The Mind of Empire: China's History and Modern Foreign Relations

By Christopher A. Ford

“Ford’s reading of Confucius is both shrewd and instructive, with implications for contemporary policymakers . . . a scholarly analysis of Chinese history.” —The Weekly Standard

China’s prosperity has increased dramatically in the last two decades, propelling the nation to a prominent position in the international community. Yet China’s ancient history still informs and shapes its understanding of itself in relation to the world. As a highly developed and modern nation, China is something of a paradox.

In The Mind of Empire: China’s History and Modern Foreign Relations, Christopher A. Ford demonstrates how China’s historical awareness shapes its objectives and how the resulting national consciousness continues to influence the country’s policymaking. Despite its increasing prominence among modern, developed nations, China continues to seek guidance from a past characterized by Confucian notions of hierarchical political order and a “moral geography” that places China at the center of the civilized world.

The Mind of Empire describes how these attitudes have clashed with traditional Western ideals of sovereignty and international law. Ford speculates about how China’s legacy may continue to shape its foreign relations and offers a warning about the potential global consequences. He examines major themes in China’s conception of domestic and global political order, describes key historical precedents, and outlines the remarkable continuity of China’s Sinocentric stance. Expertly synthesizing historical, philosophical, religious, and cultural analysis into a cohesive study of the Chinese worldview, Ford offers revealing insights into modern China.

“A much-needed and an erudite contextualization . . . [this book] will benefit immensely those interested in the history and strategic culture of China’s foreign policy.” —The China Quarterly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 28, 2010
• ISBN: 9780813139746

Book preview

Preface

This book is more of an interpretive essay on concepts and themes that, in my view, recur in fascinating and significant ways throughout the millennia of Chinese history than it is a history of China or Chinese relations with the rest of the world. It is certainly not a work written by a professional historian, being instead the work product of someone whose scholarly background is limited to international relations and the law. Nor is this book one by a professional Sinologist, and, as a newcomer to the field, I have, in deference to my nonmembership in that fraternity, taken pains to provide extensive citations to the works on which I have relied in my research. This work is aimed less at the historian or Sinologist than at the public policy intellectual or the general reader who has an interest in China's rich history and portentous future and is willing to put up with the sort of elaborate footnoting common to law reviews.

In this regard, a word is in order here about the transliteration of words from Chinese—a language I must admit to neither speaking nor reading. I am aware that several different systems of Chinese romanization have been used during the last century and a half: the modern pinyin established by the Chinese government, a simplified pinyin transliteration, the old Wade-Giles system, and the yet older one adopted by James Legge in his nineteenth-century translations (in which, e.g., the Taoist eminence Zhuang Zi is rendered Kwang-tze). As I have drawn in the preparation of this book from a number of sources using each of these various systems, I have elected in many instances—with the exception of cases in which it seemed expedient, except in direct quotation, to standardize accounts throughout this volume (e.g., the Qin [Ch'in] and Qing [Ch'ing] dynasties and the period of Zhou [Chou] feudalism)—to use the transliteration employed in each source. This will no doubt cause headaches and some confusion for well-read experts and those who know Chinese, but it seemed the safest way to eliminate actual errors on my part. For names of notables such as Kongzi (K'ung-tzu) and Mengzi (Meng-tzu), moreover, I have also tended to stick with the traditional Westernized versions of their names—Confucius and Mencius—opting to annoy the specialist rather than to confuse the more casual Western reader. For all this, profuse apologies are no doubt due to professional Sinologists and, indeed, any Chinese speaker.

For those willing to tolerate its necessary idiosyncrasies, however, I hope that this book proves interesting and enlightening. Experiences and understandings of the past, and assumptions about the nature of the world, condition all persons, and all peoples, in important ways, and they help shape how the challenges of the present and the dilemmas of the future will be understood and acted on. As any student of economics should concede, macro-level tendencies are just that: tendencies. They certainly do not necessarily predict particular, micro-level choices, nor do they invariably hold true even in the aggregate and over time. The world is a complex place. Accordingly, this book makes no pretense of predicting precisely how China's storied past will shape its future relationships with the barbarian world. But, while to describe the past is not to predict the future, one can, nonetheless, often learn a great deal from it—putting contemporary issues into a richer context, providing a basis for better understanding certain dynamics and otherwise mysterious foibles, refining one's grasp of the range of more or less likely future possibilities, and augmenting policymakers’ conceptual tool kit as they help the rest of the world live out its complex engagement with a rising China. I hope the reader will enjoy my retelling, and interpretation, of these strands pulled from Chinese history as much as I have enjoyed preparing it.

