Odd Arne Westad wrote:
As with all countries and societies, China’s present is determined by its past. Current leaders are of course at liberty to make their own decisions in order to improve their country, and the best among them do. But they do so within a framework of mind and territory that has been bequeathed them by the past. In China’s case, it is often argued that the past carries even more weight than elsewhere, simply because there is more of it: China’s history, particularly in intellectual terms, goes back several thousand years. It could, however, as easily be argued that it is the significance that history is given inside Chinese culture that provides it with remarkable power in the present. Many countries, after all, can in some form or another claim thousands of years of history without that longevity becoming a staple of their political and ideological discourses. The sharp centrality of history to China may therefore as easily be seen as an ideological construct in itself rather than something given by chronology or continuity.
For China’s foreign affairs today there are two aspects of the past that matter more than others. One is the legacy of empire. Today’s China, both in shape and content, grew out of the Qing empire and has taken over a number of that empire’s characteristics. The other is authoritarianism, which— as is the case in many places— comes out of the deeper past, but in China has become a default mode of government, to the extent that a large number of Chinese believe that their country is uncommonly suited for authoritarian government (and the other way around). Recently, many Chinese (and some non-Chinese) have started celebrating autocratic government as part of a successful model of development, especially well suited to Chinese conditions. Both of these features of China’s past are in need of further investigation as they pertain to the present.
Empire
Empire was the main form of political organization on a global scale before the mid- twentieth century. In what we know as China, empires were distinguished by their size and their cohesion. Over the past two thousand years, China has seen a number of empires that, at their peak, were able to expand their territory, integrate their populations, and control the wider region from the Himalayas to Central Asia, Korea, and Vietnam. There have also been times when Chinese states have been smaller in size and formed state systems not unlike what happened in Europe over the past five hundred years. But, in overall terms, it is the legacies of empire that have shaped China today, not least because the last of the Chinese empires, the Qing, at its height was such a powerful and pervasive entity. Since Chinese empires, like European or South Asian empires, were different in character and orientation, it is very important to note that when we speak about the direct impact of empire on China today, we are mainly speaking about the Qing, which ruled China from 1644 to 1912.
Even if it is right to focus on the Qing empire, there are of course deeper legacies from the past that influence Chinese foreign affairs today. Making these too specific makes no sense: strategists who believe that current People’s Republic of China (PRC) strategies can be constructed from reading Sun Zi or Meng Zi are certainly mistaken, just as their Chinese counterparts would be if they thought that US policies are derived from Thucydides or Xenophon. What is at work are rather broad trends, especially in terms of self-perception. Two are particularly important: a concept of cultural cohesion and a concept of centrality. These concepts have shaped China’s interaction with the world for a very long time.
China’s cultural cohesion emerged from the written Chinese language, which gradually became the means of interaction for large numbers of elites inside the empire and outside. By the end of the first millennium after the founding of the Han empire, the command of written Chinese was used as a key cultural marker in eastern Asia— whoever mastered it was on the inside of an increasingly complex cultural web. It gave the users, whatever state they found themselves within, a particular connection to and affinity for Chinese culture. The written language served as a great conveyor belt of ideas and technologies, not only from whatever empire controlled China and toward the rest of eastern Asia, but often in other directions as well. It created a pervasive cultural cohesion that defined a region. Instead of a claim to universal political centrality, which it often has been seen as constituting, in historical terms Chinese elites have asserted the superiority of their states in a cultural sense … Even so, it would be wrong to write off Chinese centrality simply as an ideologized version of China’s military power …
… The inheritance from China’s deeper past is … significant but malleable. What the People’s Republic of China inherited from the Qing empire seems more hard-wired, both in terms of perceptions and institutions. Some historians of China see this as ironic, since so much energy has been spent in Chinese nationalist historiography after 1912 on denouncing the empire’s “foreign” Manchu rulers and denying its significance for China. But in many ways denying the fluidity and changeability of empire and stressing the break between imperial and post-imperial institutions are common positions across postimperial space, both in former peripheries and former metropoles. The Chinese distaste for the Qing is echoed in most other settings where a collapsed empire serves as a useful foil for glorification of the present (or at least as an excuse for contemporary imperfections).
