It also involves a certain degree of linguistic and cultural homogeneity. That's the nation part. Mr. Green, Mr. Green, by that definition, China was a nation-state by, like, probably the Han Dynasty. Dude, me from the past, you're getting smart. Yeah, it could be, and some historians argue that it was. Nationhood is really hard to define. Like in James Joyce's Ulysses, the character Bloom famously says that a nation is the same people living in the same place, but then he remembers the Irish and Jewish diasporas and adds, or also living in different places.