how many asymmetries? continuities, …...talking to people in washington, mentoring scholars of...

Working paper --- please do not quote or cite without the author’s permission. USC U.S.-China Institute http://china.usc.edu

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How Many Asymmetries?

Continuities, Transformations, and Puzzles in the Study of

Chinese Foreign Relations

John E. Wills, Jr., University of Southern California, emeritus

[email protected]

Presented to conference, “History and China’s Foreign Relations: The Achievements and Contradictions of American Scholarship”, USC U.S.-China Institute, February 2008. Not for quotation or citation without permission. This conference has been conceived as an effort to bring together multiple

perspectives on the ways in which American scholarship has shaped and perhaps mis-

shaped American discussions of policy toward China in the last fifty years. We need two

kinds of history, the history of Chinese foreign relations and the history of American

scholarship. Let me begin with the latter, about which I hope all of us will have

something to say. I will only briefly cast myself as a relic, telling stories about the old

days and how I was there when. I began my graduate studies at Harvard fifty years ago

this summer. In the summer and fall of 1959 I started groping for ways to think about

China in the seventeenth century, discovered that there had been some very interesting

European eyewitnesses of the Ming-Qing wars, and wrote my first seminar paper for

John King Fairbank on the first Dutch embassy, 1655-1657. The rest, shall we say, is

history. I missed the “China-centered turn” in the profession, didn’t have many people to

talk to until Jim Hevia came along, tried from time to time to deflate the master concept

of the tribute system, and found hardly anyone listening. It has been the recent work of


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people gathered for this conference that has convinced me that we at last have critical

mass and diversity of approach that will make fruitful discussion of these questions

possible. Peter Perdue’s multi-dimensional account of some of the most crucial

inner/outer political shifts in Qing China is exemplary of the kind of books we of which

we need about a dozen.1 Brantly Womack has shown the use of long historical

perspectives on perhaps the most complex and instructive case of China’s pre-modern

foreign relations, and in the process has opened up a discussion of “asymmetry” in

foreign relations, with consequences in this and perhaps other papers that he may find

bizarre. 2

In the post-World War II era, one of the great success stories of American

academic life was the growth of studies of China past and present. Fairbank was a key

shaper of that trend.3 Fairbank’s own research focused on China’s foreign relations in the

nineteenth century, and for some years many of his students had similar interests. Themes

Fairbank found in the Chinese documents resonated with the state of US-China relations

in the 1950s. China was in minimal contact with the US and western Europe, mutual

hostility was the norm, and China seemed determined to go its own way, a way in which

some saw echoes of its pre-modern history and culture. Thus it was quite understandable

that Fairbank and many of his students would see China’s past as an “empire without

neighbors” dealing with foreigners only through a “tribute system”. Fairbank,

1 Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); now see also James A. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 2007). 2 Brantly Womack, China and Vietnam: The Politics of Asymmetry (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 3 A rich range of perspectives can be found in John K. Fairbank, Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); Paul A. Cohen and Merle Goldman, compilers, Fairbank Remembered (Cambridge MA: Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, 1992); and Paul M. Evans, John Fairbank and the American Understanding of Modern China (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).


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quintessentially American in his drive to get things done and be useful, spent a lot of time

talking to people in Washington, mentoring scholars of contemporary affairs, and writing

books for the general public.4 The quotes in Evans’ biography remind me once again of

the stunning cryptic insights that were a Fairbank specialty. Hear him for example,

writing to Chester Bowles in 1955:

“I urge your avoiding much expression of guilt over our past imperialism. I would

settle for the idea that while the Chinese got the short end of imperialism, they were at

that time a comparatively low, mean, vicious, and muddle-headed crowd in leadership,

and the usual narrow-minded, self-centered, ignorant, and admirable peasant types in the

mass.”5

Fairbank kept up all this writing and pursued his immense scholarly development

projects while the Communists were winning the civil war, Chinese and American

soldiers were killing each other in large numbers in Korea, and many American

politicians – John F. Kennedy as well as many Republicans6 – were accusing Fairbank

and others who knew China of pro-Communist bias. His writings, public and private,

about the contemporary situation are sometimes cryptic and not altogether consistent. He

continued to call for the U.S. to keep the door open to contacts with China, and finally

was much gratified by the post-ping pong turn. From 1950 to 1976 he was unable to visit

China and very short on reliable information from within it, as we all were in those days.

