The Mind of Empire

China's History and Modern Foreign Relations

Christopher A. Ford

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780813165431
• eBook ISBN: 9780813139746
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

In the last century, no other nation has grown and transformed itself with such zeal as China. With a booming economy, a formidable military, and a rapidly expanding population, China is emerging as a twenty-first-century global superpower. China's prosperity has increased dramatically in the last two decades, propelling the nation to a prominent position in the international community. Yet China's ancient history still informs and shapes its understanding of itself in relation to the world. As a highly developed and modern nation, China is something of a paradox.

Though China is an international leader in modern business and technology, its past remains a source of guiding principles for the nation's foreign policy. In The Mind of Empire: China's History and Modern Foreign Relations, Christopher A. Ford demonstrates how China's historical awareness shapes its objectives and how the resulting national consciousness continues to influence the country's policymaking. Despite its increasing prominence among modern, developed nations, China continues to seek guidance from a past characterized by Confucian notions of hierarchical political order and a "moral geography" that places China at the center of the civilized world.

The Mind of Empire describes how these attitudes have clashed with traditional Western ideals of sovereignty and international law. Ford speculates about how China's legacy may continue to shape its foreign relations and offers a warning about the potential global consequences. He examines major themes in China's conception of domestic and global political order, describes key historical precedents, and outlines the remarkable continuity of China's Sinocentric stance. Expertly synthesizing historical, philosophical, religious, and cultural analysis into a cohesive study of the Chinese worldview, Ford offers revealing insights into modern China.

The Mind of Empire tracks China's astonishing development within the framework of a national ideology that is intrinsically linked to the distant past. Ford's perspective is both pertinent and prescient at a time when China is expanding into new areas of power, both economically and militarily. As China's power and influence continue to grow, its reliance on ancient philosophies and political systems will shape its approach to foreign policy in idiosyncratic and, perhaps, highly problematic ways.

1

An Emergent China
and the Weight of History

DEBATING THE “CHINA THREAT”

For many years, as Thomas Kane and Lawrence Serewicz have wryly suggested, China has been “famous for its potential to be an important global actor.”¹ Napoléon Bonaparte famously referred to China as a “sleeping giant” that, if awakened, would “shake the world,” but it is only in comparatively recent years that the world's most populous country has shown signs of shaking off the torpor to which he referred and developing more than merely a notorious potential for world power. As China's economy has begun to modernize—and, with it, its huge but long ill-equipped military machine—outside observers and Chinese alike have begun to wonder what sort of a power on the world stage China will actually become.

In recent years, particularly in the United States, there has been no shortage of analysts who see in the People's Republic of China (PRC) not simply an emerging world power but a highly problematic and dangerous one. By Steven Mosher's account, for instance, China's developing role in the world is driven by a deeply entrenched worldview with its roots in ancient Chinese history, one that abstracts from China's own experiences the general conclusion that “chaos and disorder can only be avoided by organizing vassal and tributary states around a single, dominant axis of power.” According to this view, “present-day Beijing” views its role in the world as not unlike that of its dynastic imperial predecessors, in that it “does not desire equality in external affairs, but deference, for it governs not as a nation-state…but as an all-encompassing civilization.” Mosher concludes: “China projects its own 5,000-year history onto the wider contemporary world and reaches [the conclusion that]…[t]he world needs a Hegemon. To put it another way, for Chinese strategists, balance-of-power politics is inherently unbalanced. Racial pride, an innate sense of cultural superiority, and a long history all tell the Chinese that the role of Hegemon properly belongs to China and its rulers.” This Chinese view, he argues, has potentially dire implications because, “strictly speaking, the hegemon has no foreign policy other than one of continuous aggression against and absorption of neighboring states.”²

