Restless Empire (2 page)

T
HIS BOOK ATTEMPTS TO GIVE
a brief overview of China’s relationship to its outside worlds over the past 250 years, but it might be useful, in the beginning, to dwell briefly on what the legacies of the even deeper past are. In doing so, we first have to tackle the big question: What exactly is this “China” that we are discussing here, historically, geographically, and culturally? Frankly, the more I have learned about China, the more elusive a clear definition becomes. Over the past two millennia it has been an empire rather than a country, but an empire with very open and very fluid borders. Its inhabitants have, until very recently, been defined by the civilization they were part of rather than by the way they look or the ancestors they have. Reading and writing Chinese script (but not necessarily speaking whatever form of the language was in vogue at Court) have been the key to this culture—whoever mastered written Chinese were
inside
; whoever did not were
outside
, or, at best, peripheral, whether they were foreigners, slaves, peasants, women, or conquered tribes.

Perhaps because of their cultural elitism, the state has always been a central concern for the Chinese. Benjamin Schwartz, a Harvard intellectual historian who rightly warned against seeing all things in contemporary China as rooted in the past, has put it well: “One of the most striking characteristics of Chinese civilization is what might be called the centrality and weight of the political order.”
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Identifying with that state and, if possible, improving it have been central to being Chinese for more than two thousand years. Even those who persistently attempted to escape from the state’s reach—whether they were Buddhists in the tenth century or anarchists in the twentieth—had to contend with the political order. There is no organizational project quite like it anywhere else in the world, including Russia, which has its own kind of state veneration, or China’s Asian neighbors, who all have taken up some of the Chinese concepts of the state.

China originated in the Yellow river valley, first as many states that collectively called themselves the Central Kingdoms, Zhongguo—
today’s Chinese name for China. Then there was a unified empire under the Han dynasty, which ruled for most of the period from 206 BC to AD 220, roughly coinciding in time with the Roman empire in the west. The core parts of China have always faced eastward, toward the Yellow Sea, even after the vast regions south of the Yangzi river had been fully integrated during the Tang and Song dynasties some thousand to twelve hundred years ago. I always use a raised-relief map to explain to students how the state viewed its empire from its eastern capitals. The far west was mountains and deserts. Sichuan—the rich province in the southwest—was only accessible from the east through narrow mountain passes. The south was very far away, across rivers and valleys. The north held countless enemies, strong ethnic groups that could challenge the empire even when it was expanding. With few exceptions, the epicenter of power would therefore remain in the east, with most dynasties setting up their capitals around the Yellow river. Since the fourteenth century, the political center has moved between Beijing, the Northern Capital, in the northeast, and Nanjing, the Southern Capital, on the Yangzi, upriver from the central eastern coast. In essence, China has had its back on the middle part of the Eurasian continent, and that orientation has had enormous consequences for the country as it has approached the rest of the world.

Granted, it is a sketchy definition of a country, but here is mine: China is a culture, a state, and a geographical core, around which identities, boundaries, and definitions of purpose have shifted and adjusted for a very long time. Indeed, perhaps one of the reasons why the concept of China has been so durable is that it is so amorphous and so contentious. Generations after generations have struggled to give their own meaning to it and to its place in the world, while drawing on the history that preceded them. Over the past 250 years, the deeper historical legacies—the state, Confucian culture, geography—appear in battles over crucial terms that define and give a sense of direction to the Chinese.
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The concept of justice is one of these essential terms. It is key to the Confucian influences that have shaped Chinese politics since the early Han dynasty. To the philosopher Confucius (551–479 BC), as to his Greek contemporary Plato, justice meant a proper, harmonious relationship within a family, within a state, and between states. The sincerity of the ruler, according to Confucian tradition, is more important than any form of procedural justice. “He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it,” Confucius said.
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In the Chinese view today, the outside world over the past two hundred years has treated China unjustly, and this grievance remains a leitmotif in China’s international affairs.

Rules and rituals are central to many Chinese systems of thought, including but not limited to Confucianism. These rules were created by Chinese elites for their own use, and to regulate conditions for those who were subservient to them. Most of the concepts clearly define hierarchies, but they also set out the mutual duties and obligations of various members of society. As the world changed in the nineteenth century, many Chinese felt that the new Western-led international society they were being forced into was characterized more by chaos than by rules. The search for general principles in international affairs has therefore been a staple of Chinese foreign policy, even though China, like all states, accepts those rules that are to its advantage more easily than those that are not.

A sense of centrality is also a crucial component of the Chinese mindset. The ease with which its neighbors have, throughout history, accepted elements of Chinese culture has served to confirm a cosmology in which China always stands at the center. With the belief in an essential role for their country in Eastern Asia came a sense of responsibility in systemic terms, of China as the indispensable nation for its region. For this reason, some Chinese have found it difficult to understand alternative visions of how the world works and how societies
should be organized. There is an irony here. For most of its history, China has been open to the importing of ideas without, however, relinquishing the sense that Chinese thought has absolute universal applications. The parochialism and intolerance that sometimes come out of a belief in one’s own centrality have plagued China’s foreign affairs at crucial moments in its history.

Justice, rules, and centrality—these three crucial concepts should always be borne in mind when considering the past, present, and future of Chinese foreign policy. But they are, however, broad preoccupations rather than concrete prescripts. And although China’s written tradition can help us understand these concerns, the belief that we can fathom more of what China will do in a conflict today through studying, for instance, Sun Zi’s
The Art of War
—a key text of the late sixth century BC—is a far-fetched proposition.
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Present-day Chinese, whatever their background, do not set their personal priorities or those for their state and its international affairs by studying their ancient texts any more than Europeans or Americans study Plato or Aristotle before making a decision. But the social and cultural concepts developed and contested over time color their concerns and help set the agenda for people’s views of what their country ought to do.

