The meaning of China has changed across thousands of years of history. Governments, territories, and philosophies have shaped the identity of the people today known as “Chinese.” Yet even today, how to view the history of China and its present complexity remains a contested subject. Like many countries, China’s identity formation is continuously underway and defined differently by different people, both within the country’s borders and outside them. To unpack the shifting nature of China’s national and international identity, the Monitor spoke to Guoqi Xu.
Professor Guoqi Xu is the founding director of the Institute of Transnational History of China at the University of Hong Kong. He was born in China and taught both in Asia and the United States before joining the University of Hong Kong’s History Department. Xu’s research topics include First World War Studies, the role of sports in China and the world, the history of U.S.-China relations, and the idea of China, among many others. His most recent book, The Idea of China: A Contested History, was released with Harvard University Press in March 2026.
Emma Brignall: You currently teach in Hong Kong, and you attended university in the United States. How has your experience contributed to your understanding of what it means to be part of China? What led you to dive into this topic?
Guoqi Xu: That’s a big question—one I could talk about forever.
I left the People’s Republic of China in 1990, and at this point I have spent more of my life outside mainland China than inside it. That has given me the privilege of observing the country from both within and without. As a historian—particularly a historian of China’s transnational history with the wider world—my work has continually forced me to think about what we mean by “China” and what we mean by being “Chinese” from a historic perspective.
I have three children who grew up in the United States. They do not know China in the way I do, but they have often asked me about it. During a sabbatical in the United States in 2016, I spent a great deal of time with them over the Christmas holidays, and they kept asking about my understanding of China and Chinese identity. In response, I wrote a short memoir in Chinese reflecting on my experiences—with a suggestion that they have to learn Chinese to read it.
At the same time, audiences frequently asked me similar questions during lectures in mainland China and elsewhere. Eventually I realized that it was time to address the subject directly.
In many ways, I had already been dealing with these questions indirectly through my previous books. China and the Great Warexplored what China meant to the world and what World War I meant to China. Olympic Dreams, published in 2008, opened with the question, what is China, and who are the Chinese? That book led me into research on the international dimensions of Chinese sports and national identity, including work at the Jimmy Carter Library.
I later wrote Strangers on the Western Front, which examined Chinese laborers in France and Belgium during World War I. These largely illiterate farmers were forced, through their experiences abroad, to think about China and its place in the world. I also wrote Chinese and Americans: A Shared History and Asia and the Great War: A Shared History. All of these projects, in different ways, explored how China has been shaped through its interactions with the wider world.
My personal experiences, combined with my academic work, continually forced me to deal with the same question: How did China become China, and how did the Chinese become Chinese?
There was also a publishing story behind this book. Many years ago my editor at Harvard University Press asked whether I would write a textbook on China. I declined because I did not see myself as a textbook writer. But she encouraged me to consider writing something broader about China and Chinese history. We continued discussing the idea, and in 2016 I finally agreed to write what eventually became The Idea of China.
I completed a draft in 2020 but decided not to publish it immediately. Too much was changing—in mainland China, in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, and in the wider world. I felt I needed more time to think. I had to write a chapter about the idea of China from the perspective of Taiwan and Hong Kong, no matter how challenging the topic was for me.
I submitted the final manuscript in late 2024, and Harvard University Press moved quickly to publish it. In that sense, the book was the product of a long journey—nearly ten years of writing and thinking, but also decades of living with the questions that inspired it in the first place.
EB: I want to begin with the title of your book. It describes China as a “contested” idea. Why is China, as a concept, so contested?
GX: When I first submitted the manuscript to Harvard University Press, the working title was The Idea of China: A Shared History. My editors spent several months discussing the title and eventually suggested changing one word: replacing shared with contested. I thought it was a brilliant suggestion because it captured the central argument of the book.
The idea of China has always been contested. It is contested within China, among Chinese people themselves, and it is contested outside China as well. The question of what we mean by “China” or “Chinese-ness” has never had a simple or universally accepted answer.
Part of the reason is China’s history. It is one of the world’s oldest continuous civilizations, and before the 19th century, China was a superpower. The Chinese had their own ideas about what China was. Before the nineteenth century, China occupied a central position in global commerce and imagination. In fact, China did not establish a modern foreign ministry until 1901 because they thought they didn’t need anybody. They said that others should come to China for tributary missions and that the Chinese did not need anything from the outside world. From the 17th century on, everybody from Europe wanted something from China—tea, silk, among other items—China occupied the world center of trade. Everybody had ideas of China. Even Columbus was obsessed with China because he read the book by Marco Polo. He called the country Cathay. For Chinese themselves, China was not the official name until 1912. For Marco Polo it was Cathay, and in the 16th century Europeans called it China, which came from India because India called China the Chin, perhaps because of the Qin Dynasty, and so later on it became China.