Introduction

This book grew out of the curiosity sparked by my encounter with the Analects of Confucius, an encounter that engendered particular interest by virtue of the similarities—and yet striking differences—it suggested between the lives of the great Chinese sage and Hugo Grotius, the Dutchman who for some time in European history was declared to be the father of modern international law. I had written an article on Grotius that examined his legal writings from the perspective of some of the ethical advocacy traditions of Stoic moralizing out of which I felt his approach had grown.¹ His writings and circumstances were, thus, relatively fresh in my mind when first reading Confucius, and comparing the two men seemed a fascinating project.

Both Confucius and Grotius lived in tumultuous times of warfare and social dislocation marked by great intellectual and cultural change. In both men's times, traditional martial aristocracies were in decline, the nature of warfare was in flux, centuries of feudalism had collapsed, and rival princes were trying to consolidate power by beginning to build bureaucratic, administrative states—the growing power of which they then used in periodic attempts to dominate, overawe, or subjugate each other. Grotius and Confucius were also both formidable scholars famous in their own lifetimes and well versed in the literature and history of their culture. Each was, in fact, an exemplar of an emergent class of itinerant civil servant-philosophers that made its living serving as guides and tutors to a constellation of rival princes. Both were intimately familiar with the forms and voices of a distantly remembered but highly romanticized golden age—an idealized era of lost learning and wisdom, it seemed, that had collapsed and must be revived. Significantly, both men also invoked the legitimacy and authority of such classical forms in articulating their own, relatively new vision of moral social order that would give their world an antidote to the chaos and bloodshed around them.

For Grotius, who was in his prime at the apogee of Northern Europe's neoclassical Renaissance and the simultaneous nadir of the Thirty Years’ War, the world was a place of ancient wisdom betrayed by modern brutishness. Drawing, as I have argued elsewhere, on the contemporary literary fashion of political tutorials known as the mirrors for princes—and borrowing heavily from a moralizing, classically flavored, and Roman-derived Neostoic philosophy then very much in vogue among educated Europeans—Grotius set forth a vision of princely moral restraint that took the form of self-regulation by the sovereign.² This approach was less one of formal legal institutionalization than it was of a moral and educative appeal to honor and virtuous personal self-restraint. It was, in other words, an appeal for Aurelian moderation³ and self-control by the men who happened to be Europe's princes,⁴ and it was designed to regulate the severity of contemporary warfare.

To all this I saw fascinating parallels in the life, times, and philosophy of Kongzi (K'ung Fu-tzu, or Master K'ung), famous in the West under the Latinized name Confucius. Confucianism shared with Grotian ethics an emphasis on preventing anarchy through reliance on internalized mores and self-restraint by properly educated and cultivated government officials—enlightened rulers tutored in good governance by wise scholar-philosophers who were themselves held to be sterling examples of political virtue.⁵ As the Analects quotes a disciple of Confucius:⁶ "Suppose that there is an individual who can be entrusted with the charge of a young orphan prince, and can be commissioned with authority over a State of a hundred lî, and whom no emergency however great can drive from his principles:—is such a man a superior man? He is a superior man indeed."⁷

Both Grotius and Confucius were moralists and educators whose target audience was the highest officials in the state, and each man's writing had the self-consciously political aim of peace and sound governance. The student of it, as Legge observed, should be a sovereign.⁸ Accordingly, both men saw the foundation of good government and order in the personal virtue and self-control of their ruler-pupils. Virtue is the root, as Confucius put it; "the ruler will first take pains about his own virtue.⁹ By the ruler's cultivation of his own character, the duties of universal obligation are set forth."¹⁰

Grotius and Confucius also shared, in their articulation of ideals of a sovereign's virtue, a moralistic opposition to the ruthless, realpolitik advice being offered to princes by rival philosophers. For Grotius, the ideological archenemy was Machiavelli, whom he reviled indirectly, as was the fashion, through his repudiation of the ancient character of Carneades, a literary stand-in and quasi-Machiavellian straw man.¹¹ For Confucius, as we will see, the amoral philosophical opposition was the Legalist school, which dripped contempt for Confucian virtue and saw social order as being grounded on raw coercion.

Yet this was where the similarities ended, and, on further reflection, remarkable differences emerged between the Western and Chinese contexts—differences that bespoke fundamentally different conceptions of international order that might, I felt, themselves be of much broader significance, both in the past and for the future. It was with that realization that this book first began to develop.

Despite its internally focused moralism and general neglect of legal institutionalism,¹² the Grotian project was strikingly significant as one of Europe's more influential accounts of a truly international code of conduct. As such, it was a fundamentally pluralist code, providing rules to govern the conduct of rivalrous princes who were, precisely because of their independent and coequal sovereignty, otherwise answerable to no earthly law. Along with other great Western legal thinkers such as Vitoria, Suárez, Gentili, Vattel, Pufendorf, and even Hobbes—all of whom will find their places in this study as counterpoints to the Chinese world-view—Grotius exemplified a fundamentally pluralist approach in which the nature of world order presupposed an international aspect of law precisely because the existence of nations was axiomatic.

The Grotian and Confucian conceptions of geopolitical order thus took sharply divergent paths in their attempts to provide an answer to the problem of war. Grotius articulated an ideal of international law to govern the conduct of separate, coequal sovereigns and, thus, mitigate the severity of warfare between such units. Confucius, on the other hand, added his voice to an intellectual tide in his own time that saw harmonious order as being possible only in an inexorable centralization, which would eliminate warfare by subjecting all to a single, just sovereign. This distinction and the divergent conceptual currents that these two thinkers represent lie at the core of modern China's ambivalent relationship to the international legal order that has grown out of the post-Westphalia state system in Europe.

As we will see in the following chapters, however many interesting similarities there might otherwise be between the man introduced by King Henry IV of France as le miracle de Hollande¹³ and the scholar-bureaucrat who once kept the state granaries in the ancient kingdom of Lu (Lû), these Eastern and Western approaches represent very different conceptual frameworks. This book is an attempt to explain the Chinese conception of world order to Western readers, to outline the ways in which this worldview has helped shape China's relations with the rest of the world—not least with Western Europe and the United States—and to suggest some potential implications that these dynamics might have for the future.

Chinese conceptions of international order are grounded in lessons drawn from China's history, particularly the Warring States period, in which protonations struggled for hegemony and at the end of which the Qin (Ch'in) state gradually emerged victorious. The Chinese tradition has as its primary model for interstate relations a system in which the focus of national policy is, in effect, a struggle for primacy, and legitimate, stable order is possible only when one power reigns supreme—by direct bureaucratic control of the Sinic geographic core and by at least tributary relationships with all other participants in the world system. This monist model of global order is not merely a by-product of China's ancient history. Its central assumptions—about the need for political unity, the natural order of all politics as a pyramidal hierarchy, and the fundamental illegitimacy of truly separate and independent state sovereignties—are reflected in many aspects of China's classical canon: in Confucian literature, Taoist works, and the manuals of war and statecraft known as the bingjia. Sinic monism, therefore, enjoys powerful roots in China's intellectual tradition that amplify its centrality as a prism through which all subsequent Chinese leaders have viewed their world and China's place in it.

This tradition is suffused with a monist political ideology that conceives of world order in fundamentally hierarchical terms, idealizes interstate order as tending toward universal hegemony or actual empire, and lacks a meaningful concept of coequal, legitimate sovereignties pursuant to which states may coexist over the long term in nonhierarchical relationships. To what might otherwise have been a ruthlessly amoral Legalist approach to centralization, Confucianism also added a powerful ideal of virtuous rule—no less monist, but suffused with the idea that centrality in the order system derives from the virtue of the ruler who thereby achieves such primacy. There developed, in other words, a moral geography of imperium: a hierarchical or vertical conception of political order that both derived from and demanded civilizational monopolarity¹⁴ and that viewed political authority and legitimacy, in effect, as emanating in concentric circles from a sage-king unto the ends of the earth.

The implications of this cultural baggage have been profound in the past, as they have influenced how China has lived out its encounters with the Other for many centuries. Most dramatically, these conceptual currents helped shape the contours of China's awkward, painful, and sometimes disastrous encounters with the modern industrialized West. The clash of conceptual paradigms between such ancient Chinese ideals and what might be called a Westphalian notion of world order was most obvious in China's prolonged struggle (particularly with Britain) over status prerogatives and the symbolisms of hierarchy and equality, a quarrel that ran through the more concrete economic and military struggles of the nineteenth century. As we shall see, however, these themes have also echoed powerfully even in the period after the collapse of the Qing dynasty, through the period of revolutionary Marxist ideology, and to the present day.

The implications of this cultural baggage may yet be important in the future because, especially by comparison with its millennia of history as a powerful society, China is still a relative newcomer to the system of Western-derived international order and law—and an awkward one at that. In its encounters with the West, China has turned to its own history for guidance, fastening on the Warring States period as the paradigm through which to understand and operate within the modern international world. But Chinese history provides no precedent for the stable, long-term coexistence of coequal sovereigns, and its traditional ideals of moral governance and statecraft cannot even admit such a possibility. To be sure, China's modern approach to international relations suggests an understanding that ideals of sovereign equality and international law are currently in China's interest. Viewing the world through the prism of the Warring States period, it seems clear that recourse to such ideals and institutions can be useful in helping fend off the depredations of would-be (non-Chinese) hegemons. As its strength grows, however, China may well become much more assertive in insisting on the sort of Sinocentric hierarchy its history teaches it to expect and its traditional notions of power and legitimacy encourage it to demand. We shall see.

