-
Introduction -- 2 [Audible]
1 National humiliation -- 3
2 Island barbarians -- 4
3 he gullet of the world -- 5
4 A pacified south -- 6-7
5 Sons of heaven, setting suns -- 8-9
6 Claims and markers -- 10
Conclusion.- 11
BOOKS / REVIEWS
'Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push For Global Power': Waking up to China's dream of holding court
BY TYLER ROTHMAR
STAFF WRITER
JUN 24, 2017
By now, even the most casual observer of goings on in Asia will have noted the aggressive geopolitical maneuvering of China, a country news outlets have taken to calling “resurgent.”
To understand how apt that term is, it’s necessary to visit China’s distant past. By examining the ancient roots of its self-regard, it’s possible to bring the nature of its relations with neighboring countries into sharp focus. This is the idea at the heart of “Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power,” a new book by Howard W. French, a former New York Times bureau chief whose posts included Tokyo and Shanghai.
After more than a millennium of being the dominant cultural force in Asia, China spent the 20th century either locked in conflict with foreign powers or mired in internal strife. After a return to relative stability in the 1980s following the self-destructive nightmare of the Cultural Revolution, the country began a period of growth that would lift millions from poverty, sparking breathtaking expansion in its economic and military spheres that still continues apace. For the first time in recent memory, China is daring to reclaim its past.
In this book, French has curated a history of China’s foreign relations by the light of which current events can be read, with the titular tian xia providing the central thread. Across changing dynasties and political systems, the leaders of China steadily regarded the known world, “everything under the heavens,” as their dominion by divine right. The view that China’s power and authority stemmed naturally from a superior culture and the “mandate of heaven” dies hard, according to French.
Resting his arguments on wide and thoroughly referenced reading, he follows the trail of this manifest destiny of the East through time, showing that in its dealings with other nations and peoples — whether exacting tribute and supplication from Okinawan royalty during most of the Edo Period (1603-1868) or playing Vietnamese and Cambodian interests against each other in the 1970s — China has seen itself as the cultural and economic center to which all else is peripheral.
For Japan and other countries nearby, this becomes clearer by the day. Citing ancient history, China has laid claim to everything within the so-called nine-dash line in the South China Sea, which contains vital shipping arteries. In addition to ignoring a 2016 ruling by an international tribunal that rejected the legal basis of such claims, China has engaged in large-scale land reclamation projects near the Spratly Islands within the nine-dash line and, by 2016, it had established anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems on some of these artificial outcroppings. Meanwhile, tensions regularly run high around the Senkaku Islands, which lie roughly halfway between Okinawa and Taiwan and are claimed by Japan (which controls them), China and Taiwan.
“Today, in ways that are increasingly unmistakable, China’s geopolitical play draws on Chinese conceptions of the world and of the country’s own past traditions of power,” writes French, who is today a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. “Everything about its diplomatic language says that it views the Western Pacific as it once did its ancient known world, its tian xia, and that it intends for this region to return to its status as a place where China’s paramount standing goes unchallenged.”
French pauses at telling points in history to examine China’s attitude. He hovers above Zheng He, a eunuch admiral whose voyages at the head of a massive fleet in the early 1400s through Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East and Africa have been dredged up as an example of both China’s historical control of sea lanes and the abiding benevolence of its culture. And he expends considerable ink detailing the ancient and fraught relationship between China and what is today Vietnam.
Reading French on China’s sudden switch of allegiance in the 1970s from Hanoi to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, it’s hard not to think of North Korea: “Ideology explains little about Beijing’s strategic choices in the region. China’s real motives stemmed from a calculus that was far older and ran much deeper. Its basic instinct, which is still operative today, was to cling to and shelter states that behaved like tributaries and to oppose, cajole, subvert or subdue those that stood in the way of its project to hold on to an old-fashioned realm.”
French ends with a detailed summation of recent developments and a demographic analysis. We are, he concludes, likely on the cusp of the roughest wave of tensions from China’s attempts to control its maritime surroundings. China is mounting this push, he believes, before it succumbs to complications from a graying cohort that dwarfs similar problems in Japan.
“Everything Under the Heavens” was completed just before the advent of the Trump administration, but in an interview with The Japan Times, French had this to say about China’s view of the current U.S. leadership: “I remember during my time as a correspondent in Tokyo being told by a Japanese diplomat that the most remarkable thing about the United States is its capacity for course correction, renewal and resilience. There are surely people among the Chinese intelligentsia who share this thought and are wary about reading too much in the present state of things in Washington. One must hope that this capacity will remain intact.”