In his historical work his best insights emerged out of an immense wealth of detailed 4 The various editions of The United States and China sold over 300,000 copies. Evans counts up “57 books and monographs; more than 140 articles, essays, introductions and forewords; a slightly larger number of reviews and review articles, scores of letters to editors, radio and television transcripts.” Evans, pp. xiv-xv, 107. Via Evans’ index we can trace some of his contributions to the leading print media of various periods, including the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, Newsweek, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books. 5 Evans, p. 52. 6 Evans, pp. 123, 125.


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reading and exposition, and still often were rather cryptically expressed. He was uneasy

with theory; I seem to remember a few baffled remarks about his eminent colleague

Talcott Parsons. It seems to me simply a matter of the best use of his energies and talents

that in the 1960s he wrote little about contemporary China for the general public, and

pushed ahead with field development and with the writing of enormously influential

textbooks.

Fairbank was indefatigable in his efforts to get the right people in the same room

talking to each other; for traditional foreign relations that effort came to its fullest fruition

in the conference volume The Chinese World Order.7 I was the youngest and least secure

contributor to that effort. I recall considerable frustration at the unwillingness of quite a

number of participants to move beyond their demanding research in multiple languages

and histories and compare their case with others that were being represented; on the other

hand, Mancall and Schwartz and in other ways Wang Gungwu and Fairbank himself

seemed to be moving at a level of generalization that was hard to connect to specific

cases, or sliding from century to century in pursuit of a text that would support a point.

Fairbank also was very supportive of research on aspects of Chinese history other

than foreign relations. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, he made a real contribution to the

intellectual ferment in the field that found China’s foreign relations less interesting than

aspects of its internal history – a “China-centered turn” that marginalized discussion of

foreign relations for several decades.8 Partly as a result of that turn and that

marginalization, themes of China as an “All Under Heaven”, an “empire without

neighbors” with a “tribute system”, continued to haunt our undergraduate lectures and to

7 John K Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). 8 Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).


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affect our understanding of contemporary realities for much too long. Criticisms and

revisions that attracted only fitful interest and did little to affect discussion of

contemporary realities included my study of European tribute embassies,9 Hevia’s

cultural studies re-reading of the Macartney embassy,10 and Johnston’s rigorous re-

examination of China’s traditional grand strategy.11 Rossabi and his collaborators gave us

a rich set of studies of “China among equals” from Tang through Song, but raised few

theoretical flags.12 Smith, Von Glahn, and their collaborators advanced hugely our

understanding of a very long transition, but had remarkably little to say about warfare or

diplomacy among states. 13 The “new Qing history” has been very much interested in the

Qing state’s management of its ethnic and cultural diversity,14 and for example we know

a lot more about Guangxi and Yunnan than we used to, but not much of this work has

dealt with the trans-border and inter-state dimensions of ethnic diversity. 15 (Perdue is a

9 Wills, Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K'ang-hsi, 1666-1687 (Cambridge MA: Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, 1984). 10 James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). 11 Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 12 Morris Rossabi, ed., China Among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and Its Neighbors, 10th-14th Centuries (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1983). 13 Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, editors, The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 14 Pamela Kyle Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1999); Evelyn S. Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1998); Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); James A. Millward and Ruth Dunnell, eds., New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004); Lynn A. Struve, ed., The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time (Cambridge MA: Harvard Asia Center, 2004).; Perdue, China Marches West. 15 Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Pamela Kyle Crossley, ed., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2006); Diana Lary ed., The Chinese State at the Borders (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007); David G. Atwill, The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856-1873 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005; Charles Patterson Giersch, Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2006); David M. Deal, The Art of Ethnography: A Chinese “Miao


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shining exception here.) Finally, we have had a number of very rich and interesting books

that have shown us a pre-modern China far more interactive with the outside world than

we used to think, but have not gone on to show us that the “tribute system” emperor has

no clothes or to try to give him some new robes.16

But the most important reason why our picture of the empire without neighbors

no longer would suffice is that China now has a great deal to do with its neighbors, and

with such distant significant others as the United States, the European Union, and

countries from Australia to Angola that have stocks of raw materials to feed the booming

