Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power

by Howard W. French

From the former New York Times Asia correspondent and author of China's Second Continent, an incisive investigation of China's ideological development as it becomes an ever more aggressive player in regional and global diplomacy.

For many years after its reform and opening in 1978, China maintained an attitude of false modesty about its ambitions. That role, reports Howard French, has been set aside. China has asserted its place among the global heavyweights, revealing its plans for pan-Asian dominance by building its navy, increasing territorial claims to areas like the South China Sea, and diplomatically bullying smaller players. Underlying this attitude is a strain of thinking that casts China's present-day actions in decidedly historical terms, as the path to restoring the dynastic glory of the past. If we understand how that historical identity relates to current actions, in ways ideological, philosophical, and even legal, we can learn to forecast just what kind of global power China stands to become--and to interact wisely with a future peer.

Steeped in deeply researched history as well as on-the-ground reporting, this is French at his revelatory best.

Genres: China, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Asia, Business, Economics

352 pages, Hardcover

Published March 14, 2017

About the author

Howard W. French is an associate professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he has taught both journalism and photography since 2008. For many years, he was a Senior Writer for The New York Times, where he spent most of a nearly 23 year career as a foreign correspondent, working in and traveling to over 100 countries on five continents.

From 1979 to 1986, he lived in West Africa, where he worked as a translator, taught English literature at the University of Ivory Coast, and lived as a freelance reporter.

Until July 2008, he was the chief of the newspaper’s Shanghai bureau. Prior to this assignment, he headed bureaus in Japan, West and Central Africa, Central America and the Caribbean. Mr. French’s work for the newspaper in both Africa and in China has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He has won numerous other awards, including the Overseas Press Club award and the Grantham Prize. French speaks English, Chinese, Japanese, French, and Spanish.

Reviews

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book reviews history leading into current events which together with commentary attempts to explain the motivations leading to current tensions between China and its neighboring countries. It provides a prospect for a future with many challenges that will require wise diplomacy if military conflict is to be avoided. (Is "wise diplomacy" an oxymoron? Or does it just seem that way?)

From China's perspective the current international order that mantains equality of sovereignty among nation states was developed during the twentieth century when China was at a historic nadir in its power; a time when it was suffering humiliation at the hands of foreign powers. For many millenniums China was the wealthiest empire on earth and considered itself to be the center of civilization with neighboring nations of Southeast Asia governed by the concept of tian xia, which held that everything "under the heavens" belonged to the empire.

China is thus uncomfortable with the current world order which it believes to be based on a time when it was temporarily weak. This explains much of the motivations behind the recent assertiveness of China in the South China Sea. It's interesting to note that neighboring nations of India, Russia, Philippines, Japan, Vietnam and South Korea don't aspire to this same understanding of vassal status that seems to be implicit in China's understanding of the natural order of things. An irascible North Korea that constitutes a thorn in the side of other nations fits well within China's own interests.

Thus far China has mostly emphasized its intent to extend its sphere of influence in a peaceful manner. However, there are two future conditions that may force China to NOT be patient for change in its favor. (1) As the rate of Chinese economic growth levels off, the Chinese government will need to depend more on nationalistic fervor to maintain the appearance of legitimacy from its citizens. (2) China's one-child policy has doomed the country to a future demographic of being top heavy with older people relative to the number of productive younger and middle aged people. For both of these reasons the present time may be the zenith of modern Chinese international influence. If they are to establish gains in their sphere of influence it needs to be accomplished in the near future.

Already Xi Jinping, the new General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, has appealed to nationalist patriotism more and has displayed a more strident repression of dissidents than his predecessors. These together with recent overt activities in the South China Sea to establish facts on the ground—or in the sea—portends more future Asian conflict.

This book was published before the advent of the Trump presidency, so the reader is left free to speculate of how that bodes for the future.

[Zhiyi Li · Rating 4 out of 5]

A prescient book for understanding current Chinese foreign policy, especially the most recent messages from 19th National Congress of the CCP.

As a native Chinese, the theme of the book is not new to me. After all, I was indoctrinated with the Under the Heavens (天下) philosophy before I came to the US. And because I came to the US when I was relatively young, I could later saw the unreasonableness that philosophy inherently has and the uncomfortableness it may bring to people in other part of the world.

But still, I am born Chinese. I don't know what kind of a stand I ultimately would take, if I am forced to. Like Viet Thanh Nguyen said in Sympathizer.

"I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess. At other times, when I reflect on how I cannot help but observe the world in such a fashion, I wonder if what I have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess."

True to that, and I can't say it any better.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power, by Howard W. French, is a book discussing the Chinese tribute system and the system of control China has used in past centuries within its East Asian orbit. The book attempts to compare this historical system of control with modern China's political movements in Asia, discussing topics like the South China Sea, China's disputes with India and its maritime neighbours, and so forth.

There is some interesting history in this book. A discussion on the Ryuku Kingdom, now Okinawa in Japan, shows the Chinese system of informal control and influence in great light and is an excellent case study in China's Tributary System, both its strengths and weaknesses. The book moves into more recent history, looking at China's adoption of the nine-dash line map to portray its claims on the South China Sea, looking at China's Cold War relationship with North Vietnam and North Korea, and moving into the modern world with an attempt to describe Xi Jinping and modern China's strategies in the South China Sea.

As my rating will attest, I did not fully enjoy this book, or glean much information that seemed authoritative or enlightening. French has made, in my opinion, a rather clumsy attempt to compare a historical tributary system with modern geopolitics, noting that attitudes toward foreign policy are culturally and historically grounded. Although there may be some truth to this statement, it does not hold a candle to any more nuanced viewpoints of geopolitics in the modern world. I tend to shy away from materials that claim actions are motivated by culture; to me, this is a very close call to dismissing nuance with racism. China's actions are certainly fascinating from a geopolitical perspective, worrying from a Western perspective, and require balancing from an East Asian perspective. Its actions are also grounded in domestic political reality, and the geostrategic constraints it is placed under by competing powers and regional players and its resources, economics, and so forth.

One of the stronger points of the book is the nuance that French takes, something I have enjoyed in his previous works. French looks at the perspectives of neighbouring states as well, discussing the Philippines, Japan, Vietnam and India, to name a few. This book deserves some credit for being published "earlier" (2017) as events unfolded, and continue to unfold. The relationship between China and the West has deteriorated further in the years since. The COVID-19 crisis and the accusations of lab-built viruses, and racial scapegoating, have all occurred. China has increased its military capabilities, and is seen in most Western circles as much more malign than in previous years. The events related to this geopolitical conundrum continue to unfold, and it is certainly fascinating to watch. This is certainly an interesting book to read on the topic of China's foreign relations, and would be a good read to pick up for China watchers and those looking to read about current geopolitical events. Even though it is slightly dated at this point, it is still a fine book to pick up, although it is certainly lacking the nuance of other materials on the subject.

[Pedro L. Fragoso · Rating 4 out of 5]

I postulate that this is an essential book for anyone interested in understanding one of the most fundamental drivers of all our futures in this planet.

“The human mind finds it hard to resist organizing history into discrete periods, but a sense of the transitions from one era to another usually only takes firm root with the distance of time. Nonetheless, events in Asia in recent years make it very tempting to declare that a new era is upon us. One could take as its starting point the moment in 2010 when China surpassed Japan as the world’s second-largest economy. Or one could just as easily go back a couple of years earlier, to the onset of a global financial crisis centered in American markets but that quickly spread throughout the West. China’s response at the time included notes of triumphalism and outright schadenfreude, as commentators in state media crowed about the debility of Western democratic capitalism and the inevitability of China’s rise to preeminence, premised explicitly or implicitly, as the case may be, on the presumed superiority of China’s political economy. In the post-Mao era, that was certainly new, and what followed was a period filled with other examples of unaccustomed Chinese assertiveness, acts that seemed to mark a sharp break from the guiding axiom of Deng Xiaoping, which called upon China to hide its capabilities and bide its time.” And “An old era is passing, even if the contours of what is yet to come have not truly announced themselves. We cannot fully imagine them in part because of the sticky weight of the present. But even if the quotidian blinds us, an age of substantially redistributed global power is fast approaching. A time when China will be able to keep the United States at bay is rapidly drawing nearer. A time when, by virtue of its new wealth and rapidly increasing military strength, it can hold at mortal peril the United States’ most precious symbols of national power, military assets like the aircraft carrier, may already be upon us.”

The book contextualizes China’s increasingly triumphant reappearance in the world stage under the light of the country’s long and convoluted history.

“China was pursuing a strategy that has been widely described as creating facts on the ground, or, better perhaps, creating facts at sea. It was the approach of a civilization with a very long-term perspective on time, a civilization that imagines itself as accustomed to gradually bringing smaller neighbors around to the idea of deferring to it in favor of their broader interests.” And: “In this forum, the Chinese leadership stressed the need to oblige the country’s neighbors to accept China’s “core interests” as a bottom-line condition for peace in the region, which amounted to terms for a new Pax Sinica.” And “With the pursuit of ideas like this, China in the early twenty-first century is reaching back to its roots as the Central Kingdom, the world divided into China and non-China, a hierarchy between the two, with China, of course, at the summit.”

