Abstract
This article explains that the Chinese nation-building in modern times, which is based on the theory of a common ancestor--Huangdi (Yellow Emperor) or Yan-Huang (Yan and Yellow Emperors)--is not a new invention but the most recent stage in the long formative process of the Chinese people. During the late Warring States period, Huangdi was claimed to be the common ancestor of the Huaxia people. As an ancestral symbol he integrated metaphors of territorial, political and kinship implications. After that, the newly formed Huaxia ethnic entity expanded into both her geopolitical and social peripheries. By adopting a surname and the concomitant genealogical memory, more and more non-Han leading families in China’s geopolitical peripheries and families in her social peripheries, were able to commemorate Huangdi directly or indirectly by assumed blood ties. Finally, with this background and augmented by the individualism fostered by modern nationalism, Chinese intellectuals of the later Qing and early Republican era built up blood ties between Huangdi and all Chinese people.
Based on the case of the Sinicized Qiang people in northwestern Sichuan, this article also explains that social discrimination and emulation among neighboring peoples in China’s peripheral regions are a primary mechanism through which the expansion of “the offspring of Yellow Emperor and Yan Emperor” in those areas came about.
In conclusion, this article suggests that the so-called modern imagination of the Chinese nation is actually based on a historical continuum from ancient times. The term “Descendants of Huangdi” represents this historical continuum in the long process that resulted in the formation of the Chinese nation as an ethnic entity. The truly imaginary or inventive elements in the construction of the Chinese nation, and the resulting rupture between the past and the present, came from the use or abuse of modern linguistics, physiology, ethnology and archaeology in the nation-building process.
Keywords
nationalism, Chinese nation, Yellow Emperor, historical memory, genealogical memory
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