Instead, what stands out in China today are the multiple ways in which today’s People’s Republic has inherited Qing notions and practices. Many of the concepts of extreme centralization are from the Qing era, as are institutions such as the hukou [characters], the household registration system by which Chinese are permitted or denied the right to settle outside the region of their birth. In overall terms, the PRC’s current authoritarianism, its state reverence, its methods for controlling and fashioning private enterprise, organizations, and religious communities all come out of the Qing (although many of them, of course, have deeper roots). China today has done away with less of its imperial legacies overall than most other post- imperial states.
For the purposes of understanding the PRC’s international affairs, grasping this relative continuity and its effects is central. It has a strong effect both on what China is and how it constructs its outer worlds. The Qing empire expanded China’s borders into Mongolia, the Dzungar and Tarim basins, Tibet, the northeast (Manchuria), and the southwestern Hmong and Lolo areas. Even more important, it carried out large-scale Chinese colonization of these regions, starting the trend toward complete Sinification that the PRC has put into high gear today. The expansion of China is therefore in many ways similar to that of Russia or the United States, with large increases in contiguous territory and the accompanying assimilation or extermination of other groups within defined borders. Even the 92 percent within the PRC who identify as Chinese (or Han, as the official designation goes) compares with the 81 percent Russians in Russia, and 85 percent Euro or African Americans in the United States.
The borders that the PRC have today are largely the ones it inherited from the Qing empire. Outer Mongolia (today’s Mongolian republic) has been shaved off, as has large chunks of land in the far northeast (to Russia)— Mao Zedong used to say that China had not yet presented the bill to Moscow for these acquisitions. Other than that, China’s borders have been remarkably stable since the empire was abolished in 1912. China is therefore the only empire that has managed the transition to a nation- state without a significant loss of territory, and this determines not just its internal composition but its foreign affairs to a very high extent.
The Qing empire attempted to regulate its relationships with surrounding states in ways that secured the ideological centrality of the empire while also looking after its security and economic interests. On occasion, historians refer to these policies as “the tribute system”, though tribute was only a part of the relationships and the content of each country’s links with Beijing was distinct and specific (and often remarkably varied). The common element was the Qing’s insistence that all surrounding countries were in principle subservient to the empire and that their representatives ought to show up in the imperial capital at regular intervals to proclaim this deference. Other than that, relationships differed widely, dependent on cultural connections, historical ties, and local needs.
The two countries that in Qing protocols had the closest ties with the empire, while still not being a part of it, were Korea and Vietnam. Korea had interacted with China for a very long time, and during the Ming era the Korean state became a vassal of the empire, a relationship that continued more or less intact through Qing times. Korean rulers always guarded their freedom of action jealously, and Qing political influence within Korea was very limited, even if Korean kings accepted the Qing emperor as suzerain. The relationship was deeply cultural. Korean elites viewed themselves as part of a common culture centered on China, even when they found the Qing empire’s Manchurian roots insufficiently Confucian.
Vietnam, and to a lesser extent the rest of Indochina, also stood in a direct relationship with the Qing empire that went beyond anything seen elsewhere, except in Korea. It was sometimes a troubled relationship: the fact that the Vietnamese king regarded himself to be a vassal of the emperor also meant that the Qing reserved the right to determine matters such as the correct succession. And, unlike Korea, the turbulent politics of Vietnam, especially from the late eighteenth century on, meant numerous Chinese attempts at intervening in Vietnamese affairs. Ironically, the somewhat more remote relationship compared to Korea meant more intervention, because the two political cultures were less immediately aligned. The interventions gave rise to long- term resentments in Vietnam, some of which have lasted up to our own time.
Japan was partly inside and partly outside the inner Chinese cultural circle. In spite of having formed much of their cultural and political framework under the influence of China (often through Korea), Japanese states were generally outside of direct Chinese imperial control. The Qing empire never attempted to dominate Japan in the way it dominated its other neighbors, and its elites generally looked down on the Japanese as piratical troublemakers beyond the immediate realm of civilization. And as Japan became unified under the Tokugawa shogunate from the early seventeenth century on, Japanese leaders feared all forms of direct Chinese leverage, much as they feared other forms of foreign power.
