How should China be understood? This question lies at the heart of any attempt to understand both Chinese history and China’s transformation in the modern era. For a long time, China has often been interpreted through a simple opposition between “empire” and “nation-state.”
In Western-centered accounts of history, China is commonly presented as a traditional empire that lacked the political form of the modern nation-state. In reaction to such interpretations, other accounts have emphasized the idea of “All-under-Heaven” and portrayed China as a political order fundamentally different from the Western nation-state. Although these approaches appear to point in opposite directions, both can end up placing China within concepts defined in advance.
The more important question is not whether China should ultimately be classified as an empire or a nation-state, but how China’s political forms were created and how they changed over time. China was never a completely fixed historical entity. Its territory, institutions, political culture, and understanding of what constituted “China” all changed repeatedly. Different dynasties established new political orders while also redefining their relationship with China and with the historical traditions associated with it.
The Yuan and Qing dynasties are particularly revealing in this regard. Their political structures and territorial reach differed significantly from those of the Song and Ming, yet both eventually became integral parts of Chinese history. After establishing rule, the Qing faced a fundamental political question: how could a new dynasty present itself as a legitimate Chinese dynasty? Military conquest alone could not answer this question. Legitimacy was also constructed through institutions, rituals, Confucian learning, and historical interpretation. Over time, the Qing became widely recognized as part of the continuous history of China. This suggests that historical continuity should not be understood as something that simply survives unchanged. It is repeatedly reconstructed in response to historical rupture and political transformation.
This process can also be seen in the intellectual debates of the Song period. Discussions of feudalism and centralized administration, land systems and taxation, civil-service selection and the examination system, ritual and institutions may appear to concern technical questions of government. In fact, they reflected a much broader concern with the relationship between historical change and political ideals. Song thinkers repeatedly asked why political institutions had changed and whether the ideals associated with ancient political life could still have meaning under new institutional conditions.
The relationship between ritual and institutions is especially important. For Song Confucians, ritual was not simply a cultural tradition separated from political institutions, while institutions were not merely technical mechanisms of government. The relationship between the two was itself a historical problem. Arguments for restoring ancient practices were therefore not necessarily attempts to return literally to the past. They were often efforts to reconsider political order under conditions in which society and institutions had already changed.
This point also raises a broader methodological issue. Ancient Chinese history cannot always be adequately understood by imposing modern categories such as politics, economics, society, and culture onto a world in which these domains were not necessarily separated in the same way. Modern analytical concepts can illuminate the past, but they can also obscure the conceptual world in which historical actors actually lived. For Song thinkers, questions of political institutions, ethics, social order, ritual, and history were interconnected within a larger understanding of principle, political legitimacy, and the moral order of the world.
An “internal perspective” is therefore essential to understanding historical thought. Such a perspective does not mean rejecting modern knowledge or simply returning to ancient ways of thinking. It means first understanding why people in a particular historical period understood their circumstances in the way they did, and only then bringing those historical perspectives into dialogue with contemporary questions. History becomes more meaningful when the categories used to interpret it are themselves subjected to reflection.
The traditional Chinese idea of “historical circumstances” is important here. Modern Western historical narratives have often presented time as a linear process leading from the past toward progress, development, and ultimately modernity. Chinese historical thought, by contrast, placed greater emphasis on changing circumstances and the choices made within them. History did not necessarily follow a single predetermined path toward a final destination. Political action took place within changing circumstances, while historical actors continued to pursue particular values and visions of order.
China’s entry into modernity therefore cannot be understood simply as a linear movement from tradition to modernity or from empire to nation-state. From the nineteenth century onward, the growing power of the West transformed China’s historical circumstances. New forms of knowledge, new conceptions of the state, and a new international order changed the way Chinese intellectuals understood both China and the world.
This also means that criticism of Western centrism cannot simply mean rejecting everything associated with the West. By the modern period, the West had already become part of China’s historical reality. Chinese intellectuals were responding to a world that had been fundamentally transformed by Western military, political, economic, and intellectual power. Even attempts to defend Chinese tradition were therefore made under modern historical conditions.
The complexity of twentieth-century Chinese thought emerged from this situation. Chinese intellectuals faced a profound tension: traditional forms of knowledge had been disrupted, yet the question of how to preserve, reinterpret, or recreate China’s intellectual heritage remained unavoidable. Nationalism, liberalism, socialism, cultural conservatism, and other intellectual currents should therefore not be understood simply as foreign ideas imported into China or as unchanged survivals of tradition. They were different responses to a new historical world.
The formation of modern Chinese thought was consequently neither a simple process of Westernization nor a straightforward revival of tradition. It was a process of continuous adjustment and reconstruction between tradition and modernity, China and the wider world. Modernity itself cannot be treated as a single, universally identical condition. Ideas that criticized modernity could still operate within modern institutions and modern systems of knowledge. At the same time, such tensions reveal that modernity contains multiple possibilities and unresolved contradictions.
Rethinking China therefore also requires rethinking modernity. Modernity is not a fixed endpoint that China was simply destined to reach, nor is China a static object waiting to be defined. China’s modern transformation emerged from changes in political institutions, systems of knowledge, cultural traditions, and relations with the wider world.
“China” is neither an unchanging essence nor an arbitrary concept that can be defined at will. It is a political and cultural community repeatedly interpreted and reconstructed through historical change. Modern China did not suddenly appear at a single moment. It emerged through successive ruptures, continuities, conflicts, and attempts at reconstruction.
The central task, therefore, is not to assign China a final definition, but to understand how China became what it is through historical change. Moving beyond simplistic oppositions such as empire and nation-state, tradition and modernity, or China and the West makes it possible to see Chinese history not as a predetermined journey toward a fixed destination, but as a long and complex process in which a civilization and political community has repeatedly redefined itself in response to changing circumstances.
Source: aisixiang, szhgh, xinhua