Whatever happens, this book will remain a valuable resource for the continuity in the Chinese approach over time that it lays bare. “It is important never to lose sight of bedrock concepts like these, because they provide insights into how (Chinese President) Xi Jinping imagines ordering the world of today and tomorrow,” French writes. “They help to understand the China Dream itself.”
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JusenkyoGuide Michel Eyquem • 2 years ago
China is innocent because it hasn't picked on the biggest kid in the class but instead has bullied the weaker ones?
That's an interesting take on the situation.
•
Michel Eyquem JusenkyoGuide • 2 years ago
How many wars has Amerika been involved in last ten, twenty, thirty years? And how many were against bigger nations, and do the numvbers for China.
You can count, can you?
But then... you have not understood the comtent of my comment in the first place
JusenkyoGuide Michel Eyquem • 2 years ago
Then perhaps you need to focus more on your poor writing skills if I 'misunderstood' you attempt at a smoke screen. You brought up America in an article about a book about China's actions in Asia. Last I checked, the United States isn't in Asia. "But America!" is a poor excuse and a poor defense in terms of China's aggressive actions towards its neighbors. India is not the United States, and yet China violates its borders. The Philippines is not the United States, and yet China steals its land. Vietnam is most definitely not the United States, and yet China constantly butts heads with it. China has attempted to browbeat the rest of East and Southeast Asia and is getting more aggressive about it. That has nothing to do with the actions of the United States.
JusenkyoGuide Michel Eyquem • 2 years ago
China is innocent because it hasn't picked on the biggest kid in the class but instead has bullied the weaker ones?
That's an interesting take on the situation.
•
Michel Eyquem JusenkyoGuide • 2 years ago
How many wars has Amerika been involved in last ten, twenty, thirty years? And how many were against bigger nations, and do the numvbers for China.
You can count, can you?
But then... you have not understood the comtent of my comment in the first place
JusenkyoGuide Michel Eyquem • 2 years ago
Then perhaps you need to focus more on your poor writing skills if I 'misunderstood' you attempt at a smoke screen. You brought up America in an article about a book about China's actions in Asia. Last I checked, the United States isn't in Asia. "But America!" is a poor excuse and a poor defense in terms of China's aggressive actions towards its neighbors. India is not the United States, and yet China violates its borders. The Philippines is not the United States, and yet China steals its land. Vietnam is most definitely not the United States, and yet China constantly butts heads with it. China has attempted to browbeat the rest of East and Southeast Asia and is getting more aggressive about it. That has nothing to do with the actions of the United States.
=============
Everything Under Heaven17 min read
March 16, 2018Howard W. French
https://chinachannel.org/2018/03/16/everything-under-heaven/
Howard French on China’s geopolitical ambitions
There was once a country at the very center of the world, whose position was recognized as such by peoples both far and wide. Today, we call that country China.
Using the very word “country” is actually deceptive. The nation that we now instantly identify on the map as China hasn’t existed long. Throughout most of its history this dynastically ruled land would not even have recognized itself as a country, let alone seen its neighbors as such. It was an empire, and a largely borderless one, both in its geographical form and in what it considered to be the relevance or applicability— what the French would call the rayonnement— of its ideas. One could argue that there has never been a more universal conception of rule. Practically speaking, for the emperors of the Central Kingdom, this place we call China, the world could be roughly divided into two broad and simple categories, civilization and non-civilization, meaning the peoples who accepted the supremacy of its ruler, the Son of Heaven, and the principle of his celestial virtue, and those who didn’t— those who were beyond the pale.1
For the better part of two millennia, the norm for China, from its own perspective, was a natural dominion over everything under heaven, a concept known in the Chinese language as tian xia.2 It is not a term to be taken too literally. From very early times, China had an awareness of faraway places, including other great empires, like Rome, but contact with such distant regions of the world was tenuous at best and hence both economically and politically marginal.