Some other recent accounts of China's strategic worldview, particularly by American conservatives, have echoed these themes. According to John Derbyshire, for instance: “The ambitions of Chinese nationalists are not restricted to Chinese territory, they are hegemonic. Indeed, they are imperial.” To be sure, Derbyshire does not seem to think that China wishes actually to conquer all East Asia—“at least [not] in the short term.” Rather, as he sees it, Chinese leaders wish to ensure that all countries in the region “acknowledge the overlordship of Beijing, and, above all, [do] not enter into alliances, nor even close friendships, with other powers.”³ By other accounts, Beijing is determined to use the fruits of its recent economic growth to “restore [its] historical position of regional dominance in Asia,” thus making the PRC “potentially the most important and dangerous rising power of the dawning Pacific century.”⁴ China's security strategy seeks “hegemony over much of Asia”⁵ and wishes “to replace the United States as the preeminent power in Asia, to reduce American influence, to prevent Japan and the United States from creating a kind of ‘contain China’ front, and to extend its power into the South China and East China Seas so that it can control the region's essential sea lanes.”⁶ Edward Friedman similarly sees the growth of an increasingly powerful strain of Chinese nationalism, one that envisions “a glorious hegemonic 21st century” of Chinese dominance in the Asia-Pacific region.”⁷ While some admit that “China has no pretensions to a global imperium” of the sort desired by the former Soviet Union, it is said to desire at least regional hegemony. “The scope of China's ultimate territorial and other ambitions in Asia,” it has been suggested, “is simply not evident at this juncture in history—probably not even to China itself.”⁸ Encouraged by a number of books decrying alleged Western failures to respond to such Chinese threats⁹—and notwithstanding a general diversion of attention to the Islamic world in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—debates over the implications of the PRC's growing economic and military power have become staples of modern foreign policy discourse in Washington, DC.¹⁰

CULTURE AND INERTIA

What many contemporary policy-oriented discussions of such issues have lacked, however, is a detailed study of the historical roots of contemporary Chinese approaches to international politics, undertaken specifically in order to provide analytic depth to such contemporary debates. What exactly are the historical foundations on which modern Chinese conceptions of international order are built? How salient is such history to understanding China's self-perceived role in the world today? What implications might such cultural baggage have for the PRC's approach to issues of international legality and cooperation, especially as China's relative power in the world continues to increase? This book attempts to help answer some of these questions, providing policy analysts, political scientists, and international lawyers with a broader understanding of some of the concepts and history underlying China's understanding of itself in the world.

The starting point for this examination is the grounding assumption that culture and history do matter in shaping a country's views of international order, legality, and legitimacy. As Lucian Pye has observed, “Culture is unquestionably significant, in some undetermined degree, in shaping the aspirations and fears, the preferences and prejudices, the priorities and expectations of people as they confront the challenges of social and political change…. Culture is also a remarkably durable and persistent factor in human affairs…. People cling to their cultural ways not because of some vague feeling for their historical legacies and traditions but because their culture is part and parcel of their personalities—and we know from psychoanalysis how hard (and expensive) it is to change a personality.”¹¹ In helping understand the interpenetration of Chinese history and cultural baggage with modern conceptions of international order, this book borrows somewhat from Alastair Iain Johnston's notion of strategic culture. According to Johnston, states have different “predominant sets of strategic preferences that are rooted in the ‘early’ or ‘formative’ military experiences of the state or its predecessor, and are influenced to some degree by the philosophical, political, cultural, and cognitive characteristics of the state and state elites as these develop through time.” The idea of strategic culture posits that “both conflict and cooperation in international politics are rooted in historically constructed and socially-learned assumptions about the strategic environment and appropriate responses to it.”¹²

To be sure, such notions fly somewhat in the face of traditional assumptions that state behavior can best be explained by more “objective” factors such as the structure of the international state system,¹³ the bureaucratic incentives of the institutional actors competing for influence within a particular country's sociopolitical structure or in the transnational realm,¹⁴ or the self-serving economic interests of a country's ruling elites.¹⁵ The idea that socially constructed views of the past and assumptions about the nature of one's environment can exert a powerful shaping effect on how actors see the world around them and order the hodgepodge of information inputs they receive every day, however, is today neither novel nor surprising. Theorists of decisionmaking dynamics have long identified the ways in which decisionmakers—especially in times of crisis but by no means only then—commonly resort to rules of thumb and stock assumptions about historical patterns and geopolitical causality in order to help them cope with the press of events.¹⁶

Such patterns may, at times, be influenced by highly personal and idiosyncratic factors, but information organizing is also a learned behavior, in which patterns are both projected backward on the past and passed forward through time by means of the education and socialization of individual human beings. As Gary Taylor has noted, “Cultural time, like cultural space, is always limited, and those limits create competition for access to the available resources.” As Taylor conceives it, “memory is rabid,” being “driven by a need to infect others, a compulsion to repeat itself,”¹⁷ and our collective human cognitive “space” is the environment in which various organizing patterns compete for survival over time. (Daniel Dennett, borrowing from the zoologist Richard Dawkins, has described this process in explicitly Darwinian terms, in a characteristically playful but intriguing discussion of “memes.”)¹⁸ Habits of mind, it would seem, both are subject to a sort of speciation and tend to perpetuate themselves in identifiable lines over time within human communities. As David Grene observed in his discussion of Herodotus's History, there is, therefore, “something real” in the “imaginative core” of even the most outlandish myths and stories that come down to us from the past, insofar as people tend to act on them today.¹⁹