For Turks and Persians beyond the Qing’s “new frontier” (Xinjiang), for peninsular Southeast Asia and the islands, and for South Asia beyond the Himalayas, Chinese attempts at regulating its neighborhood meant even less. In Chinese terms, at least, most of the states in these regions were connected to the empire in some form of vassalage, but the relationships were not close and in some cases entirely theoretical, since leaders in Beijing had only the vaguest sense of what kind of entities they were dealing with at the other end. In these cases the ideology of empire easily superseded any form of practice, and the discourse of imperial control within the Qing state was far more significant than any attempts at exercising concrete supremacy abroad.
This, then, is what the China-centered imperial regional order of the Qing looked like before its collapse in the late nineteenth century. Unlike what is sometimes prophesied, this order is unlikely to make its return. It remains, of course, in historical echoes and more or less constructed memories, some of which are very powerful tools in Asian politics. Beyond that, a Chinese sense of centrality also remains, made more powerful by the country’s recent economic success. And in the neighboring countries a fear of Chinese domination lingers, alongside (at least in Korea and Vietnam) a sense of cultural interconnection. The rise of domestic nationalisms is a new phenomenon (except, perhaps, in Korea) that makes the return of a China-centered system less likely.
Ever since the collapse of imperial China, some scholars have theorized sets of distinctions between assumed “Western” and “Eastern” approaches to international relations. One thread in these discourses has been the notion that “Eastern” interactions, when freed from European international control, are by themselves more peaceful and less confrontational than those of the “West”. There is very little in the historical record that gives credence to such views. Chinese empires (and certainly the Qing) were expansionist and assertive, and so were other states within the region. When we speak of the legacies of empires within Asia, we need to count the effects of Asia-based empires as well as Europe-based ones.
Denying such a qualitative difference between European and Asian state systems is not, of course, the same as denying difference altogether. There were very significant differences between European arrangements (often, with a certain amplification, referred to as “Westphalian” orders) and those that have existed in eastern Asia since the Ming era. While the European state system indicated the potential for legal and diplomatic equality among states, the eastern Asian one emphasized hierarchy, with the China-based empire at least conceptually on top. Sovereignty was more diffuse in eastern Asia, and smaller states had more of an ability to trade aspects of sovereignty for practical concessions from the empire. There was also a much wider variety of informal exchanges and diffuse positions, to which official proclamations spoke in ways that were intended to be read in different ways by different groups. While empire was at the heart of the eastern Asian international order, it was never universal in jurisdiction, capability, or competence.
Authoritarianism
Most empires are authoritarian because of their very nature: in order to rule over many different groups, elites assert the need for repressive and illiberal institutions and policies. That Chinese empires have been authoritarian in their political composition is therefore more in line with what other empires have been in the past than different from them. What is different is that today’s China has taken over and to some extent celebrates the authoritarianism of the past. Participatory democracy is not suited for China even today, the Chinese Communists’ argument goes, because it is a big and diverse country that needs a firm hand at the tiller to secure social stability and economic growth. The problem with pro-authoritarian arguments is not just that they are used as an excuse for bad governance at home. It is also that they create an image of China abroad that dents its reputation for technological progress and commercial success. For many people around the world, and not least in Asia, the threat from China is not its size nor its power, but its defense of one-party rule and authoritarian government.
It is therefore of key importance to understanding China’s contemporary foreign relations to understand where the country’s authoritarianism comes from. There are of course several sources for it. Some are based on forms of Neo-Confucian thinking that have been influential in China for around 1,000 years. Some come out of imperial practices, especially as employed by the Qing empire. And some originate in the twentieth century with the birth of Chinese Communism. Let us deal with each of these in turn.
