I was born in 1950 and have lived through the whole of China's modern history. I was a farmer and a worker, and after the Cultural Revolution, I went to university. Since then, I have devoted myself to the study of history, especially the history of religion, thought and culture in East Asia, and I am currently working at Fudan University in Shanghai. I am now 74 years old and have been retired for three years. Anyone who has lived through China's modern history can see China and the world differently from other people. For example, I've lived in rural China, which is a so-called ethnic minority area in China, so I'm very interested in issues of ethnicity and identity. I've also lived through the era of reform and opening up, so I'm particularly interested in China's relationship with the world. I think that modern Chinese historiography would be between the end of the Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, that is, between the 19th and 20th centuries. I still hold this view today. In other words, when Liang Qichao and Hu Shi opened up a new historiography in China, we went down that road, even though the road was fraught with pitfalls for various political reasons. Today, we still believe that this is a modern historiography to which we should adhere, which of course raises the problem that China is prematurely advocating a postmodern historiography that seems somewhat incompatible with this context. Since we have not yet become a postmodern society, we still adhere to the modern concept of historiography. I would like to raise three points. The first is that we should not think of China as an entity that has existed since antiquity, but rather as an entity that has developed and changed throughout history, from a traditional empire to a modern state, i.e. it has been shaped by the historical process rather than being as it has been since antiquity. Then we'll look at five words about China: The first is territory, the second is religion, the third is nation or ethnic group, the fourth is state, whether empire or modern state, and the fifth is the basis of identity. In this book, we focus on these five concepts. The third aspect is that today we are very concerned about how a country like China manages its national problems internally and its relations with the world externally. So, by understanding more about China, we can understand more about how its domestic and international problems have arisen. I don't think we can deal with and solve these problems within the framework of history, but we do have the responsibility to address them. I wrote this book to deal with China's emergence, its place in the world today, and its national problems from a historiographical point of view. At first glance, when we study the meaning of the word "天下", "world", there seems to be no difference with the word "世界", "universe", which is translated into English as "all under heaven". However, if we put it in its historical context, the Chinese "world" is centred, meaning a world centred on China, rather than an egalitarian, universal world as Kant put it. Therefore, when we see that the concept of "world" has been extracted from the traditional source, we fear that it will become a concept antagonistic to the current world order. In other words, we are not adding to or joining this world order but trying to create a new one. T…