When a Manufactured State Claims to Be "Ancient"

by Orthogonal Proxy

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There is a familiar opening move in contemporary diplomacy and media: a representative of the People's Republic of China (PRC) clears their throat and announces that "China is a civilization with five thousand years of unbroken history." The statement is delivered as if it were a neutral geological fact, like the age of a mountain range. It is also treated as a kind of trump card: older means deeper, deeper means more authentic, and more authentic means more entitled to speak for "Asia" as a whole.

From a stateless Pan-Asian vantage point, this is less a fact than a psychological profile. It tells us far more about the insecurity of a twentieth-century regime than about the realities of Asia's past.

What we call "China" today—the PRC—is not an ancient state. It is a manufactured project: a Bolshevik-style party-state built in the mid-twentieth century on the territorial leftovers of the Qing Empire. Only after this Soviet-derived apparatus consolidated power did its elites begin to retro-engineer a civilizational backstory in which everything from Bronze Age polities to Inner Asian steppe conquests mysteriously converge on Beijing in 1949. The result is a peculiar hybrid: a Leninist machine claiming to be the final flowering of a five-millennia saga.

The paradox is simple: the more recent and artificial the structure, the more insistently it must declare itself ancient and inevitable.

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1. The invention of a continuous "China"

If we strip away the slogans, one uncomfortable truth appears: a single, continuous, unitary "China" as a self-aware national subject is a modern construction, not a timeless given.

For most of recorded history, the territories and peoples that are now folded into "China" belonged to shifting constellations of courts, warlords, steppe confederations, religious networks, and local regimes. The Northern Wei was not Song; the Mongol realm was not Ming; the Qing was a Manchu-led Inner Asian empire that happened to rule large Han agrarian regions alongside Tibet, Xinjiang, and Manchuria. The actors did not wake up in the morning and say, "Good morning, fellow members of a five-thousand-year-old Chinese nation-state."

The stitching together began late. In the final decades of the Qing, as European and Japanese powers carved their way into the region, Chinese-speaking intellectuals faced a brutal question: what exactly were they trying to preserve? The Manchu dynasty was foreign in origin and visibly decaying; the empire was multiethnic and multilingual; Western powers insisted that only "nations" deserved sovereign equality.

The response, driven by figures of the late Qing and early Republic, was to begin assembling a retroactive subject called "Zhonghua" or "China." Very different dynasties and polities were threaded into a single civilizational story. Empires that conquered and replaced one another were reframed as "dynasties" within one continuous national family. Peoples with distinct political trajectories—Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, various Turkic and Muslim groups—were repackaged as "minority nationalities" within a single "Chinese nation." The goal was not historical accuracy; it was survival under a new global grammar of nation-states.

After 1949, this improvised narrative encountered something new: a Soviet-style Leninist party-state. The Chinese Communist Party had been incubated under the supervision of the Communist International. Its organizational DNA—democratic centralism, vanguard party, security organs, planned economy—was unmistakably Bolshevik. What it inherited when it took power was not "China" as a nationally self-conscious subject, but the administrative carcass of the Qing and the fractured institutions of the Republic of China.

The sequence matters:

1.	Territory first: the former Qing frontier, minus what had already fallen away (Outer Mongolia, parts of Central Asia, and so on), is treated as the default map.

2.	Institutional template second: a Soviet-inspired party-state is installed over that space.

3.	Civilizational story last: only then is a narrative constructed in which this particular combination of borders and Bolshevik structures becomes the "natural" culmination of five millennia of history.

In other words, the continuity is not discovered; it is manufactured. The modern state chooses its territory and institutions, then commissions a myth in which those choices appear to have been preordained since antiquity.

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2. Insecurity and overcompensation

A regime that had truly existed for five thousand years would not need to keep reminding you of the fact. It would be like constantly insisting, at every dinner party, that one's family has "always lived here"—a telltale sign that perhaps they have not.

