Recently, on October 1st, China celebrated its birthday. It’s always a big event. Everyone has time off and you’re encouraged to spend money. There was a big push for it this year since there’s a recession. Okay.

What’s funny about this event is that it marks the date of China’s founding: October 1st 1949.

When Xi Jinping met Donald Trump for the first time, he told Trump that China is the oldest civilization. Trump told Xi that Egypt is older and Xi responded that this is true but China has an unbroken recorded history.

How can China be such an old civilization if it was founded in 1949? How can you celebrate October 1st but then claim prehistoric continuity?

I know, I know. This is a naive and stupid question. October 1st is a celebration of revolution. A nation-state is not the same as civilization. But to say that means that civilization precedes statehood. Civilization precedes monarchy. This seems obvious but bear with me here. I’m going somewhere with this.

There are many nations that were founded within this last century. A lot of existing civilizations formed new nation-states in what some call the postcolonial era. These are nationalistic projects founded during Great Britain’s decline. Why would former colonies or dynasties or the diverse types of civilization choose to enter statehood, often through violent or re-education processes? For international recognition—the right to land is only recognized by the international community through established states.

October 1st 1949—the generation of people that is my grandparents’s age are older than the nation of China. They’re still alive today. A lot of people of this generation passed during COVID and, with them, unspoken and forgotten memories.

A lot of Chinese literature is about this phenomenon of collective amnesia. It’s something that you can’t help but notice even as a visitor to the land. New developments are built on top of existing villages. If you ask older people what their lives were like during their youth, the most common answer you will get is “I don’t remember.”

“I was too young to remember.”
“Who remembers stuff from those years?”
“Different things happened every year but it’s hard to remember.”

Since China established itself as a nation-state, many things have been observed. Farmland has been disappearing, slowly in the beginning and faster more recently. Between 2009 to 2019, 1.8 million acres of farmland has disappeared. 1.8 million acres is the size of New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined. In their place are ghost towns, new developments with no people living inside of the unfinished skeletal buildings.

Cranes have become endangered. Red crowned and black necked, people have worshiped cranes since the time of the Han dynasty. Cranes are important ecologically because they follow ox around and eat parasites in the rice fields. Ever since China became a nation-state, cranes have been disappearing in large numbers because of habitat loss.

People are also well fed now. That’s a truth too but we also have to look at why. The period right before 1949 was one of war, colonization, and factional unrest. The most populated areas of present day China were considered to be a no man’s land for much of World War II. Neither imperial Japan nor the KMT wanted to be responsible for the people on this land but both wanted to kill the other military power. Many people died during those years. After 1949, there was another famine but this one is not talked about and it is forgotten.

Another thing that’s happened—a huge number of diverse languages and communities have become reorganized into a dominant Mandarin speaking Han identity and several ethnic minorities. Many local dialects are disappearing and the things that we can say using those dialects are also going away. Currently, many people west of the Hu line face genocidal policies and occupation.

Nations form and then history changes. History gets rewritten. Many histories become a singular story.

Proponents of nation-states will argue that becoming a nation protects people against western hegemony. That is true. Civilizations that are not nation-states are less respected and are more at risk. They still exist. They are still real.

Talking about statehood being constructed carries a risk—I sound crazy when I say that statehood is imaginary. What? This astrologer thinks that all countries shouldn’t exist? That states should demilitarize and every superpower should drop its nuclear programs? Haha. Yeah, sure. It does sound like wishful thinking.

But the fact remains—cutting up the world’s land into nation-states isn’t some natural or innate way of organizing land or life. There is no reason for the world to end this way. Statehood is imagined and it is a choice.

In fact, I’d say that we imagine statehood differently in different scenarios. We pay taxes and the state takes one imaginative form. We think about borders and the state takes another form. Sometimes, we think of the state as a collection of people and, other times, we discuss it as a collection of policies. Much of the time, we don’t imagine the state at all. I’d even say that, most of the time, we relate to other living beings and land without needing state intervention.

What does this mean? When the state gets defensive, not everyone gets defensive along with it. Our lives are much bigger than a national identity. Not everyone feels protected by a state. Many people feel interrupted by states.

What else does this mean? It means that a group of people is a different thing than a state. When we critique state policies, this doesn’t mean that we debate anyone’s humanity. Critiquing the state means that we are trying to figure out how statehood impacts our relationships and our choices.

Sometimes, state policies impede the way we love one another. It impedes how we imagine our friendships and our safety. Other times, states support the basis of life but that’s all it really does. It doesn’t give us life. It can only support or impede. On top of state supported realities exist other realities.

The reality of our existence is not granted to us by nation-states. We exist, our memories exist, our histories exist and the organization of nation-states impacts that already existing life in some way. Our lives are not more real because we are recognized members of a nation-states but they are treated as such.

I think that it’s worth it to recognize that statehood is imaginary, that it is a wish just like any other way of being. This recognition of statehood being imaginary liberates both memory and vision. Our grandparents are older than most nations. Our grandparents have memories that precedes most nation-states. These are real memories that were formed before the mythological beginnings of entire nations. Most languages precede nation-states and the meanings held in them can challenge what we sometimes assume to be absolute. The state is not the only viable container for recording memories and meaning.

Our political imagination also does not need to be limited by statehood. There’s ways to talk about the world that are different from the geopolitics offered by the institutions of political science. None of us have to learn our politics from a school. Some of us are ecosexuals and a lot of us worship nature. It’s possible and okay to dream alternatively even when that makes you feel crazy or sound crazy. Isn’t madness also just a construct? There are so many forms of madness and what they all have in common is that they tend to be anti-nationalistic.

So, let’s be a little crazy. We all have enough courage to be at least a little crazy. We remember memories that we shouldn’t remember. Memories that are forgotten are still alive in our bodies. We dream of things that shouldn’t transpire. If that’s madness, then madness is the stuff of liberation.