The issues facing the challenge of World domination by China are dully explored (“Then there is the matter of geography. With its One Belt, One Road scheme, Beijing is striving mightily to integrate on favorable terms its most broadly defined neighborhood, a space ultimately stretching from littoral Southeast Asia as far west as Europe, via immense new infrastructure projects and the business deals it will hopefully generate, but this changes nothing about the fundamentals of its physical disposition in the world, which seen objectively is chock-full of challenges.”; and “Looking back, what is most striking about this forecast is how dramatically it falls short of taking the full measure of China’s demographic crisis. Increasingly nowadays, even within China, the country’s demographic situation is being spoken of in terms of a crisis. According to the South China Morning Post, “the authorities expected twenty million new births in 2014, but only 16.9 million babies were born. By May 2015, only 1.45 million couples—out of 11 million eligible ones—had applied to have a second child. The figures reflected a surprisingly low level of interest.”), even if, in what concerns the United States in this equation, well, the author maybe brilliant and extremely knowledgeable, but he is American…

We get: “Beyond this powerful story of numbers, the United States has at least one other formidable asset that will provide it crucial ballast during the risky and uncertain two to three decades ahead: values.” Ah, yeah, the country that destroyed Iraq and Libya, that loves Saudi Arabia unreservedly, that created one of the biggest refugee crisis in History, that engages in civil asset forfeiture with a passion, that imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth, that keeps reinforcing the most militarised police force of the planet, that elected Donald Trump as President (just bombarded a Syrian airfield with 59 bombs, of which only 23 more or less on target…), that country of “values”. Nevertheless, we’ll have a United States of 450 million people soon enough: “The number of young males in the country has begun to decline, and between now and 2050 the number of men between twenty and twenty-five, that is, of prime military recruitment age, will fall by half. The aforementioned expression “getting old before getting rich” has become a popular journalistic catchphrase about China, but even it fails to capture the full weight of the challenge that lies ahead for the country. Over the past thirty years, the total fertility rate, or the number of children born per woman, has fallen from a fairly robust 2.5 to 1.56, which is well below the replacement rate, and the UN Population Division predicts it will continue falling, reaching 1.51 by 2020. America’s rate, by contrast, is 2.08, and rising. At this rate, as a consequence, China’s population is set to fall below one billion by 2060. By that time, America’s, by contrast, will have grown to over 450 million.” So, “As these numbers help reveal, while American politics, especially at presidential campaign time, often veer into delusional negativism over immigration, it has been and will remain one of this country’s most important competitive assets, constantly replenishing the U.S. population with eager, energetic and ambitious people—especially young people—who will drive enterprise and innovation, along with economic demand, in the decades ahead, while flattening out the stark aging curves that will afflict China (and Japan and Europe). Ironically, a great many of these newcomers will be Chinese, who are already the third-largest source of immigration to the United States. The absorption of these newcomers is as key to the sustenance of the U.S. Social Security system as it is to the future of American economic growth, as well as to the staffing of what will remain a large, dynamic and technically advanced American military.” Maybe not so much now, the way things are configuring themselves in the United States, but we’ll wait and see.

I really like this: “As even Yan Xuetong, one of China’s most well-known international relations theorists and an unabashed advocate of his country’s pursuit of geopolitical preeminence, has written, ‘an increase in wealth can raise China’s power status but it does not necessarily enable China to become a country respected by others, because a political superpower that puts wealth as its highest national interest may bring disaster rather than blessings to other countries.’” Really? Fortunately, that’s not at all the paradigm of the United States, ruled as she is by “values”, or we’d all be living in a quagmire, surely.

500 million Americans in a country ruled by Finance, Insurance and Real Estate: what will the unfunded liabilities for this population going to be? The increase in the already out of this world deficits? Food for thought. On this note, I close with Paul Theroux, his last page of the “The Shatabdi Express to Chennai” chapter of “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star”, a few paragraphs that have stayed with me since I read them, years ago:

“I finally left Trichy, and India. What sent me away was not the poverty, though it was pathetic and there was plenty of it. It wasn't the dirt, though it sometimes seemed to me that nothing in India was clean. It wasn't the pantheon of grotesque gods, some like monkeys, some like elephants, some wearing skulls as ornaments, some in a posture of repose under the hood of a rearing cobra—terrifying or benign to the believers propitiating them with flowers. It was not the widow-burning or the child marriages or the crowds of the cringing and the limbless, the one-eyed, the stumblers, the silent ones who hardly lifted their eyes. An experience of India could be like entering a painting by Hieronymus Bosch—among the deformed, the fish-faced, the crawling, the flapping, the beaked, the scaly, the screaming, the armless, and the web-footed.

“Not the heat, either, though every day in the south it was in the high 90s. Not the boasting and booming Indians and their foreign partners screwing the poor and the underpaid for profit. Not the roads, though the roads were hideous and impassable in places. Not the fear of disease or the horror of the obscenely wealthy, though the sight of the superrich in India could be more disquieting than the sight of the most wretched beggar.

“None of these. They can all be rationalized.

