On one of his state visits to Egypt in the 1990s, the then Chinese President Jiang Zemin is said to have discovered that the Egyptians showcased their civilisation as being 5,000 years old. On his return, he ordered that Chinese history–until then merely between 3,000 and 4,000 years old according to the prevailing record–claim similar antiquity with the Egyptians.
The story may be apocryphal, but it tells us a great deal about how Beijing sees the world, and more importantly, how it sees its own place in it.
In an age of intense geopolitical competition with the United States-led West and with other Asian powers such as India and Japan, China’s communist leaders have deployed the great age of Chinese civilisation as a tool to promote the narrative of their country’s supposedly inevitable rise to the top of global heap and displacement of the U.S. Age, they appear to convey, is more than a number. And their number is bigger than that of their rivals. While such a stark distinction is not possible in the case of a peer civilisation like India, there are other methods adopted – both subtle and overt – to convey the idea of inherent Chinese superiority.
