Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750
First posted November 2012
There is much I would change about this review seven years later:
It is far too long.
The long block quotes absolutely kill me. I know I liked them, but c’mon, nobody is going to read that many block quotes.
I haven’t realized not every piece of writing needs to be an audition for The New Yorker.
Too long!
My points of comparison are virtually non-existent, so I may have internalized more of this author’s particularized views of China’s history than is especially beneficial. Succinctly: I swallowed this book en masse: interpreted it as gospel; a template against which all future information will be compared; a touchstone; idealized like a collegiate significant other and polished in memory so that all that can be recalled is smooth, rounded, flawless. I readily admit that I don’t know much about China, which is why I picked this up in the first place. I was not disappointed. I didn't bring enough prior knowledge with me to Restless Empire to legitimately dispute what I learned, which is not a great position to be in when writing any sort of response to non-fiction. But for being able to create cogent thoughts about modern China based on what seem to be accurate historical references, Restless Empire is a great first step for the China novice embarking on the thousand mile journey of Chinese history.
Stylistically, this book is slow in a measured and methodical way rather than plodding or pedantic:
Today [people] often do not know the degree to which China was an open country before 1949 or the key role foreigners played in China’s development. Foreigners often do not understand the sense of humiliation today’s Chinese feel when the look back on the past, at least in the version they get presented: The concessions, the extraterritoriality, the financial reparations, and the haughty behavior of foreigners in China would be a bad example of international interaction for any country, but they particularly rile a generation grown up on spoonfuls of government-sanctioned nationalism.
This is five hundred pages of well articulated and strongly supported research. It is information that I simply didn’t know about a country that has rarely been defined in terms other than “rival”, “other”, “exotic”, or “Communist” in a conversational setting beyond academia. “Over the past two millennia it has been an empire rather than a country, but an empire with very open and very fluid borders. Its inhabitants have, until very recently, been defined by the civilization they were part of rather than by the way they look or the ancestors they have.” China as a concept in American parlance summons a wide variety of specters, depending on the speaker: cheap manufactured good; human rights violations; outsourced jobs; Communism. It is difficult to find a reference with tone and tenor that isn’t slanted—I cannot say for sure whether the author, Odd Arne Westad, has some agenda that I didn’t grok to, but I can say that, provided his facts are accurate, my comprehensive understanding of the nation of China has increased exponentially. Restless Empire leaves you with an almost too-clear picture of how a national history can color a global present.
“The US government banned Chinese immigration in 1882. It is the only restriction Congress has ever enacted directed against all citizens of a specific country. The ban lasted up to 1943, when Chinese officials managed to sufficiently embarrass their wartime ally to have it withdrawn.” This is a flatly absurd and repulsive historical fact that tends to be downplayed in American education. This is followed, a few hundred pages later, with some information that would seem innocuous, even laudable, taken on its own:
For Americans with an interest in the outside world, China also became a prime object of the American desire for reform and modernization. A powerful movement for reform at home took hold in the 1890s. Missionaries, health workers, economists, engineers, and businessmen went to China with lessons drawn from the American experiment. After China became a republic in 1912, some Americans believed that the US republican heritage would be of particular significance to the Chinese.”
How distasteful, that juxtaposition; only a century ago citizens of the U.S. made it their business to “modernize” (read: “civilize”) a nation whose citizens were barred, root and stem, from coming to this country. Hypocrisy of the highest order, and, as mentioned, even after China shifted into a pro tem Republic the absolute ban was still in place. Not to forget the direct application of foreign violence.
For foreign leaders, China was the first “failed state,” and the intervention in 1900 was the first “coalition of the willing,” meaning, in this case, an alliance of the main Western countries and Japan directed against Chinese “barbarity” and against the Qing state’s unwillingness to uphold “civilized” norms of government and public behavior....More fully than any event before it, the Boxer war had placed China outside the Western-led international system, a pariah state, the center of a 1900 axis of evil that incorporated resistance against colonial domination everywhere, from Sudan to Afghanistan to Korea.”
China’s view of Western Civilization doesn’t seem to have shifted all that much in the last two centuries, regardless of the invasions, banning, or embargoes.
The matter that preoccupied Chinese more than anything else was the absence of filial piety and the lack of a moral rather than a material justification for actions taken. ‘It is not that our emperors or prime ministers of each dynasty were less intelligent than the Westerners,’ Liu Xihong exclaimed when visiting London in 1876, ‘but none among them strove to open up the skies or dig up the earth to compete with nature for enriching themselves. Our far-seeing ancestors also cared for the future, but not in the same ways as the English who always run at full speed to gain the advantage.’
Also in London around the same time, Zeng Jize noted, ’Just as one may imagine ancient China by looking at the West today, one may imagine the future of the West by looking at China today. A day will certainly arrive when one will return to the original state of things and when one will seek neither ingeniousness nor complexity, but only simplicity. Because material resources are limited and are not sufficient for the needs of all countries in the world.’
At the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2010, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao place the blame for the crisis on “inappropriate” macroeconomic policies of Western countries....‘and their unsustainable model of development characterized by prolonged low savings and high consumption; excessive expansion of financial institutions in a blind pursuit of profit; lack of self-discipline among financial institutions and ratings agencies and the ensuing distortion of risk information and asset pricing; and the failure of financial supervision and regulation to keep up with financial innovations, which allowed the risks of financial derivatives to build and spread.’
Between those statements sits more than a century of political upheaval. The 1906 administration and constitutional reform was an attempt to make the empire look like a Westernized state to its foreign rivals. It was also a concession to those who wanted more democracy in China. But being an international pariah state, labelled as the first “failed” state—a country that looked like it was going to be picked apart by Western Imperial powers—did not lead to more democracy. It did not strengthen the 1912 attempt at a modern Chinese Republic. ”China, they argued, was too big to be reformed—it was an empire rather than a normal state, and power could only be made accountable to the people if the political units were smaller, more integrated, and more culturally and linguistically coherent, as had happened in Europe. A young Hunanese, Mao Zedong, joined in the search for autonomy.
“Our Hunan,” he wrote in September, 1920, “must wake up. Hunanese have but one alternative: that is Hunanese self-determination and self-government; that is for Hunanese to build, on the territory of Hunan, a “Hunan Republic.” Moreover, I sincerely think that to save Hunan, to save China, and to look towards cooperation with other liberated people of the whole world, we can do no other. If Hunanese people lack the determination and bravery to build Hunan independently into a country, then there is no hope for Hunan.”
Rhetorically, arguments coming from the Texas Secession movement seem to run in a similar parallel. The future head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) did not secede. Whether or not Texas will give rise to their own Longhorn version of the Chairman has yet to be seen. Communist China under Chairman Mao did almost the complete opposite of secession:
“While improving the conditions for national minorities, the CCP leaders insisted that the new China was to be a unitary, not a federal, state. Their entire political genesis dictated that aim: The CCP had been born as a reaction against imperialist designs to break up China. The party leaders firmly believed that with the right kind of policy everyone who lived within Chinese territory could be made to feel and think Chinese, as part of a Chinese socialist state. The resistance and distrust the party was met with as it tried to penetrate regions that in effect had been self-governing for more than two generations—Tibet, Qinghai, Xinjiang, and parts of the Southwest—convinced CCP leaders even further that Soviet advice was urgently needed.”
Again, I will point out that I don’t bring a lot of prior knowledge of China, so I can’t strongly critique the substance Restless Empire covers regarding communist China. At no point did I ever want to stop reading, however, because each paragraph unlocks another piece of a grand mosaic that eventually leads to a more vivid mental image of current China. If you were born after the 1940s, China has always been communist—to you. It can be a rigorous mental exercise to acknowledge that it hasn't always been that way, and Restless Empire has no qualms in reminding you there is more to history than what the reader has colloquially gleaned over their lifetime. Rather than a single elementary or nationalistic interpretation, things seem to be presented with a scholarly indifference.
