Identities are made, not born. Although I claim no originality for this insight, it is striking how much our understanding of the world has continued to be anchored on the premise that identities – in particular racial, ethnic, and national – are self-evident. In the context of China, not only do we often learn from textbooks and popular media that the country has had a continuous history of over five thousand years (a “fact” that has been used to show that China is either steady or stodgy), we are also constantly reminded by official propaganda and well-intentioned observers alike that the Chinese nation (Zhonghua min zu), internally diverse as it might be, is ultimately united by blood as the descendant of the Yellow Emperor. Although the optimistic scholar might view such efforts to promote an essential Chinese identity as so transparent as to be unworthy of intervention, it remains the case that, despite all the harms that have been done in the name of racial, ethnic, or national unity, we who live in the new millennium are still very much, in the broadest sense of the term, prisoners of modernist identities.

To claim that identities are constructed is not to deny that they could be deeply meaningful. Rather, it is to insist that, in order to capture more fully the complexity of the human past, we must approach the formation of identities not as an aside but as an essential component in historical inquiries.