Chinese economy. China seems in many ways open and eager to learn, but proud,

“rising”, a truculent nationalism visible especially among its websites and its defense

intellectuals. I have been trying to survey recent writing about China’s contemporary

foreign relations, and the broader “rise of China” literature, to see if any of them argue in

any way that the heritage of the tribute system offers important clues to China’s present

and future behavior in a multi-national world. I haven’t found very much, but there may

well be important things I’ve missed in this literature.17

Album” (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Leo Shin, The Making of the Chinese State: Ethnicity and Expansion on the Ming Borderlands (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 16 Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (New York and London: Norton, 1999); Valerie Hansen, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600 (New York and London: Norton, 2000); F. W. Mote, Imperial China, 900-1800 (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999); Warren L. Cohen, East Asia at the Center: Four Thousand Years of Engagement with the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Charles Holcolmbe, The Genesis of East Asia, 221 B.C.-A.D. 907 (Honolulu: Association for Asian Studies and University of Hawai’i Press, 2001). 17 I am particularly grateful to Alexander Vuving for sending me his “work in progress” entitled “The Myth of the Chinese World Order”. Herewith I add my own record of excessively random reading, in none of which (so far; this is a continuing search!) do I find the tribute system discussed: Yufan Hao and Guocang Huan, eds., The Chinese View of the World (New York: Pantheon, 1989);Thomas W. Robinson and David Shambaugh, eds., Chinese Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); Elizabeth Economy and Michel Oksenberg, eds., China Joins the World: Progress and Prospects (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1999); Tony Saich, Governance and Politics of China (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave: 2001), Ch. 11; David M. Lampton, ed., The Making of Chinese Foreign and Security Policy, 1978-2000 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Peter Hays Gries, China’s New Nationalism:


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Asymmetry #1. Negative Consequences of an Excess of

Information and Interpretation.

In this paper I’m going to be repeatedly tempted by more or less metaphoric uses

of “asymmetry”, and sometimes I’m just going to give in and run with it. There is a

profound and worrisome asymmetry between the growth of the quantity and

sophistication of our knowledge of China and the still very limited ability of historians,

political scientists, and policy analysts to shape public discussion and policy formation.

Things could be worse; Middle Eastern studies are not as well developed as Chinese in

this country, and even if they were I’m not sure that academics and policy wonks would

have known how to get the voting public and the policy makers to listen sufficiently to

avert the recent disasters of policy and administration. I would be delighted and relieved

to be proved wrong. Fairbank opposed the Vietnam War, regretted that he and others had

managed to do so little to build American knowledge of Vietnam, and implied that if the

academics had not let down their side the disastrous intervention might have been

Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2004); Nicholas D. Kristoff and Sheryl Wudunn China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (New York: Times Books, 1994) ; Guoli Liu, ed., Chinese Foreign Policy in Transition (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 2004); Zheng Bijian, “China’s ‘Peaceful Rise’ to Great-Power Status”, David Zweig and Bi Jianhai, “China’s Global Hunt for Energy”, Wang Jisi, “China’s Search for Stability with America”, and Kishore Mahbubani, “Understanding China”, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2005, pp. 18-60; Avery Goldstein, Rising to the Challenge: China’s Grand Strategy and International Security (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert S. Ross, eds., New Directions in the Study of Chinese Foreign Policy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); [not yet seen: Robert G. Sutter, China’s Rise in Asia: Promises and Perils (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Sutter, China’s Foreign Relations: Power and Policy since the Cold War (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008)] ; David Shambaugh, ed., Power Shift: China and Asia’s New Dynamics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006). Ross Terrill, The New Chinese Empire and What It Means for the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2003) has a great deal to say about China’s heritage as “an empire, not a country”, with the shrewdness of a long-time observer and extremely erratic analysis, exposition, and knowledge of the literature. A useful comment in passing by Samuel S. Kim mentions the heritage only to declare it impotent: “Gone apparently is the rooted Sinocentric view of the world justified by the tyrannies of the past and the abiding quest for national identity via civilizational autonomy and political self-sufficiency.” Kim, “Chinese Foreign Policy Faces Globalization Challenges”, in Johnston and Ross, New Directions, pp. 276-306, at p. 281.


