. Around the country lineage groups were frequently involved in violent feuds ranging from small inter-village disputes to large scale conflicts such as the enormously destructive Hakka Punty War in Guangdong. And going to around there. Zhu then lineage encapsulated a powerful idea. Zhang Binlin took Zhu and enlarged it from the local to the national scale. The Han became the Han Zhu and Manchu became the Manzu. Both groups were rival lineages and therefore conflict between them became not just thinkable, but logical. This is where Zhang Binlin invents the idea of Han Zhu as a separate race in effect, a Han race. Onto this he grafted European ideas about evolution and race. Both the white race and the yellow race were intelligent he argued. The Han belonged to the yellow race, but he created the idea of the race surname Zhong Sing to demonstrate that they were different from the Manchus. The term was a contraction of the characters in race lineage Zhong Zhu and surname Sing Shi. Han and Manchu may have been part of the same Zhong, but they were not part of the same Zhong Zhu. And lineage surnames were a vital way to discern differences between the two. This wasn't the only innovation in the Kyushu. In it he gave the world his lasting legacy, the notion that the ancestor of all the Han was Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor. Just after his publication of the Kyushu came his decisive split with the reformers. The Eight Nation Army seized Tianjin on the 14th of July 1900 and unlike the reformists who pledged to defend the Qing court, Zhang denounced it. In a symbolic protest he cut off his cue, the braided pigtail hairstyle imposed on all Qing male subjects on pain of death in front of a reformers protest meeting on the 3rd of August. He then wrote an article entitled entitled The Correct Discourse on Hatred for the Manchus for the first revolutionary magazine Guomin Bao based in Japan. He said he didn't want to kill the Manchus but he did want them expelled back to Manchuria, the northeastern lands of their origin. In this he was a relative moderate among the revolutionaries. There were already some arguing for an anti-Manchu genocide. While Huang Xunxian, Yan Fu and the other reformers were calling for the Qing government to break down the barriers between members of the same Yellow race, Zhang Binglin and his revolutionary comrades are arguing that the race which mattered was the Han and that there was no place for the Manchus in it. There was a key difference between Western racism and its eastern counterpart, whereas most European racialists argued in terms of biology, there were no obvious differences in skin colour or facial angle between Han and Manchu. But Zhang needed a rationale to demarcate the boundary between the two groups that he was trying to create. And he found it in the logic of the lineage. He made use of his early training as a classical scholar and went searching through the ancient texts. He found an answer in the writings of the 2nd century BCE historian Sima Qian. He began his account with the life of the Yellow Emperor. For Zhang, the emperor became the Shizu, the first ancestor. And the 24 surnames of his sons, according to Sima Qian, were the original Hang lineage family, Zhongxing. Almost 5,000 years later, therefore, the entire 450 million strong Hanzhu Han race could be imagined as the sons and grandsons of the Yellow Emperor. Like most successful new political ideas, Zhang's racial nationalism took pre-existing ideas, the myth of the Yellow Emperor, the importance of the lineage, dislike of the government and so on, and fashioned a new ideology from the amalgam. In the aftermath of the Qing court's failure to resist the Allied powers during the Boxer Rising, the concept became so successful that within just a few years the arguments of reformists such as Huang Zhenxian, Yan Fu, and Liang Chichao had disappeared into near irrelevance. So it was Zhang who joined the two terms Zhong and Zhu to form the modern word for race, Zhong Zhu. We can say that Zhang Binlin invented the Han race in 1900. These ideas began to be transferred into the Qing great state itself. In 1904, the Qing announced new regulations on primary schooling. They stipulated that schools should promote, in the words of the regulations, the children's love of the nation, through among things, other things, native place education. Various local literati rushed to publish their own gazetteers of prefectures, sub-refectures, departments and counties in the hope of promoting their worldview to the younger generation, and perhaps making a profit from sales. Mabel Qing of City University of Hong Kong argues that the politics of these men traversed the spectrum from traditional scholar officials to reformers to revolutionaries. While the gazetteer was a long established publishing format, the Qing administration specified in 1905 that the new additions needed to include new information. Apart from basic geography and history, each gazetteer should include details about the various races, and the term they chose was actually Ren Lei, person type, and their clans, literally shizu, surnames and lineages. The guidelines also specified the gazetteer compilers needed to decide who counted as a subject of the empire or a qi-min, a new term that submerged the differences between the members of the military banner units, the qi, and the civilians, the min, this new category, the qi-min. There were three criteria. They couldn't be a believer in another religion, such as Christianity or Islam. They had to be employed in one of the four traditional occupations, scholar, artisan, farmer or trader, and they could not be a member of another race. The regulations specified that Ta Zhong included the Hui, or the Muslims, or the Miao, the Hmong, the upland minorities, such as the Zhuang, the Tai, and several other name minorities. By listing these groups as outsiders, the Qing state was in effect saying that everyone else was an insider, whether Han, Manchu, or Mongol, i.e. the members of the banner units, or the qi-min. Thus, by 1905, even the Qing state had begun to replace the idea of Zhu, lineage, which had structured its military and bureaucracy for almost 300 years, in favour of the reformists' ideas of Zhong or race. However, a controversy that year would demonstrate the arbitrariness of the whole concept of a Han race and bring the pioneer of Chinese racial thinking back into the frame. Huang Zhenxian was a