In the geopolitics of Chinese empire, what was most vital to the Central Kingdom under tian xia, sometimes interpreted as the “known world” in this context, was a vast and familiar swath of geography that consisted of nearby Central Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia. Among these regions, Central Asia constituted a near-constant challenge to Chinese power, and quite often an outright threat. The dimensions of the Central Kingdom ebbed and flowed, mostly as a function of the shifting balance of power between Han (Chinese) and the peoples to the west and northwest, be they Turkic, Mongol, Manchurian, Tibetan or others. (China itself would come to be ruled by invaders from two of these cultures, the Mongols, from 1271 to 1368, and the Manchus, from 1644 to 1912, at the very end of the dynastic era.)
In geographical terms, we usually think of oceans as barriers that effectively separate countries, regions and continents, and in the faraway past nearly sealed them off from one another. But the littoral of East Asia, which runs in a gently articulated crescent from the Korean Peninsula south to the Strait of Malacca, has more typically served as a transmission belt for Chinese culture and prestige, Chinese commerce, and ultimately for Chinese power, although only occasionally hard power. From at least the Tang dynasty (618– 907) nearly to the chaotic end of dynastic rule in China in 1912, to one extent or another, the peoples of this sea-bound region often found ways to defer to China, acknowledging its centrality and loosely following its lead.
Functioning in this way, Chinese power came to underpin one of the most remarkable international systems that human civilization has ever seen— a unique form of what has sometimes been described as an extremely loose and distant brand of indirect rule by China over a very considerable slice of humanity. This description is inadequate in part because there were important variations in China’s relations with its eastern neighbors, including degrees of intensity of both contact and obeisance. But at the foundation of this remarkably resilient Pax Sinica lay a basic proposition that was reasonably consistent: Accept our superiority and we will confer upon you political legitimacy, develop a trade partnership and provide a range of what are known in the language of modern international affairs as public goods. These included policing the maritime commons, mediating disputes and granting access to China’s would-be universal system of learning, broadly based on Confucianism. In the core states of this region— Korea, Vietnam and, albeit with growing ambivalence, Japan— Chinese values, Chinese culture, the Chinese language, Chinese philosophy and Chinese religion were all regarded for long stretches of history as essential references, and even universal standards.
The “system” referred to here has long been known in the West (and yet never among Chinese themselves) as China’s tribute system. Throughout this period, beginning as far back as the Han dynasty (206 BCE– 220 CE), peoples in China’s imperial orbit regularly dispatched “embassies” to perform ritual submission before the Chinese emperor. The granting of trade rights by the imperial court by way of reward represented a tremendous boon that served as a powerful lubricant in bilateral relations. When the Chinese spoke of this system, their language was often full of euphemism and self-regard, frequently referring to the task of what would today be called in foreign policy “barbarian management.”
“To control the barbarians the sage rulers punished and resisted them when they came [to invade China], and prepared and guarded against them when they left,” reads one nineteenth-century account. “If attracted by China’s civilization, they came to offer tribute, they would be treated with courtesy, and kept under loose rein without severing the relationship, so that the blame of being crooked would always be on them.”
Within this system, foreign leaders often owed their very titles to the grant of recognition via patents of appointment bestowed by the Chinese emperor. Even as they sat on their thrones, new rulers in compliant tributary states had to content themselves with the title of heir apparent until they could receive their letters of investiture from the Celestial Emperor, for fear of infringing protocol.
Just how seriously this business was taken is vividly conveyed by a story from second-century BCE Vietnam, when a local king got it into his head to proclaim himself emperor in his own land. The response of the Han dynasty emperor Wen-Di was swift and unequivocal. “When two emperors appear simultaneously, one must be destroyed . . . struggling and not yielding is not the way of a person endowed with humanity,” he wrote to scold the Vietnamese ruler, whose response was one of abject submission. “I hear that two heroes cannot appear together, that two sages cannot exist in the same generation,” he stated in a public proclamation. “The Han emperor is the sagacious Son of Heaven. Henceforth, I shall suppress my own imperial edicts.” This pushback from China operated at two levels. Most explicitly, it was a direct statement that in its home region, the Han emperor would not countenance any would-be peers. Beyond that, China was signaling its determination to intervene anywhere in the world where it felt its central role or its vital interests might be challenged. In 1979, more than two thousand years later, as we shall see, China would mount an invasion of Vietnam aimed at making these precise points.
In fact, China would invade Vietnam numerous times during the succeeding centuries, which still resonates powerfully in their relationship today. But using violence to get its way was far from the ideal. As the Japanese scholar Takeshi Hamashita has written, “Like any hegemonic order [the tribute system] was backed by military force, but when the system functioned well, principles of reciprocity involving politics and economics permitted long periods of peaceful interaction.”
It has often been argued that the tribute system cost China more in trade concessions and in the constant hosting of visiting foreign delegations than any economic benefit it might have derived from commerce with an assortment of much smaller neighboring societies. But this is to ignore the domestic political value of the system for China’s emperors. As important as it was for neighboring rulers to enjoy the recognition of the Central Kingdom, it was equally important for the authority of a succession of Chinese emperors to have symbolically obeisant foreigners bowing regularly to their moral prestige and power. In other words, the willing subservience of others to prostrate themselves before the emperor provided domestic proof of his unassailable moral authority, of his possession of, in the well-worn phrase, the mandate of heaven. This was as true near the end of China’s imperial era as it was during early dynasties, such as the Han. When Britain, approaching the apogee of its global power in the late eighteenth century, sent a mission to China to try to establish relations on an equal footing with the Qing dynasty, Emperor Qianlong exceptionally granted permission for the envoy of King George III to visit Beijing, on the basis that it would “contribute to the Emperor’s glory.” Finally arriving in China after a nine-month sea voyage, the British were disconcerted to find that all along the route to the capital were hung banners written in large characters proclaiming that the European delegation was led by an “envoy paying tribute to the Great Emperor.” Indeed, Qianlong’s court had informed the public that the head of the foreign delegation, the Irishman George Macartney, was a member of the British royal family who had traversed the oceans in order to “contemplate Civilization.”
“Most dynasties collapsed under the twin blows of ‘inside disorder and outside calamity’ (nei-luan wai-huan), that is, domestic rebellion and foreign invasion,” wrote John King Fairbank, the eminent Harvard scholar of the tribute system. “Every regime was therefore under pressure to make the facts of its foreign relations fit the theory and so confirm its claim to rule China.”
The essence of this thought survives even in contemporary Chinese political thought. As Wang Jisi, dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University, wrote in 2015, “Ever since the founding of ‘New China’ in 1949, China’s foreign and domestic policies have both served the same goal: to maintain internal political stability under the leadership of the Communist Party.”
It is scarcely appreciated in the West today that the “international system” we so readily take for granted is actually a recent creation. It took shape between the middle of the nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth centuries, and started to be cobbled together at the precise moment that China was being subjugated by others and the world order it had sustained, and that had in turn sustained it for so long, was being replaced.
As our modern world was being born, China was plummeting toward a historical nadir in its relative regional power and influence. The norm for it had long been an unshakable conviction in the enduring universality of its values and ethics, its own culture, and its unquestioned centrality. The new, Western form of global universality was based not on a presumed natural hierarchy in the world, with China at the apex, but rather on the presumed equality (at least legally and theoretically) of clearly defined nations, on a raft of Judeo-Christian ideas and institutions, on spreading principles of electoral democracy, on open trade instead of managed tributary exchanges, and finally on a fast-emerging regime of international law. Underwriting all of these fine-sounding notions was, of course, Western and, in the twentieth century above all, American power.
China’s experience of its own successful and long-lasting international system, and of its long and mostly unchallenged status as the standard-setter of civilization itself by right, would have necessarily made a shift to almost anything new a difficult downgrade. But to an extent that is underappreciated in the West, the brutal circumstances of the transition to what is our now familiar world, coming at a moment of unprecedented Chinese weakness, feeds an unusually deep-seated ambivalence toward contemporary norms, which is becoming more and more apparent with each passing year of increasing Chinese power.
Fairbank wrote with considerable understatement nearly fifty years ago, when China was ruled in largely autarkic fashion by Mao Zedong in near-permanent, revolutionary tension with the postwar system, “Modern China’s difficulty of adjustment to the international order of nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has come partly from the great tradition of the Chinese world order. This tradition is of more than historical interest and bears upon Chinese thinking today.”
In its most familiar form, the narrative of the demise of the Chinese world order is the story of rampaging Western imperialism’s triumphant march into East Asia. In its textbooks and in its nationalist propaganda, China itself has styled the one-hundred-year period during which the modern world was built as its Century of Humiliation, with Britain’s Opium Wars and the sack of Beijing by both Britain and France accorded pride of place. Although the aggressive expansion of Western powers into the China-centered world of East Asia was a critical fact of that period, it seems more likely that what the West achieved was in reality the early transformation of the old Chinese world that would soon lead to even more dramatic changes. Principally these would be wrought not by Westerners but rather by historically subsidiary nations in East Asia, as the yawning discrepancy between China’s self-image and geopolitical reality became unsustainable.
Although there were many actors in Asia seeking their own separate accommodations with the nascent international order, the main driver of the change that definitively closed the curtains on the two millennia-old Sinocentric order in the region was without doubt imperial Japan. It defeated its much larger neighbor in 1895 in the Sino-Japanese War, and thereafter surged ahead of it according to almost every measure of national power over the next half century, only to be driven out of China and defeated in World War II, mostly as a result of reckless military overreach. But even in the decades following its ultimate defeat by the United States, Japan has remained well ahead of China in numerous ways, most obviously in per capita wealth and quality of life, but also, even if the lead here is shrinking, in things like technological advancement and global cultural influence. If nothing else, Japan’s grab for great power, coming very largely at China’s expense, proved the enduring relevance of the previously quoted maxim “When two emperors appear simultaneously, one must be destroyed.” Indeed, up until the present day, East Asia has never proven large enough for two great powers to coexist peacefully, and the question of whether this will be possible in the future looms darkly over the region and frames many of the questions to be explored in these pages.
Seen from this angle, the lingering place of the tribute system in the Chinese psyche takes on a new importance. It was one thing for China to be humiliated by the West; Chinese thinkers have taken comfort in the idea that barbarians from afar could never have been expected to accept the Central Kingdom’s virtue and cultural superiority. But the defeats administered beginning in the late nineteenth century by an upstart Japan, for the Chinese an intrinsically inferior nation whose very origins lay in immense cultural debt to China in everything from writing systems and literature to religion and governance, were a different matter, and the energies unleashed by this history are still profoundly at work in the world today. The towering early-twentieth-century Chinese intellectual and seminal figure in the birth of the country’s modern nationalism, Liang Qichao, wrote that China’s loss in the Sino-Japanese War “awakened my country from the long dream of four thousand years.”
During most of the second half of the twentieth century, including most of the Maoist era, Beijing took a relatively relaxed attitude toward Japan, eagerly absorbing its technology and increasingly massive investments and studying its successes once China’s so-called reform and opening period got under way in the early 1980s. As it did so, Beijing mostly deemphasized the divisive past. China similarly took a largely accepting view of American military primacy in East Asia in the post-Mao era. In hindsight, with both of these positions recently having changed dramatically in the space of less than a decade marked by sharp national ascent, one is tempted to say that China simply made a pragmatic calculation that it was too weak to do anything about either of these situations and should therefore concentrate on quietly building its strength. This it has certainly done, and today, as China’s self-regard has swollen, along with its newfound power, Japan has returned to the center of the Chinese gaze in the form of a bull’s-eye; the focus of Beijing’s approach to the country (and indeed to the entire sea-bound region that once defined the tribute system, and especially Vietnam and the Philippines) is to restore what from the perspective of the Central Kingdom is considered the natural order. This, it must be said, is not merely the preoccupation of the Chinese state, though. It has also increasingly become a consuming obsession of rising populist nationalism. Success or failure in this grand pursuit, therefore, will go far in determining the legitimacy of China’s leaders, from the assertive incumbent president, Xi Jinping, onward, and indeed could well decide the survival or failure of the Chinese Communist Party.
China’s ultimate goal, however, is not merely to restore a semblance of the region’s old order, an updated kind of tributary system in which the nations of Southeast Asia or even a wealthy and customarily diffident Japan will have no choice but to hitch their fortunes to it and bow to Beijing’s authority. A larger, more ambitious goal is already edging into view. This ambition, evident from behavior even if still not fully avowed, involves supplanting American power and influence in the region as an irreplaceable stepping-stone along the way to becoming a true global power in the twenty-first century. Shi Yinhong, one of China’s most prominent foreign policy realist thinkers, has written that Xi’s goal is “to give [China] a dominant role in Asia and the Western Pacific— at the cost of the U.S.’s ascendancy.” In a conversation with me, he added, “The West shouldn’t think so much about integrating China into the Western liberal order, but rather try to accommodate China.” This, he said, would ultimately mean having the United States accept military parity with China in the Pacific, the ceding of what he called a “narrow but substantial span of strategic space” for China in the nearby seas, and a loosening of America’s alliance structure in the region.