All Confucian thinking is hierarchical, but not all of it is authoritarian. At its best, Confucianism sets out assortments of duties and obligations that are valid up and down the rungs of hierarchies, from the emperor to the humblest of servants. When carefully adhered to in society and craftily employed within the state, Confucianism can create a remarkably cohesive social environment, in which individuals may feel both empowered and secure. The form of Confucianism most in vogue in China since the Song empire, often called Neo-Confucianism, emphasizes self-improvement as the only way of producing a better society. This form of thinking has often led to an emphasis on personal qualities over popular support. Especially during the Qing empire, the idea that it was the rectitude and sagacity of an official, above even his proven results, that qualified for high office, was hardwired into the imperial system of preferences. And such qualities were more likely to be found among officials whose families had served the empire for generations, thereby replacing the concept of a meritocracy with that of favoritism or even nepotism, not unlike China today. [reference to Peter Bol]
The emphasis on elite selection and heredity was probably stimulated by the Qing being led by families, including the imperial family, who were non- Chinese in origin. The Manchu roots of the dynasty, and the outsider quality that much of the Qing enterprise had, even after it had ruled China for a century, contributed to a sense of exclusivity and distinctiveness among the elite. The Qing were never quite able to relinquish the sense, inwardly and outwardly, that they were a small elite, which had conquered China by force and ruled it through a combination of purpose and fear. Again, the similarities with Communist rule are striking, even if the Communists have different purposes and very different origins.
One aspect of its rule that the CCP has taken over from the Qing is its totalitarian presumptions. The Chinese preoccupation with a strong state goes much further back than the last dynasty, but it was the Qing which expanded and perfected China’s state veneration. For the Qing, the alternative to authoritarian government was not freedom, but chaos. The need to regulate the population, sometimes in minuscule detail, was therefore obvious to them. The ideal, never implemented in practice, was government as a machine led by incorruptible idealists who worked for the best of the state. All other aspects of social life had to be subsumed under the workings of the state: religion, business, education, entertainment, even family affairs. Dictatorship was the will of Heaven and heavy regulation the duty of the regime.
The past hundred years in Chinese history has been a battle over whether the country can banish these ghosts of the past and move on. There have been times when the future seemed wide open, and other times when it seemed very closed and reflective of the Qing era. The direction that China seems to go in domestically matters intensely for its foreign affairs, as is the case with any other country. Nobody among China’s neighbors, or further afield, believes that a China that oppresses its own population, treats minorities harshly, and subsumes all activities to the needs of a centralized and dictatorial state will work with them in settling bilateral or multilateral matters fairly and promptly. They may be wrong about this, but such are the assumptions and China’s more recent actions in eastern Asia seem to confirm them.
The “Century of Humiliation”
For the Chinese Communist state, the concept of China being weak and exploited before the Communist conquest is an article of faith. The “century of humiliation,” which is assumed to have lasted from the first Opium War in 1839 to the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, is the reason, it claims, the CCP and, eventually, the PRC came into being. The Chinese Communist state is the Chinese people’s response to being humiliated by foreigners after the Qing government started getting into trouble in the mid- nineteenth century. If China today is nationalist, centralist, and authoritarian, this was caused by the terrible attacks on China that foreign imperialists, from the British to the Japanese, carried out. In other words, the CCP dictatorship is necessary to set things right and make China rich and strong again.
This version of history is not only untrue but also unhelpful for China in finding its place in the world. The late Qing empire did lose its wars against stronger empires that encroached on its territory. And Europeans behaved, and sometimes still behave, with racist condescension toward Chinese, not least in the zones they took control of along China’s coast and main rivers. Japan launched an all-out attack against China in 1937 and its forces committed terrible crimes thereafter. But China as a whole was never colonized, and the borders of China today are therefore remarkably similar to those of the Qing empire. The Western concessions in China were returned to Chinese jurisdiction well before the CCP took over. China suffered under foreign attacks, but it was never under foreign direction, at least not for very long.
But what is really untrue about the “humiliation” story is that it introduces an image of Chinese as passive victims of foreign aggression until they were rescued by the Communist Party. Instead, what happened as the Qing empire got into trouble was that Chinese from all walks of life, as others within the empire, used the opportunity to break out from the stranglehold that the imperial state had had on them. They migrated, worked, traded, invented, believed, and studied in ways that the state had tried to prevent them from doing. They cooperated with foreigners. They experimented with new forms of political representation and new forms of culture or gender relations. In short, they attempted, as best they could, to take control of their own lives.