T
HE HISTORY OF MODERN
C
HINA’S
foreign relations began with the Qing dynasty, which ruled for almost three hundred years, from 1644 to 1912. Under the Qing, China saw the peak of its power. By the 1750s, it had crushed the political and military independence of all the smaller nations on its northern frontier and begun incorporating them into a much-enlarged China. It had regulated its relations with its remaining neighbors, from the Russian empire in the north to the kingdoms in Southeast Asia and in the Himalayas, according to Chinese preconditions and based on a Chinese sense of superiority. By the middle part of the eighteenth century, the Qing empire had created a world in eastern Asia that was almost entirely its own.

The unlikely story of the Qing empire originates in the beginning of the seventeenth century. At that time, a motley crew of princes from north of the border began to take power in parts of the territory belonging to the Ming dynasty, which had ruled China since 1368. The professed goal of the invaders was to conquer all of the country and restore Confucian rectitude, which they believed had been lost under the Ming emperors, whom they saw as unrighteous and decadent. The leaders of the conquering army came from a Tungusic tribe which in the past had been known as Jurchen and now called themselves the Manchu. As they expanded southward, they were joined by many Mongols, Koreans, and Chinese, as well as people from smaller tribes in the northeast, the territory we now call Manchuria. In 1636, they created a separate polity, a state and a dynasty they called Qing, meaning bright or pure. By 1644 they had taken the Chinese capital, Beijing, and began to pacify the rest of the country. The last Ming dynasty pretender was hauled back from Burma and executed in 1662.

The Qing’s announced goal was to rule according to ancient wisdom as set out in the classic works of Confucianism. The Ming had failed, they declared, because its rulers had become lax and equivocal; they had seemed weak and without a sense of direction for generations. Now the Manchus, the outsiders, had arrived in order to rectify China and bring back its greatness. But as with many political leaders who appeal to traditions and values, the Qing emperors’ message hid the fact that they were setting out to remake China in their own image, as a great multicultural dynastic state with universalist pretensions. Their forms of organization were modern, in the sense that they were different from anything that had existed before, stressing coordinated use of economic, technical, and ideological resources. Their armies, through which they ruled, had more in common with those of the Ottoman, Russian, or even the Austro-Hungarian empires than with those of the Ming; they relied on highly mobile cavalry, firearms and artillery, and well-developed logistics. Their intention was to form a super state in
which peoples of all ethnic backgrounds and faiths should find their obedient place.
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In spite of its ideological and military power, the Qing might not have been such a success were it not for the longevity of two remarkable emperors: Kangxi (Abundant Prosperity), who ruled from 1661 to 1722, and his grandson Qianlong (Heavenly Greatness), who ruled from 1736 to 1796.
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Between them they governed China for more than 120 years and solidified Qing rule to an extent that few who were living in the 1650s would have thought possible. They also embedded their personal characteristics in the empire they created. Kangxi was mercurial and dynamic, curious about the outside world but fiercely protective of his power and that of the Manchus. Qianlong was cultured and hard-working, but he was not as intelligent as his grandfather and was therefore more doctrinaire on civil and political matters. Both were knowledgeable about the peoples they ruled and about the world that surrounded them, and adept at the diplomatic and military tools needed to navigate a complex region.

By 1750, the fourteenth year of Qianlong’s reign, the Qing empire had consolidated its rule over all of China and was expanding its imperial government into Central Asia, Tibet, and Mongolia. Unlike their predecessors, the Manchu emperors regulated the empire’s foreign relations, so that all smaller states in the region, from Korea to Burma, explicitly recognized the preeminence of the Central Kingdom and of the Qing. At home the empire was at peace, with considerable economic expansion, especially in agriculture (although China also had a large manufacturing sector, some of which specialized in porcelain and silk for export). Irrigation and transport were well developed, and markets had begun to emerge, dealing in everything from land to tools to candlesticks for the afterlife. It was an increasingly specialized society, in which written contracts and agreements between individuals and families were taking on major roles.
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The impact of the state could be seen in all walks of life. A bit like the absolutist kings of the French prerevolutionary era, the Qing aspired
to control every aspect of the lives of their subjects and to regulate those they could not directly control. Like their European counterparts they of course failed in many of these pretensions, but they did set a pattern in ideological terms that the Qing state continued to adhere to up to its collapse in the twentieth century. This pervasiveness of the state was closely linked to dreams of expansion. Qianlong believed that Qing rule was in form universal, in the sense that its principles should be applied by all peoples who were culturally advanced enough to appreciate and use them. It was this universalism, more than anything else, that in the late eighteenth century drove the empire to engage in costly military expeditions at its frontiers. These excursions would, by the early nineteenth century, empty the imperial coffers and contribute to a general sense of exhaustion and malaise.

Qing China is often presented by historians, even today, as insular and inward looking. But nobody within their region who came up against Kangxi or Qianlong in real time would have viewed them as looking inward. The Qing were continuously expanding outward. They focused primarily on their land borders, though Kangxi conquered Taiwan in 1683. By 1750, the Qing operated in three distinct spheres of foreign affairs: Central Asia, where the theme was expansion; coastal Asia, where the theme was trade and tribute; and Russia, where the theme was diplomacy. Policy on all of these fronts was coordinated to leave the Qing emperors time to fully impose their rule on China, while exterminating those enemies at the frontiers whom Beijing thought capable of threatening its rule. Having themselves taken China by force, the Qing wanted to prevent any new contenders from doing the same to them.