The Invention of China
Bill Hayton
Yale University Press: 2020
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I am looking at a map of China. Its external shape is familiar enough, but little else is. Xinjiang is now East Turkestan; a greater Tibet has gobbled up Chengdu and Chongqing. To its south is ‘Cantonia’, although Hong Kong (but not Macau) is an independent republic. Fujian and Zhejiang are now ‘Hookkien’; to its north is ‘Goetsu’, which goes all the way to Shandong. Independent Mongolia, Manchuria and Taiwan complete the picture. The residue, labelled ‘actual Chinese territory’, is a limp splatter of red running from Beijing to Hunan, looking distinctly forlorn.

These maps of China are often circulated by warring nationalists on the internet, although one version was recently featured on Indian television, after the most recent Sino-Indian border clashes. Their appeal is simple: to accuse your opponent’s country of being made up—as opposed to your own country, whose existence was decreed by nature—is one of the basic taunts in the nationalist’s repertoire. Chinese nationalists do likewise when they accuse Korea or Vietnam of not being real countries, but merely Chinese appanages that got away.

• Tags: Bill Hayton, China, Issue 21, Yuan Zhu