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Bill Hayton is an associate fellow with the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Previously, he was a journalist with the BBC World News in Vietnam and Myanmar. His research and journalism have focused on the South China Sea disputes and contemporary Southeast Asian politics. He is the author of Vietnam: Rising Dragon (2010), The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia (2014), and most recently, The Invention of China (2020). In this lightly edited interview, we discussed China’s national inventions, how bad mapmaking gave rise to the South China Sea dispute, and why some Sinologists were upset by his recent book.

Q: What inspired you to write this book? 

A: This book came out of my work on the South China Sea, which in turn came out of my work on Vietnam. The more I looked into the history of China’s claims in the South China Sea, the more I came to realize that in the early 20th century, enthusiastic nationalists were grabbing at pieces of evidence to substantiate Chinese territorial claims, and creating a version of history that seemed to work for them, but didn’t bear a huge amount in relationship to the evidence. And the more I looked into this, the more I thought about how this relates to other bits of nation building that were taking place in China at around the same time. And the more I started to question: What do we actually mean by China? Where is Chinese territory? When did people start to think about things like territory, and nation and nationalism? And then that led me into a whole other series of big questions and the idea that these were, in many ways, not indigenous ideas. They had to arrive from outside. And I don’t think many people were aware of that — they see China as this permanent, homogenous unchanging presence in East Asia, without thinking about how much of a break there was around the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

The other reason for writing it was that there are obviously a lot of issues that China presents the world with, or the world looks at China and worries about, like the South China Sea, Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan. And these are all problems that emerged from the attempt to define the new nation and the new state, where its boundaries were, what the people within its borders should be like, and how they should behave. There were parallel problems in Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries, like where boundaries should be, who’s in the nation, and who’s outside it. I wanted to show that these are not inorganic, ancient, sacred categories or definitions, but they were very much contingent on the politics of the time. Therefore, it should be possible to challenge Chinese explanations of the origins of these problems to undermine the claim that these are solid and immutable arrangements, and to show that there could be alternative, flexible ways of dealing with boundaries, and so forth. They’re not sacred. They don’t go back to ancient times.

So this book is supposed to make it easier to push back on the idea that concepts such as sound national boundaries and identity cannot change and have been around forever?

Well, I think it shows people that there are arguments that go back to this period, and they don’t go into the ancient past to the time of the Yellow Emperor. These are very much modern answers to modern questions. And therefore, there should be some wiggle room and some negotiating room for people who are concerned about what kind of language they speak in Hong Kong, or where the border lies in the Himalayas or whether somebody should be allowed to speak a different language in Tibet and Xinjiang. The idea of trying to impose a homogenous single nation identity is a very new one, compared to the length of time that people have been speaking Chinese or lived in that area. 

It’s not intended to be a guide for pushback; it’s intended to be a way of enlightening people who maybe don’t know about just how contingent this bit of history is. And lots of things that we see now were actually the fruit of arguments that took place between reformers and revolutionaries a century ago. Whereas in Europe, we’ve moved on beyond these ideas about hard national boundaries and pure national identities, somehow China is still stuck in this past.

You argue that inventions keep China together and mask internal fractures. Couldn’t the same be said about the U.S. and Europe? Why is China different? 

In some ways, it is not different, because all countries have myths around them. And that was partly what I wanted to say: China is just as much a construction and creation of myths and inventions as other countries. And we can talk about it in the same way as other states. That was part of the reason for writing the book. The other thing is that in more democratic countries, we are used to different ideas about the past being challenged, and reinterpreted, and so forth. This is what Western universities do all the time. And this isn’t permissible in China. When China looks at Western societies, which are riven with different interpretations of the past, they think that’s another reason not to go down that route. They say, ‘Look at how European and American societies have torn themselves apart over the interpretation of the past and who can be on the statue,’ and all that kind of stuff. That’s another box they don’t want to open.

This has ebbed and flowed. In the last five years in particular, the space in China for debating aspects of the past has tightened up. Archives have been closed off to academics and the kind of articles that can be written about the past and borders has been limited. So it’s not as if it’s always been the case since the start of political liberalization in the PRC, but it’s definitely closed down of late, and these questions have become far more sensitive. And so the chances of actually having an honest discussion about aspects of the past where they might have implications for contemporary policy are low. For example, did the Qing state commit genocide against the Dzungars in Central Asia? And what does that mean for the legitimacy of the current Chinese presence in Xinjiang? That’s not a debate that can be had within open academia in China at the moment.