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averted.18 I never believed it, and I still don’t know how people like us can improve our

leverage over public discussion and policy making and have a better chance of averting

our country’s next foreign policy disaster; that’s one of the core agendas of this

conference.

China is open to visitors and reporters in a way not imaginable even thirty years

ago. There is a great deal of semi-open discussion, even with foreigners. The fundamental

anarchism of the internet seems to defeat government efforts at control. This more

interactive China elicits more and more varied foreign reporting and interpretation, again

vastly facilitated by the internet. In my experience this information glut makes it harder

to keep track of the most important facts and interpretations. Are my policy wonk

colleagues in this meeting sure that they’re reading the same things and the most

important ones? I’m sure I don’t know how to make the best use of the time I can allot

after my harmless historian’s drudgery to follow the literature that may build the bridges

we’re trying to build in this conference.

The idea of a “tribute system” may be more alive among East Asian intellectuals

than among North American, as they try to confront the puzzles of their relations among

themselves, especially the China-Japan relation. Wang Hui, a very influential Beijing

intellectual and editor of Dushu, talks about a “tributary system”.19 Hamashita Takeshi,

well-know and influential on both sides of the Pacific, has been combining ingenious

source investigations with big-picture accounts of the various concentric or overlapping

18 Evans, pp. 227, 247, 263-264. 19 Wang Hui, “The Politics of Imagining Asia”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8.1 (2007), pp. 1-34, accessed on August 30, 2007 from http://japanfocus.org/products/details/2407. For a Singaporean example see Eric Teo Chu Cheow, “A Revival of the Imperial Tributary System Mentality of Stability in Chinese Foreign Policy Thinking, as Applied to China’s Western Periphery in Central Asia”, http://peaceforum.org.tw/onweb.jsp?webno=333333131&webitem_no=1880, accessed February 27, 2007. I am grateful to Peter Berton for passing this item on to me.


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spheres of asymmetric relations in maritime relations among the peoples of East Asia.20

There is a good deal of this kind of writing, and it’s not easy to get at the core issues in it.

One historian’s way of framing them would be that the Westphalian nation-state system

imposes a framework of abstract legal equality of nation-states. East Asian intellectuals

suspect, or hope, that their own rulers have been less in the thrall of these delusions of

equality and thus have been able to focus more realistically and skillfully on the

management of the consequences of inequality, of asymmetrical relations. That doesn’t

get us very far in understanding the origins and evolution of the particular Chinese and

East Asian modes of management of asymmetry. Here I offer a few signposts through the

centuries, and then show the shaping of modern East Asia by the proliferation of

asymmetries and contradictions among them.

Asymmetry #2. Writing and Record-keeping.

The early centers of Bronze Age China appear as islands of sophisticated use of

writing and of kinds of organization it makes possible: Recording who is responsible for

what taxes on what lands,21 sending detailed and binding instructions to subordinates at

some distance, and so on. Consequences for relations with neighboring peoples who may

not have started using writing include the keeping of reference records about them and

making uniform exchanges with them all along a contact zone and the ceremonies of their

reception at a royal court. These are reflected in early texts identifying and categorizing

foreign peoples and listing the “tribute” of local products which they bring to court.

20 Takeshi Hamashita, “The Tribute Trade System and Modern Asia”, Memoirs of the Toyo Bunko,No. 46 (1988), pp. 7-25; Hamashita, “Tribute and Treaties: Maritime Asia and Treaty Port Networks in the Era of Negotiation”, in Giovanni Arrighi, ed. The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 17-50; Hamashita, Kindai chūgoku no kokusaiteki keiki: chōkō bōeki shisutemu to kindai Ajia (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppansha, 1990). 21 See especially the early chapters of Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004).


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Further consequences flow from the non-alphabetic script of early China. It was

available as a means of communication among peoples who spoke differently within

what ultimately became “China”. But of course variant scripts developed; their

standardization was a result of political unification; and the standardization in turn

became a vital asset of bureaucratic unification among people who had no common

speech; more on this in Asymmetry #3. The standardized script also became available for

the use of people who spoke languages unrelated to the Chinese group: in modern terms,

Vietnamese, Koreans, and Japanese. (The uses of fragments of characters as quasi-

alphabets for Khitan and Jurchen were important for a time and then disappeared.) Thus

we have a thousand years of Japanese literati writing kanshi 漢詩, Korean, Vietnamese,

and Ryukyuan ambassadors exchanging poets with capital officials, and so on,

reinforcing Chinese thoughts of their “civilizing influence”. The canonicity of the great

Chinese texts was preserved, but the reach of common writing was quite narrow,

compared to what could be done in the transcriptions of different sounds and the

borrowing of words from a canonical language in the spheres of the Greek, Latin, and

Arabic scripts. (Never mind South and Southeast Asia, where some people think a

language isn’t real unless it has its own idiosyncratic alphabet.)