More prosaically, it seems safe to say that the sophisticated observer need not revert to archaic and culturally deterministic ideas of national types in order to appreciate that different countries and peoples do have different experiences of the world and do understand their present at least partly through the prism of the past—or at least through what they take the past to have taught them. Culture is hardly destiny, and cultural baggage is seldom so heavy that its owners cannot carry it some distance down a road they themselves choose. Yet culture does matter, and, by understanding its “historically imposed inertia on choice,”²⁰ we can often make great strides toward understanding the motivational structure and behavior of specific groups, peoples, and national elites.

Johnston's specific concern in his work on Chinese strategic culture was to understand the inertia imposed by particular “ideas and habits of mind” as “observable constraints on choice” by elite decisionmakers during the Ming dynasty about the role of war in human affairs, the nature of threats facing China, and the efficacy of the use of force in international affairs.²¹ My task is a related but broader one, seeking to outline and explore the historical roots of some of the ideas underlying contemporary Chinese understandings of China's place in the world, the workings of international politics, and the meaning and legitimacy of international order and legality. This endeavor will necessarily require explorations of less depth than Johnston's book-length study of Ming-era strategic culture permitted him. This book will proceed from a quick survey of ancient Chinese history through a series of brief outlines of the geopolitical lessons that can be teased out of the Confucian classics, other ancient literature (e.g., Taoist and Buddhist texts), Legalist thinking, and the Military Classics. Then, I will sketch the ways in which China has dealt with both internal and international pluralism during the past twenty-five hundred years and attempt to draw from this analysis some of the implications for others of China's view of itself in the world, of the legitimacy of the international legal system, and of its images of and approaches to the foreign Other.

PACKING AND REPACKING THE BAGGAGE OF HISTORY

The Power of the Past

To begin with, it is worth noting that China's thousands of years of history have an extraordinary presence in contemporary Chinese life and thought. In the Anglophone West, it is common to dismiss a past event as being irrelevant to our contemporary life by describing it as “ancient history.” Such remote history, it is assumed, can have no meaning to us today precisely because it is ancient. Our world, Westerners tend to assume, is shaped and develops in new ways that cannot be understood through the myopic prisms of the past—and it is only by breaking free of such strictures that one can make real progress. Whether or not this is actually true, however, it is hard to exaggerate how much such Western assumptions are unlike the approach to history usually taken in China.

To be sure, China is also a society in the midst of rapid social and economic change, and ideals of law in the PRC today present a mosaic of traditional legal conceptions, Western influences (including Marxist theory, adopted and adapted so enthusiastically by Mao Zedong [Mao Tse-tung]), and “strenuous current efforts to adapt to the legal requirements of a fast-changing global economy.”²² Nevertheless, as China struggles with change, its leaders and its people must take what bearings they can by making reference to the past—and China is “perhaps the most historically conscious nation on Earth.”²³ As Witold Rodzinski has observed, the Chinese have long been “almost uniquely concerned with history, seeing in it not only the main source of knowledge regarding the functioning of human society…but viewing it also as providing a model for the present.”²⁴ In no country, agrees Samuel Kim, “does history seem to be playing as omnipotent and omnipresent a role as in China.”²⁵

China has a “long-standing tradition of using history to comment upon contemporary events,” a tradition described by the colorfully idiomatic saying zhi sang ma huai (point at the mulberry and revile the ash).²⁶ According to another ancient saying, “[The] common people worship the past and devalue the present. Those who disseminat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 - An Emergent China and the Weight of History
• 2 - History Lessons
• 3 - Confucian Conceptions of Order
• 4 - Power and Order in Other Chinese Traditions
• 5 - Western Assumptions about International Order
• 6 - Sinic Universalism in Theory and Practice
• 7 - The Prehistory of Foreign Engagement
• 8 - Engagement and Status Conflict
• 9 - Through Formal Equality to Inferiority
• 10 - China's Loss of Its Dependencies
• 11 - Imperial Denouement
• 12 - Intellectual Ferment in the Nationalist Era
• 13 - Mao and the Middle Kingdom
• 14 - China and the Foreign Other
• 15 - Conceptual Currents
• 16 - China Imagines Its World…and Its Future
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover