Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750
Ira Hubert
February 10, 2013
Restless Empire: China
and the World Since 1750. By Odd Arne Westad. Basic Books, New York, 2012. 515
pp.
Xi Jinping’s rise, Bo Xilai’s fall, Chen Guangcheng’s escape,
and maritime crises between China and Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines—and
ensuing protests in each nation—kept the foreign news bureaus in Beijing
buzzing throughout 2012. The quick succession and at times relationship of
these and other dramas with each other left even the most seasoned
China-watchers scratching their heads and often reaching for the nearest Asia-Pacific
map they could find. Leaders of the People’s Republic hoped it would be a quiet
year, punctuated only by celebrations marking the once-a-decade gathering of
the Communist Party’s National Congress, held in the capital city last
November.
Despite
the opaque processes by which their national leaders are chosen and government
decisions are made, opinions among mainland Chinese in these first hundred days
of Xi Jinping’s term were in abundant supply. Regarding the clout China has
attained in global affairs alongside its tremendous economic growth at home,
genuine feelings of confidence and positive expectations about the coming years
predominate. But nearly just as often—and at times in the very same
sentence—feelings of insecurity and mistrust of other nations are expressed as
well. This is the paradox of Chinese nationalism. Norwegian historian Odd Arne
Westad’s Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 provides
a fine starting point for understanding the manifestation of this paradox
today, be it in the PRC’s proud claims over uninhabited islands in the East
China Sea or its defiant defense of the Syrian regime at the United Nations.
Westad calls his book a “revisionist take” on the foreign
relations of China, in the sense that rather than writing a strict history on
war and diplomacy, he aims to highlight “encounters” with the outside world,
not only among high officials but also workers and businessmen, missionaries,
students, and others. Thanks to this approach, we learn how migrations of
mainlanders to distant parts of the Asian continent and across the globe have
been critical to the introduction of foreign goods, technologies, and political
philosophies to China for well over 200 years. Without this transmitting and
domestic refashioning of ideas from overseas—most notably from Japan, Western
Europe, Russia, and the United States—China’s historical trajectory would look
unquestionably different. For Chinese revolutionaries of every generation
Westad notes, “abroad has always been the initial staging ground for their
dreams and hopes.”
A
second, and equally important argument the author makes by way of illustrating
these cross-cultural encounters is that it remains a challenge to this day to
articulate just who and what have comprised China. Questions such as “Who
counts as Chinese?” or “Where is China?” may appear academic, but try asking a
native Beijinger or a Uighur in Xinjiang province or a Taiwanese Canadian, and
you will get three different answers. Westad’s narration of clashes along China’s
periphery since the Qing Dynasty makes clear the mixed success of rulers trying
to promote “one inclusive identity” from afar. The persistence of a certain
self-image in light of China’s imperial past—during which the country was
central to the natural order of things in the known world and lacked perfectly
defined borders—means matters such as where, geographically, China begins and
ends, remain fiercely contested even among its own citizens. One need only note
the nearly one hundred incidents of Tibetans self-immolating in the past year
to recognize this fact. Or how taking a domestic flight or bus ride across
Muslim-majority Xinjiang, seems, in a word, militarized in a way that riding
the gaotie (bullet train) to Shanghai does not. China is not your typical
nation-state.
Restless Empire provides a brisk
overview of the most significant diplomatic and military episodes in modern
Chinese history. It neatly summarizes the bloody catalog of forced land
concessions and other humiliations at the hands of foreign powers, and the
intellectual soul-searching and political movements emerging alongside them.
Westad highlights points of contact between Chinese and non-Chinese at times
and places where we might have hardly expected them. For instance, he tells of
some 150,000 Chinese laborers recruited to serve on the Western Front in Europe
in the First World War. By the time the war ended, these Chinese had aided the
armies of France, Russia, Great Britain, and the U.S. in various ways; at least
3,000 lost their lives in the process.
Back
on the mainland during roughly the same period, American missionaries and
reform-minded educators were instrumental in establishing and managing Tsinghua
University, Nanjing University, and the precursor to Beijing University—among the
most elite academies in China today. For Westad, reminding readers of such
cooperation with Western actors is not intended to be self-congratulatory.
Rather, it is to drive home the point that China’s engagement with the world
has run far and long before our own lifetimes—before the Nixon-Kissinger
rapprochement or the 2008 Beijing Olympics or other conventional markers of its
“opening up” or “coming out.”
If
there is a single, overarching theme to China’s history as Westad sees
it—whether governed by Qing emperors, early twentieth century republicans or
Nationalists, Mao Zedong for a quarter century, or the market-oriented elites
of today—it is the “encounter with capitalist modernity and of how Chinese
shaped that modernity and were shaped by it” up to current times. He falls
short of coming up with a firm definition or contemporary vision of this unique
“Chinese modernity.” Linked to the topic is the thorny question of what
governing model will prevail, or ought to, in China the years ahead, and Westad
has his predictions; for instance, that Beijing might take a lesson or two
about “good governance” from Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao.
Competing ideas about the proper path of political and
economic development for China are as central now in defining relations between
rulers and ruled in the country as they have been in the past. The passions
that differing views are capable of stirring were on full display to the world
recently during the brief censorship scandal involving the outspoken Southern
Weekly newspaper, based in Guangzhou. Borrowing a phrase coined by Xi
Jinping himself a few days earlier, the paper planned to run a provocative new
year’s editorial with the title, “China Dream: Dream of Constitutionalism.”
When provincial officials blocked the article from going to press, journalists
and other supporters staged a strike. Also appropriating Xi’s phrase,
counter-protesters carried signs proclaiming, “We don’t want the American
dream—We want the Chinese dream,” and called for the “traitor newspaper” to be
shut down. Rather than brushing this off as empty rhetoric, we might consider
it to be an expression of the quest for an elusive Chinese modernity that
Westad argues has been at the heart of every revolutionary struggle in China’s
history. Whether the dream can be converted into a stable reality for 1.3
billion citizens before the end of Xi’s term, and whether the road to it will
be an entirely peaceful one, is far from clear.
Ira Hubert is a doctoral student in diplomatic history at McGill
University, concentrating on Sino-Arab
relations. From 2008 to 2011, he served as an intelligence analyst with the
U.S. Department of Justice.