Asymmetry #3. China Is Big.

Bronze Age China had a lot of little state centers. Their having writing before

their neighbors did not necessarily lead to the emergence of a single very large polity. So

we need to ask a question that seems silly, and the answer obvious to modern Chinese

nationalists and many others, but that needs to be problematized and made explicit; “Why


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is China so big?” Many historians and social scientists have noticed the persistent bias of

China toward political unity, and a surprising degree of commonality in elite and even

popular culture, over a very wide area. In 2007 I was privileged to read a draft chapter for

the second volume of Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels,22 in which he finds

interestingly parallel trends of unity and crisis in China and other places and notes some

important factors that help to explain China’s large size. Patricia Ebrey in a recent think-

piece has laid out a number of important factors, and notes the importance not only of

China’s great territorial extent but of its very large and dense population.23 My modest

addition to this discussion rises out of the teaching and thinking that led to my Mountain

of Fame.24

Continental strategic and ecological factors – the need for unity against the threat

of the northern nomads and for coordinated efforts to keep the Yellow River in check --

go only part way even toward explaining the persistent unity of north China, and do

nothing at all to explain the long and successful incorporation of the center, south, and

eventually southwest, where water control problems usually could be worked out at local

levels, and where local cultures were quite different from those of north China. Here we

have to look at some peculiarities of north Chinese culture that opened the way toward

incorporation of southern elites and peoples. In many parts of the world, there is a strong

tendency to divide people into “us” and “them”. When you meet one of them you are

always on your guard, or perhaps you just shoot first. Serbs and Croats are a good

example. You would never want your daughter to marry one of them; in fact, in such a

22 For Volume 1 see Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 23 Patricia B. Ebrey, “Pondering China’s Size”, typescript, 2006. 24 I have tried to develop some of these ideas in lectures at Mesa State College, Colorado, in 2005 and at the University of British Columbia in 2006.


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“tribal” system, cross-cousin marriage often is a preferred option. By contrast, as far back

as we can trace Chinese constructions of kinship, they have been exogamous and

patrilineal. People in the same patriline, later those bearing the same surname even if no

genetic relation was clear, did not marry. Thus every marriage involved making a

connection with someone “outside”, not predetermined by blood. In many parts of the

world today, and throughout the world until about 1850, it has been understood that a

marriage is an alliance between two families, to be based on more reliable criteria than

raging young hormones. A potential son-in-law might have to prove himself, or continue

to show his qualities even after the wedding.

This family and kinship background can be seen nourishing a political culture in

the very important legends of three sage emperors, Yao, Shun, and Yu, traditionally a bit

before 2000 BCE. Each succeeded the one before not by heredity but after proving

himself the best man for the position. Shun passed the ultimate test when Yao gave him

his two daughters in marriage, and Shun kept harmony in the household. We have here in

kinship, I think, an important root of a political culture that produced not competitive

corporate solidarities like the Greek city states but open-ended networks of one-to-one

human connections, many of them hierarchical. Such connections are important in all

societies and all complex organizations, but the Chinese have been unusually adept at

them and self-conscious about them. None of us can function or talk about functioning in

a Chinese society without thinking a lot about guanxi.

A particular form of guanxi that was of special importance in traditional Chinese

political culture was “the Way of the Ruler and the Minister”, 君臣之道. A great many of


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the most heroic figures in the very rich Chinese stories of their own past are not rulers but

selfless ministers, defending the realm against invaders, protesting against corruption

and abuse of the common people, risking their own lives to give unwanted advice to

unworthy rulers. Confucius himself was a would-be minister and teacher of other would-

be ministers. Not even Confucius had a very strong sense of commitment to his home

state in a multi-state world; when politics went sour there, he and his disciples moved

around, looking for a ruler who would listen to the Master’s Way.

