Only a small portion of what people do and think, some psychologists contend, is prompted by the conscious mind. A much larger part is driven invisibly by the unconscious, which contains ‘the memory of every event we’ve ever experienced, and is the source and storehouse of our emotions’. This so-called iceberg metaphor can also apply to a country like China, whose history is – allegedly – at least five thousand years old. That means that the last two centuries of foreign humiliation, the fall of the empire, the Republican period, the war with Japan, the civil war, the founding of the People's Republic of China, the mass campaigns of Mao and the reforms of Deng Xiaoping only make up a small percentage of the conscious, collective memory. The remainder of China's historical recollections are vague and amorphous, but as the unconscious portion of the collective memory they are at least as important. Marxism/Maoism writes off China's pre-modern history (that is, before the founding of the People's Republic) as ‘feudal’, yet this label does not even come close to embracing the present-day perception of the country's deeper past. The pride felt for the period of Chinese imperial supremacy is deeply rooted and widely shared. At present, these historical recollections are still like ‘the unconscious mind that regulates all the systems of the body and keeps them in harmony with each other’. However, what was once below the surface is now becoming increasingly visible. As to the restoration of the old order, it is only a matter of time before those in power start translating the ideas of nationalistically-minded intellectuals into official policy. In part, they are already doing that.

Three Circles of Civilisation

Until well into the nineteenth century, China considered itself to be so superior that it felt no need to compare itself with other countries. It did not see the world through the lenses of ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’. All-Under-Heaven was roughly divided into three domains, three concentric circles of decreasing civilisation.