Not all was well in China in the late imperial and republican eras. The weakening of the central state opened up for rampant forms of exploitation, especially in the countryside, and capitalism undercut many social ties that people had depended on in the past. But, during the early twentieth century, China avoided the stifling oppression of the Qing or the murderous campaigns of the early Communist period. This may not be good news for those who believe that the purpose of Chinese society is to produce a strong state. But it did provide people in China with opportunities that they did not have before or after, or at least not until the era of economic reform in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Past in the Present
Today’s Chinese government has inherited the legacies of empire and especially the last empire’s authoritarianism. It has also constructed a version of recent history that emphasizes past Chinese victimhood as a justification for Communist control. The only alternative to CCP rule, according to this version of Chinese history, is domestic chaos and a return to humiliation at the hands of foreigners. The fact that the political theory the party represents, communism, was developed by a German, Karl Marx, and first implemented by a Russian and a Georgian, Lenin and Stalin, is often conveniently forgotten by today’s party leaders. The strengthening of one-party rule, which is the main aim of General Secretary and President Xi Jinping, is first and foremost justified by Chinese nationalism and China’s national needs.
The CCP version of history is of course strengthened by China’s recent economic success. The growth of the Chinese economy and its increasing internationalization have created links with the world that China’s Communist leaders find difficult to manage. But it has also supplied a story about Chinese successes that can be used to present a positive image of the country abroad. China is genuinely admired by many in Asia and Africa who themselves dream of high growth rates and high- tech production lines, and it is acclaimed and feared in equal amounts by Westerners who are anxious about their own displacement as global leaders. Most Chinese are understandably proud of their economic achievements, and many are still willing to give the Communist Party at least the benefit of the doubt for having presided over such a period of extraordinary growth.
It may be that China’s economic advance together with the historical legacies of empire and authoritarianism, now mixed with more recent nationalism, will make compromise abroad more difficult. That will lead to problems for China, because it is on such compromise that the country’s further rise depends. Those, be they in Beijing or Washington, who believe that eastern Asia will return to its international state of around 1750 with China as an uncontested hegemon, or that China as a new great power will get its way by behaving like other rising powers have in the past— by throwing its weight around and alienating others— are almost certainly wrong. Eastern Asia, and the world, are more complex than before, and nationalisms and quests for sovereignty more widespread. Even if China overcomes its domestic challenges and continues its rise, it will not be able to dictate its will to others. Unless the whole international system, regionally and globally, changes dramatically, China will be dependent on compromise to further its own interests, whatever way its government perceives them.
This is where China may face its biggest foreign policy challenges. The constructed history of China as ever peaceful and accommodating is not only untrue, it is also rejected by China’s neighbors and unhelpful to the processes of Chinese foreign policy making. The more China defines itself as a normal country (albeit a very big one) with limited but clear foreign policy interests, the better it is both for China and its neighbors. But China’s imperial heritage stands in the way of such forms of thinking. So does its authoritarianism, which frightens others elsewhere in Asia and beyond. Although there is no absolute rule that authoritarian governments are more aggressive than democratic or pluralistic ones, it is hard to convince other countries that China’s authoritarianism stops at home. As long as China remains a repressive authoritarian state, its diplomatic, military, business, and cultural initiatives abroad will always be regarded with suspicion by others who do not share these values. A more attractive China, for Chinese and foreigners alike, will mean that the country has to overcome its past and present itself in a new light. The tremendous changes it has gone through over the past generation shows that such a different China is possible, even if it is not very likely in the short run.
The Source:
Odd Arne Westad, ‘Legacies of the Past’, in China and the World, edited by David Shambaugh, Oxford University Press 2020 [pp. 25-36]
Qing dynasty Emperor painted by Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766), Imperial workshop. The painting is arranged with Qianlong at the center of a symbolic universe. The emperor holds the wheel of law in his left hand and makes the gesture of argumentation with his right. This unusual portrait reflects upon the political strategy of the Qianlong emperor (reigned 1736-96) as well as his personal religious beliefs. Moreover, it is testimony to the cultural nature of his court and empire.
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.