INTRODUCTION

Chung Kuo. The words mean ‘Middle Kingdom’ and, since 221 BC, when the First Emperor, Ch’in Shih Huang-ti, unified the seven Warring States, it is what the ‘black-haired people’, the Han, or Chinese, have called their great country. The Middle Kingdom – for them it was the whole world; a world bounded by great mountain chains to the north and west, by the sea to east and south. Beyond was only desert and barbarism. So it was for two thousand years and through sixteen great dynasties. Chung Kuo was the Middle Kingdom, the very centre of the human world, and its Emperor the ‘Son of Heaven’, the ‘One Man’. But in the eighteenth century that world was invaded by the young and aggressive Western powers with their superior weaponry and their unshakeable belief in Progress. It was, to the surprise of the Han, an unequal contest and China’s myth of supreme strength and self-sufficiency was shattered. By the early twentieth century China – Chung Kuo – was the sick old man of the East: ‘a carefully preserved mummy in a hermetically sealed coffin’, as Karl Marx called it. But from the disastrous ravages of that century grew a giant of a nation, capable of competing with the West and with its own Eastern rivals, Japan and Korea, from a position of incomparable strength. The twenty-first century, ‘the Pacific century’ as it was known even before it began, saw China become once more a world unto itself, but this time its only boundary was space.

David Wingrove

May 2012