Debate over China’s rise often assumes a long, continuous national identity stretching back thousands of years. Policymakers, academics, and media narratives frequently rely on that premise when discussing sovereignty, territorial claims, and nationalism.
Bill Hayton argues that many of those assumptions rest on ideas that are far more recent and constructed than widely believed.
Hayton is a longtime journalist who spent years with the BBC covering international affairs across the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. He served as a reporter in Vietnam and reported extensively across Southeast Asia. He is the author of several books on the region, including The Invention of China, which examines how modern concepts of Chinese identity, history, and territory took shape.
Hayton says his work began with questions about the South China Sea. “The more that I read… the less certain I was,” he says. “You’d see the same sentences copied from academic work to academic work and realize that a lot of what we understood was very, very badly sourced.” That research led him to a broader conclusion. “A lot of things were just asserted as being fact,” he says, “but when you actually went back… there was nothing there.”
His book argues that even the concept of “China” as a unified nation-state is relatively recent. “The Chinese never used the name China as we say it at all,” he says. He explains that earlier political systems were tied to ruling dynasties rather than fixed national identities. “The state was generally referred to as being the name of the ruling dynasty… it wasn’t about a piece of defined territory,” he says. That shift toward a modern nation-state required new answers to basic questions. “Who is Chinese… what shape is China… where does our history begin and end?” he says.
Hayton argues those answers emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, often influenced by ideas from outside China. Reformers in exile began to view their homeland through a global lens. “They were seeing a China as it was seen by foreigners as one state among many,” he says. He adds, “Even the idea of China is a foreign construction.”
The same process shaped widely accepted narratives about history. Hayton describes the idea of “5,000 years of history” as an invented tradition. “Various calculations were made and they came back with this idea,” he says. He argues that such narratives serve a political purpose. “It binds people together,” he says. Leaders use themes like national humiliation and shared ancestry “as a way of binding people together.”
Hayton also challenges assumptions about ethnicity, particularly the idea of a unified Han identity. “We can sort of say that the Han race was invented in 1900,” he says. He explains that the concept emerged from political struggles during the collapse of the Qing dynasty. “We need a way of thinking that divides us from them,” he says of revolutionary thinkers. The boundaries of that identity were debated and fluid. “The boundaries were not natural. They were defined by political and social arguments,” he says.
These constructed ideas continue to shape modern policy debates, including Taiwan. Hayton says historical ties between Taiwan and the mainland are often overstated. “It’s only really been four years when it’s been ruled by the same government on both sides of the Taiwan Strait,” he says. He argues that the idea that Taiwan is inherently part of China “is very much a sort of construction of the Second World War and the years afterwards.”
Hayton says reactions to his work have been mixed. “For some people it completely rubbed them up the wrong way,” he says, noting that challenging “nationalist myths” provoked strong responses. He hopes the research encourages more flexible thinking. “If I can show that a lot of these ideas are modern inventions… there can be different policies,” he says.
He worries that recent trends are moving in the opposite direction. “He’s a hardliner… he believes in creating a single Chinese national race,” Hayton says of current leadership. He adds that the system now demands “the total allegiance of everybody.”
Hayton says understanding how these narratives formed is essential to interpreting China’s actions today. “It clearly serves a useful function for the leaders of China,” he says.
