I was totally unprepared for Gao’s reaction. Her face became contorted and she reacted as if she had just heard something offensive and abhorrent. She clearly found the very thought repellent, as if it was unnatural and alien, akin to having a relationship with another species. Her reaction was a demonstration of prolonged physical repulsion the like of which I had never previously witnessed. For her the idea was simply inconceivable. Gao was a highly educated and intelligent woman; and an extremely nice one. I was shocked. I asked her what the matter was as she writhed in disgust, but there was no answer and no possibility to reason with her. That was more or less the beginning and end of our conversation on the subject. The memory of that journey has remained with me ever since. There was, alas, no reason to think that Gao’s reaction was unusual or exceptional. This was not simply the reaction of an individual but the attitude of a culture. And she was surely destined to become a member of China ’s elite.

What will China be like as a great power? The traditional way of answering this question is in terms of geopolitics, foreign policy and interstate relations. In other words, it is seen as a specialist area of foreign ministries, diplomacy, bilateral talks, multinational negotiations and the military. A concentration on the formal structures of international relations, however, fails to address the cultural factors that shape the way a people think, behave and perceive others. The geopolitical approach informs how a state elite reasons and acts, while a cultural analysis, rooted in history and popular consciousness, seeks to explain the values, attitudes, prejudices and assumptions of a people. In the short run, the former may explain the conduct of relations between countries, but in the longer run people’s values and prejudices are far more significant and consequential. [704] Ultimately, nations see the world in terms of their own history, values and mindset and seek to shape that world in the light of those experiences and perceptions.

Take the example of the United States. Fundamental to any understanding of American behaviour over the last three centuries is that this was a country established by European settlers [705] who, by war and disease, largely eliminated the indigenous population of Amerindians; who, having destroyed what had existed before, were able to start afresh on the basis of the European traditions that they had brought with them; who engaged in an aggressive westward expansion until they came to occupy the whole of the continent; and who were to grow rich in large measure through the efforts of their African slaves. [706] Without these building blocks, it is impossible to make any sense of subsequent American history. They help us to understand the basic contours of American behaviour, including the idea of the United States as a universal model and the belief in its manifest destiny. It is clear that race and ethnicity are fundamental to this picture. Consciously or unconsciously, they lie at the heart of the way in which people define themselves and their relationship to others. [707]

This more cultural approach is, if anything, even more important in China’s case because it has only very recently come to see itself as a nation-state and engage in the protocol of a nation-state: most Chinese attitudes, perceptions and behaviour, as we saw in the last chapter, are still best understood in terms of its civilizational inheritance rather than its status as a nation-state. If we want to comprehend how China is likely to behave towards the rest of the world, then first we need to make sense of what has made China what it is today, how it has evolved, where the Chinese come from, and how they see themselves. We cannot appreciate their attitude towards the rest of the world without first understanding their view of themselves. Once again, history, culture, race and ethnicity are central to the story.

China, or at least the land mass we now call China, was once, like any other huge territory, occupied by a great multitude of races. [708] Today, however, China sees and projects itself as an overwhelmingly homogeneous nation, with over 91 per cent of the population defined as Han Chinese. True, the constitution defines China as a unitary, multi-ethnic state, but the other races compose less than 9 per cent of the population, a remarkably small percentage given its vast size. A tourist who visits the three great cities of Guangzhou in the south, Shanghai in the east and Beijing in the north-east, however, ought to have no difficulty in noticing that there are very marked physical differences between their inhabitants, even though they all describe themselves as Han Chinese. While Beijingers are every bit as tall as Caucasians, those from Guangzhou tend to be rather shorter. Given that modern China is the product of a multiplicity of races, this is not surprising. The difference between China and other populous nations has not been the lack of diversity, but rather the extraordinary longevity and continuity of Chinese civilization, such that the identity of most races has, over thousands of years, been lost through a combination of conquest, absorption, assimilation, intermarriage, marginalization and extermination.

Like all racial categories, the Han Chinese — a product of the gradual fusion of many different races — is an imagined group. The term ‘Han Chinese’, indeed, only came into existence in the late nineteenth century. But such has been the power of the idea, and its roots in the long history of Chinese civilization, that it has spawned what can only be described as its own historical myth, involving the projection of the present into the distant past. That myth holds that the Chinese are and always have been of one race, that they share a common origin, and that those who occupy what is China today have always enjoyed a natural affinity with each other as one big family. [709] This has become an integral part of Chinese folklore and is shared by the Confucian, Republican and Communist traditions alike. [710] A recent official Chinese publication on patriotic education declared: ‘Patri otism is a fine tradition of our Chinese nation. For thousands of years, as an enormous spiritual force, it continuously stimulated the progress of our history.’ [711] There is a commonly held view amongst the Chinese that Chinese civilization commenced with the Yellow Emperor (Huang Di), who, as legend has it, was born in 2704 BC and ruled a kingdom near the Yellow River on the central plain that is regarded as the cradle of Chinese civilization. Many Chinese, both on the mainland and overseas, believe that they are genealogically descended from the Yellow Emperor. [712] Although Mao rejected the idea, it has staged something of a revival since the mid eighties. In a speech in 1984, Deng Xiaoping suggested that the desire for the reunification of the mainland and Taiwan was innately ‘rooted in the hearts of all descendants of the Yellow Emperor’. [713] A well-known intellectual, Su Xiaokang, has written: ‘This Yellow River, it so happens, bred a nation identified by its yellow skin pigment. Moreover, this nation also refers to its earliest ancestor as the Yellow Emperor. Today, on the face of the earth, of every five human beings, there is one that is a descendant of the Yellow Emperor.’ [714] This statement implies that the Chinese have different origins from everyone else. Like the Japanese, the Chinese have long held, albeit with significant dissenting voices, a polygenist view of the origins of Homo sapiens, believing that — in contrast to the generally held view that we all stem from a single ancestry in Africa — humanity has, in fact, multiple origins. [715] Peking Man, discovered in Zhoukoudian near Beijing in 1929-30, [716] has been widely interpreted in China as the ‘ancestor’ of the Mongoloid race. [717] In 2008 a further important discovery was made of skull fossils of a hominid — Xuchang Man — at the Xuchang site in Henan province, which was believed to date back 80-100,000 years. An article in the China Daily claimed that ‘the discovery at Xuchang supports the theory that modern Chinese man originated in what is present-day Chinese territory rather than Africa.’ It continued, ‘Extraordinary archaeological discoveries are critical to maintaining our national identity as well as the history of our ancient civilization.’ [719] While internationally archaeological findings are regarded as part of a worldwide effort to understand the evolution of the human race, in China, where they are given unusual prominence, they are instead seen as an integral part of national history and are used ‘to promote a unifying concept of unique origin and continuity within the Chinese nation’. [720]