At any rate, the conceptual and factual history of the Chinese paradigm of world order—and its troubled relationship with alternative views that stress plurality and sovereign coequality—is a fascinating one. If this book prompts the reader to think somewhat more deeply about the principles and assumptions that underlie these competing visions of the international system and their implications for the future, it will have succeeded in its purpose.

1

An Emergent China

and the Weight of History

DEBATING THE CHINA THREAT

For many years, as Thomas Kane and Lawrence Serewicz have wryly suggested, China has been "famous for its potential to be an important global actor."¹ Napoléon Bonaparte famously referred to China as a sleeping giant that, if awakened, would shake the world, but it is only in comparatively recent years that the world's most populous country has shown signs of shaking off the torpor to which he referred and developing more than merely a notorious potential for world power. As China's economy has begun to modernize—and, with it, its huge but long ill-equipped military machine—outside observers and Chinese alike have begun to wonder what sort of a power on the world stage China will actually become.

In recent years, particularly in the United States, there has been no shortage of analysts who see in the People's Republic of China (PRC) not simply an emerging world power but a highly problematic and dangerous one. By Steven Mosher's account, for instance, China's developing role in the world is driven by a deeply entrenched worldview with its roots in ancient Chinese history, one that abstracts from China's own experiences the general conclusion that chaos and disorder can only be avoided by organizing vassal and tributary states around a single, dominant axis of power. According to this view, present-day Beijing views its role in the world as not unlike that of its dynastic imperial predecessors, in that it does not desire equality in external affairs, but deference, for it governs not as a nation-state…but as an all-encompassing civilization. Mosher concludes: China projects its own 5,000-year history onto the wider contemporary world and reaches [the conclusion that]…[t]he world needs a Hegemon. To put it another way, for Chinese strategists, balance-of-power politics is inherently unbalanced. Racial pride, an innate sense of cultural superiority, and a long history all tell the Chinese that the role of Hegemon properly belongs to China and its rulers. This Chinese view, he argues, has potentially dire implications because, strictly speaking, the hegemon has no foreign policy other than one of continuous aggression against and absorption of neighboring states.²

Some other recent accounts of China's strategic worldview, particularly by American conservatives, have echoed these themes. According to John Derbyshire, for instance: The ambitions of Chinese nationalists are not restricted to Chinese territory, they are hegemonic. Indeed, they are imperial. To be sure, Derbyshire does not seem to think that China wishes actually to conquer all East Asia—at least [not] in the short term. Rather, as he sees it, Chinese leaders wish to ensure that all countries in the region acknowledge the overlordship of Beijing, and, above all, [do] not enter into alliances, nor even close friendships, with other powers.³ By other accounts, Beijing is determined to use the fruits of its recent economic growth to restore [its] historical position of regional dominance in Asia, thus making the PRC potentially the most important and dangerous rising power of the dawning Pacific century.⁴ China's security strategy seeks hegemony over much of Asia⁵ and wishes to replace the United States as the preeminent power in Asia, to reduce American influence, to prevent Japan and the United States from creating a kind of ‘contain China’ front, and to extend its power into the South China and East China Seas so that it can control the region's essential sea lanes.⁶ Edward Friedman similarly sees the growth of an increasingly powerful strain of Chinese nationalism, one that envisions a glorious hegemonic 21st century of Chinese dominance in the Asia-Pacific region.⁷ While some admit that China has no pretensions to a global imperium" of the sort desired by the former Soviet Union, it is said to desire at least regional hegemony. The scope of China's ultimate territorial and other ambitions in Asia, it has been suggested, is simply not evident at this juncture in history—probably not even to China itself.⁸ Encouraged by a number of books decrying alleged Western failures to respond to such Chinese threats⁹—and notwithstanding a general diversion of attention to the Islamic world in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—debates over the implications of the PRC's growing economic and military power have become staples of modern foreign policy discourse in Washington, DC.¹⁰

CULTURE AND INERTIA

What many contemporary policy-oriented discussions of such issues have lacked, however, is a detailed study of the historical roots of contemporary Chinese approaches to international politics, undertaken specifically in order to provide analytic depth to such contemporary debates. What exactly are the historical foundations on which modern Chinese conceptions of international order are built? How salient is such history to understanding China's self-perceived role in the world today? What implications might such cultural baggage have for the PRC's approach to issues of international legality and cooperation, especially as China's relative power in the world continues to increase? This book attempts to help answer some of these questions, providing policy analysts, political scientists, and international lawyers with a broader understanding of some of the concepts and history underlying China's understanding of itself in the world.

