Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

Last month, we published a brief history of China’s language Romanization—and why Americans in particular mispronounce the name of Chinese President Xi Jinping. It was so popular that we decided this week to take a dive down another linguistic rabbit hole.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

Last month, we published a brief history of China’s language Romanization—and why Americans in particular mispronounce the name of Chinese President Xi Jinping. It was so popular that we decided this week to take a dive down another linguistic rabbit hole.

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There are two factoids that every pundit knows about China: One, that its Chinese name, Zhongguo, means “Middle Kingdom,” and two, that this name reflects China’s belief about its centrality in world affairs.

Neither of these ideas is entirely untrue, but there is a more complex history behind them. (As ever, I am deeply indebted to Endymion Wilkinson’s magisterial Chinese History: A New Manual for information here.)

Names, empires, and countries can be slippery to define over time, and China is no exception. We think of the Roman Empire as ending in the fifth century in part because historians later devised the name “Byzantium” to describe the successor state that ruled from Constantinople until 1453. But no Byzantine ever called themselves such; they called themselves Romoi, meaning “the Romans” in Greek.

In China, successive empires from as early as the Zhou in 1046 B.C. legitimized themselves by claiming to be the inheritor of a single polity, regardless of whether they had just toppled their predecessor as the Qing did to the Ming, or aspired to be the heirs of previous empires as the Sui did.

The emergence of the nation-state as the basic unit of geopolitics in the 19th century led Chinese intellectuals to claim in hindsight that China was a single nation that........

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