Haka, as we've mentioned before, and the question of who was and was not Han, was not Han, could be extremely divisive, particularly in Guangdong, where older inhabitants still remembered the Haka-Puanti War. The compilers of different local-level gazetteers took different positions on whether Haka could be Han. The issue came to a head when a writer with revolutionary sympathies, Huang Ji, a co-founder of the National Essence Society, published his version of the textbook of Guangdong local history. His society's anti-Manchuism combined revolutionary zeal with the social Darwinist fear that the Han race had to be preserved from the threat of extinction. This, the society argued, could only be done through the mobilisation of ancient culture. In Huang Ji's 1905 Guangdong history textbook, he stated boldly that among the races of Guangdong are Haka and Hocklow, who are not Cantonese and not of Han racial stock. Now this infuriated Huang Zhenxian, then living in quiet banishment in the province, and provoked him into organising, along with fellow Haka scholar officials, a society for investigating origin of the Haka people. The society used all its influence to lobby the provincial educational authority, which eventually agreed to have the sentence removed from the book. Huang Zhenxian died in March 1905, but the struggle continued, although other textbooks were published that specifically excluded the Haka from membership of the Han. By 1907 the provincial authorities had agreed to remove all the offending sections. Thus in his final act, Huang Zhenxian demonstrated the emptiness of the notion of a Han race by showing it could be expanded or contracted, not by science, but by political pressure from influential people. Henceforth the Haka and the Hocklow would be categorised as Han. The empty or not, the idea of a Han race became the revolution's most powerful weapon. It enabled them to create alliances between literate officials and illiterate peasants. It was no longer sufficient to be a cultured Hua or a member of the Yellow Race. Change could only come from the Han, the sons and the grandsons of the Yellow Emperor. Thank you. Thank you very much, Bill. I forgot to unmute myself. Before I start off with our discussions, let me just remind everybody, some of the ground rules and offer an apology. I believe that when Bill was talking, we did have occasions when the connections dropped somewhat and you might not have been able to hear him as clearly as we would like you to all the time for which I apologise. Now, if you are watching this with Zoom, then please use the Q&A box for your questions. If you are watching this via Facebook, then Archie will transpose your questions to me through the chat box. If you would like to ask a question anonymously, please still provide your name and preferably with some indication of who you are. And that's entirely for my benefits so that I know where the question comes from. And if you're willing to share that, I will mention that. But if you prefer to be anonymous, please say so, in which case I will not mention your name, but nonetheless, it will be helpful to know where the question comes from. Now before I open the floor, let me kick off, Bill, by asking you something fairly basic, really. I think you've given us a really interesting and well documented, well supported analysis of the way how the use of the hand raised came into existence. In the beginning of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. But we also know about what Benedict Anderson has done in terms of the creation of national identity and nationalism. And one of the key things that Benedict Anderson has said is that in fact all nations are based on myth creation. What happens across the world is nothing so specific or unusual about any country in this regard, because if you don't create that you simply cannot create that sense of modern national identity. Now, in a sense this is what exactly happened in China at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. So if that is the case, perhaps you could explain why it is so important that we need to understand this particularly successful miscreations, and why it is important that we should all be paying attention to that. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. Good question. Yes, I think I'm not saying that what China went for the Chinese Revolutionary Reformers did in this period was unique. I think the same processes were happening all around the world coming together of Germany from dozens of small states similar process in in Italy. The imposition of national cultures in places like France and Britain too. But if we can one contrast for example, what happened with the Qing Empire, Qing great state, which managed to retain its shape and its diversity with the Ottoman Empire which fragmented leaving a Turkish core with the Arab states and other other parts breaking away. So I'm not here saying that what happened in the end of the Qing was was was unique and in fact I think that's my point is that I think there's a way of looking at China for a lot of people which somehow implies that China didn't go through this process. And that the China has always been China, and it's been a seamless process of the same culture same state, same everything, you know for the last 5000 years going back to the, you know the birth of the of the Yellow Emperor. And what I wanted to say was that, you know, even in the term that we use you know even the name China, for example, there was a debate about that you know what name was this modern country going to be called. Was it going to be Zhonghua? Was it going to be Zhonghua? Was it going to be something else? And there were live debates among the revolutionaries and the reformists about everything that these names imply. So Zhonghua for example, contains the word Hua has a more sort of ethnic meaning whereas Zhonghua was preferred by the reformists who wanted a more kind of open concept of the state. So, first, the first point is to say that this process happened in China just as it happened in other states and let's stop pretending that China was in any way different or special. I mean all states are different all states are special, but you know China went through this just like everybody else. The other thing I think it's important is because I think that the current government to the people's public of China is using this race based to try and reach out to people who are of Chinese