Even though he is a respected insider, Shi’s vision is provisional and anything but official. It points us nonetheless toward perhaps the most important question there is in this era’s realm of international relations: What kind of power is China likely to become? What follows is an extended reading of the country’s long past undertaken in order to comprehend how it has conceived of and used its power historically. I do not believe in what is sometimes referred to as cultural DNA. With their infinite contingencies, China, and indeed the world, is far too complicated for anything so simple as that. And yet in drawing on these traditions and exploring a number of historical Chinese reflexes, I believe we may better inform our sense of how China might exercise its growing national power in the decades ahead. ∎
This excerpt from Everything Under the Heavens published by arrangement with Vintage, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
- As the Yale political scientist James C. Scott explains in his book The Art of Not Being Governed, at least since the twelfth century the Chinese have made a further distinction among the “uncivilized,” dividing this world into two categories, “raw” and “cooked,” with the latter meaning amenable to assimilation.
- Tian xia is customarily translated as “all under heaven,” though I prefer the slightly modified form “everything under the heavens.” In his book Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power, the prominent Chinese political scientist Yan Xuetong cited the ancient classic The Book of Odes to explain these terms: “The term all under heaven was virtually synonymous with the world. The title Son of Heaven referred to the person who ruled over all people on the earth as the representative of Heaven. The emperors of China’s feudal times called themselves Son of Heaven, which shows that they thought of themselves as rulers of the world. The idea that ‘under heaven’s canopy there is nowhere that is not the king’s land; up to the sea’s shores, there are none who are not the king’s servants’ illustrates that the contention for the power of Son of Heaven was, from another point of view, a contention for world-leadership.”
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He has written an interesting, thought provoking, and timely book: Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Shapes China's Push for Global Power; Knopf published it in March 2017.
The book examines China’s view of itself and uses an extensive analysis of China’s long history to both set the scene and propose how history informs China’s recent push for global power. The writing is clear, coherent, and vibrant. China’s diminished global position in the 19th and 20th centuries was very much an historical anomaly. For over two millennia China was effectively without a peer; it was the largest country by population and seemed not to want for anything. From its own perspective, China had a natural dominion over everything under the heaven, a concept known as tian xia (天下); it sees itself as the cultural and economic center to which all else is peripheral hence the Chinese name for itself zhong guo (中国) the Middle Kingdom. Combining historical research with investigative journalism, French draws the links between this historical concept and the country’s current aspirations, particularly with regard to the South China Sea. China spent the 20th century either locked in conflict with foreign powers or mired in internal strife. After a return to relative stability in the 1980s the country, led by Deng Xiaoping, began a period of growth that would raise hundreds of millions from poverty, sparking spectacular expansion in its economic and military spheres that still continues. For the first time in recent memory, China is daring to reclaim its past. The post-Deng period was largely defined by Deng’s 24 Character Strategy: 冷静观察, 站稳脚跟, 沉着应付, 韬光养晦, 善于守拙, 绝不当头 (lěngjìng guānchá, zhàn wěn jiǎogēn, chénzhuó yìngfù, tāoguāngyǎnghuì, shànyú shǒu zhuō, jué bù dāngtóu) "Observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership.” Until 2012 and the arrival of Xi Jinping as the chairman of the Communist Party of China the strategy largely held. It is apparent that the new leader, Xi dada as he is known in China, feels that it is time for the Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation and for it to realise the Chinese Dream. China is no longer biding its time; maintaining a low profile; and eschewing leadership. The most interesting part of the book is the description of history and China’s view of itself as a once great power humbled by outside countries. French outlines many of China’s current political and strategic policies and how China views itself from an historical perspective. There is an excellent discussion of China’s use of the “Nine Dash