The starting point for this examination is the grounding assumption that culture and history do matter in shaping a country's views of international order, legality, and legitimacy. As Lucian Pye has observed, Culture is unquestionably significant, in some undetermined degree, in shaping the aspirations and fears, the preferences and prejudices, the priorities and expectations of people as they confront the challenges of social and political change…. Culture is also a remarkably durable and persistent factor in human affairs…. People cling to their cultural ways not because of some vague feeling for their historical legacies and traditions but because their culture is part and parcel of their personalities—and we know from psychoanalysis how hard (and expensive) it is to change a personality.¹¹ In helping understand the interpenetration of Chinese history and cultural baggage with modern conceptions of international order, this book borrows somewhat from Alastair Iain Johnston's notion of strategic culture. According to Johnston, states have different predominant sets of strategic preferences that are rooted in the ‘early’ or ‘formative’ military experiences of the state or its predecessor, and are influenced to some degree by the philosophical, political, cultural, and cognitive characteristics of the state and state elites as these develop through time. The idea of strategic culture posits that both conflict and cooperation in international politics are rooted in historically constructed and socially-learned assumptions about the strategic environment and appropriate responses to it.¹²

To be sure, such notions fly somewhat in the face of traditional assumptions that state behavior can best be explained by more objective factors such as the structure of the international state system,¹³ the bureaucratic incentives of the institutional actors competing for influence within a particular country's sociopolitical structure or in the transnational realm,¹⁴ or the self-serving economic interests of a country's ruling elites.¹⁵ The idea that socially constructed views of the past and assumptions about the nature of one's environment can exert a powerful shaping effect on how actors see the world around them and order the hodgepodge of information inputs they receive every day, however, is today neither novel nor surprising. Theorists of decisionmaking dynamics have long identified the ways in which decisionmakers—especially in times of crisis but by no means only then—commonly resort to rules of thumb and stock assumptions about historical patterns and geopolitical causality in order to help them cope with the press of events.¹⁶

Such patterns may, at times, be influenced by highly personal and idiosyncratic factors, but information organizing is also a learned behavior, in which patterns are both projected backward on the past and passed forward through time by means of the education and socialization of individual human beings. As Gary Taylor has noted, Cultural time, like cultural space, is always limited, and those limits create competition for access to the available resources. As Taylor conceives it, memory is rabid, being driven by a need to infect others, a compulsion to repeat itself,¹⁷ and our collective human cognitive space is the environment in which various organizing patterns compete for survival over time. (Daniel Dennett, borrowing from the zoologist Richard Dawkins, has described this process in explicitly Darwinian terms, in a characteristically playful but intriguing discussion of memes.)¹⁸ Habits of mind, it would seem, both are subject to a sort of speciation and tend to perpetuate themselves in identifiable lines over time within human communities. As David Grene observed in his discussion of Herodotus's History, there is, therefore, "something real" in the imaginative core of even the most outlandish myths and stories that come down to us from the past, insofar as people tend to act on them today.¹⁹

More prosaically, it seems safe to say that the sophisticated observer need not revert to archaic and culturally deterministic ideas of national types in order to appreciate that different countries and peoples do have different experiences of the world and do understand their present at least partly through the prism of the past—or at least through what they take the past to have taught them. Culture is hardly destiny, and cultural baggage is seldom so heavy that its owners cannot carry it some distance down a road they themselves choose. Yet culture does matter, and, by understanding its historically imposed inertia on choice,²⁰ we can often make great strides toward understanding the motivational structure and behavior of specific groups, peoples, and national elites.

Johnston's specific concern in his work on Chinese strategic culture was to understand the inertia imposed by particular ideas and habits of mind as observable constraints on choice by elite decisionmakers during the Ming dynasty about the role of war in human affairs, the nature of threats facing China, and the efficacy of the use of force in international affairs.²¹ My task is a related but broader one, seeking to outline and explore the historical roots of some of the ideas underlying contemporary Chinese understandings of China's place in the world, the workings of international politics, and the meaning and legitimacy of international order and legality. This endeavor will necessarily require explorations of less depth than Johnston's book-length study of Ming-era strategic culture permitted him. This book will proceed from a quick survey of ancient Chinese history through a series of brief outlines of the geopolitical lessons that can be teased out of the Confucian classics, other ancient literature (e.g., Taoist and Buddhist texts), Legalist thinking, and the Military Classics. Then, I will sketch the ways in which China has dealt with both internal and international pluralism during the past twenty-five hundred years and attempt to draw from this analysis some of the implications for others of China's view of itself in the world, of the legitimacy of the international legal system, and of its images of and approaches to the foreign Other.

PACKING AND REPACKING THE BAGGAGE OF HISTORY

The Power of the Past

To begin with, it is worth noting that China's thousands of years of history have an extraordinary presence in contemporary Chinese life and thought. In the Anglophone West, it is common to dismiss a past event as being irrelevant to our contemporary life by describing it as ancient history. Such remote history, it is assumed, can have no meaning to us today precisely because it is ancient. Our world, Westerners tend to assume, is shaped and develops in new ways that cannot be understood through the myopic prisms of the past—and it is only by breaking free of such strictures that one can make real progress. Whether or not this is actually true, however, it is hard to exaggerate how much such Western assumptions are unlike the approach to history usually taken in China.

