ORBIS 1008 No.

of pages 5

What China Seeks and What China Fears

February 2019

Reviewed by Jason M. Kelly

Jason M. Kelly is Assistant Professor in the Strategy and Policy department at the U.S. Naval
War College, Newport, RI. The views expressed here are his alone.

IN REVIEW

Review of Sulmaan Wasif Khan, Haunted by Chaos: China’s Grand Strategy from Mao
Zedong to Xi Jinping, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.

I n Haunted by Chaos, Sulmaan Wasif Khan brings a historian’s sensibility to a

pressing contemporary question: What drives China’s foreign policy? The book
examines the arc of Chinese grand strategy since the founding of the People’s
Republic of China in 1949 by comparing the strategies pursued by each of China’s top
leaders—Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. This
approach leads Khan to uncover a “commonality of purpose and power” that brought
continuity and consistency to Chinese grand strategy despite the nation’s economic
and social transformations over the past seven decades. Not even the end of the Cold
War has pushed China’s leaders to abandon this consistency. “Of all the great powers,”
Khan writes, “China is perhaps the one that has seen the fewest changes in its basic
philosophy of international relations between the Cold War and post-Cold War eras.”
What are the fundamentals of this philosophy? Khan argues that all China’s
top leaders have shared the view that their main task was the protection of the Chinese
state in a fundamentally dangerous world. This understanding stemmed from a deep,
historically rooted fear of a return to the powerlessness and disorder of the late Qing,
warlord, and early Republican eras of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
To shore up the state, China’s leaders all have striven for a balance of power, control
of the Chinese population, a modernized military, and sustained economic growth.
These are all fairly conventional objectives, Khan admits, but other political entities
have sometimes sought very different strategic goals, such as containment, world
revolution, and global jihad. China’s leaders, however, were haunted by chaos, which
predisposed them to emphasize the importance of strengthening the Chinese state.
Haunted by Chaos offers much more than a window into overlooked
consistencies in Chinese grand strategy. By tracing these consistencies across five

© 2019 Published for the Foreign Policy Research Institute by Elsevier Ltd.

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generations of Chinese communist leadership, the book provides a coherent narrative

of the worldview that has shaped China’s “rise” up to the present. It also reveals how
China’s past offers valuable insight into the calculations and impulses that guide Xi
Jinping’s grand strategy today. “The ideas born in the Mao and Deng years were
nurtured by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao,” Khan writes, “before being imbued with the
purpose, the growing power, and the sudden fear that have marked Xi Jinping’s
tenure.” To understand Chinese grand strategy today, in other words, we must
understand its roots, which stretch back to Mao.
The book defines grand strategy as “the way in which [China] marshals
different forms of power to pursue national objectives.” Khan does not see Chinese
grand strategy as a painstakingly compiled grand design, passed from one leader to the
next, but rather as an instinctive understanding of what they wanted and how to get it.
“These were not men of the staff colleges or Ivy League,” he writes, “theirs was a
peasant wisdom, honed in combat and despair.” This statement in itself is an
important point. Many studies presume that grand strategy emerges only from careful,
deliberate analysis of ends and means. But Khan argues that in China’s case, a shared
instinct was coherent and persistent enough to produce enduring grand strategic
principles.
These principles first crystallized in the mind of Mao Zedong. Nearly half the
book is devoted to Mao, a reflection of the chairman’s outsized influence on the
making of the People’s Republic, and Khan does a masterful job of placing Mao and
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) into proper historical context. The first chapter,
“Forging Great China,” begins with the disorder and foreign incursions that helped to
precipitate the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. The chapter then traces the
emergence of Mao and his worldview during the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937), the
Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), the Chinese civil war (1945-1949), and into the earliest
years of the Chinese communist state. The book recounts these busy years clearly and
concisely, and the Mao who emerges from them is a pragmatic nationalist, a man
willing to “use whatever tools he had to in order to get that grand China he had talked
about so long ago.” Mao wanted a new Chinese state, but, beyond that, the chairman
was flexible in his ambitions for China. “[W]hat that state would be—its borders, its
peoples—was open to adjustment,” Khan argues.
Ideology mattered to Mao and the CCP, but only to a point, Khan contends.
The book identifies many instances when Mao was willing to depart from communist
orthodoxy in search of national security, including a consistent willingness to negotiate
with whomever he thought was useful. In the spring of 1949, for instance, the CCP
dispatched Huang Hua, who was then the director of the communist foreign affairs
bureau, to meet with John Leighton Stuart, then the American ambassador to China,
to probe for a modus vivendi. The talks foundered on the CCP’s insistence that the
Americans stop aiding Chiang Kai-shek, but “[h]ad the Americans accepted these
terms,” Khan argues, “some sort of working relationship might well have been
established.” Alongside this initiative, Mao also sought closer ties to the Soviet Union.
His objective was to be closer to other players, in balance-of-power terms, than other
powers were to each other.
This image of a “Bismarckian” Mao chips away at the lingering popular
perception of a Mao consumed by ideological fanaticism. It also serves as an important

