2

Legacies of the Past

As with all countries and societies, China’s present is determined by its past.
Current leaders are of course at liberty to make their own decisions in order
to improve their country, and the best among them do. But they do so within
a framework of mind and territory that has been bequeathed them by the past.
In China’s case, it is o en argued that the past carries even more of weight than
elsewhere, simply because there is more of it: China’s history, particularly in
intellectual terms, goes back several thousand years. It could, however, as easily
be argued that it is the signi cance that history is given inside Chinese culture
that provides it with remarkable power in the present. Many countries, a er
all, can in some form or another claim thousands of years of history without
that longevity becoming a staple of their political and ideological discourses.
e sharp centrality of history to China may therefore as easily be seen as an
ideological construct in itself rather than something given by chronology or
continuity.1
For China’s foreign a airs today there are two aspects of the past that ma er
more than others. One is the legacy of empire. Today’s China, both in shape
and content, grew out of the Qing empire and has taken over a number of
that empire’s characteristics. e other is authoritarianism, which—as is the
case in many places—comes out of the deeper past, but in China has become
a default mode of government, to the extent that a large number of Chinese
believe that their country is uncommonly suited for authoritarian government
(and the other way around). Recently, many Chinese (and some non-Chinese)
have started celebrating autocratic government as part of a successful model
of development, especially well suited to Chinese conditions. Both of these
features of China’s past are in need of further investigation as they pertain to
the present.

Odd Arne Westad, Legacies of the Past In: China and the World. Edited by: David Shambaugh, Oxford University
Press (2020). © Oxford University Press
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190062316.003.0002
26

Empire
Empire was the main form of political organization on a global scale before the
mid-twentieth century. In what we know as China, empires were distinguished
by their size and their cohesion. Over the past two thousand years, China has
seen a number of empires that, at their peak, were able to expand their territory,
integrate their populations, and control the wider region from the Himalayas to
Central Asia, Korea, and Vietnam. ere have also been times when Chinese
states have been smaller in size and formed state systems not unlike what hap-
pened in Europe over the past ve hundred years. But, in overall terms, it is the
legacies of empire that have shaped China today, not least because the last of
the Chinese empires, the Qing, at its height was such a powerful and pervasive
entity. Since Chinese empires, like European or South Asian empires, were dif-
ferent in character and orientation, it is very important to note that when we
speak about the direct impact of empire on China today, we are mainly speaking
about the Qing, which ruled China from 1644 to 1912.2
Even if it is right to focus on the Qing empire, there are of course deeper
legacies from the past that in uence Chinese foreign a airs today. Making
these too speci c makes no sense: strategists who believe that current People’s
Republic of China (PRC) strategies can be constructed from reading Sun Zi
or Meng Zi are certainly mistaken, just as their Chinese counterparts would
be if they thought that US policies are derived from ucydides or Xenophon.
What is at work are rather broad trends, especially in terms of self-perception.
Two are particularly important: a concept of cultural cohesion and a concept of
centrality. ese concepts have shaped China’s interaction with the world for a
very long time.3
China’s cultural cohesion emerged from the wri en Chinese language, which
gradually became the means of interaction for large numbers of elites inside the
empire and outside. By the end of the rst millennium a er the founding of the
Han empire, the command of wri en Chinese was used as a key cultural marker
in eastern Asia—whoever mastered it was on the inside of an increasingly com-
plex cultural web. It gave the users, whatever state they found themselves within,
a particular connection to and a nity for Chinese culture. e wri en language
served as a great conveyor belt of ideas and technologies, not only from whatever
empire controlled China and toward the rest of eastern Asia, but o en in other
directions as well. It created a pervasive cultural cohesion that de ned a region.4
Instead of a claim to universal political centrality, which it o en has been seen
as constituting, in historical terms Chinese elites have asserted the superiority
of their states in a cultural sense: China was at the center of a common culture
because it was the origin, the root, of its manifestations, of which the superior-
ity of the empire and the person of the emperor—over time known as the “son
 Leg aci es o f the Past 27

