Premium members are invited to join the next session in our “China, Bookmarked” series, a new CBBC Premium member programme where we discuss China-related books with the authors.
On Thursday 29 April we’ll be talking to Bill Hayton about his book The Invention of China published late last year.
 
China’s current leadership lays claim to a 5,000-year-old civilization, but “China” as a unified country and people, Bill Hayton argues, was created far more recently by a small group of intellectuals.
 
In this compelling account, Hayton shows how China’s present-day geopolitical problems—the fates of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea—were born in the struggle to create a modern nation-state. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reformers and revolutionaries adopted foreign ideas to “invent’ a new vision of China. By asserting a particular, politicized version of the past the government bolstered its claim to a vast territory stretching from the Pacific to Central Asia. Ranging across history, nationhood, language, and territory, Hayton shows how the Republic’s reworking of its past not only helped it to justify its right to rule a century ago—but continues to motivate and direct policy today.

 
Bill Hayton

Bill Hayton is an Associate Fellow with the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House, a former journalist with BBC News in London and a regular writer on Asian issues. His latest book, ’The Invention of China’ has just been published by Yale University Press. He previously authored ’The South China Sea: the struggle for power in Asia’ (Yale, 2014) and ‘Vietnam: rising dragon’ (Yale, 2010, second edition 2020). In 2006/7 he was the BBC’s reporter in Vietnam and in 2013/14 he was seconded to the Myanmar state broadcaster to work on media reform. 
 
If you would like to purchase a copy of Bill’s book please click here.