heritage in other countries and somehow imply that they owe a loyalty to the homeland, at least as much as to the country that they currently live in. And we've seen examples, you know, where you've had Chinese diplomats, for example, in Malaysia, or other countries, you know, basically saying that they are the, you know, the defenders of the ethnic Chinese population in that particular country and trying to create some kind of linkage between people of, quote, Chinese race, Han race in outside China and the motherland. And I think that's a worrying development. So I think that's why it continues to be important now. But I think, in general, so many things, you know, the idea of a Han race is such a commonplace in discussion, you know, that when, for example, we talk about, you know, peoples of the world or genetics or so forth, this idea of Han race just seems to be assumes to be a truth and I wanted to show how in fact it was politically constructive. Okay, thank you, Bill. I have two sets of questions which in a sense really are in parallel to the one I pushed to you, but I will put them to you anyway so perhaps if you could answer them more briefly. The first is from Peter Humphrey. He said, I have spent my entire career studying China, but also spend parts of it studying the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Have you noticed or considered the striking parallel between your thesis and the contrived homogenization, in other words, invention of certain people in southeastern Europe in the 19th century into the modern nation states, such as Romania and Bulgaria. I found strong echoes of this homogenization in what you have said today about China. And isn't this how many modern nation states were formed, i.e. through the combination and macimation and homogenization of smaller states, older societies, where one group eclipsed the identities of the other. I will also read you the question from another person who prefers to stay anonymous. There are some interesting and possibly defensible thesis about the Han race and China. However, isn't this the same as with other races and countries. You can make the same reasoning to write about the invention of India, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Armenia, Israel, and so on. And I think one of our political and racial identities today came about in the past two or 300 years over to you. Yeah, yeah, I think those are both important points and I don't say anything against them. I mean I think the Balkans is a is an interesting comparison because, like I was saying the Ottoman Empire which obviously included large parts of the Balkans fragmented. So you had to get. So there were new identities formed in the Balkans in this period, and Slavic identities. And yet they, in some ways they in some places you had a Yugoslavia the southern Slavs, you know kind of created themselves as a, as a nation, tying together Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians in a way that lasted for 80 years or something before dissolving into into violent bloodshed. And then of course we had, you know, other, you know, kind of uprisings and wars in other parts of the former Ottoman Empire, partly because the of course the British and the French were busy trying to dismantle the empire in the context of the First World War, and a retreat to a kind of core Turkishness, which of course, you know, created other problems in terms of, you know, Kurdish separatism, and the Armenian genocide and so forth. So, you know, different, the ways that different multinational empire empires broke up, and the way that new identities were formed from the wreckage was a violent process in Europe and the Mediterranean just as it was. In East Asia too. So, yeah, I would say, you know, plenty of, plenty of parallels but but you know every family is miserable in its own special way. Okay, I have a question next from Graham Hutchings. What are the implications of this interesting challenging presentation for Xi Jinping's China dream? Question mark. Does it challenge the CCP's concept of in nation it rules. Thank you. Yeah, I mean I have a chapter in the book on the invention of the Chinese nation I look at the idea of where the Chinese nation comes from and the, in the same way that I looked at the word race here I looked at the word Minzu, which can be translated as nation. In fact, the part of the problem is that you can translate the word Minzu in many different ways. So, officially China has 56 Minzu, 56 different ethnic groups you might say, but at the same time it also has one, one Chinese nation. So does is a Minzu does it mean the whole country everybody in it or is it a way of categorizing different groups within it and this and this tension and the meaning of the word Minzu I think is absolutely critical to understanding many of the problems in Tibet and Xinjiang and upland areas to this day. So, and I think you can see it, you can contrast for example the position of Xi Jinping's father, who was a good friend of the former pension and who supported autonomy for the minorities and the idea of separate identities for the different Minzu versus the sun Xi Jinping, who seems to be interested in steam rolling over ethnic difference to create a single Chinese nationality a single Zhonghua Minzu, and is willing, you know to put potentially millions of people into camps and all the rest of it in order to achieve that, that end. So, yeah, I think these debates about race and nation are still very much alive with us today. And I, you know, obviously, you know, there have been different policies over the course of the last century. In the book I talked a little bit about the influence of the Soviet Union and Stalin on China's nationality policy, there's plenty to be said about that, but I wanted to show how the roots of these problems go back to the late 19th, early 20th century and these debates about nationality and race, which were in effect, Chinese debates filtered through Japanese translations of European arguments going through at least a double filter. So these European ideas about race and nation and state become Chinese debates through translation, and we're still living with the legacy of those translations and arguments today. Thank you, Bill. Next one is going to be very short. I expect the answer to be very short. This is a question that have come up through the Facebook feed. What was the revolutionary daily that published articles by Zhang Binglin. I