Ask WSP
Three Thousand YearsQ: I read where China has been China for 3000 years or more. True?
A: Not exactly. "China" was created in 0221 [221 BC] when the Chin state conquered all the other states and imposed an Imperial unity which had never existed before. In the centuries before this, the separate states in the part of the map that we think of as "China" had been a mixture of Chinese-type (Sinitic) and other states, speaking different languages and having different customs and beliefs.
The Sinitic states gradually exterminated or assimilated the non-Sinitic states. That process required centuries. The non-Sinitic states are hardly mentioned in the standard Chinese histories, and their contribution to the eventual mixed Sinitic culture is nearly always denied. Some "minority peoples" of today are the descendants of those classical non-Sinitic cultures, surviving despite centuries of suppression, and in some cases numbering in the millions. They do not count in conventional perceptions of "China." But there they are.
Up to just before the 0221 conquest, one of the biggest contenders, Chu, was non-Sinitic. If Chu had won, either then or in the scramble for power after the collapse of Chin in 0208, there would now be no "Chinese" language. We would all be speaking Chu (see our Chu Language page).
As for the Sinitic strand in Chinese history, it too has undergone major changes. The Warring States political philosophers were concerned to lay a foundation for Sinitic Unification. They did this partly by projecting the Sinitic perceptions of their time back on much earlier periods, giving them greated continuity than they had actually had. (The earliest of those periods were more or less wholly invented). Revealing the mutations which the Sinitic strand has undergone, and restoring the non-Sinitic strands to the classical picture, is one result of distinguishing the forged sources from the genuine ones, and reading the genuine ones in true chronological order. This task is the one which the Project, in particular, has set itself.
That work is ongoing. But it is already clear that the Sinitic strand was not self-identical, all the way back to the Neolithic, and that it became the dominant strand by eliminating or absorbing a number of non-Sinitic peoples and traditions.
14 Mar 2004 / Contact The Project / Exit to Implications Page