of heaven”—was one. Of course, imperial centrality was much more immediate

when the emperor had a great deal of physical power to back up his position. And
the cultural zone in which such claims had validity was limited to some areas
immediately adjacent to China itself, rst and foremost Korea and Vietnam, and
to some extent Japan. Even so, it would be wrong to write o Chinese centrality
simply as an ideologized version of China’s military power. For a very long time,
it was a concept that others bought into as well as Chinese.5
e long-term consequences of these concepts are fairly clear and also vis-
ible today. Among many Chinese, they have led to an immense cultural pride: I
am among the many who have witnessed how barely literate Chinese delight
in their country being the root of a regional (and today increasingly global)
culture. But as with all concepts of centrality, their practices can go in di erent
directions: they can justify a empting to dominate a region (as Germany did
in Europe prior to 1945) or integrate a region (as Germany has done in Europe
a er 1945). But, however they are practiced, concepts of centrality o en give
rise to a sense of exceptionalism with regard to others.
e inheritance from China’s deeper past is therefore signi cant but mal-
leable. What the People’s Republic of China inherited from the Qing empire
seems more hard-wired, both in terms of perceptions and institutions. Some
historians of China see this as ironic, since so much energy has been spent in
Chinese nationalist historiography a er 1912 on denouncing the empire’s “for-
eign” Manchu rulers and denying its signi cance for China.6 But in many ways
denying the uidity and changeability of empire and stressing the break between
imperial and post-imperial institutions are common positions across post-
imperial space, both in former peripheries and former metropoles. e Chinese
distaste for the Qing is echoed in most other se ings where a collapsed empire
serves as a useful foil for glori cation of the present (or at least as an excuse for
contemporary imperfections).7
Instead, what stands out in China today are the multiple ways in which
today’s People’s Republic has inherited Qing notions and practices. Many of the
concepts of extreme centralization are from the Qing era, as are institutions such
as the hukou ( ), the household registration system by which Chinese are
permi ed or denied the right to se le outside the region of their birth.8 In over-
all terms, the PRC’s current authoritarianism, its state reverence, its methods
for controlling and fashioning private enterprise, organizations, and religious
communities all come out of the Qing (although many of them, of course, have
deeper roots). China today has done away with less of its imperial legacies over-
all than most other post-imperial states.
For the purposes of understanding the PRC’s international a airs, grasping
this relative continuity and its e ects is central. It has a strong e ect both on
what China is and how it constructs its outer worlds. e Qing empire expanded
28

China’s borders into Mongolia, the Dzungar and Tarim basins, Tibet, the north-
east (Manchuria), and the southwestern Hmong and Lolo areas. Even more
important, it carried out large-scale Chinese colonization of these regions, start-
ing the trend toward complete Sini cation that the PRC has put into high gear
today. e expansion of China is therefore in many ways similar to that of Russia
or the United States, with large increases in contiguous territory and the accom-
panying assimilation or extermination of other groups within de ned borders.
Even the 92 percent within the PRC who identify as Chinese (or Han, as the
o cial designation goes) compares with the 81 percent Russians in Russia, and
85 percent Euro or African Americans in the United States.
e borders that the PRC have today are largely the ones it inherited from
the Qing empire. Outer Mongolia (today’s Mongolian republic) has been shaved
o , as has large chunks of land in the far northeast (to Russia)—Mao Zedong
used to say that China had not yet presented the bill to Moscow for these acqui-
sitions. Other than that, China’s borders have been remarkably stable since the
empire was abolished in 1912. China is therefore the only empire that has man-
aged the transition to a nation-state without a signi cant loss of territory, and
this determines not just its internal composition but its foreign a airs to a very
high extent.9
e Qing empire a empted to regulate its relationships with surrounding
states in ways that secured the ideological centrality of the empire while also
looking a er its security and economic interests. On occasion, historians refer to
these policies as “the tribute system,” though tribute was only a part of the rela-
tionships and the content of each country’s links with Beijing was distinct and
speci c (and o en remarkably varied). e common element was the Qing’s
insistence that all surrounding countries were in principle subservient to the
empire and that their representatives ought to show up in the imperial capital
at regular intervals to proclaim this deference. Other than that, relationships
di ered widely, dependent on cultural connections, historical ties, and local
needs.10
e two countries that in Qing protocols had the closest ties with the empire,
while still not being a part of it, were Korea and Vietnam. Korea had interacted
with China for a very long time, and during the Ming era the Korean state
became a vassal of the empire, a relationship that continued more or less intact
through Qing times. Korean rulers always guarded their freedom of action jeal-
ously, and Qing political in uence within Korea was very limited, even if Korean
kings accepted the Qing emperor as suzerain. e relationship was deeply cul-
tural. Korean elites viewed themselves as part of a common culture centered on
China, even when they found the Qing empire’s Manchurian roots insu ciently
Confucian.11
 Leg aci es o f the Past 29