“What sent me away finally was something simpler, but larger and inescapable. It was the sheer mass of people, the horribly thronged cities, the colossal agglomeration of elbowing and contending Indians, the billion-plus, the sight of them, the sense of their desperation and hunger, having to compete with them for space on sidewalks, on roads, everywhere—what I'd heard on the train from Amritsar: "Too many. Too many." All of them jostling for space, which made for much of life there a monotony of frotteurism, life in India being an unending experience of nonconsensual rubbing.

“And not because it was India—Indians were good-humored and polite on the whole—but because it was the way of the world. The population of the United States had doubled in my lifetime, and the old simple world that I had known as a boy was gone. India was a reminder to me of what was in store for us all, a glimpse of the future. Trillions of dollars were spent to keep people breathing, to cure disease, and to extend human life, but nothing was being done to relieve the planet of overpopulation, the contending billions, like those ants on the rotting fruit.

“I had not felt that way in India long ago, but I was younger then. I took the short flight over the Palk Strait to Sri Lanka, into a different world.”

A different world... coming sooner rather than later.

[Kian · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a rather typical Western-biased view of Chinese "expansionism", which of course pales in comparison to Western "expansionsim" by any measures, but we won't mention that inconvenient truth. Underlying this theme is the same old regurgitation of its perceived threat to the Western world order you can find in pretty much any articles in Western media. I have expected more from this author since he has more understanding of Chinese history and culture than most, but aside of some tidbits of history and quotes, it is pretty much the standard Western view of the issue, offering no new insights.

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating and incisive look into how China’s history has shaped its geopolitical strategies and future interests, especially in relation to to the East and South China Seas. I learned a lot about the concept of tian xia, disputes over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, and China’s relationships to the US but also, neighboring nations.
I’d recommend this as an introductory book for people that have never read much about China before (like myself) but are interested in politics— it is short, easy, and quite informative, although I do wish it was more chronologically ordered (it tends to skip about). My favorite part was definitely the end, which brings us up to modern day predictions about the future... I had no idea about the extent of aging China’s population is facing!

[Rob Hocking · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, originally released in 2017 and with a new afterword for the 2018 edition, is quite up to date and focuses on the more recent issues that China has been having with its neighbours (particularly in the South China Sea), as well as their historical context. The main theme of the book is that you cannot understand how the leadership of China today thinks without understanding the "tribute system" that existed in China for thousands of years before the modern era.

What is this tribute system? Well, there was this idea that China was the center of the universe (中国, the Chinese name for China, literally means "middle or central kingdom"), that all other countries were inferior, but that they could be allowed to exist so long as they formally recognized the supremacy of China and paid it regular tribute. China eventually paid dearly for this arrogant attitude and from roughly 1850 to 2000 lost its position as the dominant power in Asia. The actions of Today's strong China can be understood in terms of an attempt to restore the tribute system of the previous several thousand years.

Here's another interesting tidbit on how this arrogant attitude is built right into the Chinese language, which I didn't know before:

Under the Ming dynasty, three centuries later, when the Chinese were confronted for the first time with a European-drawn map of the world, in 1584, the mappa mundi produced by the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci, they were astonished to to find their empire positioned at the eastern edge of the European landmass. Out of deference, Ricci drew another map for his hosts placing China at the center.

Because he had acquired impressive fluency and literacy in Chinese, the Ming court recognized Ricci as a 华人, or civilized man. Ricci graciously accepted the compliment, but insisted that his civilization derived from his homeland, Italy. This perplexed his hosts as much as his strange map had, because for the Chinese, civilized simply meant culturally Chinese. There was no other term for Chinese at the time, and in fact 华人 is still used, unselfconsciously, by Chinese to refer to themselves.

I have long thought of 华人 as a helpful blanket term to refer to anyone of Chinese ethnicity, whether they come from China, Taiwan, or elsewhere. I never made the connection between 华人 and 文化 (culture, containing the same 化 component), until reading this passage.

Another tidbit talks about how unlike Japan, who recognized early on how far behind the European powers it was and quickly set about changing the situation, China's attitude prevented it from seeing the danger of its situation until it was too late. The following quote concerns an official visit to Japan of Chinese officials, taking place after the opium wars but before the first Sino-Japanese war (which Japan won and received Taiwan as a prize). Not that by this point Japan has already rapidly modernized in response to the European threat.

"...For all of this, in the crucial opening years of these exchanges, the Chinese could not see past their own abiding sense of superiority. Instead of quickly getting down to the task of understanding Japan's ongoing transformation, the Chinese were absorbed in above all in the self-flattering pursuit of information that might confirm traditional Chinese views of the origins of the Japanese race. According to ancient Chinese myth, the original Japanese was dispatched by China's first emperor, Qin Shihuang, in the second century BCE, in the company of three thousand youths...

...by the time the Chinese emerged from the fog of self-absorbed condescension, it was too late for them to get out of the way of the train that was speeding headlong in their direction."