The PRC's obsession with antiquity is best understood as overcompensation. This is a state that was born only in 1949, after a protracted civil war, under conditions of foreign tutelage. Soviet advisers shaped its early military doctrine, security services, and economic planning. The party's own founders swore allegiance to an international revolutionary center in Moscow. Far from being the serene heir of an ancient civilization, the new regime was one node in a global Bolshevik experiment.

This origin story contains several vulnerabilities:

•	It is recent, which makes it comparable to other twentieth-century projects, not uniquely "eternal."

•	It is ideological, tied to a now-discredited Soviet model whose core promises—classless society, withering away of the state—have obviously not been fulfilled.

•	It is imperial in its own way, exerting control over borderlands whose inhabitants did not freely choose incorporation into a Leninist party-state.

To cover these vulnerabilities, the regime piles on symbolic legitimacy:

•	"We have thousands of years of history."

•	"We were always here."

•	"These territories have always been part of our civilization."

These are not neutral cultural claims; they are political technologies. They turn contested spaces—Manchuria, Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia—into allegedly indisputable components of a trans-millennial essence.

Manchuria ceases to be a region with its own layered history of Khitan, Jurchen, Manchu, Japanese, Russian, and Chinese entanglements; it becomes "the Northeast," an organic limb of "China" since time immemorial. Xinjiang, whose very name as a "new frontier" betrays its late incorporation, is recast as an ancient Western gate of the same civilization. Tibet becomes, retrospectively, an inseparable highland of the same imagined entity.

The more the regime fears losing control over these regions, the more stridently it asserts that they were "always" part of the same whole. The myth of unbroken antiquity functions as a plaster cast around a fractured skeleton.

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3. Projecting the myth onto the rest of Asia

Once a story of ancient continuity is built for the PRC, a second maneuver follows: projecting a similar story onto everyone else, so that the PRC's own narrative no longer looks unusual.

Within mainstream PRC discourse, there is an unspoken assumption that other Asian polities must also be ancient, continuous entities, just less glorious or less complete versions of the same pattern:

•	Indonesia is imagined as if it had "always been Indonesia," rather than a post–World War II construction that fused colonial "Netherlands East Indies" borders with a modern republican project.

•	Singapore is treated as a timeless "Chinese-influenced city," not as a twentieth-century port colony that became an accidental city-state after being expelled from a short-lived Malaysian federation.

•	Vietnam is cast as a perennial "junior version of China," as if its long history of resisting, appropriating, and redefining Chinese influence could be flattened into a subordinate copy.

This projection serves several functions.

First, it normalizes the PRC's own retrospective stitching. If Indonesia and Vietnam are assumed to be ancient, continuous nations, then it seems less odd that the PRC claims the same for itself. Everyone, the story goes, is simply returning to their rightful place on a civilizational map that has always existed.

Second, it obscures the reality that many of these states are mid-twentieth-century improvisations. Their borders, institutions, and identities emerged from:

•	The collapse of European and Japanese empires;

•	Violent anti-colonial struggles and negotiated settlements;

•	Contingent alignments with one or another Cold War bloc.

Indonesia's independence involved both mass mobilization and bloody internal purges. Malaysia's formation and Singapore's separation were the result of bargaining among elites under British withdrawal. Vietnam's path ran through French colonialism, Japanese occupation, anti-French resistance, partition, and American intervention. None of these trajectories resemble an unbroken line from antiquity to the present.

Third, and crucially, their political evolution—however flawed—is often more bottom-up and emergent than the PRC's. Parties, armies, religious organizations, trade unions, and student movements collided and competed. Colonial administrative borders became raw material for new experiments. Where Leninist models did take root (as in Vietnam), they did so through local struggles rather than as a pure transplant.

By projecting a myth of ancient continuity onto neighbors, PRC discourse diverts attention from this messy, contingent, and often creative process. It prefers a world where every state claims deep antiquity and inevitable borders; in such a world, the PRC's own manufactured continuity looks less like an outlier and more like the regional norm.

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4. The Pan-Asian rupture in World War II

There is another reason why the "everyone is ancient" story is attractive: it dulls the memory of a specific moment when Asia's political future became radically open.