guess the probably the most important one was with Guomin Bao, the citizen journal, I guess, was probably the most important one but I mean his, it was his book really the Kyushu that's the book of urgency or the sometimes the book of compulsion, which I think is most important for showing his arguments, particularly when they move in a more anti-Manshu direction. Okay, next I'm grouping two questions together as they are kind of in parallel. The first one is from to the Rickam Mira. Today it seems like the CCP is stressing a revival of culture and heritage, specifically by inscribing culturally intangible heritage in the World Heritage List. It seems like the central government is unifying ethnic regions and minorities under the idea of a united nation. These minorities are regarded as subject to to the hand raised. I was wondering whether he had, whether you have any insight on today's renewed emphasis on culture and heritage. Canada is a question from Colin Copland. Thanks for a very interesting presentation. You ended early in the 20th century. To what extent do you think the idea of the Han people influence current Chinese culture and mainland Chinese government policy, both internally and externally? You may or may not wish to mention Hong Kong. Is this nationally unifying but xenophobic or something else? Yeah, I mean, I'm reluctant to talk about present day situations because I don't I'm not going to claiming to be an expert on contemporary Chinese policy. I mean, I think that what we can say is that there is definitely an attempt to impose a more homogenous idea of a national culture. And you can see this, for example, in language questions, the desire to roll out a national language to make sure that everybody speaks. And obviously that obviously relates directly to Hong Kong. But I think the other desire to homogenize can be seen in many areas. And I think there's an interesting, there must be an interesting tension between the sort of verification of local identities, you know, in a way that allows, for example, local tourist attractions and so forth or ethnic minorities to become heritage attractions for local tourism industry and the sense of a single national culture. You know, I think there's work been done on that but I mean I think what you sort of see I suppose is a hollowing out of a genuine localness and a kind of emphasis on costumes and dances and a kind of sanitized, hanefied local culture, which squeezes out a lot of the difference and just makes it renders it friendly for tourists. I mean, and I guess the sort of worst examples of this is sort of when you get basically a bunch of hand people that people want to call them that dressing up as some minority and performing dances, you know, for tourists. You know, I don't claim to be an expert on that. But yes, I think there is a tension between the celebration of local and this desire from the top through what's, you know, what the Communist Party calls the five nations in it to identify with the Chinese nation and the Chinese party and all the rest of it. You know, to have a homogenous culture, which won't go in the same direction as Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union and break into constituent pieces. Okay. Jonathan Fembe would like to ask you to throw the story forward foods to 1911 to 1912, the early Republic. Right. Okay. Well, obviously the, I mean, and Edward Rhodes has written about this in his book, Manchus and Han, one of the consequences of this generation of a Han race identity was that in many places during the 1911 12 Revolution you had considerable acts of genocide against Manchu people. Edward Rhodes himself, I mean, I can get the numbers here. I mean he talks about something like 10 cities where massacres took place in Xi'an, half the Manchu population 10,000 people were slaughtered in Fuzhou, Hangzhou and Taiwan as many as 20,000 were done were killed in Nanjing the garrisons surrender without a fight yet Manchus were killed in large individual Manchus was singled out by the shape of their allegedly flat heads or by the unbound feet of their women. So you did actually have, you know, a genocidal elements to the, the, the revolution of 1911 1912. And one consequence of that was that the revolutionaries were in order to kind of stabilize the situation were forced. And to kind of come to an agreement with Yuan Shikai the military strong man of the north, and reach a compromise on the future state of the Republic which neither side really wanted I mean, the revolutionary wanted their homogenous Chinese nation, and you know, Yuan Shikai would have been happy to have no have no revolution at all. But the consequence was the end the this idea of the, the five lineage Republic represented by the Republic the first flag of the Republic of China which is the five one stripe though the white the red the yellow the black, I've missed one blue, you know, for the five different peoples of the or five different races of the of the new state. And that was a sort of compromise which was sort of forced upon the revolutionaries and and Yuan Shikai in the early part of 1912 as a means of trying to stop the genocides and keep the country together and prevents, you know, Tibet and Xinjiang and the disappearing into separatism, which obviously didn't stop them. I mean, Tibet did disappear and you know did was independent, you know, and large part of Mongolia went the same way. Nonetheless, there was this rhetorical commitment to a state within the same borders such as they were with the old Qing states and this was the way of trying to keep it together by this sort of compromise of this sort of five race or five lineage Republic. Yes, and that was I mean that was a, you know, a definite consequence of these rival discussions about yellow race and and Han race and how in the reformers were arguing for sort of yellow race unity whereas the revolutionaries by and large were much more hand focused. And the compromise was this five lineage Republic, which and the flag remains the flag until Chiang Kai-shek takes the north in 1928 when it changes to the current white star on the blue background. There is a question from Jingyuan Deng. Will it be constructive to understand the 19th and 20th century development as a modernization of the existing Han identity via race. Sorry, can you say that again I was slightly distracted. Will it be constructive to understand the 19th and 20th century developments as a modernization of