Overall I enjoyed this book greatly and learned many new things. My favourite chapter talked about China's historical relations with its Southeast Asian neighbours,. I won't elaborate on this here, but in addition to a fascinating discussion of the historical interactions of China and Vietnam (it's greatest rival in the region), the book also talks about how Mao's China supported the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and contributed to its rise. Even more shocking, I learnt here that when the Khmer Rouge were ousted by Vietnam, Pol Pot's government in exile (in Thailand) was supported as the legitimate government of Cambodia not only by China but by the United States! To be fair, the full scale of the Khmer Rouge massacre was not yet known, but also to be fair, a great deal already was known.

The main theme of the book, however, is China's recent aggressive actions in the South China Sea, such as building artificial islands in contested waters and then putting military bases on them, as well as it's long-term objectives. The book concludes by saying that China's power is likely to peak in the next ten years, beyond which the effects of the one Child policy will start to be seriously felt in the form of a vastly diminished population of working (or military service) age. Therefore, if China is going to make a power grab, it is sensible to do so in the next ten years, before this occurs. Hence, the risk of an armed conflict - either with Taiwan, Japan, or another maritime neighbour - is greatest in the next ten years.

[Raghu Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

China has emerged as a major economic and military power in the last fifteen years, surpassing Japan as the second largest economy in the world. This sudden rise of China has raised anxiety among the Western powers as to whether the future portends a peaceful China or an aggressive, militaristic one. More importantly, China’s neighbours like Japan, Vietnam, Philippines, India and Indonesia have started feeling that China is on its way to use its economic and military might to hegemonize Asia and force them into submission. China’s conduct in the Senkaku islands and in the South China sea have given them cause to re-assess China’s role in the coming decade in Asia. For policy wonks, the question to answer is ‘how do we assess China’s intentions correctly, without erring on the extreme side?’. This is because China is a rising superpower already and one has to deal with it here and now. This is where author Howard French’s book provides some key analysis and prescriptions based on the long civilizational history of China.

So, what kind of power is China likely to become? French says that we must study China’s long past to comprehend how it has conceived of and used its power historically. Even though the author discounts the concept of ‘cultural DNA’, his analysis draws strongly on the traditions and historical Chinese reflexes to understand how it may exercise its power in the coming decades. He advances two key concepts to decode the Chinese riddle. They are ‘Tian Xia’ and the ‘new patriotic education system based on hundred years of humiliation’.

Tian Xia means ‘under the heavens’ and implies that China is the center of the world and all other nations are peripheral and inferior to it. This idea has sustained China from about 200 BCE till the mid 19th century. China has particularly applied this view to its immediate neighbourhood in the East (Japan, Korea) and to the south (Vietnam, Burma..). This concept of Pax Sinica, as the author calls it, means that the other nations must accept Chinese superiority and pay tributes. In return, China will confer upon them political legitimacy, trade benefits resulting in public goods. Historically, this meant that China will police the maritime commons, mediate disputes for them and grant access to the Confucian system of learning, which is the best, in their view. Chinese values, culture, language, philosophy and religion were all regarded for millenniums as the Universal standards by the Chinese people and its ruling dynasties. This idea had come under pressure only for about a hundred years between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th century, when the West subjugated them and Japan conquered them.

The ‘Hundred Years of humiliation’ is the basis of the new Patriotic education system that President Jiang Zemin initiated in 1991, resulting in a whole new generation of young people today who have this view of their history. It is focused on the period between mid-1800s and mid-1900s when China was attacked, bullied, and torn asunder by imperialists, both Western and Japanese. The patriotic education campaign thus revised Mao-era narratives. The new narrative blamed the West rather than class enemies for China’s suffering. In teaching students about the War of Resistance against Japan, for example, the revised curriculum focused on ethnic conflict between Japan and China rather than class conflict between the Communists and the Guomindong. More than anything else it emphasized the foreign powers’ brutality against the Chinese, forcing the younger generation to confront the atrocities of the century of humiliation. This transition from China as victor to China as victim reveals a great deal about changes to Chinese national identity today.

How do these two ideas affect China’s conduct today in its neighbourhood and in the wider world? The author says that the Chinese are paradoxical in the sense that they are at once the most self-confident people in Asia but also highly insecure about their status. The superior self-confidence comes from its history of being the only nation that has never been colonized and of course, from Tian Xia. The insecurity comes from the coming to end of the historical era of miracle growth, bringing possible widespread disaffection, unrest and challenge to the legitimacy of the Communist party. Being the pre-eminent military power in Asia today, Tian Xia makes China want to displace the US from Asia and emerge as the dominant Asian power. China’s conduct in the south China sea and the Senkaku islands is the message to nations like Japan, Vietnam and Philippines that they are supposed to accept China’s superiority and be suppliant without challenging its military strength. At a security forum in Hanoi in 2010 with ASEAN, a Singaporean delegate made a statement advancing a maritime code of conduct in the disputed south China sea. China was unenthusiastic. By way of reply to George Yeo of Singapore, Yang Jiechi, the Chinese foreign minister, said, " China is a big country and others are small countries. It is just a fact". This was classic Tian Xia in practice. Historically, Tian Xia viewed Japan as a culturally derivative, subsidiary nation on the margins of China’s celestial empire and hence could not be seen as an equal. This is seen in action in the recent aggressive moves by China in the Senkaku islands.

