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Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu.

Every episode, I'll be talking to journalists, experts, and long-time China

watches about the latest in Chinese politics, society, and more. There'll be a smattering

of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How do the

Chinese see these issues? The Chinese government today puts forward an idea of what it is to be Chinese,

of what contributes to that Chinese identity, which is often shared by a lot of Chinese people themselves.

Some of the key tenets of this identity are 5,000 years of history, for example,

dating all the way back to the Yellow Emperor.

There's also this notion of territorial sovereignty,

this territorial wholeness, which includes places like Taiwan, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and even

the South China Sea. And that's also a definition of what peoples live in China,

56 ethnic groups of which the Han are the vast majority. But amongst these and other tenets

of national identity, how much of them actually have a solid historical basis as opposed to

being constructed in some way by people in recent history? That's the question I'll be asking

today, together with the journalist Bill Hayton, who has written a book, The Invention of China, looking at all of these questions.

He pins a lot of what we know as modern Chinese identity down to a group of reformers that were active at the end of the Qing dynasty.

And without giving you even more spoilers, Bill, welcome to the podcast. To start with, can you set

out your store? You write that you are not a historian, but you're collating and making

accessible the academic debates that have been happening in recent history, this revisionism

...