You argue in this book that the South China Sea disputes can be partly traced back to bad translation and map-making in the mid-1900s, can you explain that claim? 

So, my argument is that China’s claims in the South China Sea emerged in a distinct period between 1907 in 1947. Every time there was a crisis — and there were three that I talked about in the book — China’s claim advanced further down the South China Sea. So in 1909, there was a controversy about an island called Pratas — in Chinese it is called Dongsha — with Japan, and that led to a claim on the Paracel Islands. In 1933, there was a crisis with France that really showed that the Republic of China government didn’t know where these islands were. They repeatedly confused the Paracels, which they made a claim on in 1909, with the Spratly Islands, which they had not made a claim on. But in that confusion, an idea started to emerge that China did have a claim to the Spratly Islands. That claim wasn’t formally made until after the Second World War. And the reason why that claim moved so far south is because, after this crisis in 1933, the Chinese government set up a committee to translate the names of the islands in the South China Sea, and to work out which ones it wanted to claim. And in doing so, it simply copied the names that were on British maps, and gave them Chinese equivalents. So, for example, the “North Danger Reef” becomes Beixian — simply North Danger in Chinese — or the Spratly Islands became simply a transliteration of that. My favorite one is that Money Island, which is named after someone at the East India Company named William Money, becomes Jinyin Dao, which is the Chinese word for money. And so even to this day, the Chinese name still honors a British imperialist, probably without knowing it. 

In that translation process, they also used the word tan for some underwater features like sandbanks. On a British map, these features were little dotted lines, but then a Chinese mapmaker comes along in the 1930s and colors them in, turning these underwater sandbanks into islands. He’s the very first person that then draws a big line down around the South China Sea incorporating these “islands” and says that this is all Chinese territory. Now that might have been irrelevant, except that two of his students went on to become geography professors, and in the 1940s, they were hired by the Ministry of Interior to define where China’s boundaries should be claimed after the Second World War. They take their former teacher’s ideas about these underwater islands and transfer them into the official thinking of the Republic of China. And that’s why the Nine-dash line, the U-shaped line that draws China’s claim in the South China Sea, takes the shape that it does today — because of this confusion about the translation of tan and the coloring in of these underwater features as islands in the 1930s. My contribution to the history of the South China Sea has been to highlight the importance of screw ups in the emergence of the territorial claim.

There was a recent article in the New York Times about how China is building villages in Bhutan, using the same tactics as the South China Sea and claiming a different interpretation of the border based on a 1890 treaty. Do you think we are going to see these conflicts play out all around China in border areas?

I think there are certain areas where that’s possible. I mean, it’s remarkable that China has settled its land boundaries in many areas. But it took a long time to do so. It wasn’t until 2009 that the Vietnamese border was fully demarcated. And the parts of the Himalayan boundary with India are still the most sensitive. The real problem is that China has taken this fundamentalist attitude to sovereignty, whereby a few meters on the riverbank are absolutely critical somehow to national integrity and survival. Whereas, in reality, there’s plenty of room for compromise on these things. But China’s attitude is completely different to its attitude to frontiers that existed in the past, when Owen Lattimore was wandering around China’s inner Asian borders. He described the border zone, as Chinese authority just gradually faded away, and then somebody else’s authority gradually emerged — there was no sharp line. And yet, we’ve now got this situation where you can literally have Chinese and Indian troops beating each other to death with steel poles over exactly where somebody can pitch a tent. It seems completely absurd compared to how the frontier was managed before the time of the modern state, when neither side really knew where a frontier was, or there was some kind of minority ethnic group that was a buffer, living on both sides of the line. And by contrast, the current situation is fairly hard and fast, solid lines. It is quite frightening.

Why is there such an intense focus on these lines now? 

