If you want to get into the semantics of it, lets do so.
The Chinese character for guo is a 'kou' around the character 'huo' which leads me to believe a couple of things.
At first glance one may think this character is a 'xing sheng' (sorry FR cannot support Chinese characters or I would type it in Chinese for you). Xing sheng means the character mimics its compents sounds.
Huo, Guo, similar sound...
However upon further investigation, the character "huo" that makes up the center of the character 'guo' actually is a pronoun in classical chinese, IE wen yan wen and has been around for ages.
So linguistically, if we were making a deduction here, this character would fall under 'hui yi', meaning you can visualize the meaning of the character by its components.
Everyone knows 'zhong'. It is a box with a line in the middle of it, denoting centralization. "Guo" has a box, or a border, around 'a certain person', thus denoting a reference to a central or supreme leader, namely the emperor.
The character 'huo' that makes up the middle of the character guo is again, a pronoun referencing a person.
When you combine these two characters together it speaks for itself.
There is no reference to land in the physical sense, other than maybe to denote the area that the 'certain person' controls.
But no, it does not have any reference to physical land.
Even if you look at the jianti simplified character, even the communist translators knew this. The center of 'guo' in jianti is that of jade, which has a clear reference to emperial persons and power.
Also regarding post #15, I can provide a whole litany of other ancedotal evidence proving my point.
Chinese characters are 94% phonetic. That jade means nothing, it's a phonetic element. In ancient Chinese (and in Japanese and many Chinese dialects), jade (yu) rhymes with "guo." In Japanese, the jade character is still pronounced "goku." In traditional characters, the phonetic element "huo" obviously also rhymes with "guo." And your additional analysis is merely post hoc, a mnemonic to teach 1st graders so they can remember the character.