existing Han identity via race. It's an interesting question. I don't think I can give you a useful answer. I mean I guess the big question really is, did, I mean did the people who were called Han think of themselves as Han. I read, I don't think that's the case. I think they thought themselves as Hua as a kind of cultural identity. And the Han was a sort of administrative term adopted by the, by the, the Qing state. I would be interested to do some more digging on that. And if anybody has any thoughts on, you know, whether Han identity, you know, whether people call themselves Han and to what extent, you know, before these 1900 discussions, then I would be, I'd be interested to hear. Okay. There is a question from somebody who prefers to remain anonymous. Is there any connection between this Han race, it is all the G and the current ethnic cleansing or genocide that is happening to the biggest in Xinjiang. Well, yes, I guess is the is the obvious answer. I think that the authorities want to make the Uighurs Han, but they want to make them Chinese and there's a specific way of defining Chineseness which is in conforming to the Han, you might call it Hua, you might call it lowland ideas of what Chineseness is through the through the five identifications that I mentioned earlier. So, I think, you know, going into the Republic and period in the 20s and the 30s and beyond. And there's this idea that since the borders were fixed in advance, you know, the borders of the Qing state should become the borders of the Republic. And therefore, the Republic is going to inherit a lot of people who would have a different identity that they were going to have to be made Chinese. And what Chineseness was would be in effect a Han standard. And there's plenty of textbooks, you know, from the 1920s and 30s, you know where they sort of more or less give a sort of racial hierarchy in terms of who is, you know, the Hannah at the top and then the various different levels of civilization kind of going down the chain. So, yeah, there's always been the idea that's kind of that there was a single way of being Chinese and that everybody in the state has to reach that standard. Hence you have sort of all these various missions to the border areas to develop agriculture and so build railways to link the territories together and to make everybody kind of be the same. So just alert me said for the questions that I thought have been answered that I've taken off seems to have appeared in the box that everybody else can see I didn't realize that so I apologize. If anybody who asked an anonymous questions has now been compromised, I do apologize that I will not click on that until I find better ways of dealing with that. The next questions comes from Joanna. I understand that you have shown quite clearly that the notion of a hard race was recent, a political project. Do you claim that there was no nation of a common people or culture or nation or ethnicity in China, simple, similar to what existed in other pre modern societies worldwide. That's a very good question. And I note that Nicholas Tackett has written a book recently, arguing that you can identify a Chinese nation going back to the song periods, you know, kind of a thousand years ago. I think what I would say, I'm back. Yes, I got cut off but I'm back. Hello. So I think what I would say is, I don't know how much of that you heard but I was mentioning Nicholas Tackett's book arguing that there was been a Chinese nation, you know, for 1000 years. But I think what I would say is that, you know, it depends who we're talking about are we talking about a small geographical area. Are we talking about a rather elite group of literate people. Or are we talking about every single person in the state and obviously if we're talking about every single person within the frontiers. No, there was no sense of nationhood absolutely not you know when people are not literate when they're not aware of, you know, kind of the extent of the you know the state that they live in, then no you can't talk about a nation in that sense. What's interesting to me is that all of the people, I think who were involved, pretty much all of the people who were involved in these discussions about nation are actually outside the country or living in the treaty ports, the colonial treaty ports. And they are in effect looking back at a country with the eyes of foreigners where they can see the contrast between China and in their eyes and the other countries, you know, European countries or Japan or India or whatever it might be. And that creates a sense of national identity, whereas if you're just somebody living in a town, you know and you've never traveled abroad or traveled very far at all. You just don't have a sense of being part of a nation, or really of what the difference is between you know you and your community your ethnic group and other ethnic groups. So therefore it takes as you were mentioning Benedict Anderson before and he focuses a lot on the importance of print and newspapers and the idea of communicating to people that they are part of a nation, which you know who they will never meet. You know this vast number of people and I assume they will only know a small number. It's really important to understand that this idea of a Chinese nation is constructed by people who are not in China. They're, you know, Sun Yat-sen was in Hawaii, the angry Chow was in Yokohama, Kanyue was in various different parts of the British Empire. They were outside the country looking back. And that's where we get this idea of a Chinese nation from. Next question from Francis one. What extent is the idea of being civilized? And culturally superior than other races or nations or people intrinsic or fundamentals to the construction of the Han race. If yes, do you see moderating or watering down of these superiority elements being possible, or perhaps even desirable. Yeah, why was integral to Hannes, as it were. And I think it goes into forming the debates about what kind of a society. The Republic is going to become. I mean, all states can be accused of thinking themselves better than their neighbors. I guess. I think of one that doesn't. You know, it's not like the kind of, you know, the mill wall approach to politics nobody likes us and we don't care. I think everybody kind of likes to think of themselves as being somehow better doing things in a more authentic, pure or whatever way. But whether that kind of continues to animate. I