I think it comes from the nation building experience of the 1920s and 30s. This is a time when the Republic of China was fractured into warlord fiefs. And then in the 1930s, you have increasingly aggressive moves by Japan invading Manchuria and Shanghai and places along the coast. And then obviously, the start of the Second World War, and in particular, in the Nanjing decade, from 1928 to 1937, when you have the Nationalist government, the Kuomintang, trying very hard to educate the people about the territory of the nation and the need to protect it. And so they have a very deliberate education project led by historians and geographers to teach the masses about the territory, and to deliberately inculcate a sense of humiliation about the losses of territory that the British, French, Russians and other countries have stolen from China. They deliberately created this sense of belonging, this sense of threat, and this sense of violation that losing these territories has caused to the nation as a whole. And a sense of humiliation that must be experienced by each individual. 

You can see this parallel in other circumstances. I know the story of the Vietnamese claim in the South China Sea reasonably well. And it’s pretty clear to me that Vietnamese people didn’t think about the islands in the South China Sea personally until 1974, when the Chinese invaded half the Paracels and took them. Then you suddenly got an experience of national humiliation and outpouring on the streets. It became an emotional claim. And so this sense of humiliation seems to be very important for generating a sense of identity and for concern about the borders and for the legitimacy of the government. It became less a question of strategic need and more a question of emotion and the legitimacy of the regime at that point. And I think that’s why it’s so difficult for the Chinese government to back down.

So you are saying that the issues in the South China Sea are so emotional that the government couldn’t possibly back down on their claims? 

I think that makes it much more difficult to do so. But I think this also can be used as a tool. Jessica Chen Weiss, in her book Powerful Patriots, looks into the idea that governments can actually use this idea of public opinion as a tool. The government says, ‘We can’t back down because there’ll be demonstrations in the streets,’ or whatever. Both China and Vietnam are consummate propagandists, they continue to exist because they’re so good at managing public opinion. So presumably, if they decided they wanted to manage public opinion away from confrontation, then they could do so. But they both seem to find some advantage in ramping up public opinion from time to time, although they’ve been careful not to get too emotional in the last five years.

So given that these claims are so tied up in national emotions, how should other countries approach issues like the South China Sea in a diplomatic way?

It starts from a realization that neither side is likely to make any kind of public backwards step. They’re going to have to manage expectations. In the South China Sea context, the status quo should be what prevails. No one’s going to ask anybody to pull out of any islands that they currently occupy. But you do need an understanding that nobody’s going to try to fight a war and push anybody else off any other islands. And that needs to be agreed initially and informally between the various claimants and then maybe more publicly or formally later. And also, it’s important to remember that all the countries in the South China Sea have already signed and ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. They’ve agreed among themselves the rules to divide up the marine resources. So hence this focus by many countries on the rules-based system. All these countries have signed up to these rules, so they should live by these rules. It’s still an emotional cause — there’s no doubt about that. But countries have agreed on ways to resolve them. And that probably offers the best way forward.

In another chapter of your book, you investigate the issue of language, and how the government has pushed policies to increase Mandarin speaking and diminish local dialects. Why is it important to think about the issue of language in China? 

Well, when I was writing that chapter, I was also thinking about language as a marker of regional identity. And the need to try to create a more homogenous nation and to smooth over difference and thereby diminish our sense of regional specialness. Of course, we see this in Hong Kong, and feelings about speaking Cantonese have spilled over into Guangzhou as well and other parts of the country. Shanghai has their own sense of identity, which is tied up in speaking Shanghainese. So the desire to make sure everybody speaks Mandarin, a single national language, seems to be another plank of Xi Jinping’s effort to homogenize Chinese society and to reduce the sense of regional difference. This follows things that European countries did a century ago. The way that France, for example, rolled out standard pronunciations of French over local ones. The German model was adopted by Japan, and the Japan model became an inspiration for the Chinese language reformers.

But there are other places that managed to run a country with no national language. India, of course, is the most obvious example. But maybe when the Chinese government looks at India and sees all its states speaking different languages, they think that’s exactly the kind of state that they don’t want to run. They want to run a unitary republic, which only has one timezone and one language.

Will their efforts to homogenize regional identities be successful? 

It used to seem like regional identity and national identity were just impossible to crush, and the more that the state tried to impose something, the more people would resist. But somehow the degree of effort and resources that the Chinese state is able to throw at these problems seems to be in a different order. And so it may well be that they will be successful. There aren’t that many countries that can incarcerate a million people in camps in Xinjiang and try to reeducate their minds. There aren’t that many states that can insist on people in Hong Kong all speaking one language. 

