It is harder than you might think to explain in Chinese the background to Scotland’s independence debate, not least because the three English words “nation”, “country” and “state” are in Mandarin all generally translated as a single word: guojia.
As an exiled Scot, I had to wrestle with this lack of linguistic precision many times while living in China during the 1990s and 2000s. Why, friends and acquaintances asked, was Scotland considered a nation when it was part of the highly centralised UK state? Why did it in 1999 suddenly acquire a parliament after three centuries without one? And – of greatest interest to Beijing cab drivers – why did it have a national football team but compete in the Olympics as part of Great Britain?
But the hardest thing for many of my Chinese friends to understand was how Scottish nationalism could be an accepted part of the British political landscape. In China, a state founded on the carcass of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, independence movements are anathema. Any “splittism” in Tibet or western Xinjiang is ruthlessly crushed and Taiwan’s de facto independence only grudgingly granted temporary toleration.