The importance of this theme in political culture for the enduring Chinese

tendency to unity of a very large continental area is immense. A powerful ruler could

count on having a large number of able men from a very wide area present themselves as

candidates for ministerial positions, and could appoint them to govern local areas.

Members of local elites, even hereditary rulers on the fringes of the Chinese realm, might

be attracted by the moral glamour and material rewards of ministerial status. In Warring

States, Qin, and early Han times, c. 400-100 BCE, we can see a long arc of

transformation, culminating in the dramatic new measures of bureaucratic recruitment at

the beginning of the reign of Emperor Wu in 141 BCE, as grandees of a northern culture

zone with much herding, and the elite of the Yangzi valley state of Chu, with a distinctive

shamanic culture, were drawn into the central political order. (This looks obvious to me

now, and I used to show this arc to my freshmen every time I taught the survey, but it’s

not clear in Chapters 3 and 4 of Mountain of Fame, nor in Mark Edward Lewis’ excellent

new survey;25 the tyranny of the Great Change in 221 BCE is with us yet.) As noted

25 Mark Edward Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (Cambridge MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).


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above, there was a mutually reinforcing loop of bureaucratic centralization and script

standardization.

The Way of the Ruler and the Minister was protean in the changing circumstances

to which it adjusted, as protean as the idioms of citizenship and solidarity in the European

tradition. 26 A crucial reshaping of this tradition will be much more accessible to us, we

can hope, with the appearance any day now of the Five Dynasties-Song volume of the

Cambridge History of China.27 Later, quite different inter-dynastic re-shapings can be

followed in the rich volume edited by Smith and Von Glahn and in the abundant

literature on the Ming-Qing transition. (One could get the impression from Smith and

Von Glahn and their collaborators of disappointment at the failure of early Ming projects

of systematic transformation; I, on the other hand, think mid-Ming mess and muddle

worked pretty well to keep the peace in such a vast and varied area, as it does in the PRC

today.28) Around 1800 China showed signs of the kinds of centrifugal growth that

afflicted the Ottoman, Persian, and Mughal empires,29 but avoided dismemberment to

join the “family of nations” as a single state. Today, the great area and population of

China are important shapers of global interaction. Among the benefits of this deep

divergence to China’s people at many periods, not matched in polycentric Europe or in

the Ottoman, Persian, and Mughal empires of many cultures, languages, and religions,

were long periods without full-scale war over this large area, a nearly complete absence

of ethnic cleansings and bonfires of heretics, and the economic stimulus of a huge 26 I tried to highlight some of the more important changes in Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 27 January 30, 2008 according to Amazon; September 2008 according to the Cambridge University Press website. 28 See my review of this book in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 48, No. 1 (2005), pp. 134-136. 29 C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (London and New York: Longman, 1989, Ch. 1, 2.


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internal market. The Chinese people today have good reason, it seems to me, to cherish

their rather fragile unity and internal peace.

The consequences of China’s bigness for its foreign relations were manifold. The

Chinese state could draw on great wealth and a dense population in mobilizing military

power against a challenging neighbor, but was wary of the ways in which military

strength assembled to dominate a neighbor might destabilize politics within the empire.

The rewards of foreign aggression could not compare with the abundance of trade and of

tax revenues within the huge empire. The marvelous silks and other consumer goods

produced for the vast domestic market were attractive to foreigners as well, and could be

obtained either through trade or through gifts from the imperial court. But big was fragile.

The Chinese tradition offered nothing equal to the deterrents to contact with foreigners of

the Hindu caste system or Muslim wariness of associating with non-believers. The

Chinese itch for guanxi easily reached across the boundaries of imperial rule. In Chinese

thinking and writing the figure of the “Chinese traitor” 漢奸 is omnipresent. Foreigners

wandering around China and building guanxi with Chinese might open the way to

subversion and invasion. Chinese sources form Han times on are full of stories of

Chinese traitors advising foreign rulers on strategies of invasion. Qing documents on

disorders in the mountains of northern Annam/Vietnam sometimes seem to assume that

the foreigners couldn’t produce their own scams and thieveries without the instigation of

Hanjian.30 If big was fragile and Hanjian were everywhere, defensive limitation of

foreign contacts made sense; trade was confined to a border point or two or to strictly

30 I have work in progress drawing on the Beijing Archives documents on these relations., have presented papers at the International Association of Historians of Asia in 2004 and at a conference at the National University of Singapore in 2006.