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What China Seeks and What China Fears

line of continuity that links Mao to Deng, Jiang, Hu, and Xi, all of whom have
demonstrated similar flexibility. At the same time, the book’s emphasis on continuity
can sometimes obscure idiosyncrasies in Mao’s outlook that explain other prominent
aspects of Chinese foreign relations since 1949. If we consider the language and
concepts Mao used consistently in speeches, private conversations, official writings,
and internal Party messages and memoranda, then a more complicated relationship
between Mao and communist ideology emerges. Ideology was more than a collection
of principles that Mao could disregard or suspend in the interest of national security.
Ideology colored his worldview. It generated beliefs and assumptions that shaped
Mao’s understanding of strategic threats and opportunities. Not unlike Khan’s
description of Chinese grand strategy, ideology could be instinctive for Mao. It offered
a sense of how the world worked and where it was headed. Seen in this light, Mao’s
ideological convictions answer some of the questions raised by Khan’s analysis.
For example, Mao often considered foreign affairs—alliances in particular—
through the logic of the “united front,” a Leninist-inspired framework that divided the
world between revolutionary and reactionary forces. This dichotomous framing
enabled Mao and the CCP to rationalize temporary cooperation with otherwise
ideologically suspect partners, such as Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists during the Sino-
Japanese War or British traders during the early Cold War. According to united-front
thinking, these temporary allegiances were designed to confront shared and more
pressing threats. A united front thus required a foil, a common enemy that could justify
cooperation with erstwhile enemies and against which the population at home could
be mobilized. The United States played this role for much of Mao’s rule, until
rapprochement in the early 1970s. Yet, Khan claims that Mao could have launched an
opening to the United States “at just about any point in his reign.” Perhaps, he could
have, but Mao’s persistent use of united-front mobilization against the United States
helps to explain why he did not, at least not until after the Soviet Union had replaced
the United States as China’s primary threat.
A second element of Mao’s ideological outlook that is largely absent from
Haunted by Chaos is his commitment to revolution. China’s revolutions will emerge one
after another, Mao wrote in early 1958, and each revolutionary wave would mobilize
the masses and propel them toward communism. Mao recognized that revolution was
destructive, which introduced an abiding contradiction into the state-building process
in the early People’s Republic. Mao was building and safeguarding a new Chinese state,
but he was also committed to a method of state-building rooted in ceaseless destruction
and renewal. In Mao’s mind, an overly centralized, sclerotic state bureaucracy could
stifle this cycle of destruction and regeneration and thereby check the Chinese people’s
revolutionary momentum. This belief created a more complex relationship between
chaos and national security than we might otherwise expect from a pragmatic grand
strategist. Mao was not simply haunted by chaos; he was also drawn to it. “All under
heaven is in great chaos,” he exclaimed on more than one occasion, “[and] the situation
is excellent.”
This paradoxical thinking on chaos lends insight into the clearest departure
from the grand strategy framework developed in Haunted by Chaos: the Cultural

