China's five thousand years of history has become a fact, repeated ad nauseum by the state-run media and Chinese textbooks alike, but could it be a national myth? In his recently published book, The Invention of China, Bill Hayton argues that “China” was cooked up by a small group of intellectuals who brought notions of sovereignty, citizenry and borders back from Europe just over 100 years ago, using a 'pick-and-mix' approach to history to invent their own past. But how does this interpretation sit against China's long historiographical tradition? In this episode, Hayton, a former BBC journalist now with the Asia program at Chatham House, tests his claims with Esther Klein, a senior lecturer in Chinese intellectual history at the Australian National University.
Image: Yellow Emperor, Xinzheng. Wikimedia Commons 2017
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