Line” to provide historical justification of its claim to nearly all the South China Sea. China refused to take part in the international Permanent Court of Arbitration tribunal in the Hague and ignored the 2016 ruling that firmly rejected the legal basis of such claims. This puts the 1982 UNCLOS, to which China is a signatory, in some danger should it withdraw. For Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Shapes China's Push for Global Power 2 anyone wanting to understand how China strives to use its perspective on history to justify its expansionist actions in international law the book is recommended. Moreover, China has engaged in large-scale island building projects within the nine-dash line: it is estimated that it has constructed about 30 hectares of new real estate at Fiery Cross, Subi, and Mischief Reefs in the Spratlys, and North, Tree, and Triton Islands in the Paracels. By 2017, it had established anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems and extensive buildings on some of these artificial islands. These are Beijing’s largest bases in the area, containing air fields and harbours capable of supporting the largest military aircraft and vessels. Using historical reference French lays out the case that it has a long history of dominating its smaller and weaker neighbours. He spends much time providing background on the often fraught Sino-Japan relationship. The historical relationship during the Edo period is examined in some detail. It is brought up to date with the recent situation in the East China Sea and the control of the Senkakus or Diaoyu Islands. The diplomatic and military manoeuvering between Japan and China is well covered. One of the major points raised by French that contradicts the official Chinese narrative is the story of Admiral Zheng He who led a Chinese armada to Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka and the east coast of Africa under the Ming in the 15th Century. In China, Zheng He is glorified as an unconventional explorer; an ambassador of Chinese benevolence. Unlike Western explorers and colonisers, whose expeditions were marked by greed, violence, and conquest. French reminds us that Zheng's massive ships were actually troop carriers, whose arrival off the coast carried a distinctly menacing message to the coastal kingdoms being visited. Modern China continues to proclaim this concept of benevolent internationalism that is contradicted by events well-known to those living outside of China. In a very detailed exposition French examines the historical relations between Vietnam and China. It was in Vietnam that China’s last went to war with thousands paying with their lives in early 1979. French, with two soldiers who fought in the conflict, visited the graves of PLA soldiers in Yunan. The war is not well known in China and the graves are hidden in the jungle hills of Yunan. Later he also describes in harrowing detail the massacre of 64 Vietnamese sailors and soldiers on the Johnson Reef by the PLAN in March 1988. The grainy YouTube videos of the March 14, 1988 incident are well worth viewing for a sobering reminder of the brutality of the regime in Beijing. (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=14+march+1988+china+vs+vietnam) The book clearly lays out how basic economics is the driving factor in much of China’s behavior toward its neighbors. The ruling Communist Party recognises the obligation to continue expanding the Chinese economy in the face of structural issues such as high levels of institutional debt and a rapidly aging population. The often provocative acts conducted by China in the last number of years have occasionally produced a nationalist backlash among the Chinese citizens that the ruling party may have trouble controlling. This is particularly the case with anti- Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Shapes China's Push for Global Power 3 Japanese propaganda and resulting public action. In one possible scenario described in detail, an unintended clash in the disputed Senkaku Islands between Japan and China could easily erupt into a global crisis through miscalculation and rapid escalation. China has a very unbalanced demographic because of the former one-child policy; it may be destined grow old before it grows rich. The social and economic issues China is likely to face through mid-century are expected to increase. The leadership will face a rapidly aging population requiring extensive social services that will undermine the country’s economic growth exacerbating instability within the country. This may put continued pressure on the regime to justify its legitimacy and claim to power, making more possible the potential for continued hegemonic acts to distract from internal social strains. It is an excellent and very well written book that I highly recommend.