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Revolution. Khan describes the chaos unleashed by Mao from 1966 to 1969 as a “great
aberration” and proposes various reasons for its eruption. It may have sprung from
the chairman’s lust for power, his desire to distinguish the Chinese revolution from its
Soviet counterpart, or a need to change the nature of human behavior in China. Khan
later suggests that “Mao had no idea of what he wanted: he was an old, confused man,
who in his arrogance and confusion had unleashed forces that could not easily be
stoppered again.” It is hard, maybe impossible, to explain this violence and
destruction, Khan rightly notes. But the longstanding tension in Mao’s thinking on
the relationship between chaos and state-building suggests that the Cultural Revolution
may not have been simply a departure from grand strategy, but rather the pursuit of
grand strategy through Mao’s ideologically informed, if tragically misguided, means.
Given the chaos and trauma of the Cultural Revolution, it is hardly surprising
that Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s eventual successor, placed stability at the top of the list of
priorities following Mao’s death. “[I]nstability was the one thing Deng wished to avoid
above all else,” Khan explains. If stability faltered, chaos might erupt, which could
dash Deng’s hopes of modernizing the Chinese economy. Deng was able to pursue
his pragmatic approach to economic development in China largely because he had
inherited such a favorable geopolitical position from Mao, Khan argues. Deng took
advantage of this context to pursue two basic aims abroad: recover China’s “lost”
territories, most immediately Hong Kong, and maintain a favorable balance of power
with great powers in the region. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao extended this cautious
approach after Deng’s death.
Like Deng, neither Jiang nor Hu brooked any challenge to CCP authority at
home. The two leaders—Khan describes them as “colorless,” “wooden,” and
“unobtrusive”—remained committed to preserving stability in the interest of nurturing
economic development. They made a “virtue of dullness,” he says, except when
emotion got the best of them, as it did during the third Taiwan Strait Crisis. When the
United States permitted the leader of Taiwan, Lee Teng-hui, to visit Cornell University
in mid-1995, Beijing responded with a series of harsh reactions that included recalling
the Chinese ambassador from the United States and conducting multiple rounds of
missile tests near the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan was a “trigger point,” Khan explains, which
“awakened emotions in Chinese officialdom that might lead it to depart from grand
strategy.” Taiwan remains a blind spot in Chinese grand strategy even today, a gap
where “grand strategy shades over into emotion.” This point may be true as far as it
goes, but the persistence of this blind spot over decades, and the CCP’s demonstrated
willingness to court conflict with a superpower over the island’s status, suggests there
may be more to the issue than just flights of emotion.
Xi Jinping has inherited the fundamentals of grand strategy from his
predecessors, Khan explains, but China’s current leader applies greater intensity to the
project. His goal remains to keep the state intact, which requires economic growth, a
favorable balance of power, strong armed forces, and “political cohesion,” a
euphemism for uncontested CCP control. The problem for Xi is that simultaneous
pursuit of these goals creates problems. A stronger, more modern People’s Liberation
Army, and Beijing’s willingness to use it, has undermined regional stability by
encouraging states like Vietnam and Japan to seek greater military capabilities for
themselves, Khan observes. Beijing is also increasing the military’s budget at a time of

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What China Seeks and What China Fears

slowing economic growth. These and other problems, from environmental strains to
unsteady demographics, place Xi Jinping in a difficult position today. To find a way
forward, he will have to resolve pressing domestic challenges and secure the state from
foreign threats, all while cultivating popular faith in his and the CCP’s right to govern
on behalf of the Chinese people. It is no easy task. But then again, it never has been,
as Haunted by Chaos makes convincingly clear.
This book will appeal to a wide audience. It is an excellent choice for a seminar
on contemporary Chinese foreign relations, and its focus on the form and function of
grand strategy in the Chinese context also makes it a valuable addition to courses on
comparative foreign policy or national security affairs. Historians of China will notice
that Khan relies heavily on the CCP’s official chronologies (nianpu) in some places,
especially in the first chapter. But elsewhere Khan uses an impressive blend of internal
Chinese documents, including files from the Foreign Ministry Archive in Beijing that
are no longer available today, following several years of increasing restrictions on
access to archival documents in China.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Haunted by Chaos is a book for
policymakers. Khan’s clear prose and his ability to balance breadth with concision
makes this the kind of book that practitioners can actually read on the margins of busy
days, and to great benefit. At a time when the rationales and expectations that
undergird the U.S.-China relationship appear to be shifting, Haunted by Chaos offers
timely and accessible historical context for thinking carefully about not just
what China’s current leaders seek, but also what they fear.

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