To be sure, China is also a society in the midst of rapid social and economic change, and ideals of law in the PRC today present a mosaic of traditional legal conceptions, Western influences (including Marxist theory, adopted and adapted so enthusiastically by Mao Zedong [Mao Tse-tung]), and strenuous current efforts to adapt to the legal requirements of a fast-changing global economy.²² Nevertheless, as China struggles with change, its leaders and its people must take what bearings they can by making reference to the past—and China is perhaps the most historically conscious nation on Earth.²³ As Witold Rodzinski has observed, the Chinese have long been almost uniquely concerned with history, seeing in it not only the main source of knowledge regarding the functioning of human society…but viewing it also as providing a model for the present.²⁴ In no country, agrees Samuel Kim, does history seem to be playing as omnipotent and omnipresent a role as in China.²⁵

China has a long-standing tradition of using history to comment upon contemporary events, a tradition described by the colorfully idiomatic saying zhi sang ma huai (point at the mulberry and revile the ash).²⁶ According to another ancient saying, [The] common people worship the past and devalue the present. Those who disseminate principles can only explain things in the name of the Yellow Emperor.²⁷ The role of history has long been bound up with the legitimacy of present-day behavior and its actual or purported rootedness in understandings from the past:

In few countries does history play a greater role than [in] China. For more than two millennia, successive imperial dynasties and generations of Confucian scholar-officials found in the history of earlier eras explanations of the moral waxing and waning of society and its institutions. From this they drew conclusions about how the affairs of their own era ought to be governed. The legitimacy of each dynasty was closely tied to this historical explanation, and each dynasty produced an orthodox history justifying its rise to power. The official history invariably demonstrated that the decline of the previous regime was caused by moral decay and the establishment of the present regime resulted from its superior virtue.²⁸

Today, as in the past, Chinese policy makers and strategists rely heavily upon Chinese cultural heritages as the reservoir of wisdom.²⁹ In fact, it is hard to overestimate how important the past is considered to be in understanding the present, and, as contemporary China retreats from the doctrinaire orthodoxies of Maoist thought, it seems to be turning more, not less, to the lessons of its ancient history. In May 1996, for instance, it was announced that the government in Beijing had formed a new strategic research center that would combine research on traditional Chinese statecraft with studies and experiments designed to generate innovative military operational concepts for twenty-first-century warfare.³⁰ Ancient history, in other words, lives on today in China's understanding of itself as it lives on in perhaps no other nation of power and significance in the modern world.

One factor that has greatly enhanced the perceived salience of the past throughout the long course of China's history has been the relative uniformity and stability of its written language. Westerners keen to understand their culture's political and intellectual legacy must either approach classic works in translation or master Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and several European tongues in both their archaic and their modern forms. By contrast, however, educated Chinese students of history can read most of their culture's masterworks in the original, thanks to the Qin dynasty's establishment of a uniform Chinese script at the end of the third century B.C.E. This standardization, modified only somewhat under the succeeding Han dynasty, has made Chinese writing into a sort of universal means of expression in every part of Asia subject to Chinese civilization for the past two millennia. It has also made possible in China a study of—and devotion to—the written tradition that is unlike any other in the world.³¹ Even where divergent spoken dialects such as Mandarin and Cantonese render Chinese citizens unintelligible to each other in person, an educated Chinese has always been able to avail himself of the literature of almost any period,³² drawing not only on literary works but also—and more important for present purposes—on historical records only a portion of which include twenty-five dynastic histories equivalent in length to a total of some forty-five million English words.³³ Nor are ancient works turned to in China principally for cultural, literary, or spiritual points of reference, as, for example, are Homer and the Bible in the West. For Chinese, a sprawling classical canon of texts is felt to provide historical instruction on issues of present-day policy relevance.

This powerful written tradition, and the comparative cultural uniformity that it has encouraged—at least among the educated elite capable of mastering the thousands of ideograms necessary for truly facile literacy in the complex Chinese system—has helped foster the intense and inwardly focused classicism that is a distinguishing characteristic of Chinese intellectual life. If, indeed, it is true that China is perhaps the most monolithic cultural and political system anywhere,³⁴ it owes this in large part to its literary tradition.