mean, certainly, you know, when you get forms, you know, today of, you know, Han chauvinism you might say then clearly these people are thinking of themselves as superior to either people outside China or to minorities within within China. I wouldn't want to kind of say that everybody who claims a hand, you know, identity, you know, thinks of themselves as superior. But I think there is a sort of sense, you know, historically there was, you know, in a sense that, you know, written language and an ordered society and urban society that these were better ways of living than living in the uplands living in houses on stilts, or kind of not recognizing the authority of the empire of the emperor. Yeah, I think it, I think it is a key part of it, but I'm loath to overstate it or to say that it's in any way different to, for example, you know, Herbert Spencer and the rest of the sort of British intellectuals thinking that their ideas are superior to everybody else's and need to be exported around the world. Next question from Martin Thorne. What's the intellectual for fathers of their hand as a racial group that you have discussed today, will the current PLC leadership usage of their term in a negative or positive light. That's a good question. Imagine they'd be quite pleased to be honest. I mean, they've managed to create a, well, whatever China now is a state which is strong appears united is based on a very strong belief in a sense of past and identity. The words, you know, Han and Hua are very prominent in that identity formation. The state has managed to reclaim the entire territory pretty much of the of the Qing, you know, with a couple of exceptions. I think, yeah, I think they would probably think, you know, you know, one of the most successful nationalist movements that there's ever been frankly. The next one from Jiren town. At present, I think the ethnic minorities in China have been deliberately assimilated with the harm. They may no longer speak their own language or wear their own national clothes. If things go on like this, the 56 ethnic groups in China will become meaningless. Do you think this has a political or ideological relationship with the era that you are describing? Yeah, absolutely. I think this was explicitly the outcome that the leading minds were foreseeing at the time. You know, Liang Chichao and Sun Yat-sen were on different sides of the reform versus revolution debate, but they were both believers in the idea of smelting. And they looked to the United States, and they saw the way that the United States had taken Brits and Italians and Poles and Irish and smelted them in the great melting pot and created Americans out of them. Of course, they had nothing. They had very little to say about the fate of Native Americans. You know, for them, they were part of the red race and their historical fate was to become extinct. And this was also a kind of a view derived from the racial politics of the time. And similarly, they had very little to say about the black population of the United States, but they were very admiring of the way the United States had smelted together all these different Europeans to create Americans. And I think that was the model that particularly Liang Chichao after he visited the United States had in mind, and he and Sun Yat-sen I think could agree on that. And I think one of the people among the revolutionaries sort of hand nationalist, if you were, who would have been more than happy to say goodbye to the non-hand, if you like, parts of the state, to Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Manchuria, and let them go their own way and put it on a quote, China proper the former Ming state, and make it a very much a kind of hand state and then not worry about so much about these other these other groups, but they lost the debate. And so we ended up in a kind of logic that if we're going to the state is going to inherit the boundaries of the Qing Empire, and has a logic of smelting of making of erasing difference. And, you know, no matter who's in charge, you know that's going to be the project. And you could say for you know considerable period of time that project was on hiatus. You know when you under the influence of the Soviets, when you had the national minorities model and the 56 minorities and all the rest of it. It was a, you know, there was a more interesting autonomy and allowing these minorities, some kind of self expression and autonomy, but that era just seems to be over right now. And from Chris how linking this batch to your previous book about the marine time disputes in South China Sea. How are the two views related. Would you consider the appearance of the nine dashed line in manifestation of the high identity and the projection of that to the wider world. Thank you. Great question. I think the answer is probably I wouldn't see a direct link to think about it. I mean there were the link is two ideas about territory and territory is another one of these words which comes into Chinese in translation. The Chinese word that you know is used for territory these days, link to. It's exactly the same characters as the Japanese word real door, and it was translated into Japanese in order by translating a Herbert Spencer text. So Herbert Spencer gave Japanese the word territory in Japanese gave it to Chinese via the translation of the angel. So the idea of territory is a kind is a modern invention. But I, there's some good research, the guy called Chris children who's been looking at the emergence of the Chinese claim in the early 20th century in the sea. And it seems that it started off as being a claim over people, fishermen, you know kind of working at sea rather than specifically islands and territory. So there may be an element there that you know that this kind of idea of no hand people may have played into that. But I'm not so sure I think this was a separate debate or discussion about territory, which comes from debates about land territory. And I would argue I mean I have a bit more in the in this book about the emergence of the maritime claim, which I go into a bit more detail compared to my South China Sea book. I kind of look at the way I mean it's interesting that the guy for example who drew the nine dash line, or rather he drew the line that became the nine dash line in 1933 guy called by me to was Manchu. And he had been attempting to get a job as a scholar official before the revolution of 1911 12. And because the revolution