Later on, after China was defeated by Japan in 1895, they realized they had to change and join the rest of the world as a nation-state. In 1912, China changed from the “Middle Kingdom” to become a republic. From 1912 to this moment it went through many rebirths. First a republic, then the People’s Republic, and through many constitutions. In the beginning, China wanted to make a constitution based on the French constitution, then they invited an American scholar, Frank Goodnow, who came to China to make their constitution and left one year later. With his help, there was the 1914 constitution. From 1912 to 1946 China had 12 different constitutions, either draft or organic. But its first real constitution was adopted only in 1947 and is still in use in Taiwan.
If you have a problem with your constitution, you have a problem with the idea of that country. A constitution defines who a people are and what kind of country they want. The 1947 constitution came into effect for the Republic of China, but the Nationalist Party was defeated by the Communist Party. Officially, Taiwan remains the Republic of China, preserving institutions and constitutional traditions that date back to 1912. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China developed its own political system. They did not have their first constitution until 1954, five years after its birth.
Joseph Stalin told Chairman Mao that without a constitution the birth of the country is illegitimate. The PRC has had four constitutions since its founding in 1949. The first in 1954, then 1975, 1978, and the one still in use from 1982. The fourth constitution has at least 52 amendments, the most recent one in 2018. If the constitution is the yardstick to measure the idea of China or how contested it is, the Chinese just keep debating and revising their official idea of China.
China was so confident as the Middle Kingdom and refused to deal with anybody else, but after 1895, when China was defeated by Japan, they were impatient and lost confidence and decided to learn from everybody else. China tried to learn from Japan, the U.S., Germany, and the Soviet Union. Many Chinese reformers concluded that traditional Chinese institutions and values had contributed to the country’s weakness. They challenged Confucianism, imperial traditions, and other longstanding features of Chinese civilization. Now at this moment, the Chinese have some soul-searching to ask who they are and what they want.
The United States has the same issue. The U.S. was based on the idea of America, but the idea of America changed after Donald Trump came to power. For Japan, their constitution was made by Americans in 1946 and defined that Japan should be a peaceful nation with a military only for self-defense purposes. Great Britain decided to withdraw from the European Union. That’s why in the beginning I called it the contested history of the idea of China, a shared history. The idea of China not only depends on the Chinese themselves but also on others. Other nations have identity challenges as well. The idea of China has never been fixed. It has been shaped by internal debates, foreign influences, historical experiences, and competing visions of what China was, is, and should become.
EB: In the introduction, you write, “If there is indeed an idea of China, it clearly must be multidimensional, that is, transnational, international, and transcultural.” What does it mean for China to be international and transcultural and how is that different from typical understandings of China?
GX: The traditional understanding of China often treats it as a self-contained civilization with a long, continuous history. Then they transformed themselves from the middle kingdom to a nation-state to join the rest of the world. That was a conscious choice by the Chinese and foreigners because Western countries and Japan forced China to change. When Japan defeated China, China realized it had to try to become an equal member in the family of nations.
China was content to be alone before, because they had an agriculture-based economy which was quite stable. They were very happy with who they were, with Confucianism, feeling arrogant and content. That’s why in the 18th century, when Great Britain, the rising power of the West, came to China, they begged China to treat them equally, to grant them access to the Chinese market. The Chinese Emperor was arrogant, and said, “No, we don’t need anything from you. We are too great to be equal to you.” Great Britain was determined to have access to China, peacefully or not peacefully.
In the 20th century, China was very weak, very disorganized, and was bullied by many Western countries and westernized Japan. First the Opium Wars, then the Boxer wars, then the First World War, the Second World War, then the Cold War. So now, China is a major supporter of the international system created by the United States after the Second World War. China was a founding member of the United Nations. It was one of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and really benefited from the world order and globalization. China became very powerful economically, diplomatically, and militarily. For both China and outside, we have to think about what we mean by “China” or “Chineseness.” It has to be multinational because all these ideas, including their political system and ideology, came from abroad—concepts such as constitutionalism, nationalism, socialism, and communism. They studied foreign political institutions. Some turned to Japan for inspiration; others looked to the United States, Germany, or later the Soviet Union.
The same is true culturally. Chinese civilization has long been influenced by contact with other societies. One important example is Buddhism, which entered China from India and transformed Chinese philosophy, language, literature, and religious life. It became deeply integrated into Chinese culture, even though it originated outside China.
In the modern era, Western influences became significant. Chinese intellectuals studied Western philosophies. Large numbers of Chinese students traveled abroad, especially to the United States. Today, China’s economic power and international influence affect nearly every region of the world and Americans think China is a competitor. Everyone has to figure out what she or he means by “China.”
The current Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, talks about the Chinese Dream and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Samuel Huntington, in his controversial book, Clash of Civilizations, simply identified China as a Confucian civilization. But Confucius, that poor guy, had been denounced since the turn of the 20th century in mainland China. They think he was responsible for failure of China. That’s why the Chinese declared war on him and on Confucian ideas since the late 19th century. Now, if the Confucian civilization is something we want, the Chinese have to relearn.
