The Middle Kingdom Has No Ethnonym

Barbarians, but our barbarians

You will always a conversation about China where someone who admits they once treated China the way other people collect stamps. Rice paper and ink. Tea bought in thimbles and drunk by the bucket. An annual pilgrimage to Shanghai every May to argue with plantation owners over the new Longjing harvest, the seller opening at ten times the market price, the buyer brandishing photographs of the price tags from the Yuan market, and then the long ritual haggle until both sides arrive at something they can live with — which, if you have ever priced anything against a counterparty who would rather not sleep than be cheated, is a negotiation you recognise in your bones. That was the exotic China: elite, eccentric, the property of a few obsessives the rest of the country considered mildly unwell. The thesis worth lifting out of the conversation is that this China is gone, and almost nobody in the West has marked the position to market. China stopped being an exotic asset and became a pervasive one. It is no longer a curiosity you travel to acquire; it is ambient. A man who buys a Haval and finds it drives perfectly well has just been told, more persuasively than any propaganda channel could manage, that the country which supposedly makes plastic rubbish has quietly overtaken him. The material fact does the work. China stopped selling a story and started shipping the conclusion.

The cost of misreading this is not aesthetic, it is analytical, and it begins with the single most useful thing a foreigner can learn about the country, which is that the word Zhongguo — the Middle Kingdom — contains no ethnonym. There is no equivalent of asking a man what he is and being told “I am Chinese” the way an American says American or a Russian says Russian. Ask a citizen of the Middle Kingdom what he is and he tells you where he is from: Shanghainese, Beijingese, Cantonese, in words so different they barely rhyme. A Mongol can claim the centre with a straight face. So can a Uyghur. Even Han is not an ethnicity in the sense the term implies; it is the name of a dynasty, the way a man in Guangzhou will tell you he is Tang, a person of the Tang house, naming a state structure rather than a bloodline. The nearest historical analogues are not nation-states at all. They are the European Union — if the EU had an army and a single administrative language — or the Roman Empire, with its provinces and its legions and its capital, granting each province a measure of autonomy in tax and in custom while binding them under one script and one centre. Egypt was a Roman province and did not speak an Indo-European language; that did not make it less Roman. China is a continent wearing the costume of a country, and every Western model that begins “China, a nation of 1.4 billion, wants…” has already mispriced the underlying. You cannot speak to a continent the way you speak to a country.