Vietnam, and to a lesser extent the rest of Indochina, also stood in a direct
relationship with the Qing empire that went beyond anything seen elsewhere,
except in Korea.12 It was sometimes a troubled relationship: the fact that the
Vietnamese king regarded himself to be a vassal of the emperor also meant that
the Qing reserved the right to determine ma ers such as the correct succes-
sion. And, unlike Korea, the turbulent politics of Vietnam, especially from the
late eighteenth century on, meant numerous Chinese a empts at intervening
in Vietnamese a airs. Ironically, the somewhat more remote relationship com-
pared to Korea meant more intervention, because the two political cultures were
less immediately aligned. e interventions gave rise to long-term resentments
in Vietnam, some of which have lasted up to our own time.13
Japan was partly inside and partly outside the inner Chinese cultural circle. In
spite of having formed much of their cultural and political framework under the
in uence of China (o en through Korea), Japanese states were generally outside
of direct Chinese imperial control. e Qing empire never a empted to domi-
nate Japan in the way it dominated its other neighbors, and its elites generally
looked down on the Japanese as piratical troublemakers beyond the immediate
realm of civilization. And as Japan became uni ed under the Tokugawa shogu-
nate from the early seventeenth century on, Japanese leaders feared all forms of
direct Chinese leverage, much as they feared other forms of foreign power.
For Turks and Persians beyond the Qing’s “new frontier” (Xinjiang), for pen-
insular Southeast Asia and the islands, and for South Asia beyond the Himalayas,
Chinese a empts at regulating its neighborhood meant even less. In Chinese
terms, at least, most of the states in these regions were connected to the empire
in some form of vassalage, but the relationships were not close and in some cases
entirely theoretical, since leaders in Beijing had only the vaguest sense of what
kind of entities they were dealing with at the other end. In these cases the ideol-
ogy of empire easily superseded any form of practice, and the discourse of impe-
rial control within the Qing state was far more signi cant than any a empts at
exercising concrete supremacy abroad.14
is, then, is what the China-centered imperial regional order of the Qing
looked like before its collapse in the late nineteenth century. Unlike what is some-
times prophesied, this order is unlikely to make its return. It remains, of course,
in historical echoes and more or less constructed memories, some of which are
very powerful tools in Asian politics. Beyond that, a Chinese sense of central-
ity also remains, made more powerful by the country’s recent economic success.
And in the neighboring countries a fear of Chinese domination lingers, alongside
(at least in Korea and Vietnam) a sense of cultural interconnection. e rise of
domestic nationalisms is a new phenomenon (except, perhaps, in Korea) that
makes the return of a China-centered system less likely.
30

Ever since the collapse of imperial China, some scholars have theorized sets
of distinctions between assumed “Western” and “Eastern” approaches to inter-
national relations. One thread in these discourses has been the notion that
“Eastern” interactions, when freed from European international control, are by
themselves more peaceful and less confrontational than those of the “West.”15
ere is very li le in the historical record that gives credence to such views.
Chinese empires (and certainly the Qing) were expansionist and assertive,
and so were other states within the region. When we speak of the legacies of
empires within Asia, we need to count the e ects of Asia-based empires as well
as Europe-based ones.
Denying such a qualitative di erence between European and Asian state sys-
tems is not, of course, the same as denying di erence altogether. ere were very
signi cant di erences between European arrangements (o en, with a certain
ampli cation, referred to as “Westphalian” orders) and those that have existed
in eastern Asia since the Ming era. While the European state system indicated
the potential for legal and diplomatic equality among states, the eastern Asian
one emphasized hierarchy, with the China-based empire at least conceptually on
top. Sovereignty was more di use in eastern Asia, and smaller states had more
of an ability to trade aspects of sovereignty for practical concessions from the
empire.16 ere was also a much wider variety of informal exchanges and di use
positions, to which o cial proclamations spoke in ways that were intended to be
read in di erent ways by di erent groups. While empire was at the heart of the
eastern Asian international order, it was never universal in jurisdiction, capabil-
ity, or competence.