The patriotic education campaign, based on ‘a century of humiliation’, is used today to whip up anti-West and anti-Japanese frenzy in a new nationalist China. Author French says that China’s television is inundated with war-themed movies, which focus overwhelmingly on Japanese villainy. More than 200 anti-Japanese films were made in 2012 alone, with one scholar estimating 70% all Chinese TV dramas involving Japan-related plots of war.

The author says that Xi Jinping, the president today, believes that China has arrived as a military and economic power to challenge the US as the pre-eminent power. In a forerunner to Donald Trump, Xi proclaimed soon after assuming power that it is time for China to be great again, reclaiming its eminent position in the world. Gone are the days of Deng Xiao Bing, who said to the Chinese, ‘lie low, bide your time’. Xi believes that the time has come. However, the author posits some warnings in this rush towards Tian Xia. He quotes Michael Pettis, an economist with the Peking university, that China is no longer in the economic sweet spot it was during the past 30-40 years and growth will slow down eventually to 3-4% per year before the end of Xi Jinping’s administration. However, China’s demography is such that it will grow old much before it grows rich. This will pose the challenge to the Communist party to divert ever more increasing portion of growth in a slowing economy to social security rather than to the military and internal security. By 2050, China is expected to have a staggering 400 million people above the age of 65, needing support from the system. Whereas, its rival, the US, has good prospects of growth for much longer because of positive immigration policies (in spite of Donald Trump). This will result in greater and greater gap in economic and military strengths between them in future than now. French says that the communist leadership in China, Xi in particular, understands this quite well and that may be the reason for China’s rush towards aggressive flexing of its military muscle at present, because they think that there is only a 15-year window for enhanced military spending.

I found it a compelling account of China’s history and its impact on today’s world. It amazes me that the Chinese have internalized the notion of their pre-eminence and sustained it for so long in spite of today’s world, which is so widely dominated by Western Science, technology and popular culture. The fact that Japan has almost 5-6 times China’s per capita income does not seem to affect this self-image. There have been other dominant empires across the world in the past, like the Roman empire, the Ottoman empire, the Habsburg empire and the British empire. But their modern remnants in Italy, Turkey, Austria and UK seem to have come to terms with their demise now. In China, it does not seem to be so, possibly because a hundred years of reversal is just a blip in their long history and it is easy to convince oneself that Tian Xia is the natural order of things.

It is a scholarly work but quite accessible at the same time. Even if one does not agree with the author’s analysis based on Tian Xia, I would think it is a very interesting way of looking at China today. I found it educational and well worth the time spent on it.

[Murtaza · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although my knowledge of Chinese history is far from extensive, there was surprisingly not a lot here that I did not know. Chinese rulers have a conception of themselves as rulers of "all under heaven," and went through a painful "century of humiliation" at the hands of both their neighbors and Western powers, which they are eager to rectify. As a power returning to greatness, China seeks to revise the terms of an international order that it had no hand in constructing. In particular, it seeks to reassert dominance over the South China Sea and demands to receive the same exceptional treatment that the United States often expects for itself. Of all its bordering countries (all of whom China views as historic vassals) the one which should most expect a comeuppance is Japan, which we can already see the stage being set for.

I really did not learn much from this book. "The Gate of Heavenly Peace" by Jonathan Spence and Kissinger's "On China" were much more informative about China for a layperson. Robert Kaplan's book on the South China Sea also gives a good image of the "Middle Kingdom mentality" Chinese rulers are often said to maintain. In addition this book is written almost like a policymakers report or a textbook, making it an extremely dull read. This is just my subjective opinion but I was a bit disappointed with this book. Having said that, it is probably still recommended reading for devoted China experts or those trying to get a lay of the land with regards to the subject.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Everything Under the Heavens' is ideal for anyone who, like me, does not have much, if any, knowledge of the history of China and the rest of East/Southeast Asia, but who wishes to understand more about the whys and hows of the events playing out in the Pacific. French guides readers through history with an even hand never pushing too hard in any one direction. Asia's history dates back much further than that of the West, the scope of which is something that can be difficult at times to grasp for someone from the West. Where we in the United States speak of history over a period of hundreds of years, people in China and other Asian countries speak of periods of thousands of years. Much has happened to bring the peoples of East and Southeast Asia to where they are today. Long-held beliefs and traditions play a very prominent role in their politics, economy, and military. In order to understand their motivations, perspectives, and actions now, it is essential to understand how they formed. French provides an invaluable tool to begin to do this in 'Everything Under the Heavens.' 5-stars are well deserved here, and I highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in the topic.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting methodology and follow through. It was sometimes slightly disjointed (as opposed to a fluid narrative) because it jumped all around in time, but it showed immense intelligence throughout and I learned a lot.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

French is a sad example of the government mandated education: for him China means a vague blend between a god and a hive mind.