As Najime Nakamura has noted, The thought and life of the Chinese people must always be examined in relation to the Chinese classics, for the life of the Chinese has been strongly conditioned by the classics. The texts of every period abound in allusions to previous periods, and the legitimacy and validity of contemporary views or approaches are to be judged first and foremost by the ability of their proponents to demonstrate congruence with the fruit of the past experiences of people of older times.³⁵ As the canonical Confucian text Ch'un chiu (Spring and Autumn Annals) described it in terms that still echo in Chinese intellectual life today, history is not a progression of the new but the recurrent living out of basic principles, patterns, and rules that can be understood with reference to the past and used to the advantage of the wise ruler: Wisdom is the means by which one compares the past, views what is far off, and sees what is nearby. The present is to antiquity as antiquity is to later ages. The present is to later ages as the present is to antiquity. Thus if one thoroughly knows the present he can know the past, if he knows the past he can know later ages. Antiquity and the present, earlier and later, are one. Thus the Sage knows a thousand years ahead, a thousand years back.³⁶

The principles embodied in the classics, therefore, are not ancient history in the contemptuous Western sense; rather, they spell out the causal sinews of the world as it exists at all times, making them fundamental reference points for decisionmaking at any, and every, point in history. Guidance for today, in other words, is to be found in chi-ku: in searching out the ancient ways.³⁷ For more than two thousand years, China has almost religiously looked to the past for the wisdom necessary to achieve ideal government and behavioral patterns to emulate and avoid.³⁸ The Chinese classics³⁹ understood to offer the best guidance on such matters have, thus, played a crucial role in establishing a tradition, a virtual mind-set for subsequent generations and largely defin[ing] the parameters and categories that were vigorously followed thereafter.⁴⁰

Some flavor of the—to Westerners—extraordinary way in which the texts of the past shape and color understandings of the present can be seen in the beloved fourteenth-century Chinese novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the four great classic novels of Chinese history, attributed to Luo Guanzhong. Hugely influential, and clearly itself a nearly universally known classic that has had a vast impact on Chinese culture and self-identity,⁴¹ the novel tells a tale of ancient heroes and villains who themselves routinely cite classical precedents as a guide to day-to-day decisions. In Three Kingdoms, arguments over military strategy are settled by the use of ancient references, leaders’ decisions are questioned (and sometimes reversed) by appeal to classical precedents, and ancient historical and legendary references pepper everyday speech at least as much as Western Europeans might allude to Grimm's fairy tales, biblical stories, and Greek myths.⁴² The novel recounts, presupposes, and contributes to a Chinese culture ineradicably wedded to a deeply historicized self-understanding in which an ancient canon of historical and philosophical works provides guidance and illumination in every aspect of statecraft and politics.

As William Alford has observed, even in the contemporary PRC, the immediacy of history is such that scholars, bureaucrats, and ordinary people alike tend to draw examples from the Chinese past to illustrate points about the present.⁴³ This profound reverence for the past and focus on grounding the legitimacy of contemporary thought and action in congruence with alleged historical lessons has inimically influenced China's attitude toward military preparedness and intelligence over the centuries.⁴⁴ It also seems to have powerfully conditioned China's approach to basic issues of legitimacy and legality in the international system.

Even the revolutionary Marxist leader Mao Zedong made reference to classical Chinese sources nearly as often as he made references to Stalin, a tendency that was even more pronounced in his later years.⁴⁵ In just one of his speeches, for instance—a lecture delivered in May 1938—Mao discussed historical precedents for his guerrilla strategy that could, he said, be found in at least six different conflicts between ancient Chinese warring states. He also presumed his audience's familiarity with passing references to such arcana as the asinine ethics of Duke Hsiang of Sung.⁴⁶ By the late 1990s, Chinese military writers seemed more comfortable citing classical sources such as Sun Zi (Sun Tzu) than they did citing Mao himself.⁴⁷

Legitimating the New in Antiquity

All this is not to suggest any sort of rigid cultural determinism. It may be true, as Nakamura points out, that, etymologically, the Chinese word ‘to learn’ has no other meaning but ‘to imitate.’⁴⁸ This does not mean, however, that China's traditional culture mandates an intellectual ossification and sterile scholasticism that makes it not simply resistant but, in fact, positively immune to new ideas. However influential the Chinese cultural tradition may be—and whatever inertia it may impose on the present—serious observers can hardly argue that Chinese intellectual traditions ‘lock in’ particular ideas and concepts or that the Chinese people cannot escape from the walls of Confucian political philosophy.⁴⁹

Nevertheless, while the overpowering historicism of the Chinese tradition has clearly not prevented innovation, it has often constrained and channeled it by giving special advantages to those who can denounce and resist what they do not like by appealing to the authority of precedent.⁵⁰ Conceptual entrepreneurs frequently find it necessary to frame new arguments by making them seem to be the true and authentic embodiment of old wisdom.⁵¹ Of necessity, therefore, it has long been the favored technique of Chinese thinkers to present their own views as simply a reaffirmation, an appeal to an ancient, legitimate but neglected tradition⁵²—even when they are not. The Chinese intellectual tradition, Roger Ames has noted, is "generally characterized by a commitment to continuity," requiring that a thinker achieve prominence therein, not by feeding a Western-style fetish for novelty, but rather by stressing the degree to which he embodies, expresses, and amplifies his tradition. Novelty is, in other words, customarily expressed by working within the tradition, not by repudiating the tradition.⁵³