meant there were no jobs for scholar officials, he had to become a teacher and then he became a geography teacher he taught himself geography, and he tried to kind of mix and match the sort of classical views of geography with modern nation states views. And the results, ultimately was the nine dash line. So this question from Hannah. How does hard ethnic identity, potentially invented in 1900s China, relate to the Han Cook ethnic identity in Korea. And this comparison might be important is to look at, given the historical relationship between China and the Korean Peninsula, and due to the idea of unite united rather than singular ethnic identity promoted in both North and South Korea. I think I'm going to take a pass on this one Steve. I'm not watching about Chinese history without trying to compare it with Korean which I know almost nothing about. I mean, the question I use the term Han ethnic identity, I'm specifically talking about Han race here, just to try and kind of give myself a specific point. We can argue whether ethnic identity. I mean, it's a much more fluid term, something which exists. Now I guess I guess you could argue that even if the word race has slipped out of use that maybe there's now a Han ethnic identity there's been a ethnogenesis of Han as modern words modern phrase would be. But I think sorry I'm going to pass on the career question my apologies. So, not at all. I thought I would broaden the range of questions being thrown at you, and in the same spirit I'm asking the next question. It's interesting for example in Vietnamese, the career is called Han Kwok, and you know the hand, hand state. And, and so I guess maybe there is, you know, in regionally there's some idea of, you know, hand but I'll stop talking there. Okay, the next question asked is about do you feel broader awareness of pluralistic concepts of cultural identity can help overcome destructive civilization states and great power narratives, which profess inherent, if not in reconcilable differences between people, which we have seen over the past few years between the PLC government and the Trump administration. And there perhaps something the world can learn from the British South Asians, who may identify as that said, and know that this does not necessarily means Indian, or Jewish people who know that their Jewish identity does not necessarily relate to Israel. Great question. I mean I think it's, for me, it's interesting where these ideas about race and nation fit in the, what in the longer debate about race and nation I mean if you, and sort of European timescale, I mean it was the sort of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, which started to fragment the empires and unleashed the idea of the nation state, which an essentially which sort of, you know, ultimately ends in the Second World War, and genocide and hugely destructive interstate fighting, which you can largely blame on the desire to try and match the nation with the right, you know that if you're going to, you know you want to have a homogenous nation you either change the boundaries by war, or you exterminate minorities or both. And, you know Europe went through that for a century. And at the end, we had a sort of compromise which is that, you know, we will form a European Union, where boundaries are less important where minority rights are protected. We will move to business, and all the rest of it will take the kind of the sting out of being different, as it were. And yet it seems in, in many parts of Asia that they're still on the kind of the difference in the division angle of that of that chart. So insisting that sort of borders are sacred, and that China and India are going to fight to the death literally over some scrap of barren, you know kind of riverbank in the Himalayas, or that there could be some, you know, war over Taiwan or whatever. I mean it's interesting. I mean there are clearly different ways of being a large state. So, for example, you know, whereas China insists that there is a single national language and that everybody has to speak it. In India, there is no national language, for example. In English is a kind of compromise that was, you know, agreed on it at independence, but it's never been a national language. Each, you know, each state in India is free to choose its own official languages. So there are different ways of being pluralistic here. And it seems to me that's, I mean it's kind of, why is China so emotional or emotive about these markers of nationalism? I mean, is it a way of marshalling the people behind the leadership? You know, is that what it's useful for? I mean, people know people do believe it, but I think there's a legacy of what happened in the Republic, which was that because you'd had this very fragmented state in the first part of the Republic, you know, kind of in the warlord era, but there was a need to kind of bond people together. And of course that was made far more urgent by the fact that in the 30s the Japanese were attacking. And so there was a deliberate creation of a sense of fear and national worry about boundaries, about the future of the state and about, you know, which kind of goes back to these social Darwinist ideas of racial extinction. And so it's been kind of baked in, I think, to a lot of modern Chinese thinking about the nation and the state. But, and I don't, you know, these, you know, how can one persuade a Chinese government that they can relax about so many other things and they don't need to kind of, you know, demand this monotheism, you know, kind of mono culture across the country in that you can allow people to be different. I don't know, it doesn't seem as if that's going to be possible for the time being. Okay, this kind of somewhat related and it comes from the Facebook feed. You mentioned the importance of written language to construct a Chinese national identity. But to what extent would you think the vernacular spoken was played a role, especially the relationship between the written words and the oral traditions, such as myths. Well, I think it cuts both ways. I have a chapter on language in the book. And writing about language is incredibly complicated as to what we mean by language and the different words for, you know, dialects and language and so forth. I mean, using the Chinese word Fang Yan, you know, regional speech, I think is probably better than trying to talk about languages. But I mean the, I mean, it's clear, you know, that the different ways