[Scribe Publications]

Howard French has tackled what is perhaps the most important issue of our time, and of many years to come, with the vivid prose of a first-rate reporter, the scholarship of an excellent historian, and great human sympathy.
Ian Buruma, Author of Year Zero: A History of 1945

Taking full account of China’s achievements and ambitions, without being panicked by them or losing sight of China's vulnerabilities, will be a major challenge for the next generation in the rest of the world — and in China itself. Howard French very lucidly lays out a guide to thinking about the next stage in China's evolution, and the positive signs and danger signals to be watching for.
James Fallows, Author of China Airborne

In the brilliant Everything Under the Heavens, Howard French offers a sweeping historical view of China’s relentless attempt to build an Asian world order around its unchallenged authority. French’s meticulously reported and beautifully written book is disquieting but essential reading.
Nayan Chanda, Former Editor of The Far Eastern Economic Review

In Everything Under the Heavens, Howard French has written an absorbing and penetrating dissection of the deep roots of China's claims to large swathes of the oceans off Japan and south-east Asia, with profound implications for control over vitally important global trade. French understands that China's sense of historical entitlement is both deeply emotional and crudely political, and allows Beijing to pretend to stand with Asia, while standing over it at the same time.
Richard McGregor, Author of The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers

With Everything Under the Heavens, Howard French brings us a wonderfully well-researched and elegantly written book about what we might call China’s ‘shape memory.’ If you’re wondering why this singular country acts as it does, this volume will go a long way to explaining it.
Orville Schell, Director, The Arthur Ross Director, Center on US-Relations, ASIA Society

Compelling … Fluent and interesting.
Financial Times

[Digs] deep into history … fascinating.
The Irish Times

A deep historical and cultural study of the meaning of China’s rise … Fascinating … Convincing.
The New York Times Book Review

[An] essential reminder about the unparalleled influence of the past on China’s political present … One of the most lucid and illuminating books on China’s conception of power and its place in the world … Fascinating.
The Time Literary Supplement

Through [French’s] considered analysis and investigations, the scale of 21st-century Chinese ambition, and its determination not to be simply absorbed into the Western liberal order, become powerfully evident … French lucidly illuminates the specifics of these ambitions with detailed historical investigation, turning over some long-held truisms along the way … Everything Under the Heavens provides the best account we currently have of the cultural and historical influences on China’s 21st century aspirations.
Asian Review of Books

Stimulating … This book is a reminder that China’s international relations take place in a historical context going back centuries if not millennia, and Mr. French is an engaging guide through that deeper history.
The Wall Street Journal

Howard W. French makes it clear China’s sense of national superiority is of more than historical significance … Chilling.
The Globe and Mail

Impressive … Masterful … An excellent introduction to the complex issues of East Asia and the potential for conflict in this critical region of the world.
New York Journal of Books

Nuanced … The detail of [French’s] scholarship and reporting is matched by the suppleness of his prose … This will be a useful, and necessary, starting point for informed discussion.
Publishers Weekly

Everything Under the Heavens is the most persuasive account I’ve ever read of how China's history shapes its foreign policy and that of its neighbors today. A subtle and beautifully written book that offers surprising lessons for how Americans and Asians should respond to China’s rise. Strongly recommended for policy makers and citizens alike.
Susan Shirk, Chair of the 21st Century China Center, University of California – San Diego

Brilliantly fuses history and reportage to explore China’s relationships with its neighbours.
Michael Burleigh, Evening Standard

One wishes his book could have been longer, as it is the best I have read so far this year … fascinating.
Michael Burleigh, Literary Review

[Chris Jaffe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is French's second book on China's foreign policy in the 21st century. Previously he wrote "China's Second Continent" about their involvement in Africa. This time, he's looking closer to home, as China deals with other countries in Asia - East Asia, Southeast Asia, and a little in South and Central Asia.

He links it to the imperial tradition, where China saw itself as the Middle Kingdom and others gained respect by their proximity to China and similarity to its culture. French begins with that connection, but I dunno if the book afterwards really follows throw on it. Clearly, China is engaging in a more aggressive foreign policy. The Nine Dash Line in the South China Sea is the most obvious manifestation of this. Their attitude has some counterproductive results. For instance, Japan's Prime Minister Abe wants to have an actual army for Japan, so he'll play up China's increasingly aggressive nature to gain more support for it. China has promoted more nationalism at home, but so have other countries in the area.