Authoritarianism
Most empires are authoritarian because of their very nature: in order to rule
over many di erent groups, elites assert the need for repressive and illiberal
institutions and policies. at Chinese empires have been authoritarian in
their political composition is therefore more in line with what other empires
have been in the past than di erent from them. What is di erent is that today’s
China has taken over and to some extent celebrates the authoritarianism of the
past. Participatory democracy is not suited for China even today, the Chinese
Communists’ argument goes, because it is a big and diverse country that needs a
rm hand at the tiller to secure social stability and economic growth. e prob-
lem with pro-authoritarian arguments is not just that they are used as an excuse
for bad governance at home. It is also that they create an image of China abroad
that dents its reputation for technological progress and commercial success.
For many people around the world, and not least in Asia, the threat from China
 Leg aci es o f the Past 31

is not its size nor its power, but its defense of one-party rule and authoritarian
government.17
It is therefore of key importance to understanding China’s contemporary
foreign relations to understand where the country’s authoritarianism comes
from. ere are of course several sources for it. Some are based on forms of Neo-
Confucian thinking that have been in uential in China for around 1,000 years.
Some come out of imperial practices, especially as employed by the Qing
empire. And some originate in the twentieth century with the birth of Chinese
Communism. Let us deal with each of these in turn.
All Confucian thinking is hierarchical, but not all of it is authoritarian. At
its best, Confucianism sets out assortments of duties and obligations that are
valid up and down the rungs of hierarchies, from the emperor to the hum-
blest of servants. When carefully adhered to in society and cra ily employed
within the state, Confucianism can create a remarkably cohesive social envi-
ronment, in which individuals may feel both empowered and secure. e form
of Confucianism most in vogue in China since the Song empire, o en called
Neo-Confucianism, emphasizes self-improvement as the only way of producing
a be er society. is form of thinking has o en led to an emphasis on personal
qualities over popular support. Especially during the Qing empire, the idea that
it was the rectitude and sagacity of an o cial, above even his proven results, that
quali ed for high o ce, was hardwired into the imperial system of preferences.
And such qualities were more likely to be found among o cials whose families
had served the empire for generations, thereby replacing the concept of a meri-
tocracy with that of favoritism or even nepotism, not unlike China today.18
e emphasis on elite selection and heredity was probably stimulated by the
Qing being led by families, including the imperial family, who were non-Chinese
in origin. e Manchu roots of the dynasty, and the outsider quality that much
of the Qing enterprise had, even a er it had ruled China for a century, contrib-
uted to a sense of exclusivity and distinctiveness among the elite. e Qing were
never quite able to relinquish the sense, inwardly and outwardly, that they were a
small elite, which had conquered China by force and ruled it through a combina-
tion of purpose and fear.19 Again, the similarities with Communist rule are strik-
ing, even if the Communists have di erent purposes and very di erent origins.
One aspect of its rule that the CCP has taken over from the Qing is its totali-
tarian presumptions. e Chinese preoccupation with a strong state goes much
further back than the last dynasty, but it was the Qing which expanded and
perfected China’s state veneration. For the Qing, the alternative to authoritar-
ian government was not freedom, but chaos. e need to regulate the popula-
tion, sometimes in minuscule detail, was therefore obvious to them. e ideal,
never implemented in practice, was government as a machine led by incorrupt-
ible idealists who worked for the best of the state. All other aspects of social life
32