This was, as we will see, the method of Confucius himself, who forged a powerful new tradition by describing his own work as merely an exposition of the ancient wisdom of the golden age of the Zhou (Chou) dynasty, a period that was by his time only a fading memory and was, therefore, easy prey for romanticization and recharacterization. There is in one Taoist text, for instance, an account of a dialogue between Confucius and a notable by the name of Yen Hui in which Confucius describes his methods as follows: Fully declaring my sentiments and substantiating them by appealing to antiquity, I shall be a co-worker with the ancients. Although my words in which I convey my lessons may really be condemnatory (of the ruler), they will be those of antiquity, and not my own. In this way, though straightforward, I shall be free from blame. This is what is called being a co-worker with antiquity.⁵⁴ Confucius may, indeed, be considered a great cultural innovator,⁵⁵ but he claimed to be a transmitter and not a maker⁵⁶ and spoke only in terms of re-creating an ancient harmony, an imagined golden age of Zhou feudalism.⁵⁷ This has been a recurring pattern in Chinese intellectual history.

Similarly, the great Neo-Confucian scholar of the Song (Sung) dynasty, Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi), was willing to reject certain portions of the classic texts that he deemed obsolete and unsuitable for contemporary society, but he carefully justified this move as being one of rejecting superfluous decorations and upholding the essential and practical.⁵⁸ This pattern may also be found in the political discourse of China's more recent Marxist-Leninist period, in which the principal vehicle for new thought remained—in true Confucian fashion—the genre of the scholarly commentary, in which an author added his own amplifying explanations to the doctrinal gospel laid down by his political and historical betters.⁵⁹ The judicious editing (and sometimes outright alteration or falsification) of canonical texts has, thus, been a staple of Chinese discourse for thousands of years, creating the paradoxical situation described by Janet Ainsworth in which a canon-obsessed culture has long faced perpetual insecurity about the precise language and meaning of the very texts it prizes most.⁶⁰

This should not be too surprising, for no society could truly encase its collective wisdom in amber and expect it to remain as relevant after two millennia as it was at the first. Nevertheless, the importance of ensuring that every innovator appears to be a co-worker with antiquity underlines the extraordinary presence of the past in contemporary Chinese life and thought. This, in turn, points us back to the importance of understanding the historical roots of Chinese conceptions of international order, legitimacy, and legality.

As Alford has noted, China's obsession with the past suggests strongly, for Western observers, that it may be even more necessary to appreciate legal history in the Chinese context than it is in our own.⁶¹ The classic texts may be edited and skewed over time by intellectual entrepreneurs, but the necessity for doing so underscores the overawing fact that they are the classic texts. The past is felt to live for China today, and to reside immortally in such classics, in ways that Westerners have difficulty imagining. In the old story recounted by Huang Tsung-hsi, the scholar Ch'eng Mo, speaking to his son from his deathbed, is said to have admonished the boy not to bemoan his passing. Pointing to the Six Classics, the old man declared, "You can find me in these books. Do not think they are just old words.⁶² In the Chinese tradition, there is no ancient history, and there are no old words."

MAKING SENSE OF THE TRADITION

It is, therefore, not just important to understand the historical antecedents of China's conception of international order, legality, and legitimacy; it is crucially important. China presents a fascinating object of study in this regard precisely because, although far from homogeneous and displaying enormous geographic and human diversity,⁶³ its tradition is, nonetheless, characterized by a remarkable continuity over time—and an equally great perceived salience in the contemporary world.⁶⁴ For all its diversity, as Ainsworth has noted, Chinese culture does represent a social order with sufficient coherence for scholars to develop useful generalizations about an imperial Chinese legal sensibility and its attendant legal order.⁶⁵ For Johnston, this continuity over time made the Sino-Confucian system a good place to start for the study of strategic culture,⁶⁶ and so also we may find it for our examination of notions of international order, legitimacy, and legality.⁶⁷

Indeed, as Caroline Blunden and Mark Elvin have suggested, this may be an arena in which Western scholars can play a useful role. It is paradoxical, they write, that the very continuity of Chinese history has often served to obscure their own past to the Chinese. Being far less well attuned than his Chinese colleagues to nuances of meaning, however, the Western scholar is freer from the taboos, inhibitions and assumptions of the Chinese present. In some ways, it may be psychologically easier for the Westerner to