China, People's Republic of

Abstract

Abstract The People's Republic of China (PRC) was founded in 1949 and continues to be ruled by the Communist Party of China (CPC), which maintains control over the state, the military, and important social and economic institutions. Given the wealth of available information on a broad range of issues related to the PRC, this entry focuses on those aspects of the PRC and its history that can be usefully understood as imperial or as in some way related to empire. The PRC is indirectly, via the intervening Republic of China (1912–1949), the territorially coterminous successor of the earlier multinational empire ruled by the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1911). As such it possesses two important attributes characteristic of empire: administrative authority over an extensive territory and an ethnically diverse population comprising many “peoples.” PRC official ideology and policies have changed greatly over the course of its existence. At its founding the PRC might reasonably be judged to have been a multinational state. However, in the years since its founding and most notably in recent decades Chinese political and intellectual elites have promoted reconceptualization of the PRC as a nation‐state. China's evolution over the course of a century from empire to multinational state to nation‐state, and all within borders that have changed remarkably little over that time, is a process that is still incomplete and filled with contradictions. Although the PRC cannot be judged an empire in any narrow sense of the term, an appreciation for China's recent imperial roots and the shaping influences the territorial and demographic legacies of empire have had, and still have on that country, proves illuminating in several ways.