The first is this, that China is not really a nation state. Okay, it's called itself a nation state for the last hundred years. But everyone who knows anything about China knows it’s a lot older than this. This was what China looked with the victory of the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C. at the end of warring state period—the birth of modern China. And you can see it against the boundaries of modern China. Or immediately afterward, the Han Dynasty, still 2000 years ago, and you can see already it occupies most of what we now know as Eastern China which is where the vast majority of Chinese lived then and live now.
首先是这个,中国事实上不是一个民族国家。在过去的几百年,中国自称是一个民族国家。但对中国很了解的人知道中国比这历史要悠久得多。中国是在公元前221年也就在战国时期的末期从秦朝一统江山起,现代中国就诞生了。你可以看到现代中国的边界线。随之其后的汉朝,还在2000年前。你可以看出中国已经占据我们现在所知的华东地区的大部分,绝大多数的中国人当时在那儿居住现在还生活在那儿。
Now what is extraordinary about this is what gives China it’s sense of being China, what gives the Chinese the sense of what it is to be Chinese, comes not from the last hundred years, not from the nation state period which is what happened in the West, but from the period, if you like, of the civilization state. I’m thinking here, for example, of customs like ancestral worship, of a very distinctive notion of the state, likewise, a very distinctive notion of the family, social relationships like “guanxi”, Confucian values and so on. These are all things that come from the period of the civilization state.
这点非同寻常的是,它赋予了中国作为中国的意义,也赋予了中国人成为他们中国人的意义,这不是从过去几百年,也不是从民族国家开始形成这种认识,这跟西方发展也不一样,而这一阶段,如果你喜欢,可以说是文明国家的阶段。我想到这儿,举个例子吧,传统习惯例如:对祖先的崇拜,非常有特色的国家概念,诸如此类的,非常有特色的家庭观念,社交关系如关系,儒家价值观等等。所有这些事都来自于文明国家的阶段。
In other words, China, unlike the Western states and most countries in the world, is shaped by its sense of civilization, its existence as a civilization state, rather than as a nation state. And there’s one other thing to add to this, and that is this. Of course we know China’s big, huge demographically and geographically, with a population of 1.3 billion people. What we often aren’t really aware of is the fact that China is extremely diverse and very pluralistic, and in many ways very decentralized. You can’t run a place on this scale simply from Beijing, even though we think this to be the case. It’s never been the case.
换言之,中国不像世界上的西方国家和多数国家,它由它自身文明所形成,它是作为一个文明国家而不是一个民族国家而存在的。还有另一件事要加进来,这就是:当然我们知道中国是幅员辽阔,人口众多,在人口统计和地理上都是首屈一指,它有13亿人口。我们常常没关注的事实是中国也是极其多样化和非常多元化的,在许多方面甚至权力是非常分散化的。尽管我们认为不能仅从北京中央政府来管理这庞大规模的国家,我们以为会是这样,但从来都不是这样。 |