Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. US$30.00, cloth; US$20.00, ebook. ISBN 9780197629116.
China is a rising major global power to be reckoned with on the international stage. The rise of China remains a hot topic for both China scholars and the policy research community worldwide. The authors of China’s Galaxy Empire, John Keane and Baogang He, both political scientists, contribute to the scholarship by bringing readers a nuanced picture of China’s regained prominence in global affairs, calling it a “young galaxy empire,” the first of such kind to emerge in the digital communications era.
According to the authors, the term “galaxy empire” refers to China’s growing global influence and ambition; Chinese rulers and authorities have begun to think big and plan long term. China, as a young galaxy empire, is multidimensional. The authors articulate how the galaxy empire has generated huge impacts across countries and continents by exerting its combination of political, cultural, technological, economic, and military power, as well as via the push/pull effects. The galaxy empire theory rejects clichéd misdescriptions of China as a hegemony, autocracy, or a big power.
The book, which is written as a long essay, details how China defies conventional definitions of land, sea, and air power. It explores new thought on such topics as state capitalism, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects launched by China in 2013, cross-border institution building (e.g., the United Nations), and the rise of the Chinese middle class—all within the context of empire. The authors show how the young galaxy empire has been making efforts to challenge the West-led rule-based international order via various tools, such as the BRI, cross-border currency swap arrangements, and the use of digital information to shape public opinion at home and beyond.
Beijing firmly believes connectivity, not territorial control, is the trump card to gain global prominence. China favours the rapid and efficient flows of capital, technology, goods, services, and personnel. The authors are right to argue that “fluid mobility is the currency of China’s galaxy empire” (47). Against this backdrop, the drive for the BRI, for example, has been largely driven by Beijing’s desire to cope with domestic production overcapacity by securing wider foreign market access for Chinese goods and to sustain domestic economic growth. The BRI has also been primarily motivated by China’s pursuit of a leading role in international development and infrastructure financing.
These authors frame China’s burgeoning global role and assertive behaviour amid the strategic competition between China and the United States, the world’s most powerful country. Meanwhile, the book proffers a forewarning to Chinese leaders: no empire lasts forever, and some are stillborn due to their illusions of greatness, abstract exercise of power, and reckless power adventure.
Notwithstanding, my criticisms relate to three areas. First, using the concept “galaxy empire” to describe the rise of China is debatable, as many different perspectives and views exist on China’s prominence in global affairs. From the viewpoints of Chinese officials, empire is a bad word. They argue that China is not an empire seeking to dominate global affairs; instead, China is making contributions to global development, peace, and governance. For example, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is the largest contributor to the UN peacekeeping mission worldwide among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. China’s brokerage of the Iran-Saudi Arabia reproachment in early 2023 is a case in point. Seeing itself as a responsible global player, China purports to stand against empire of any kind.
Although the rise of China as an emerging global power is nothing short of phenomenal, Beijing has faced external challenges such as the changing global geopolitical environment, as well as long-held structural problems at home, including rapid population aging, collapse of the property sector, weak domestic consumption, and regional development inequality. The sustainability of its development model is questionable. In addition, although China’s geopolitical and geoeconomic influence over other countries is rising, there is a lack of trust in China, which is perceived as a threat to regional stability due to its assertive behaviour in the South China Sea. Therefore, the claim of the galaxy empire’s global triumph is misleading and grossly exaggerated. Reactions to the rise of China from its neighbours, the region, and the world should be studied carefully and interpreted thoroughly.
Second, an important omission in this book is that the authors failed to provide adequate empirical data or statistics to endorse their assertions. This book presents imaginative and speculative analysis that is unconvincing.
Last but not least, the book points out that social media platforms like Tencent’s WeChat are among the country’s most valuable assets, vital for the functioning of the galaxy empire. Nevertheless, Chinese authorities have been tightening their grip on Chinese society, economy, and social media under President Xi Jinping in recent years. Censorship remains a pressing issue. Chinese people’s freedom of speech via the internet and social media like WeChat and Weibo has shrunk considerably during recent years. For example, all bloggers now must obtain government approval of their credentials before posting any blogs online.
Additionally, some factual errors exist in the book. The total numbers of state-owned-enterprises (SOE) is wrong (26–27), and the numbers here should refer only to the centrally-administrated SOEs under the State Council of China. China has hundreds and thousands of SOEs across the provinces. And, the Chinese company BYD, a global leading electric vehicle maker and a serious peer competitor to Tesla, is headquartered in Shenzhen, Southern China, not Xi’an in Shaanxi Province (169), to mention just a few inaccuracies.
Despite the above reservations, this book is a welcome addition to the ongoing debate on the multifaceted yet complex nature of the rise of China and its global implications.
Hong Yu
National University of Singapore, Singapore