In Hong Kong and Taiwan, they use classic Chinese characters. They preserved a certain essence of Chinese tradition. And after the last dynasty came to power in China, the Manchus and the Qing dynasty, Korea declared they were the real China. Korea said they inherited everything, the real essence of Confucian culture. They had a civil service examination based on the Chinese model. They were deeply obsessed with Confucian ideas. That is why I describe the idea of China as both international and transnational.
EB: A major question running throughout the book is who counts as Chinese today. How do places such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang fit in—or not fit in—to the idea of China?
GX: This is another enormous question, but one way to approach it is through a simple observation. Under the name of China there are four different passports: Republic of China (on Taiwan), the People’s Republic of China, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region passport, and the Macau Special Administrative Region passport. Passport holders from the PRC cannot visit many countries without visas, but passport holders from Hong Kong can visit many countries without any visa requirement. For passport holders from the Republic of China on Taiwan, even though most countries don’t recognize it, their passports are very valuable and do not need a visa for many places.
The same complexity appears in currency. Mainland China uses the renminbi. Hong Kong has the Hong Kong dollar. Macau has its own currency, and Taiwan has the New Taiwan dollar. Four different currencies and four different passports—they all claim to be Chinese in some way.
Sports offer another useful illustration. In the Winter Olympics in Italy, American skater Alyssa Liu did very well. Her father is from China and she is Chinese American. Another star, Eileen Gu, is American-born and represented China. China has naturalized citizens who represent China, too. Are they Chinese?
From 1895, the Chinese thought the image of China was under attack. They were not proud of the fact that men had queues and women had bound feet, so from that moment on they tried to remake the image of China to compete with everyone in the world on equal footing. Sports became a vehicle of nation-building to remake China as a strong nation by remaking Chinese. In the 2008 Olympics, China finally replaced the U.S. as the number one gold medal-holder. The Chinese thought they were equal. But in the World Cup, the Chinese men have only qualified once in 2002. If the Chinese were very comfortable with who they are, they would not be so upset. Indians who have never shown up in the World Cup and do not seem as upset as the Chinese are. Every time certain events happen abroad the Chinese ask themselves what is China, what do we mean by China: a powerful nation or a weak nation?
There are many overseas Chinese communities, living in the United States, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. Are they Chinese? Legally, they are not. But culturally, they are more Chinese than some people in the PRC because they preserve traditional culture and traditional characters. The Confucian idea was broken in the 20th century, but for them—even for Hong Kong, as a colony—the literary tradition was preserved. How do we define the idea of China, culturally, legally, economically? Economically, China is a capitalist society with cut-throat competition. But politically, it’s a socialist country. That’s why this question is so contested.
Historically, Chinese identity was often understood as cultural and civilizational rather than purely ethnic. Hunan was traditionally thought of as a “barbarian” region. Even by blood you might be Chinese, but you might not follow the correct version of Confucian ideas. If you don’t follow those ideas, you’re not Chinese. But foreigners could become Chinese if they followed them. For more than 3000 years the Chinese were debating among themselves who could be called the “real Chinese” or “civilized Chinese.”
If you say history explains what China was, that is very chaotic. The PRC treats the ROC as evil. The Ming dynasty treated the Yuan dynasty as corrupt and not Chinese. Every dynasty that came to power declared the previous one bad. From the memory of history, it is clearly complicated to define the idea of China.
EB: As I was reading the book, I found myself thinking about the comparison with the United States. The U.S. also experiences identity formation struggles, and even defining what America is today could garner vastly different responses from different individuals. Is China that different in its continuous identity construction?
GX: One of the reasons I originally wanted to call the book The Idea of China: A Shared History is because it is not only the idea of China that is contested. Many other countries have the same experience. As Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of independence, people are debating what the idea of America is. That idea has changed historically from the Declaration of Independence beginning with “we the people,” a category that did not include women, African Americans, or Asians. Women did not have the right to vote until the 20th century. Until the Civil War, the U.S. was “one country with two systems” —a slave country and a free economy. Before the Civil War it was not united. Just like Lincoln said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” And there was still the Civil Rights Movement to follow. Now Donald Trump has his own vision of America.
Every community is imagined, and so is the nation. French people are proud of their identity and history, but until the French Revolution and even after, many French people did not speak French. Until 1914, Indian people did not have an idea of the Indian nation. They were divided and a colony, and it was only after the first World War that they had a sense of belonging and a nation. Japan used to be a nation with deep-rooted militarism, but with the American-imposed constitution in 1946 a new idea of Japan came up which only allowed Japan to use the military for self-defense. In that sense, the idea of China is contested as much as many other nations.
The idea of other countries also affects the idea of China. People ask whether the U.S. and China will have a war. The answer is simple: if you treat China as an enemy, you will get an enemy. If China treats the U.S. as an enemy, it will get an enemy. They each affect the idea of America and China, respectively. The future idea of China will function the same way. It will be decided by both the Chinese themselves and by outsiders.