“Hua-Hsia” consciousness was transformed to become the new basis for the state after the First Emperor of Ch'in (Ch'in-Shih-Huang) united the Hua-Hsia world to replace the old aristocratic clan enfeoffment system with a bureaucratized empire. This marked a new era in which the people should construct a new world order under rulers who worked to create and maintain the unification of the empire. This article makes two key arguments: first, that the officers of the empire possessed free movement within it, making its effective scope; and second, that the “Man-Yi-Jung-Ti” “barbarians” were recognized to be the eternal “other” outside of the empire. Thus did a new “Hua-Hsia imagination” take shape in early imperial China.