In her compelling new history, The Shortest History of China, Linda Jaivin distills China’s vast history into a short, riveting account that today’s globally minded readers will find indispensable. We sent Jaivin a few questions to learn more about how she manages to fit in so much of China’s vast story so concisely.
1. What does China’s history have to tell us about China today?
So much! Politically, we can see how long violent periods of division, in which the land we now think of as China was divided into warring states, has made unification an almost sacred goal: The CCP’s preoccupation with Taiwan comes from this, as well as more recent history. The ancient Qin Shi Huang emperor built the first unified Chinese empire, one still much smaller than China today, and although he was a terrible tyrant, he is revered for his act of unifying previously warring states under his rule. Culturally, we can see how Confucianism (in all its variations and mutations) has helped to define Chinese society: The sense of social hierarchy that embeds respect for education and that reinforces parental authority, for example. The violence of the effort to overthrow these traditions in the Cultural Revolution is a measure of how deeply they were embedded in Chinese society. The fact that succession crises and corruption have brought down so many dynasties has prompted a number of decisions on the part of the Communist Party – Xi Jinping’s first move on taking the position of supreme leader was to launch a huge anti-corruption campaign.
2. When you say Shortest History of China what do you mean by China exactly?
There are different expressions in Chinese that are all translated as “China” in English. But they fall into two main categories: One, Zhongguo (commonly, if somewhat misleadingly, translated as “Middle Kingdom”) expresses the sense of a country, a nation, a place with borders; and the second, Zhonghua, conveys a sense of culture, history, and, indeed, civilization that is greater than any particular nation state. There were many periods in Chinese history when there was no “China” in the first sense, but a civilizational China has existed for at least three and a half thousand years. When I refer to China, it’s generally to China in that sense. If I refer to the nation state with its capital in Beijing, I usually call it by its proper name, which is the People’s Republic of China.
3. You seem to have a fondness for the quirky characters of Chinese history – the eccentrics, the Daoists, the poets, the drinkers, the women who broke with convention, the Third Century courtiers who experimented with “ecstatic drugs,” the rebels, the Song dynasty thinker who drove people mad with his unhygienic ways and proto-socialist ideas…
Guilty as charged. I think that we can understand a lot about a society by looking at the people it pushes to the margins, as well as those who choose to rebel or drop out. What is it about a society that its freethinkers find most intolerable or repressive? Besides, these characters are so much fun. Chinese history is much more than a parade of emperors (some of whom were genuine oddballs themselves), economic developments, demographic shifts, technological advances, wars, and crises – although I cover these as well, of course.
4. You say you wanted to write “herstory” as well as “history.” What does that mean in practice?
I was always on the lookout for interesting women who may have been overlooked in general histories, and for how other women, who feature large, may have had their stories too simply told. I also wanted to highlight the variety of contributions that women have made to Chinese history – as fighters, inventors, historians, political advisors, revolutionaries, and more. I wanted to show how, during different periods of time, women enjoyed different degrees of social and other freedoms. I look into the invention of foot binding, and how it became universal at a time when conservative “Neo-Confucianism” was on the rise. I talk a bit about extravagant makeup trends in the Tang dynasty, how fashion reflected politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and how the fictional story of Pan Jinlian, China’s archetypal “bad woman,” reflects historical legal, social, and other realities.
5. What do you hope readers will get out of this book?
I hope they come away with a great appreciation for Chinese civilization and culture, for its genius, its diversity, and the impact it has had on the world at large for over a millennium. I hope that when there is tension or conflict between, say, Washington and Beijing, that they will know that China is so much more than just Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. At the very least, I hope it gives them a very enjoyable afternoon or two of reading. As for people who are relatively well-informed about Chinese history, I hope that I have been able to give them at least one or two little surprises.
This interview can be reprinted in part or in its entirety with the following credit line:
Interview with Linda Jaivin, author of The Shortest History of China (The Experiment, September 2021).
