Book Review - Bill Hayton, The Invention of China

The Old Nationalists’ New Clothes Bill Hayton’s “The Invention of China” is an accessible intervention in the study of Chinese nationalism, aimed not at China watchers but at any reader interested in modern Chinese politics. It aims to contextualise present worries about Xi Jinping’s China within the study of intellectual history, exploring how major political figures and thinkers consciously shaped modern China as a national entity and the way in which certain thinkers contracted the notion of China as “a coherent territory with a seamless history” following the collapse of the Qing Empire. In deconstructing cliches such as the “five thousand years of history,” “the century of humiliation” and “the founding of New China,” Hayton argues that these exhausted narratives should instead be interpreted as those of any other nation: mythologies that are contingent on circumstance and as conscious responses to political change. More precisely, he argues that China has succeeded in constructing itself as an exception to the rule that nations and civilizations are overlapping but separate concepts, and that all manifestations of communal political identity are, to some degree, inventions.