Mandarin Expression of the Week

Zhōngguó⁺ (Zhōng·guó Central · Nation → [China | Chinese] 中国 中國) 👈🏼 Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

[This is a repost of one of the earliest MEotW posts, from October 19, 2020.]

“Zhōngguó (Zhōng·guó Central · Nation → [China] 中国 中國)” is commonly translated into English as “Middle Kingdom”, which may suggest something in the middle, or middling, average, unremarkable. However, considering the history of the usage of the expression “Zhōngguó (Zhōng·guó Central · Nation → [China] 中国 中國)”, and considering how the people of China have historically viewed their nation, it would be more correct to translate “Zhōngguó (Zhōng·guó Central · Nation → [China] 中国 中國)” as “Central Nation”, the nation that’s at the centre, the heart, of the world that matters to them.

According to Wikipedia’s summarizations, the earliest known appearance of the expression “Zhōngguó (Zhōng·guó Central · Nation → [China] 中国 中國)” was on the Hé Zūn^{[source][source]}, an ancient Chinese ritual bronze vessel dating from the era of early Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE).^[source]

Here are some quotes from that Wikipedia article, with links to information about sources:

The phrase “zhong guo” came into common usage in the Warring States period, when it referred to the “Central States”; the states of the Yellow River Valley of the Zhou era, as distinguished from the tribal periphery.^[source]

There were different usages of the term “Zhongguo” in every period.

With the overthrow of the Qing in 1911, most Chinese dropped Shina as foreign and demanded that even Japanese replace it with Zhonghua minguo or simply Zhongguo.^[source] [The reformer] Liang went on to argue that the concept of tianxia [Wikipedia article] had to be abandoned in favor of guojia, that is, “nation,” for which he accepted the term Zhongguo.^[source] After the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1912, Zhongguo was also adopted as the abbreviation of Zhonghua minguo.^[source]

The English translation of Zhongyuan as the “Middle Kingdom” entered European languages through the Portuguese in the 16th century and became popular in the mid-19th century. By the mid-20th century, the term was thoroughly entrenched in the English language, reflecting the Western view of China as the inward-looking Middle Kingdom, or more accurately, the Central Kingdom or Central State. Endymion Wilkinson points out that the Chinese were not unique in thinking of their country as central, although China was the only culture to use the concept for its name.^[source]

In summary, while the exact meaning and borders of Zhōngguó (Zhōng·guó Central · Nation → [China] 中国 中國) have varied thoughout China’s history, overall, the people of China have long viewed their nation as central to the world that they knew, or cared most about, to the point that “China was the only culture to use the concept for its name”.

The people of China considering their nation to be the centre of the world has historically been such a thing that there are several concepts related to this. E.g.:

• Sinocentrism

  • The geographical dimension of traditional Sinocentrism was highlighted by Chinese reactions to the publication of the first world map by the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552–1610):

    • …Lately Matteo Ricci utilized some false teachings to fool people, and scholars unanimously believed him…take for example the position of China on the map. He puts it not in the center but slightly to the West and inclined to the north. This is altogether far from the truth, for China should be in the center of the world, which we can prove by the single fact that we can see the North Star resting at the zenith of the heaven at midnight. How can China be treated like a small unimportant country, and placed slightly to the north as in this map?^[source]

  • Culturally, one of the most famous attacks on Sinocentrism and its associated beliefs was made by the author Lu Xun in The True Story of Ah Q, in which the protagonist is humiliated and defeated; satirizing the ridiculous way in which he claimed “spiritual victories” in spite of this.^[source]

    • [Lǔ Xùn is generally regarded as the greatest Chinese writer of the twentieth century. Interestingly, he was a strong proponent of replacing the Chinese characters writing system with an alphabetic system. (A modern example of such a system for Mandarin is Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音).) He felt so strongly about this that he was reported to have said, “Hànzì (Hàn·zì {Han (Chinese)} · characters 汉字 漢字) bú (not 不) miè ({are extinguished} 灭 滅), Zhōngguó (Zhōng·guó Central · Nation → [China] 中国 中國) bì (certainly 必) wáng ({will flee} → [will die] 亡).” (“If Chinese characters are not abolished, China will certainly die.”). The text in Chinese characters of something he wrote on this subject can be found here, and an English translation of it can be found here.
      • Some wonder why China has held on to its archaic characters writing system instead of moving on to using a modern alphabetic writing system like almost every other nation does, even though outstanding native sons like Lǔ Xùn ((Lǔ Stupid; Rash (surname) 鲁 魯) (Xùn Fast; Quick; Swift 迅) (pen name of Zhōu Shùrén, the greatest Chinese writer of the 20th cent. and a strong advocate of alphabetic writing)) have advocated strongly for that. Perhaps the proud self-centredness of the only nation to name itself the centre of the world provides a clue….]
• Tianxia

  • In ancient China, tianxia denoted the lands, space, and area divinely appointed to the Emperor by universal and well-defined principles of order. The center of this land was directly apportioned to the Imperial court, forming the center of a world view that centered on the Imperial court and went concentrically outward to major and minor officials and then the common citizens, tributary states, and finally ending with fringe “barbarians”.

• Tributary system of China

  • a network of loose international relations focused on China which facilitated trade and foreign relations by acknowledging China’s predominant role in East Asia. It involved multiple relationships of trade, military force, diplomacy and ritual. The other nations had to send a tributary envoy to China on schedule, who would kowtow to the Chinese emperor as a form of tribute, and acknowledge his superiority and precedence.

• Hua–Yi distinction

  • an ancient Chinese concept that differentiated a culturally defined “China” (called Huá, Huaxia 華夏; Huáxià, or Xià 夏) from cultural or ethnic outsiders (Yí, conventionally “barbarians”). …The Hua–Yi distinction asserted Chinese superiority

• Four Barbarians

  • Tiānxià 天下 “[everywhere] under heaven; the world” encompassed Huáxià 華夏 “China” (also known as Huá, Xià, etc.) in the center surrounded by non-Chinese “barbarian” peoples.

  • Liu Junping and Huang Deyuan (2006:532) describe the universal monarch with combined political, religious, and cultural authorities: “According to the Chinese in the old times, heaven and earth were matched with yin and yang, with the heaven (yang) superior and the earth (yin) inferior; and the Chinese as an entity was matched with the inferior ethnic groups surrounding it in its four directions so that the kings could be valued and the barbarians could be rejected.”

Meanwhile, in the face of this long history of worldly Chinese national and cultural self-centredness and self-importance, the Almighty Creator of the entire universe looks upon all the nations of mankind on this little dustball of a planet and considers them as being “like a drop from a bucket, and as the film of dust on the scales”!—Isa. 40:15.

“To Jehovah, for whom ‘a thousand years is as one day’, Chinese civilization has only been around for a few days.…

“…we should boast in Jehovah, not in needlessly and self-indulgently complex knowledge relating to a mere worldly human culture” https://t.co/emXNAng9W2#MEotW pic.twitter.com/xEjlDPAkud

— tiandi, Links News (@TiandiLinksNews) June 9, 2024