Professor James Millward (Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service & Department of History, Georgetown University)

Standard narratives of the Chinese past present "China" as a continuous entity since ancient times, attaining its current territorial shape through cultural osmosis rather than military force, and presiding over a peaceful, hierarchical and Sinocentric system of Asian states maintained through Confucian deference.  This vision has been promoted by Chinese governments, but it is also commonplace in survey courses, textbooks and popular culture produced outside of China, especially in the Anglophone world, and is even routinely referenced by politicians and diplomats from the US.  It is also patently wrong, as anyone who has ever read any Chinese history knows:  wars and conquest have been no less common in China and East Asia than anywhere else; modern migrations by Chinese into "frontiers" backed by state power have displaced indigenous peoples in ways reminiscent of European settler colonialism in the Americas, and the legacy of this expansion remains problematic decades after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in the territory of the former Qing empire.  This lecture will examine how three key concepts in the historiography of China, "Sinicization," the "tribute system" and "Chinese dynasties," have ingrained and perpetuated an inaccurate exceptionalism in how we talk about the past and present of peoples and states in geographical China.