“The [CCP] regime did much to improve the position of women, by abolishing arranged marriages and the economic or sexual exploitation of young girls. Factory workers got set working hours and increases in pay. Peasants could break free of generations of abuse by landlords. Campaigns against opium use and prostitution were widely hailed, also outside of China, and the CCP’s literacy campaigns, modeled on the Soviet experience, were the most successful the world had ever seen. It did not matter much, most people thought, that jazz records or jazz musicians disappeared or that the regime—to better coordinate its campaigns—set all of the country on the same time zone (Beijing Time), forcing farmers in the far west to get out of bed at two a.m. to start their day.”
These are small facts that add a sense of reality to a country that has consistently been ignored or vilified throughout my lifetime. The Soviet Union and its subsequent collapse figure heavily into China’s modern development. While that may not be surprising to most, the role the United States played, and continues to play, seems to be at best ignored and at worst actively denied.
“The relationship with the United States stood left, right, and center in Communist China’s initial market revolution. Even though much of the capital came through Hong Kong, the experts, the methods, and the technology were often American. It was the United States, more than any other country, that lobbied for China’s entry into international institutions. It was also the United States that took the largest share of the PRC’s exports, on which China’s beginning prosperity depended. While many Americans worried about Japanese and European competition in the 1980s, very few worried about China. Most assumed that it would take generations before China’s economy got off the the ground and believed, with the US government, that strengthening China was in the national security interest of the United States.”
It would be difficult to over-represent the global impact the United States has had after the end of the cold war, when it took up the mantle of the world’s sole hyperpower. It would be naive to assume that the rest of the world is ready to embrace a total U.S. cultural hegemony, so the treaties and organizations like 2001’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization charter that binds the members to seek “multipolarity” in trading and cultural interactions should not be a surprise. No matter your opinion on U.S. global interventionism, the world is a smaller place than it used to be, and the shrinking globe tends to encourage action, or at the very least the appearance of action. “In place of a grand strategy to change the world, China seems to offer little but firm belief in free trade and the inviolability of borders. China’s many abstentions on crucial votes in the UN Security Council have left the impression of a power that wants to abdicate responsibility in the international community rather than assume it.”
Whether or not China’s UN presence has been lackluster or cleverly subdued has yet to be seen. Their diplomatic tactics have modernized rapidly, as can be seen during the US-led invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s. China proved it could hang with the top countries in the world of Realpolitik:
“China did not want to be seen as the main opponent of unilateral US action and was happy to leave that task to Russia and the Americans’ own European allies, France and Germany. In the wake of the invasion, China secretly cooperated with the United States at the UN to enable a resolution that, postfactum, found the foreign occupation of Iraq “legal”, so that oil exports could continue. At the time, China was Iraq’s main foreign debtor. It was in the PRC’s interest to provide an income for the new occupation government and to keep Iraqi oil flowing, including to China itself.”
If that isn’t proof enough that China is more similar than not to the rest of the planet, the influx of Western-style commerce and the needs of global marketplace interoperability seem to be rounding down its edges:
“Foreign and Chinese investors alike are eager that their money be protected, and they have reaped a great harvest from the seeds they have sown. Today’s business law in China is remarkably similar to its Western parentage on crucial issues such as contract law, company law, banking law, and commercial dispute resolution. While the argument that emerging middle classes are more democratically inclined than other groups rarely holds up in history, the need to protect investments is, as Karl Marx observed for Europe in the nineteenth century, one of the reasons why the bourgeoisie generally create the rule of law. And, at least in most cases, it becomes hard over time to defend the principle that money has more rights than men.”
If you’re looking to learn about modern China, Restless Empire will give a base of understanding that is sufficient in depth and breadth to create your own general thoughts and conclusions. Restless Empire is a long book, and it is a very clean one; there is no particular chapter or section that feels like a forced slog through a dreary morass of text which might so bog down a reader to the point of setting the book aside. The writing will continuously urge you along, though never at a brisk pace—more a soft nudge from an old classmate reminding you to keep up with the assigned reading.