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controlled trade in the capital or another major city. Defense is the category under which

foreign relations are discussed in the Qing statecraft collections. It is far more useful as a

master concept for our historical long perspectives that the tribute system. Unilateral and

bureaucratic management of foreign relations were indeed persistent aspects of China’s

defensive foreign policies, but only from about 1425 to 1550 did the tribute system

provide the matrix within which all of the empire’s legal foreign relations were managed.

Asymmetry #4. The Great Divergence in Technology.

Ken Pomeranz’ classic account of The Great Divergence has elicited a great deal

of comment and controversy, and I’m not sure I’m up on the latest developments.31 Peer

Vries in an astute review noted the importance of the difference between machines

replacing horses and oxen in Europe and machines (eventually) replacing human muscle

in China.32 Mark Elvin’s picture of the “high level equilibrium trap” still ought to be part

of a multi-causal account.33 I would add that the abundant uses of print in Ming and Qing

China included quite a lot about best practices in agriculture but surprisingly little about

machines; note that the great Tiangong kaiwu was not reprinted in toto in the Qing.34

Roots for a positive evaluation of the potential of technology were much stronger than in

South Asia or the world of Islam, which ought to lessen any remaining surprise at modern

China’s exuberant embrace of technology. But technological superiority was an

immensely important source of western asymmetric power between 1830 and 1960.

Asymmetry #5. Asymmetries in “National” Mobilization.

31 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 32 P.H.H. Vries, “Governing Growth: A Comparative Analysis of the Role of the State in the Rise of the West”, Journal of World History, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2002), pp. 67-138. 33 Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973). 34 Sung Ying-hsing, trans. and annot. by E-Tu Zen Sun and Shiou-chuan Sun, Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century: T’ien-kung K’ai-wu (Mineola NY; Dover, 1966), p. vii.


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Among the great polities of the “early modern” world, Europe was radically

polycentric, not an empire. We might see this political pluralism building on idioms of

citizenship and competitive corporate solidarity reaching back to the Greeks and crucially

consolidated in the late Middle Ages when the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire

checked each other’s projects of unified rule over Western Christendom. Competition

among these powers in commerce, in war, in territorial expansion and consolidation,

including empires in the Americas, Africa, and the Indian Ocean stimulated their efforts

to mobilize resources. The climax of Anglo-French competition in the wars of the

American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic era interacted with the

beginnings of modern technology and new technologies of power – censuses,

conscription, policing – and the new rhetorics and practices of nation and citizen to set

European state mobilization on a course of unprecedented intensification. Japan was

primed by its idiosyncratic early modern formation of competitive demilitarized domains

and landless salaried samurai to respond with the huge transformations of the Meiji era.

Russia competed in Europe, conquered Central Asia, and built the Trans-Siberian

Railroad. The consequences of these massive asymmetries, and the technological one,

were the whole dismal sequence of China’s subjection from 1839 to 1902.

After 1898 the Chinese understood what had hit them. Liang Qichao and many

like him called for new citizenship and national mobilization, and in the process showed

that the protean Way of the Ruler and the Minister no longer could guide political life.35

Mobilization efforts, from arsenals to new armies and schools to assemblies, were most

effective at the level of the great viceregal units of two or three provinces, and thus had

centrifugal consequences for the whole of China. Guanxi with foreigners were fraught 35 Wills, Mountain of Fame, Ch. 17.


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with contradiction, both necessary for new ideas and techniques and likely to give the

foreigners greater leverage within China; the contradictions were especially monstrous

for relations with the Japanese.36 The occasionally successful experiments in mobilization

of people and resources by warlords like Yan Xishan and Feng Yuxiang were centrifugal.

The Nanjing Republic faced the Japanese threat, Communist resistance, and a new

combination of anti-Nanjing politicians and warlords every year, and had very little

foreign aid or advice, except for a bit from Germany.37

Asymmetry #6. But Still Too Big to Conquer.