The book examines China’s view of itself and uses an extensive analysis of China’s long history to both set the scene and propose how history informs China’s recent push for global power. The writing is clear, coherent, and vibrant. China’s diminished global position in the 19th and 20th centuries was very much an historical anomaly. For over two millennia China was effectively without a peer; it was the largest country by population and seemed not to want for anything. From its own perspective, China had a natural dominion over everything under the heaven, a concept known as tian xia (天下); it sees itself as the cultural and economic center to which all else is peripheral hence the Chinese name for itself zhong guo (中国) the Middle Kingdom. Combining historical research with investigative journalism, French draws the links between this historical concept and the country’s current aspirations, particularly with regard to the South China Sea. China spent the 20th century either locked in conflict with foreign powers or mired in internal strife. After a return to relative stability in the 1980s the country, led by Deng Xiaoping, began a period of growth that would raise hundreds of millions from poverty, sparking spectacular expansion in its economic and military spheres that still continues. For the first time in recent memory, China is daring to reclaim its past. The post-Deng period was largely defined by Deng’s 24 Character Strategy: 冷静观察, 站稳脚跟, 沉着应付, 韬光养晦, 善于守拙, 绝不当头 (lěngjìng guānchá, zhàn wěn jiǎogēn, chénzhuó yìngfù, tāoguāngyǎnghuì, shànyú shǒu zhuō, jué bù dāngtóu) "Observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership.” Until 2012 and the arrival of Xi Jinping as the chairman of the Communist Party of China the strategy largely held. It is apparent that the new leader, Xi dada as he is known in China, feels that it is time for the Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation and for it to realise the Chinese Dream. China is no longer biding its time; maintaining a low profile; and eschewing leadership. The most interesting part of the book is the description of history and China’s view of itself as a once great power humbled by outside countries. French outlines many of China’s current political and strategic policies and how China views itself from an historical perspective. There is an excellent discussion of China’s use of the “Nine Dash Line” to provide historical justification of its claim to nearly all the South China Sea. China refused to take part in the international Permanent Court of Arbitration tribunal in the Hague and ignored the 2016 ruling that firmly rejected the legal basis of such claims. This puts the 1982 UNCLOS, to which China is a signatory, in some danger should it withdraw. For Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Shapes China's Push for Global Power 2 anyone wanting to understand how China strives to use its perspective on history to justify its expansionist actions in international law the book is recommended. Moreover, China has engaged in large-scale island building projects within the nine-dash line: it is estimated that it has constructed about 30 hectares of new real estate at Fiery Cross, Subi, and Mischief Reefs in the Spratlys, and North, Tree, and Triton Islands in the Paracels. By 2017, it had established anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems and extensive buildings on some of these artificial islands. These are Beijing’s largest bases in the area, containing air fields and harbours capable of supporting the largest military aircraft and vessels. Using historical reference French lays out the case that it has a long history of dominating its smaller and weaker neighbours. He spends much time providing background on the often fraught Sino-Japan relationship. The historical relationship during the Edo period is examined in some detail. It is brought up to date with the recent situation in the East China Sea and the control of the Senkakus or Diaoyu Islands. The diplomatic and military manoeuvering between Japan and China is well covered. One of the major points raised by French that contradicts the official Chinese narrative is the story of Admiral Zheng He who led a Chinese armada to Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka and the east coast of Africa under the Ming in the 15th Century. In China, Zheng He is glorified as an unconventional explorer; an ambassador of Chinese benevolence. Unlike Western explorers and colonisers, whose expeditions were marked by greed, violence, and conquest. French reminds us that Zheng's massive ships were actually troop carriers, whose arrival off the coast carried a distinctly menacing message to the coastal kingdoms being visited. Modern China continues to proclaim this concept of benevolent internationalism that is contradicted by events well-known to those living outside of China. In a very detailed exposition French examines the historical relations between Vietnam and China. It was in Vietnam that China’s last went to war with thousands paying with their lives in early 1979. French, with two soldiers who fought in the conflict, visited the graves of PLA soldiers in Yunan. The war is not well known in China and the graves are hidden in the jungle hills of Yunan. Later he also describes in harrowing detail the massacre of 64 Vietnamese sailors and soldiers on the Johnson Reef by the PLAN in March 1988. The grainy YouTube videos of the March 14, 1988 incident are well worth viewing for a sobering reminder of the brutality of the regime in Beijing. (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=14+march+1988+china+vs+vietnam) The book clearly lays out how basic economics is the driving factor in much of China’s behavior toward its neighbors. The ruling Communist Party recognises the obligation to continue expanding the Chinese economy in the face of structural issues such as high levels of institutional debt and a rapidly aging population. The often provocative acts conducted by China in the last number of years have occasionally produced a nationalist backlash among the Chinese citizens that the ruling party may have trouble controlling. This is particularly the case with anti- Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Shapes China's Push for Global Power 3 Japanese propaganda and resulting public action. In one possible scenario described in detail, an unintended clash in the disputed Senkaku Islands between Japan and China could easily erupt into a global crisis through miscalculation and rapid escalation. China has a very unbalanced demographic because of the former one-child policy; it may be destined grow old before it grows rich. The social and economic issues China is likely to face through mid-century are expected to increase. The leadership will face a rapidly aging population requiring extensive social services that will undermine the country’s economic growth exacerbating instability within the country. This may put continued pressure on the regime to justify its legitimacy and claim to power, making more possible the potential for continued hegemonic acts to distract from internal social strains. It is an excellent and very well written book that I highly recommend.
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