ABSTRACT
China is not a country but an idea, which was reformulated in the twentieth century to fit with the hegemonic world nation-state system. This involved a reformulation not only of the idea of the Chinese Empire, but also of the remains of its past – including artifacts that once served as the mystified insignia of power of mighty rulers, or as the tokens of refinement and civilization, or simply as the ostentatious playthings of the wealthy; and also objects previously unknown unearthed by modern archaeology, that is, artifacts left by people living in “China” long before China became China. Similar to what has happened in other “countries,” these objects have been recast as “national cultural heritage,” and are believed to carry the essence of a Chineseness reaching back “5000 years” – a claim inseparable from the new contemporary global politics of representation in the arena of competing nation-states (where, one might say, modern China competes especially in the fields of “civilizational antiquity” and “unbroken continuity”).
