“We have selected some people from the past as our ancestors, and some moments of our history from the past.” At the press conference of the old book “Changes in Ancient and Modern Times: A Record of Historians’ Visits to Taoism” held the night before yesterday, Luo Xin, a professor at the Central Committee of Chinese Ancient History Research and the Department of Khaganalogy at Peking University, passed on this kind of Taoism.
In this book, writer Li Li stops visiting 17 Chinese and foreign historical scholars, and Luo Xin is one of the tools for visiting Taoism. In the dialogue, he explores topics such as national nationalism. At the sports scene, Luo Xin also began to narrate around this topic.
People are the source of legitimacy for a nation state
According to Luo Xindao, the term “nation” is a modern Japanese vocabulary that has been abolished. Like metaphysics, chemistry, physics, and familiar objects, it is a new vocabulary developed by Japanese people using Chinese characters to correspond to Western language. “Ethnicity” itself is a political concept of the modern Western European state system. Modern national states are different from conservative, church based, and monarchy based states. They are the most powerful collective unit of people, and thus have the principle of “sacred sovereignty”.
People believe that a country is composed of a single ethnic group, which grants the greatest legitimacy. In fact, “every individual of us is a member of a nation, and this country is the result of every individual of us. We grant the power of a country, which is the source of its legitimacy.”
Luo Xin compared ancient dynasties with modern nation states. The legitimacy of ancient dynasties did not come from ethnicity or the people. Therefore, ancient dynasties were not nation states, but states that were usurped through violent means. They were controlled by a minority through violence against the majority. Therefore, only subjects were not citizens, and people were not members of ethnicity, but rather members of servant collectives. Therefore, nationalism, democracy, freedom, and individual rights are interrelated and cannot be separated.
On the other hand, when it comes to “ethnicity”, people naturally recite words such as “we are one family” and “we have common ancestry, we have common ancestors”. However, such assumptions are actually wishful thinking. Luo Xin, who had been studying the history of northern ethnic groups for a long time, felt dissatisfied with the research of the ancients. He realized that the key to his achievements lies in the complexity of the concept of “ethnicity”. In the past, people thought that the Xiongnu, Turkic, Xianbei, Wuhuan, and others were ethnic groups. However, Luo Xin discovered that they were not actually the ethnic groups in today’s sense, but rather countries – the Xiongnu were not a single ethnic group, it was an empire with various conservative civilizations, and people spoke various languages, including Chinese, Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolian, as well as people from Central Asia who spoke Iranian. Therefore, if traces of the Xiongnu period are found on the Mongolian Plateau today, the people buried in the Dao are all Xiongnu people. Extracting genes and manipulating the scale gene group of the Xiongnu people will attract companions.
Similarly, dynasties such as the Han and Tang dynasties were states rather than nations. “Of course, within a country, due to long-term exchange, especially under the interference of national teaching strategies, economic strategies, etc., there will be a lot of cultural convergence.”
Family structure is actually a social system structure
Luo Xin also encountered some supportive views, which believed that a nation is constructed by individual families, and families are a kind of bloodline structure, so a nation is also a bloodline structure. For this concept, Luo Xin also refuted it at the sports scene. He pointed out that the Chinese family tree only explores the father branch, and the last three generations of mothers will still be included in it. In a few more generations, mothers will exist, which means that “with each passing generation, 50% of our bloodline will exist.”.
Everyone has parents, and each parent has two parents. Based on this calculation, there are more than one million ancestors in the 20th generation. Today, the ancestors recognized in our family tree were not selected from one million people, which is one in a million bloodline. Based on this, “Even if Xuanyuan Huangdi is a real person, he is only one of our millions of ancestors. We cannot forget that there are also millions of other people who are also our ancestors, and we cannot possibly be led by his nose by this ancestor.”
Luo Xin also realized that there are a large number of unmarried mature children in the family. After several generations, the adopted son is no longer recorded as an adopted son in the family tree, but is considered a true child. For the closest person in their bloodline, there is also a system that disrupts them and rejects family ties. There is sufficient institutional insurance to ensure who can join the family and who can be expelled from the family, so family structure is actually a social institutional structure.
In this sense, Luo Xindao said, “All the structures we are familiar with are political in nature, with a strong color of social and political systems.” History is not just the past, before us at this moment, the past is boundless, there are countless, but history is very few. “We have selected some people from the past as our ancestors, and some moments from the past that move our history,” he urged on-site readers to remain vigilant. “The past is constantly changing, and we have an obligation to transform it based on our understanding today.”