New York: Basic Books, 2012. ix, 515 pp. (Maps.) US$32.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-465-01933-5.
For the contemporary student of China in recent centuries the idea of China as the “Immobile Empire” seems utterly ancient. Everyone seems to know today that the notion of China as stagnant and immobile is nonsense. Yet, it is always a surprise to realize that Alain Peyerfitte published L’Empire Immobile only 23 years ago. Peyerfitte, the distinguished French diplomat and statesman, thought that China was “asleep.” But he always believed that it could one day “wake up” and “shake the world.” His 1973 Quand la Chine s’éveillera … le monde tremblera, promised just that. The problematic nature of the notion of China’s “immobility” or “sleepiness” confounded earlier generations of scholars, so they stuck with the “immobility” paradigm at the same time as they insisted that the sleeping China has somewhere in its huge body a grain of radioactive matter. The great French Sinologist Etienne Balazs expressed this confusion nicely in 1968 when he remarked, “Hegel’s idea that China was mired in immobility is easily refuted… Yet Hegel was right.” It is astonishing to think that this comment was made when China was in internal turmoil, feuding with both the US and the Soviet Union, claiming leadership of the “Third World,” and deeply dividing the French Left. One should add to this strand of thought about China the numerous times that the “giant in the east” was called upon “to awaken”—by many Chinese intellectuals since the early 1900s—or declared “waking up”—by many, oftentimes petrified, observers since 1949 and the rise of Mao, or since its recent economic surge.
Restless Empire, discussing and presenting over more than 500 pages of new international history of China, should be viewed first and foremost against this image of “immobile” and “sleepy” empire. Lucidly written for both amateur and expert readers, this fine book makes an impressive case for a different image of China—a China that is restless rather than restful. Westad’s major achievement in this book is not only the story he tells, but also the way in which he organizes it. Tacked between an opening statement on “Empire” and a conclusion on “Modernities,” are 11 thematic chapters with self-explanatory titles that any “Modern China in the world” course covers or should cover: metamorphosis, imperialisms, Japan, republic, foreigners, abroad, war, communism, China alone, China’s America, and China’s Asia. Loosely chronologically organized, the book takes us almost to the 2000s with each chapter covering a different aspect of China’s history of foreign affairs. This reader regretted not seeing the first decade of 2000s represented in the book. Two events—China’s celebration of the 600th anniversary of Zheng He’s maritime expeditions in 2004, and the festivals around the 400th anniversary of Matteo Ricci’s death in 2010— projected exactly how China wants the world to see it, thereby illustrating Westad’s point. The first celebration projected confident might, the latter a desire to have a “dialogue” between equals with the West. It is interesting to note, however, that both events look back to the Ming dynasty, and not to the Qing period within which Wested locates the “metamorphosis” of the empire.
The book does not address the 200-year-old history, since Hegel, of China’s image as a stagnant polity. But it is clear that Restless Empire runs against it. The author refers only once to past perceptions: “Qing China is often presented by historians, even today, as insular and inward looking. But nobody within their region who came up against Kangxi or Qianlong in real time would have viewed them as looking inward. The Qing were continuously expanding outward” (9). China’s current aggressive pursuit of resources all over the globe, and its increasing involvement, for instance, in the goings on in Africa, the Middle East, and South America, remind us that China, not only the Qing during the times of Abundance Prosperity (Kangxi) and of Strong Prosperity (Qianlong), was always looking outward. In this regard Westad is correct in presenting the few historical moments that China was not looking outwards as instantiations of “weakness” rather than “immobility.” Weakness, better yet the consciousness of weakness, affected China’s international conduct in ways that made it look stationary at times. Weakness sometimes drove some of its leaders into action. The Emperor Guangxu (b. 1871, r. 1875-1908) declared on the eve of the failed 1898 reforms: “when compared with other countries we soon see how weak we are … [w]e must substitute modern arms and western organization for our old regime … obtain a knowledge of ancient and modern world-history, a right conception of the present-day state of affairs, with special reference to the governments and institutions of the countries of the five great continents” (105). That was in 1898. Commenting on Deng Xiaoping’s policies in the late 1970s, Westad remarks: “Deng often said that there would be a time for China to take a more prominent position in international affairs. But that time was not now, when China was weak and needed to grow fast” (373). These are but two examples. The theme of weakness, or the perception of weakness, as a major factor determining Chinese foreign conduct, runs throughout the book. In so doing, Westad reshapes the grand narrative of China’s international history in a very interesting way. The notions of immobility, sleepiness, stagnation and, conversely, awakening, were all born out of early nineteenth-century European perceptions of China that Marx once summarized poignantly. For Karl Marx China was “a giant empire… vegetating in the teeth of time.” Westad uses here Chinese, rather than Western, ways of thinking that place, since the Warring States period, a great deal of emphasis on internal “strength and wealth” as the basis for proactive, mobile, foreign policies.
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
New York University, New York, USA
pp. 331-332