of speaking within the, you know, contemporary China are in many cases as different as the different European languages, you know, kind of the difference between, you know, Cantonese and Fujian or Shanghai needs are, you know, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, whatever in a different political context, they would be different languages. And so language, you know, plays a role of both, you know, as you say, if you have shared stories and shared, you know, ideas that they can they can unite people but also they can be a focus for a different identity, as we've seen in in Hong Kong. And as we've seen in other places too, I think hence the move to try and impose put on wires as the national language. So yes, I mean there's a, you know, there is a shared culture but you know that's in the shared spoken culture. But then you got to ask who is sharing this I mean is this only shared in the lowland areas by hwa slash hand people do Haka people shared same. Do the mighty the upland minorities share the same certainly the Tibetans and the Uighurs and the Mongols have different, you know, written and spoken cultures. So, you know, it depends what your vision of China is if your vision of China is quotes China proper the former provinces of the Ming, you can talk maybe, you know, more reliably about a shared spoken language and written culture and that's as soon as you start to kind of go up in altitude into the hills or further away from the low from the sort of the central plains. It's much more difficult obviously. Right. Next question from Gregory Leslie. The logic of a greater than ever decides to have one China one raised only taking matters to that theological conclusion and only to tolerating one language Mandarin and more or less one culture. Incremental extinguishing of differences in race, tradition and culture. We bang eventually to create an upsurge in ethnic awareness and desires to be different and hang on to the individuality, leading to protests, for example, Mongols and violence in the long term. It's a, you know, it's a, it's the big question really isn't it. And so far, it would appear that the resources of the People's Republic are greater than the resources of those that want to oppose the People's Republic I mean, the ability to build enough centers to house a million people to reeducate them in the ways of being Chinese or to garrison enough troops to make sure that people can't protest on the streets, or set fire to themselves or whatever. I mean, it seems that it, you know, I used to sort of think that there was, you know, there was some kind of inevitability that's, you know, national minorities, you know, only responded by getting stronger to suppression. It seems that when there's enough suppression, the state can win. I mean, it may well be that, you know, further down the line, the state runs out of energy or, you know, the movement kind of low suppressed kind of remains some identity and it comes back in a decade or so time, but at the moment, it looks to me like the state is winning in quite a big way in the People's Republic. Next question goes back into history. Can you say something about pre-modern Chinese concepts about race or ethnicity, even if they didn't have the specific term for them? And by which the questioner means before the Europeans and Japanese racial theories filtered through to China. Obviously, by pre-modern Chinese dynasties, she meant, for example, the Tang dynasty, where they would have to deal with multi-ethnic, multicultural society. I'm going to dodge this one, Steve. I don't think I can say anything intelligent without getting myself into trouble, but maybe to recommend Nicholas Tackett's book on that and I think it's a live and interesting debate, really. And Pamela Crossley's discussion about how the Manchu, the Qing, moved to a more racialized conception of difference, you know, kind of in the 18th century, but I am not going to go back beyond that. Okay. The next question, and this will have to be the last question. I was just wondering how you saw your arguments in the context of the increasing popularity of non-Westphalian notions of sovereignty. That is, moving away from this idea of one cohesive China, one that has been intact for thousands of years and towards the use of a term like greater China or Chinese civilization. It's interesting, isn't it? Because, you know, in one level, China was the ultimate sort of Westphalian state, you know, insists on sovereignty, that no one will tell it what to do within its boundaries and, you know, kind of takes a very absolutist view, it says, the United Nations, for example. But on the other, you do have this, you know, appeal to chineseness abroad, to using overseas Chinese communities as part of a sort of campaign for the reunification of the motherland, you know, and you see these associations around the world, these United Front associations, you know, which are often called the, you know, association for the peaceful reunification of the motherland or whatever, which are clearly designed to appeal to the people of Chinese heritage around the world and to recruit them for campaign to, you know, bring Taiwan back to the motherland. And obviously appeals to Taiwan are based on that same kind of language, but shared, you know, Huahua heritage, among other things. So, yeah, I think there's a, there is a kind of contradiction between this sort of Westphalian sovereignty fundamentalism, and the idea that there is a kind of a global Chinese who all in some way belong to the motherland in, you know, either a, you know, a clear or a very grey. And I was just someone just on Twitter today introduced me to a book which I think is published by a couple of Polish academics which I think I'm going to try and look up because it does sort of try to look at how China presents itself in three different ways, as a third one was, you know, kind of as this sort of as a state as an ideology and as a kind of as a nation I think it was, because I think this, you know, I'm trying to unpack these these different ways of being China myself. So, thank you very much. And I'm afraid that we have a lot of time, and I do apologize to many of you who have sent in questions through the Q&A box that I have not been able to fit into before addressing, but Bill Hayton you have given us a fantastically interesting evening and certainly extremely rewarding discussions. I'll see some of you next week. Thank you and goodbye.