Names of China
has many contemporary and historical designations given in various languages for the East Asian country known as t=中國 in Standard Chinese, a form based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin.
The English name "China" was borrowed from Portuguese during the 16th century, and its direct cognates became common in the subsequent centuries in the West. It is believed to be a borrowing from Middle Persian, and some have traced it further back to the Sanskrit word चीन for the nation. It is also thought that the ultimate source of the name China is the Chinese word, the name of the Qin dynasty that ultimately unified China after existing as a state within the Zhou dynasty for many centuries prior. However, there are alternative suggestions for the etymology of this word.
Chinese names for China, aside from, include,, and. While official notions of Chinese nationality do not make any particular reference to ethnicity, common names for the largest ethnic group in China are and. The People's Republic of China and the Republic of China are the official names of the two governments presently claiming sovereignty over "China". The term "mainland China" refers to areas under the PRC's jurisdiction, either including or excluding Hong Kong and Macau.
There are also names for China used around the world that are derived from the languages of ethnic groups other than Han Chinese: examples include "Cathay" from the Khitan language, and from Tuoba. The realm ruled by the Emperor of China is also referred to as Chinese Empire.
Sinitic names
Zhongguo
Pre-Qing
Zhongguo is the name for China most commonly used in Chinese in modern times. The name has ancient origin: the earliest appearance of this two-character term is on the He zun, a bronze vessel dating to 1038–, during the early Western Zhou period. The phrase "" 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. In later periods, however, was not used in this sense. Dynastic names were used for the state in Imperial China, and concepts of the state aside from the ruling dynasty were little understood. Rather, the country was called by the name of the dynasty, such as "Han", "Tang", "Great Ming", "Great Qing", etc. Until the 19th century, when the globalizing world began to require a common legal language, there was no need for a fixed or unique name.As early as the Spring and Autumn period, ' could be understood as either the domain of the capital or used to refer to the Chinese civilization or, and the political and geographical domain that contained it, but Tianxia was the more common word for this idea. This developed into the usage of the Warring States period, when, other than the cultural community, it could be the geopolitical area of Chinese civilization as well, equivalent to Jiuzhou. In a more limited sense, it could also refer to the Central Plain or the states of Zhao, Wei, and Han, etc., geographically central among the Warring States. Although ' could be used before the Song dynasty period to mean the trans-dynastic Chinese culture or civilization to which Chinese people belonged, it was in the Song dynasty that writers used ' as a term to describe the trans-dynastic entity with different dynastic names over time but having a set territory and defined by common ancestry, culture, and language.
The term ' was used differently in every period. It could refer to the capital of the emperor to distinguish it from the capitals of his vassals, as in Western Zhou. It could refer to the states of the Central Plain to distinguish them from states in the outer regions. The Shi Jing defines ' as the capital region, setting it in opposition to the capital city. During the Han dynasty, three usages of ' were common. The Records of the Grand Historian use Zhongguo to denote the capital and also use the concepts ' and ' to indicate the center of civilization: "There are eight famous mountains in the world: three in Man and Yi, five in ". In this sense, the term ' is synonymous with and, names of China that were first authentically attested in the Warring States period and Eastern Jin period, respectively.
From the Qin to the Ming dynasty, literati discussed ' as both a historical place or territory and as a culture. Writers of the Ming period in particular used the term as a political tool to express opposition to expansionist policies that incorporated foreigners into the empire. In contrast, foreign conquerors typically avoided discussions of and instead defined membership in their empires to include both Han and non-Han peoples.
Qing
' appeared in a formal international legal document for the first time during the Qing dynasty in the Treaty of Nerchinsk, 1689. The term was then used in communications with other states and in treaties. The Manchu rulers incorporated Inner Asian polities into their empire, and Wei Yuan, a statecraft scholar, distinguished the new territories from ', which he defined as the 17 provinces of "China proper" plus the Manchu homelands in the Northeast. By the late 19th century, the term had emerged as a common name for the whole country. The empire was sometimes referred to as Great Qing but increasingly as '.is the Manchu name for China, with "Dulimbai" meaning "central" or "middle" and "Gurun" meaning "nation" or "state". The historian Zhao Gang writes that "not long after the collapse of the Ming, China became the equivalent of Great Qing —another official title of the Qing state," and "Qing and China became interchangeable official titles, and the latter often appeared as a substitute for the former in official documents." The Qing dynasty referred to their realm as "Dulimbai Gurun" in Manchu. The Qing equated the lands of the Qing realm with "China" in both the Chinese and Manchu languages, defining China as a multi-ethnic state, rejecting the idea that China only meant Han areas; both Han and non-Han peoples were part of "China". Officials used "China" in official documents, international treaties, and foreign affairs, and the "Chinese language" referred to Chinese, Manchu, and Mongol languages, and the term "Chinese people" referred to all Han, Manchus, and Mongol subjects of the Qing. Ming loyalist Han literati held to defining the old Ming borders as China and using "foreigner" to describe minorities under Qing rule such as the Mongols and Tibetans, as part of their anti-Qing ideology.