had to be subsumed under the workings of the state: religion, business, educa-
tion, entertainment, even family a airs. Dictatorship was the will of Heaven and
heavy regulation the duty of the regime.20
e past hundred years in Chinese history has been a ba le over whether the
country can banish these ghosts of the past and move on. ere have been times
when the future seemed wide open, and other times when it seemed very closed
and re ective of the Qing era. e direction that China seems to go in domesti-
cally ma ers intensely for its foreign a airs, as is the case with any other country.
Nobody among China’s neighbors, or further a eld, believes that a China that
oppresses its own population, treats minorities harshly, and subsumes all activi-
ties to the needs of a centralized and dictatorial state will work with them in set-
tling bilateral or multilateral ma ers fairly and promptly. ey may be wrong
about this, but such are the assumptions and China’s more recent actions in east-
ern Asia seem to con rm them.

e “Century of Humiliation”
For the Chinese Communist state, the concept of China being weak and
exploited before the Communist conquest is an article of faith. The “cen-
tury of humiliation,” which is assumed to have lasted from the first Opium
War in 1839 to the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, is the reason, it
claims, the CCP and, eventually, the PRC came into being. The Chinese
Communist state is the Chinese people’s response to being humiliated
by foreigners after the Qing government started getting into trouble in
the mid-nineteenth century. If China today is nationalist, centralist, and
authoritarian, this was caused by the terrible attacks on China that foreign
imperialists, from the British to the Japanese, carried out. In other words,
the CCP dictatorship is necessary to set things right and make China rich
and strong again.21
is version of history is not only untrue but also unhelpful for China in
nding its place in the world. e late Qing empire did lose its wars against
stronger empires that encroached on its territory. And Europeans behaved, and
sometimes still behave, with racist condescension toward Chinese, not least
in the zones they took control of along China’s coast and main rivers. Japan
launched an all-out a ack against China in 1937 and its forces commi ed
terrible crimes therea er. But China as a whole was never colonized, and the
borders of China today are therefore remarkably similar to those of the Qing
empire. e Western concessions in China were returned to Chinese jurisdic-
tion well before the CCP took over. China su ered under foreign a acks, but it
was never under foreign direction, at least not for very long.
 Leg aci es o f the Past 33

But what is really untrue about the “humiliation” story is that it introduces an
image of Chinese as passive victims of foreign aggression until they were rescued
by the Communist Party. Instead, what happened as the Qing empire got into
trouble was that Chinese from all walks of life, as others within the empire, used
the opportunity to break out from the stranglehold that the imperial state had
had on them. ey migrated, worked, traded, invented, believed, and studied in
ways that the state had tried to prevent them from doing. ey cooperated with
foreigners. ey experimented with new forms of political representation and
new forms of culture or gender relations. In short, they a empted, as best they
could, to take control of their own lives.22
Not all was well in China in the late imperial and republican eras. e weak-
ening of the central state opened up for rampant forms of exploitation, espe-
cially in the countryside, and capitalism undercut many social ties that people
had depended on in the past. But, during the early twentieth century, China
avoided the sti ing oppression of the Qing or the murderous campaigns of the
early Communist period. is may not be good news for those who believe that
the purpose of Chinese society is to produce a strong state. But it did provide
people in China with opportunities that they did not have before or a er, or at
least not until the era of economic reform in the 1980s and 1990s.

e Past in the Present

Today’s Chinese government has inherited the legacies of empire and especially
the last empire’s authoritarianism. It has also constructed a version of recent his-
tory that emphasizes past Chinese victimhood as a justi cation for Communist
control. e only alternative to CCP rule, according to this version of Chinese
history, is domestic chaos and a return to humiliation at the hands of foreign-
ers. e fact that the political theory the party represents, communism, was
developed by a German, Karl Marx, and rst implemented by a Russian and
a Georgian, Lenin and Stalin, is o en conveniently forgo en by today’s party
leaders. e strengthening of one-party rule, which is the main aim of General
Secretary and President Xi Jinping, is rst and foremost justi ed by Chinese
nationalism and China’s national needs.
e CCP version of history is of course strengthened by China’s recent eco-
nomic success, which are outlined elsewhere in this volume. e growth of the
Chinese economy and its increasing internationalization have created links
with the world that China’s Communist leaders nd di cult to manage. But it
has also supplied a story about Chinese successes that can be used to present
a positive image of the country abroad. China is genuinely admired by many
in Asia and Africa who themselves dream of high growth rates and high-tech
34

