China's rise in Historical Perspective

Abstract

China today is the product of thousands of years of expansion. Much like the Russian and American empires, the Chinese Empire resulted from the ruthless extension of power from a relatively small core over a vast territory. The original inhabitants of those lands were driven away, killed, or assimilated. For much of its history, China dominated East Asia and controlled its contacts with the rest of the world. In the nineteenth century, however, the rise of European power challenged China and, for a relatively brief period – perhaps 100 years – Europeans and subsequently Japanese were able to impose their will on the Chinese people. Beginning with the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, China has reasserted itself as a force in world affairs. Its government united the people and gained control over most of the territory the Han and Qing empires had acquired. As China regains its great power status, it can be expected to behave as all great empires have throughout history, resume its place as East Asia's hegemonic power and extend its influence wherever it can in the rest of the world.

Key words:

• Rise
• empire
• humiliation

Notes

¹For a useful discussion of the historiography of the Xia, see Cho-yun Hsu and Katheryn M. Linduff, Western Chou Civilization (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1988), 9–17.

²David N. Keightly, ‘The Late Shang State: When? Where? and What?’, in David N. Keightly (ed.), The Origins of Chinese Civilization (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 1983), 529.

³Li Xueqin, Eastern Zhou and Qin Civilizations (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1985) is the best introduction to this period.

⁴See Yu Ying-shih, ‘Han Foreign Relations’, in Denis Twitchett and Michael Lowe (ed.), Cambridge History of China, I: The Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 B.C.–A.D. 220 (Cambridge: CUP 1986).

⁵See esp. Howard J. Wechsler, ‘T'ai-tsung (Reign 626–49) The Consolidator’, in Denis Twitchett (ed.), Cambridge History of China, III: Sui and T'ang China, 589–906, Part I, 188–241 and Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 1963).

⁶All of the essays in Morris Rossabi's, China Among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and its Neighbors. 10th–14th Centuries (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 1983) are valuable for this period.

⁷Rossabi's Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 1988) is essential reading.

⁸Fresh insights into and brilliant analysis of Ming foreign policy can be found in Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton UP 1995).

⁹New approaches to the Qing era can be found in James Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, NC: Duke UP 1995) and Evelyn Rawski, ‘Presidential Address: Reenvisioning the Qing: The Significance of the Qing Period in Chinese History’, Journal of Asian Studies 55 (1996), 829–50.

¹⁰See Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1988) and William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Armed Force and Society Since A.D. 1000 (Univ. of Chicago Press 1982).

¹¹Akira Iriye, ‘Imperialism in East Asia’, in James B, Crowley, Modern East Asia: Essays in Interpretation (New York: Harcourt 1970), 129.

¹²Readers interested in the historiography of the Boxer movement should begin with Paul A. Cohen's History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia UP 1997).

¹³See Ernest P. Young, ‘China in the Early Twentieth Century: Tasks for a New World’, in Merle Goldman and Andrew Gordon, Historical Perspectives on Contemporary East Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2000).

¹⁴The era of Japanese dominance is most accessible in W.G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 1894–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1987).

¹⁵Warren I. Cohen, America's Response to China, 4th edition (New York: Columbia UP 2000), 125–32; See also Xiaoyuan Liu, A Partnership for Disorder (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1996).

¹⁶Cohen, America's Response, 133.

¹⁷Cohen, America's Response, 162–3.

¹⁸Chen Jian, Mao's China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press), 50–3.

¹⁹Chen, Mao's China, 54–5; See also Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford UP 1993).

²⁰Warren I. Cohen, Dean Rusk (Totowa, NJ: Cooper Square Publishers, 1980), 59.

²¹See, for example, John W. Garver, Chinese-Soviet Relations 1937–1945: The Diplomacy of Chinese Nationalism (New York: OUP 1988), 238–9.

²²Chen, Mao's China and the Cold War, 175–81 presents a fascinating and plausible analysis of Mao's decision.

²³William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W.W. Norton 2003), 389–94; Chen, Mao's China and the Cold War, 78–82.

²⁴Cohen, Dean Rusk, 169–70.

²⁵John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, China Builds the Bomb (Stanford UP 1988).

²⁶See Roderick MacFarquhar's three volume Origins of the Cultural Revolution (New York: Columbia UP 1974–97).

²⁷Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, ‘Taiwan Expendable? Nixon and Kissinger Go to China’, Journal of American History 92 (June 2005), 109–35.

²⁸Merle Goldman and Roderick MacFarquhar (eds.), The Paradox of China's Post-Mao Reforms (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1999).

²⁹Cohen, America's Response to China, 211–32.

³⁰Warren I. Cohen and Li Zhao (eds.), Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule: The Economic and Political Implications of Reversion (Cambridge: CUP 1997).

³¹Avery Goldstein, Rising to the Challenge: China's Grand Strategy and International Security (Stanford UP 2005) is excellent on Chinese strategic thinking. See also David Shambaugh (ed.), Power Shift: China and Asia's New Dynamics (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 2005) and Robert G. Sutter, China's Rise in Asia: Promises and Perils (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield 2005).

³²See C. Fred Bergsten, Bates Gill, Nicolas Lardy, and Derek Mitchell, China: The Balance Sheet: What the World Needs to Know About the Emerging Superpower (New York: Public Affairs 2006), esp.,118–61.

³³See essays in Goldman and MacFarquhar, The Paradox of Post-Mao Reforms. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999).