When the Qing conquered Dzungaria in 1759, they proclaimed that the new land was absorbed into in a Manchu language memorial. The Qing expounded on their ideology that they were bringing together the "outer" non-Han Chinese, like the Tibetans, Inner, Eastern, and Oirat Mongols, together with the "inner" Han Chinese, into "one family", united in the Qing state, showing that the diverse subjects of the Qing were all part of one family. The Qing used the phrase "s=" or "s=", to convey this idea of "unification" of the different peoples. A Manchu-language version of a treaty with the Russian Empire concerning criminal jurisdiction over bandits called people from the Qing "people of the Central Kingdom ". In the Manchu official Tulisen's Manchu language account of his meeting with the Torghut Mongol leader Ayuki Khan, it was mentioned that while the Torghuts were unlike the Russians, the "people of the Central Kingdom" were like the Torghut Mongols, and the "people of the Central Kingdom" referred to the Manchus.
The geography textbooks published in the late Qing period gave detailed descriptions of China's regional position and territorial space. They generally emphasized that China was a large country in Asia but not the center of the world. For example, the "Elementary Chinese Geography Textbook" published in 1905 described the boundaries of China's territory and neighboring countries as follows: "The western border of China is located in the center of Asia, bordering the territories of Britain and Russia. The terrain is humped, like a hat. So all mountains and rivers originate from here. To the east, it faces Japan across the East China Sea. To the south, it is adjacent to the South China Sea, and borders French Annam and British Burma. To the southwest, it is separated from British India by mountains. From the west to the north and the northeast, the three sides of China are all Russian territories. Only the southern border of the northeast is connected to Korea across the Yalu River." It further stated that "There are about a dozen countries in Asia, but only China has a vast territory, a prosperous population, and dominates East Asia. It is a great and world-famous country."
The Qing enacted the first Chinese nationality law in 1909, which defined a Chinese national as any person born to a Chinese father. Children born to a Chinese mother inherited her nationality only if the father was stateless or had unknown nationality status. These regulations were enacted in response to a 1907 statute passed in The Netherlands that retroactively treated all Chinese born in the Dutch East Indies as Dutch citizens. Jus sanguinis was chosen to define Chinese nationality so that the Qing could counter foreign claims on overseas Chinese populations and maintain the perpetual allegiance of its subjects living abroad through paternal lineage. A Chinese word called , which means "bloodline" as a literal translation, is used to explain the descent relationship that would characterize someone as being of Chinese descent and therefore eligible under the Qing laws and beyond, for Chinese citizenship.
Mark Elliott noted that it was under the Qing that "China" transformed into a definition of referring to lands where the "state claimed sovereignty" rather than only the Central Plains area and its people by the end of the 18th century.
Elena Barabantseva also noted that the Manchu referred to all subjects of the Qing empire regardless of ethnicity as "Chinese", and used the term as a synonym for the entire Qing empire while using to refer only to the core area of the empire, with the entire empire viewed as multiethnic.
William T. Rowe wrote that the name "China" was apparently understood to refer to the political realm of the Han Chinese during the Ming dynasty, that this understanding persisted among the Han Chinese into the early Qing dynasty, and that the understanding was also shared by Aisin Gioro rulers before the Ming–Qing transition. The Qing, however, "came to refer to their more expansive empire not only as the Great Qing but also, nearly interchangeably, as China" within a few decades of this development. Instead of the earlier idea of an ethnic Han Chinese state, this new Qing China was a "self-consciously multi-ethnic state". Han Chinese scholars had some time to adapt this, but by the 19th century, the notion of China as a multinational state with new, significantly extended borders had become the standard terminology for Han Chinese writers. Rowe noted that "these were the origins of the China we know today.". He added that while the early Qing rulers viewed themselves as multi-hatted emperors who ruled several nationalities "separately but simultaneously", by the mid-19th century, the Qing Empire had become part of a European-style community of sovereign states and entered into a series of treaties with the West, and such treaties and documents consistently referred to Qing rulers as the "Emperor of China" and his administration as the "Government of China".
Joseph W. Esherick noted that while the Qing Emperors governed frontier non-Han areas in a different, separate system under the Lifanyuan and kept them separate from Han areas and administration, it was the Manchu Qing Emperors who expanded the definition of ' and made it "flexible" by using that term to refer to the entire Empire and using that term to other countries in diplomatic correspondence, while some Han Chinese subjects criticized their usage of the term and the Han literati Wei Yuan used ' only to refer to the seventeen provinces of China and three manchurian provinces of the east, excluding other frontier areas. Due to the Qing usage of treaties clarifying the international borders of the Qing state, they were able to inculcate in the Chinese people a sense that China included areas such as Mongolia and Tibet by education reforms in geography, which made it clear where the borders of the Qing state were, even if the populace didn't understand how the Chinese identity included Tibetans and Mongolians or what the connotations of being Chinese were. The English version of the 1842 Treaty of Nanking refers to "His Majesty the Emperor of China" while the Chinese refers both to "The Great Qing Emperor" and to ' as well. The 1858 Treaty of Tientsin contains similar language.
In the late 19th century, the reformer Liang Qichao argued in a famous passage that "our greatest shame is that our country has no name. The names that people ordinarily think of, such as Xia, Han, or Tang, are all the titles of bygone dynasties." He argued that the other countries of the world "all boast of their own state names, such as England and France, the only exception being the Central States", and that the concept of had to be abandoned in favor of, that is, "nation", for which he accepted the term '. On the other hand, American Protestant missionary John Livingstone Nevius, who had been in China for 40 years, wrote in his 1868 book that the most common name which the Chinese used in speaking of their country was ', followed by ' and other names such as and the particular title of the reigning dynasty. Also, the Chinese geography textbook published in 1907 stated that "Chinese citizens call their country ' or '", and noted that China was one of the few independent monarchical countries in the whole Asia at that time, along with countries like Japan. The Japanese term "Shina" was once proposed by some as a basically neutral Western-influenced equivalent for "China". But after the founding of the Republic of China in 1912, ' was also adopted as the abbreviation of, and most Chinese considered foreign and demanded that even the Japanese replace it with ', or simply '.
Before the signing of the Sino-Japanese Friendship and Trade Treaty in 1871, the first treaty between Qing China and the Empire of Japan, Japanese representatives once raised objections to China's use of the term ' in the treaty, partly in response to China's earlier objections for the term or Emperor of Japan to be used in the treaty, declaring that the term ' was "meant to compare with the frontier areas of the country" and insisted that only "Great Qing" be used for the Qing in the Chinese version of the treaty. However, this was firmly rejected by the Qing representatives: "Our country China has been called ' for a long time since ancient times. We have signed treaties with various countries, and while Great Qing did appear in the first lines of such treaties, in the body of the treaties Zhongguo was always being used. There has never been a precedent for changing the country name". The Chinese representatives believed that ' as a country name equivalent to "Great Qing" could naturally be used internationally, which could not be changed. In the end, both sides agreed that while in the first lines "Great Qing" would be used, whether the Chinese text in the body of the treaty would use the term ' in the same manner as "Great Qing" would be up to China's discretion.
Qing official Zhang Deyi once objected to the western European name "China" and said that China referred to itself as '. However, the Qing established legations and consulates known as the "Chinese Legation", "Imperial Consulate of China", "Imperial Chinese Consulate " or similar names in various countries with diplomatic relations, such as the United Kingdom and United States. Both English and Chinese terms, such as "China" and "'", were frequently used by Qing legations and consulates there to refer to the Qing state during their diplomatic correspondences with foreign states. Moreover, the English name "China" was also used domestically by the Qing, such as in its officially released stamps since Qing set up a modern postal system in 1878. The postage stamps had a design of a large dragon in the centre, surrounded by a boxed frame with a bilingual inscription of "CHINA" and the local denomination "CANDARINS".
During the late Qing dynasty, various textbooks with the name "Chinese history" had emerged by the early 20th century. For example, the late Qing textbook "Chinese History of the Present Dynasty" published in 1910 stated that "the history of our present dynasty is part of the history of China, that is, the most recent history in its whole history. China was founded as a country 5,000 years ago and has the longest history in the world. And its culture is the best among all the Eastern countries since ancient times. Its territory covers about 90% of East Asia, and its rise and fall can affect the general trend of the countries in Asia...". After the May Fourth Movement in 1919, educated students began to spread the concept of ', which represented the people, including 55 minority ethnic groups and the Han Chinese, with a single culture identifying themselves as "Chinese". The Republic of China and the People's Republic of China both used ' in their official names. Thus, ' became the common name for both governments and for their citizens. Overseas Chinese are referred to as, or, i.e. Chinese children born overseas.