Also, they seem to have thought about their approach quite carefully. Rather than going head on, but, for example, by offering incentives for schools to teach in Mandarin as the first language and then offering Cantonese almost like a foreign language. And then by implementing incentives for children to be able to work in other parts of the country, and then thereby get a better job and so forth. This tends to encourage families to put their kids in the Mandarin stream. And so it may well be that over a long period, they will be successful. 

It used to seem like regional identity and national identity were just impossible to crush, and the more that the state tried to impose something, the more people would resist. But somehow the degree of effort and resources that the Chinese state is able to throw at these problems seems to be in a different order. And so it may well be that they will be successful.

It’s interesting to compare richer places — cities like Shanghai or Hong Kong — with less well-off places. It may be that they have the resources to sustain a local language and a more localized entity. Whereas in a poor place, maybe where people are leaving, or emigrating from, the young speakers will move away to cities where they don’t speak the local language. And their local identity will just disappear in the giant cities, with everyone mixing together and speaking Mandarin. 

You point to the fact that the Chinese government has taken different approaches to ethnic difference over time. What have these different approaches been?

There have been two approaches to difference that have been present in the state from the beginning. There’s been a modernizing, nationalist, homogenizing influence, and then there’s been more of a tolerance of difference, which you can argue goes back to the time of the Qing Empire. But also there was another influence coming into the nationalist movement, which was from the Soviet Union and from Stalin’s view of national minorities. And this is important in the ’20s and the ’30s, because even though the nationalists are not a communist movement, they do receive quite a lot of help from the Soviet Union. And in order to get the support they needed from Stalin and the Soviet Union, they had to agree to this policy on national minorities: that they would define groups as being national minorities and then those groups would be given a degree of autonomy. The Communist Party actually talked about giving groups autonomy, and potentially even independence. That didn’t happen when they got to the point of independence, but it was their principal. 

So you’ve had these two strands of thinking about what to do with minorities and how to create a single Chinese nationality, or whether you needed to, running side by side. The Party went through a time of what you might call ‘smelting,’ trying to melt everybody’s differences in one great pot. Particularly in the ’50s in Tibet with the attempt to close monasteries and make Tibetans feel part of the Chinese nation. Then Xi Jinping’s father was a key figure in seeing that the approach had failed and was creating hostility and thereby encouraging greater autonomy among the Tibetans. That seemed to become the orthodoxy for a couple of decades, until Xi Jinping came along, and basically overturned his father’s approach to difference. Particularly under the influence of academics who worried about China going the same way as the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia with all these separate identities becoming a way of mobilizing discontent and separatism. Therefore, he saw the importance of trying to impose a homogenous identity, a ‘Zhonghua minzu,’ a Chinese nation. It comes out of this word ‘minzu,’ which was a neologism invented in the 1890s to be an equivalent for the western word ‘nation.’ But people also use minzu to mean ethnic group: there are 56 minzu in China. There is also a single Chinese minzu, or nation. And so this tension between the two different meanings of minzu really goes to the heart of the problem. You could say Xi Jinping’s father was a 56 minzu guy, whereas Xi Jinping is a one minzu guy.

You also talk about how the category of the Han race is, in some ways, invented.

The word Han, before 1900, was a sort of category of the Qing empire, which was a Manchu Empire run by people from Manchuria. And they refer to themselves as Man and the people that they conquered as Han. So Han starts off really as a word describing the conquered peoples. But it’s not really a word that the Chinese people used to refer to themselves. They prefer to use the word Hua, which has these connotations of enlightened and civilized. 

But the word Han starts to take on a new meaning in the context of the arguments between the reformers and the revolutionaries starting in 1898. Because the reformers are basically saying, ‘We don’t need a revolution, the Manchu rulers will gradually reform and they will mix with the Han population. Everybody can become quite civilized; we can break down the boundaries between us, and we don’t need a revolution.’ Whereas the revolutionaries said, ‘There’s no way that these Manchu are going to reform on their own. They have to be kicked out.’ And then they look for a way to define the difference between the ruling elite and the mass of the people. And they found it in the idea of the Han, and the idea of a lineage that could be traced through surnames going back into the ancient past. And then Zhang Binglin, who was one of the most articulate, and intellectual of the revolutionaries, came up with this idea that the Han were all the sons of the Yellow Emperor, this mythical figure from 5,000 years before, and that you could tell through surnames and family lineage that they were different from the Manchu. So he took these European ideas about race and created a new word Zhongzhu to create an idea of race and the idea of there being a Han lineage that was biologically different from the Manchu. 

For me, much of the book is about saying that many of these insights actually took place outside China. It was when Chinese intellectuals were in exile or sojourning, or being diplomats abroad in Japan, Southeast Asia, London, and North America. That’s when they looked back on their country from afar, and all these ideas about nation building and how our society should exist in this new world. That’s really when they managed to mix modern ideas about nation and race and territory with old Chinese ideas and make them so successful. This book is about the importance of exile and foreigners in the creation of ideas of authentic Chineseness.

I want to circle back to the idea of Soviet influence on ethnic policy. Do you think the fear of following a similar path as the Soviet Union is the main motive for Xi’s policies towards Xinjiang and Tibet? 

I don’t claim to be an expert on contemporary Chinese state policy, but from my understanding, there are a couple of advisors who have become extremely influential on this. These two professors, who I talk about in the book — Hu Angang of Tsinghua University, and his colleague Ma Rong of Peking University — have become the leading voices against the idea of a melting pot and against autonomy. They think you need to smelt out all the differences between the different people. So they are key figures in this change of thought, and in their writings, they explicitly warn about China going the same way as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

You have two anecdotes about maps in your book. One is about a globe statue at the London School of Economics, which did not include Taiwan as part of China, and the other is about Angela Merkel giving an old map to Xi Jinping which did not include Xinjiang and Tibet as part of China. Why do you think these maps caused large firestorms and what does that say about Chinese perceptions of their own territory?

It’s a good question. I think it goes back to this brittleness about national identity. And the concern that if you start to question or challenge anything to do with national identity, then the whole edifice could come tumbling down. So just the idea of seeing Taiwan painted a different color on a statue is enough to unsettle everyone’s feelings of the correct order. And that having a map given by Angela Merkel that doesn’t show Tibet and Xinjiang is somehow hostile. 

I’m speculating here, but I think there might be a sense that somehow there’s a moral order here that’s being violated. There’s something about boundaries and territory in contemporary Chinese thinking that has acquired a moral force. And therefore, seeing something that is violating that takes on an immoral character, which is more than just coloring in something the wrong color on a map. Europeans are used to the idea that borders have changed and people can have different claims, and we can have Scots or Irish who don’t want to be part of Britain. But somehow even talking about it in a Chinese context threatens to unravel the whole enterprise. So the only response is fury and emotions.

You are a journalist and writer, not a policy maker. But this book is framed as a way to view and approach modern China. So what do you hope this book can change in the mind of policy makers?

It would be nice to think that they take the idea that China is a state like any other. Often people think China is different — more special, more ancient than the other states — and therefore, its territorial claims are somehow more authentic or deeper than any other states. When it comes to the South China Sea, people say China’s been around for millennia, so therefore it must have claimed these islands before any of the other countries. My research says that’s not true. And some of the same things apply to questions of language policy or boundaries or national identity. So I wanted to show how these things are constructions and ultimately, that will help people understand why China can appear so brittle sometimes about these questions, and why there is this lack of flexibility. Partly it is because these ideas are so new, because they were contested, because perhaps people themselves don’t fully understand the historical basis for the things that are now said to be true. And that creates a feeling of insecurity and brittleness about identity, which comes out in an emotive reaction when it’s challenged.

All countries have created myths about themselves and their past. And China is no different from that. Every country’s myths are different, but they all go through the same process of amplifying certain bits about their past and forgetting other bits. In that, China is exactly the same as any other country. 

Have you received any pushback for the claims you make in this book? 

I know I have upset a few Sinologists along the way. My colleague at Chatham House, Kerry Brown, is a bit critical. His argument is that no matter the invented nature of these ideas, that they are still hugely powerful, and literally hundreds of millions of people buy into them and believe them. And that might be true. But I think it’s still important to show how these myths are constructed and came out of certain, specific historical circumstances that don’t exist today. And then, of course, the other pushback is to say that there has always been a Chinese nation and a sense of Chineseness, that none of this has been invented. I hope my book is the answer to that.

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