production lines, and it is acclaimed and feared in equal amounts by Westerners

who are anxious about their own displacement as global leaders. Most Chinese
are understandably proud of their economic achievements, and many are still
willing to give the Communist Party at least the bene t of the doubt for having
presided over such a period of extraordinary growth.
It may be that China’s economic advance together with the historical legacies
of empire and authoritarianism, now mixed with more recent nationalism, will
make compromise abroad more di cult. at will lead to problems for China,
because it is on such compromise that the country’s further rise depends. ose,
be they in Beijing or Washington, who believe that eastern Asia will return to
its international state of around 1750 with China as an uncontested hegemon,
or that China as a new great power will get its way by behaving like other rising
powers have in the past—by throwing its weight around and alienating others—
are almost certainly wrong. Eastern Asia, and the world, are more complex than
before, and nationalisms and quests for sovereignty more widespread. Even if
China overcomes its domestic challenges and continues its rise, it will not be
able to dictate its will to others. Unless the whole international system, region-
ally and globally, changes dramatically, China will be dependent on compromise
to further its own interests, whatever way its government perceives them.
is is where China may face its biggest foreign policy challenges. e con-
structed history of China as ever peaceful and accommodating is not only untrue,
it is also rejected by China’s neighbors and unhelpful to the processes of Chinese
foreign policy making. e more China de nes itself as a normal country (albeit
a very big one) with limited but clear foreign policy interests, the be er it is both
for China and its neighbors. But China’s imperial heritage stands in the way of
such forms of thinking. So does its authoritarianism, which frightens others else-
where in Asia and beyond. Although there is no absolute rule that authoritarian
governments are more aggressive than democratic or pluralistic ones, it is hard to
convince other countries that China’s authoritarianism stops at home. As long as
China remains a repressive authoritarian state, its diplomatic, military, business,
and cultural initiatives abroad will always be regarded with suspicion by others
who do not share these values. A more a ractive China, for Chinese and foreigners
alike, will mean that the country has to overcome its past and present itself in a new
light. e tremendous changes it has gone through over the past generation shows
that such a di erent China is possible, even if it is not very likely in the short run.

Notes
1. e classic discussion is Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History om the Nation: Questioning
Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also Julia C.
 Leg aci es o f the Past 35