From a Pan-Asian structural perspective, World War II in Asia was not only a clash between Allies and Axis, or between "fascism" and "anti-fascism." It was also a brief, violent rupture in which an Asian power—Imperial Japan—shattered the aura of invincibility surrounding European empires.

This must be stated with all the necessary cautions. Japanese militarism was brutal. Its armies committed atrocities across the region: mass killings, forced labor, sexual slavery, medical experimentation. The suffering inflicted on Chinese, Korean, Southeast Asian, and other populations is not up for debate.

And yet, at the level of imperial structures, Japan's campaigns did something no Asian power had yet done at that scale: they defeated or humiliated European colonial regimes across Asia.

•	In Southeast Asia, Japanese forces overran British defenses in Malaya and Singapore with startling speed, capturing what had been marketed as an impregnable imperial fortress. The fall of Singapore in 1942 broadcast a simple message to subject peoples: the white empire can be beaten.

•	In the Netherlands East Indies, Japanese advances toppled Dutch colonial control and created the conditions in which Indonesian nationalist leaders could later claim independence.

•	In French Indochina, the erosion of Vichy and later Free French authority under Japanese occupation weakened the colonial grip, opening space for local communist and nationalist movements.

This does not make Japan a liberator. It makes Japan a disruptive agent in an imperial system that had previously seemed permanent. Japanese rule was exploitative and violent; it replaced one set of masters with another. But in doing so, it undermined the illusion that European domination was the natural order of things.

The shockwaves of this rupture carried into the post-war period:

•	Asian elites could negotiate independence from weakened European powers.

•	Mass movements could mobilize around the idea that colonial rulers were neither omnipotent nor morally superior.

•	The very concept of an "Asian independence wave" became imaginable.

Even in Manchuria, the contested borderland where Japanese, Soviet, and Chinese ambitions collided, the region functioned as a laboratory: first for Japanese imperial industrialization and military planning, then for Soviet occupation and technology transfer, and finally for the Chinese Communist Party's own experiment in rule. Here too, the neat story of an unbroken "Chinese" space collapses into overlapping imperial projects.

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5. How the PRC flattens the timeline

The official narrative of the PRC has little room for this Pan-Asian rupture. Instead, it offers a more comforting script.

World War II in Asia becomes, in this storyline, primarily:

•	"The Chinese people's War of Resistance against Japanese aggression";

•	"The Eastern front of the global anti-fascist war."

Other theaters—Indonesia, Malaya/Singapore, Vietnam, Burma—fade into the background. Their independence struggles are treated as peripheral, derivative, or at best parallel. The focus is firmly on a single, heroic subject: "the Chinese people," who are said to have fought continuously from the 1930s onwards and to have contributed decisively to the defeat of fascism.

This flattening performs at least two crucial functions.

First, it protects a moral monopoly.

If the primary story of Asian World War II is "Chinese resistance to Japanese aggression," then the PRC can claim a privileged moral position: it stood, supposedly, at the center of Asia's anti-fascist struggle. Atrocities suffered by other Asians—Koreans, Southeast Asians, Pacific Islanders—can be acknowledged, but they orbit the central Chinese narrative. The fact that Japanese victories against European powers accelerated decolonization becomes awkward and is usually minimized.

Second, it hides the autonomy of other Asian trajectories.

If the map we see today is the natural end point of ancient civilizations, then independence movements in Indonesia, Vietnam, India, and elsewhere appear as mere "national awakenings" of entities that were always destined to exist. The specific contribution of Pan-Asian ruptures—the sudden collapse of European prestige, the circulation of anti-colonial ideas, the complex interactions between local elites and global powers—is blunted.

Above all, this narrative sidesteps an uncomfortable reality: many Asian societies owe their current sovereignty more to their own movements and to the structural collapse of European empires than to any leadership from an eternal "China." The PRC did not orchestrate Indonesian independence, Malaysian state formation, Vietnamese victory, or Indian decolonization. It was one actor among many in a rapidly shifting field.

