WHAT'S IN A NAME: ZHONGGUO (OR ‘MIDDLE KINGDOM’) RECONSIDERED

Abstract

ABSTRACTWestern writers have long criticized the Chinese term Zhongguo, translated as ‘Middle Kingdom’, for its ethnocentric purport. This article proposes to address this criticism by re-examining salient features of Zhongguo's etymological past. The discussion is divided into two parts. The first part offers an overview of the term's historical usage and argues that contrary to the common view, Zhongguo as applied to the imagined whole of Chinese political and cultural traditions or to any of its discrete period segments had not been employed primarily as an ethnocentric expression but as a simple identity label. The second part revisits a late Qing (c. 1861–1912) episode in which Chinese writers made a rare, if not unprecedented, attempt to dispute and, indeed, to reject the name in light of the foreign criticism. Though their arguments did not, in the end, alter how nationalists named the Chinese nation, these debates revealed a cultural posture that became prevalent as educated Chinese negotiated the crossroads of modernity.