Schneider, Nation and Ethnicity: Chinese Discourses on History, Historiography, and Nationalism
(1900s–1920s) (Boston: Brill, 2017).
2. For an overview of empire in Asia since the early modern era, see the two-volume work
Brian P. Farrell and Jack Fairey, eds., Empire in Asia: A New Global History, vol. 1, and Brian
P. Farrell and Donna Brunero, eds., Empire in Asia: A New Global History, vol. 2 (both
London: Bloomsbury, 2018). For a discussion of imperial interactions, see Odd Arne Westad,
“Empire in Asia: e Long Nineteenth Century?,” in Farrell and Brunero, vol. 2.
3. See Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750 (New York: Basic
Books, 2012).
4. A good overview is in Hongyuan Dong, A History of the Chinese Language (London:
Routledge, 2014).
5. See Alexander Woodside, Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World
History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Alexander Woodside, “ e
Centre and the Borderlands in Chinese Political eory,” in e Chinese State at the Borders,
ed. Diana Lary (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).
6. e degree to which the Qing should be understood as a Chinese empire, a Manchu one,
or as an amalgam of Manchu, Central Asian, and Chinese in uences is still a hotly debated
topic; see Ding Yizhuang and Mark Ellio , “How to Write Chinese History in the Twenty-
rst Century: e Impact of the ‘New Qing History’ Studies and Chinese Responses,” Chinese
Studies in History 51, no. 1 ( January 2, 2018): 70–95.
7. For its origins, see Wang Chunxia, “Pai Man” yu minzu zhuyi [“Anti-Manchuism” and
Nationalism] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2005).
8. For an overview, see Wang Weihai, Zhongguo huji zhidu: lishi yu zhengzhi de fenxi [China’s Huji
System: A Historical and Political Analysis] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 2006).
9. For the southwest and Tibet, see Charles Giersch, Asian Borderlands: e Transformation
of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006);
and Yingcong Dai, e Sichuan Frontier and Tibet: Imperial Strategy in the Early Qing
(Sea le: University of Washington Press, 2009). A good overview of conceptual issues is
James Leibold, Recon guring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and Its Indigenes
Became Chinese (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
10. e contributions in Di mar Schorkowitz and Ning Chia, eds., Managing Frontiers in Qing
China: e Lifanyuan and Libu Revisited (Leiden: Brill, 2017) take us a bit of the way in under-
standing how Qing foreign relations were actually managed.
11. See Odd Arne Westad, Empire and Righteous Nation: Six Hundred Years of China-Korea
Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
12. For an overview, see Jaymin Kim, “ e Rule of Ritual: Crimes and Justice in Qing-Vietnamese
Relations during the Qianlong Period (1736–1796),” in China’s Encounters on the South and
Southwest: Reforging the Fiery Frontier over Two Millennia, ed. James A. Anderson and John K.
Whitmore (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
13. Tuong Vu, “ e Party v. the People: Anti-China Nationalism in Contemporary Vietnam,”
Journal of Vietnamese Studies 9, no. 4 (2014): 33–66.
14. For a view of changes from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth, see Ma hew
W. Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: e Question of India and the Transformation
of Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).
15. Some have even started using the term “Eastphalia” as a contrast to the Westphalian order
in Europe (Sung Kim, David Fidler, and Sumit Ganguly, “Eastphalia Rising? Asian In uence
and the Fate of Human Security,” World Policy Journal 26, no. 2 (2009): 53–64). e term is
unlikely to catch on, since there is an actual Eastphalia in eastern Germany, unrelated to cur-
rent debates in international relations theory.
16. For general perspectives, see Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr, eds.,
e Sca olding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); for East Asia in the nineteenth century see
Junnan Lai, “Sovereignty and ‘Civilization’: International Law and East Asia in the Nineteenth
Century,” Modern China 40, no. 3 (2014): 282–314, and Tong Lam, “Policing the Imperial
Nation: Sovereignty, International Law, and the Civilizing Mission in Late Qing China,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, no. 4 (2010): 881–908.
36

17. For the early modern era, see Michael Ng‐Quinn, “ e Normative Justi cation of
Traditional Chinese Authoritarianism,” Critical Review of International Social and Political
Philosophy 9, no. 3 (2006): 379–397. Current a airs are covered in Wenfang Tang, Populist
Authoritarianism: Chinese Political Culture and Regime Sustainability (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2016) and Daniel Koss, Where the Party Rules: e Rank and File of China’s
Communist State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). For an alarmist interna-
tional view, see Stefan Halper, e Beijing Consensus: How China’s Authoritarian Model Will
Dominate the Twenty- rst Century (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
18. For an overview, see Peter Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History, Harvard East Asian
Monographs 307 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
19. For a brilliant discussion of Manchu identities, see Pamela Kyle Crossley, A Translucent
Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999).
20. See Willard J. Peterson, “Dominating Learning from Above During the K’ang-Hsi Period,”
in e Cambridge History of China: Volume 9: e Ch’ing Dynasty to 1800, ed. Willard J.
Peterson, vol. 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 571–605 and Wang Fan-
sen, “Political Pressures on the Cultural Sphere in the Ch’ing Period,” in Peterson, 606–48.
See also Jonathan D. Spence, Treason by the Book (New York: Viking, 2001), and for an
overview of the late Qing era that stresses the collapse of the Qing authoritarian order, see
Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo and Suzhou daxue shehui xueyuan, eds.,
Wan Qing guojia yu shehui [State and Society in Late Qing] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian
chubanshe, 2007).
21. See William A. Callahan, China: e Pessoptimist Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010), especially 31–60; Zheng Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory
in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations (Columbia University Press, 2014); and Jonathan
Unger, Chinese Nationalism (London: Taylor and Francis, 2016).
22. See Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750, 19–52.