By retroactively projecting a continuous "Chinese" subject back through all upheavals, the regime claims honorary authorship over a regional story it did not write.

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6. Manufactured continuity vs. emergent evolution

At this point, a conceptual contrast becomes clear.

On one side stands the PRC: a manufactured continuity narrative glued onto a Soviet-derived state.

•	The borders are inherited from a fallen empire (Qing).

•	The internal wiring follows a Bolshevik template (party monopoly, security apparatus, cadre management).

•	The civilizational story is assembled after the fact to make this hybrid look ancient and inevitable.

On the other side stand a diverse set of Asian states whose political forms are emergent.

•	Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and many others are products of twentieth-century decolonization, partition, federation, secession, and experimentation.

•	Their internal regimes vary: some democracies, some military dictatorships, some one-party states, many hybrids.

•	Their identities are contested and evolving: ethnic, religious, linguistic, regional fault lines all matter.

None of this is tidy. There are coups, massacres, failed experiments, authoritarian backsliding. But the key point is structural: these polities were not created by simply taking a pre-existing "ancient nation" and attaching a modern state to it. They came into being through collision: between local actors and imperial powers, between global ideologies and village realities, between old elites and new masses.

The PRC's discourse, by insisting that "we are all ancient civilizations," performs a quiet act of conceptual annexation:

•	It drags emergent, contingent, and experimental political forms into the same frame as its own invented continuity.

•	It implies that history naturally leads to the present map—that Qing frontiers, Dutch colonies, British protectorates, French Indochina, Japanese mandates, and Soviet spheres all contained within them the seeds of today's "ancient nations."

•	It reduces the Pan-Asian rupture of World War II and the subsequent decolonization wave to a mere "chapter" in a long civilizational story, rather than a genuine break in the order of things.

In doing so, the PRC's narrative blurs the fact that twentieth-century Asia is not a museum of ancient states finally getting their due, but a crowded workshop of unfinished experiments.

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7. The cost of calling the manufactured "ancient"

What, then, does it mean when a manufactured state insists on calling itself ancient—and quietly rewrites everyone else's past to match that fiction?

At one level, it is simply a familiar move in the politics of legitimacy. States everywhere like to imagine themselves older, deeper, and more inevitable than they really are. But in Asia, where the wounds of empire are recent and the lines on the map still tremble, this move has a particular cost.

It discourages honest conversation about:

•	How Qing imperial practices—settler colonization, frontier militarization, ethnic categorization—were taken over and updated by a Leninist party-state;

•	How Japanese militarism, despite its crimes, helped crack open the European colonial order;

•	How Asian societies outside the PRC improvised their political forms in the rubble of multiple empires;

•	How today's various regimes—democratic, authoritarian, or something in between—are still provisional, not the final word on what "Asia" must be.

When a state that is, in structural terms, a twentieth-century Soviet-style experiment built on a collapsed Inner Asian empire insists that it is five thousand years old, it is not just flattering itself. It is attempting to close the timeline, to present a contingent configuration as destiny.

For Pan-Asian self-understanding, this is a trap. If we accept that everyone is ancient and everything is inevitable, then the unfinished work—rethinking borders, reexamining alliances, revisiting the memory of anti-colonial struggles, reconsidering the role of external powers—becomes unnecessary. The future shrinks to the management of inherited myths.

A stateless perspective suggests the opposite. Asia's twentieth century was a sequence of ruptures: revolutions, invasions, occupations, partitions, decolonizations, Cold War realignments. The structures that emerged from this turbulence are not sacred relics; they are provisional answers to questions that remain open.

Redrawing the timeline does not mean erasing anyone's cultural depth. It means refusing to let a manufactured continuity claim a monopoly on antiquity, or to let one state's story overwrite the plurality of Asian experiences.

The unfinished task of Pan-Asian reflection begins not with accepting any slogan about what has been true "since ancient times," but with a quieter, more unsettling question: if we let go of the fiction that all this was inevitable, what other futures become thinkable?