CHINA AND NATIONALISM

China and Nationalism

China and Nationalism

Introduction

China is the most populous country in the world and the third-largest country (after Russia and Canada) with a total area of 3.7 million sq miles (9.6 million sq km). The country's land boundaries total 13,840 miles (22,143 km) and it borders 14 countries: North Korea, Russia and Mongolia in the north; Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal in the west; and Bhutan, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam in the south. China's territory spans a distance of 3,250 miles (5,200 km) from west to east and 3,440 miles (5,500 km) from north to south. In the east it has a coastline of 9,060 miles (14,500 km) that extends from the Yellow Sea in the north to the South China Sea in the south. The country's climate ranges from tropical in the south to subarctic in the north. In the west there are mainly deserts, high plateaus and mountains, while in the east mainly plains and deltas.

The great majority of China's population is concentrated in the eastern part of the country, where the climate and the terrain are the most hospitable. The east, especially the coastal region, is also the most developed and modern part of the country, where its major cities are located. Most of the interaction with the West in modern history took place along the coastline, and major cities in this region have developed in the context of semi-colonization by Western powers and Japan. In sharp contrast to this region, the western part of the country and its northernmost part have inhospitable climates and terrain, are sparsely populated and relatively underdeveloped.

In the early 1980s, approximately 80 percent of China's population were peasants, whereas urbanites constituted only 20 percent of the population. These proportions, however, started to change during the 1980s and 1990s as tens of millions of peasants started to migrate to cities as a result of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms and the lifting of former restrictions on geographical mobility. In addition to the urbanite-peasant divide, ethnicity constitutes another major social division in China. The country is a multiethnic state and its population is made up of 92 percent Han Chinese and 55 national minorities that together constitute 8 percent of the total population. Minority groups usually inhabit the less hospitable and less developed parts of the country, and although significantly smaller in terms of population size, they still dominate demographically much of western China (most notably Tibet and Xinjiang) despite massive Han settlement in recent decades.

Nationalism and China

The birth of modern Chinese archaeology in the early twentieth century was a product of the introduction of western scientific methods, the rise of nationalism, and the search for the cultural origins of the nation. These three factors have had a continuing influence on the development of the discipline, with the consequence that archaeology in China has been firmly placed in the general field of history. Its research orientations and interpretations have been significantly affected by the different political agendas of the nation—especially ...