The British and the Americans had shown, as far back as the Open Door Notes, a

preference for keeping China intact. The Japanese and perhaps the Russians had other

ideas. Manchuria was lost, Xinjiang and Tibet nearly so. But China was too big; Japan

might well have conquered a coastal province or two and found enough would-be

ministers to staff a subservient administration – they hadn’t done too badly in Manchuria

– but they were tempted by the vast potential of inland China and wary of the counter-

attack that surely would be launched by Chinese patriots if they didn’t control the whole

country. They were defeated, of course, primarily in the Pacific. But they could not stop

the local resistance and guerrilla war efforts that were based at a village level that Ming,

Qing, or Nanjing Republic never had controlled.

Asymmetry #7. And Too Big and Fragile for Political Experiment

or Clarity.

36 Douglas R. Reynolds, China, 1898-1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan (Cambridge MA: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1993). 37 William C. Kirby, Germany and Republican China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984).


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The achievements of political transformation and control of the People’s Republic

in the 1950s are remarkable; notice, for example, the stabilized currency and the

successful roundup of guns.38 But even some of these apparently bureaucratic

achievements drew on “mass line” or instigated movement from below strategies. These

of course became pathological in the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution. Today

most people who lived through some of these wrenching reversals want stability above

all. But what is the state of the Party? Of the Army? People have reason, it seems to me,

to be wary of political changes that might have destabilizing consequences. The status of

the most sensitive minority regions, Xinjiang and Tibet, legacies of the Qing expansion,

is another big worry. China is going to continue to be far from transparent to its own

people, or to those of us who try to understand it from outside. If prosperity is the main

source of legitimation and popular acceptance of the regime, it can’t afford to cut off the

web of trans-border guanxi that contribute so much. But are there still worries that those

contacts will be subversive and de-stabilizing? It will not be surprising to find among the

many voices seeking to shape China’s foreign relations some who remind us of past

epochs of defensive policy.

China’s “peaceful rise” is a great hope for China’s people and all the world, as

well as a somewhat politically problematic phrase,39 but we must not expect it to be a

straightforward or transparent process. Muddle, contradiction, and cross-currents of

guanxi are common features of many periods of flourishing, human, political, and

38 Ezra Vogel, Canton Under Communism: Programs and Politics in a Provincial Capital, 1949-1968 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1969). 39 Bonnie S.Glaser and Evan S. Medeiros, “The Changing Ecology of Foreign Policy-Making in China: The Ascension and Demise of the Theory of ‘Peaceful Rise’”, China Quarterly, No. 190 (June 2007), pp. 291-310. I am grateful to Jonathan Spence for the reference.


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economic, in Chinese history, such as mid-Ming. Conceptual clarity and uniformity often

have been disastrous, from the Qin to Wang Anshi to the Great Leap.

By Way of Summary: Empire, Nation, Frontier, Network.

The Chinese from Han times on built and often maintained a very large single-

centered polity, an empire, partly on a basis of military power, demographic weight,

prosperity, and sophistication of written culture, but also on a basis of their ability to foster

and adjust networks among individuals, especially those between rulers and ministers and

between patrons and clients of various kinds. Such a network-built empire rarely was totally

controlling of the activities of its subjects, and did not elicit all-consuming devotion and

identification in the way a pseudo-kin "we group" or a religion can. It could easily generate

centrifugal forces or conflicts if it tried to control or tax its subjects too heavily. Thus

expensive conquests often were suspect, and too much contact with foreigners might lead to

de-stabilizing connections with them. But this very large empire also had proportionately

long and deep frontier zones, into which it was drawn by real and perceived threats, by

conflicts between emigrants from the empire and local peoples, and, more rarely than for

Europe and some other great civilizations, by the lures of loot and glory. When the western

powers kicked down the door of a very defensive Qing empire, China had to become a

mobilizing state if it was to survive as one nation among many. The heritages and logics of

the self-limiting empire had to be overcome. In the longer run, the heritages of empire and

network offer many strengths to the Chinese in an interactive modern world. But there are

baffling contradictions between the heritages of a nation in quest of unity and strength, an

empire that acknowledges no equals, frontier zones largely within the borders of the

modern nation-state, and the energetic network-building that links Chinese in the PRC, in


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Taiwan, and in the diaspora, and a host of foreign significant others, perhaps even including

foreign would-be experts on China.

how many asymmetries? continuities, …...talking to people in washington, mentoring scholars of...

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