The US, French notes, has done a rather poor job trying to figure out how to contend with and deal with the new rising China. Too often, the US looks at China as it was, a nation not really capable of threatening it, and not what it's turning into, a nation that is ramping up its diplomatic, economic, and even military muscle. French actually ends on a pessimistic note for China, noting that among its other problems, it's going to suffer from a graying population. It'll be the most not fully modernized country to contend with this, and that will make all the normal stresses of a graying population worse. (For example, he notes that by Year X - I forgot the year, obviously - China's median age will be 49, nine years older than that of the US at the time).

French has some optimism for the US on his final pages, but those reasons seem to be totally subverted by Trump. French notes that China has no real strong allies, but the US benefits from a strong series of alliances around the globe. (I read this sentence a few days after Germany's leader stated that they couldn't rely on the US anymore). Also, French notes that immigration helps the nation as a whole stay younger and avoid the graying population factor. Yeah, and now there is a strong push to make immigrants uncomfortable here.

The most interesting part was on the traditional China-Vietnam relationship. China tried to make Vietnam model itself on China. Vietnam didn't like it, but often treated others in southeast Asia the way China treated them. Well, I guess a lesson had been learned, in a way.

[Daniel Cunningham · Rating 5 out of 5]

For someone like me (American, generally aware of current events but not particularly aware of e.g Vietnamese-Chinese conflict beyond there being a history of wars and imperialism "a long time ago", etc.) this book was both incredibly eye-opening and a series of, "Oh, right, duh!" moments. I've read enough to know about Chinese expansion southward over the last couple of mellenia, to know about "Chinese exceptionalism," to know about Chinese imperialism, indigenous racism, etc. I have had a couple of people (as I now think about it, all Vietnamese) express shockingly, ahh, strong distaste for the Chinese, in one case something approaching apoplectic rage.

Ahh, now I see.

Highly readable and timely, and putting forward a cultural and geopolitical explanation (though at one point Mr. French curiously somewhat disavows that he is doing the latter, per se) that makes sense of China's actions, some of the online vitriol I have run into in English (mainly, in my slight experience, from Chinese students in the US, Canada, and Australia), and positions all that to make some weak(-ish) predictions and recommendations.

[Viet Phuong · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a novice in this subject, this will probably be a fascinating book that helps provide a certain, and correct, perspective about China's world view and its interaction with neighbouring countries. On the other hand, people with a sufficient understanding of China's history and its perception of nation/state identity would likely find this book disappointing due to its repetitiveness (many ideas and narratives are repeated many times throughout the book without any added value), academic shallowness in some parts (many long passages from other works were cited unnecessarily at full length in this book and thus make it even more repetitive), and incompleteness (the lack of any discussion about Taiwan and the two Koreas is just inexplicable). The loose structure of the book's narrative (except for the first two chapters and the one on Vietnam) is another disappointing issue given the author's background as journalist and editor.

[Tom Mobley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book explaining how we got to where we are with China.

Listened to this book on my travels back and forth to MI.

[Joana Kim]

was for school so just here for book creds

[Alexandre Assine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Howard French é um ótimo jornalista e esse livro revela a capacidade do jornalismo bem formado e informado de articular ideias normalmente restritas ao universo acadêmico e ligá-las às notícias contemporâneas de um modo acessível.
O autor também é modelar ao oferecer uma perspectiva crítica a mitologias políticas fomentadas por oficiais, jornalistas e acadêmicos chineses ligados ou alinhados ao governo do partido comunista sem incorrer em apologia do imperialismo americano ou europeu (ou japonês).

[Liam · Rating 5 out of 5]

"For the better part of two millennia, the norm for China, from its own perspective, was a natural dominion over everything under heaven, a concept known in the Chinese language as tian xia." (3-4)

"'The modern idea of Zheng He as an explorer is largely a creation of Western scholarship. Zheng He's fleet was actually an armada, in the sense that it carried a powerful army that could be disembarked, and its purpose was to awe the rulers of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean into sending tribute to China.'" (quoting Edward Dreyer, 104)

"When the Singapore delegate made a statement supporting a maritime code of conduct in the region, something that Beijing had already signaled it was unenthusiastic about, the Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, fixed his gaze on his Singaporean counterpart, George Yeo, and let slip his country's view of the rules of the game: 'China is a big country and other countries are small countries,' he said. 'And that's just a fact.'" (126)

"For all of the potential for radical change that the future seems to hold out for us, the most important lesson to retain may well be that contrary to superficial impressions, the urgency that sometimes gives china the appearance of a juggernaut is driven more by a sense of precariousness and self-doubt than by any clearly reasoned belief in its inevitable triumph." (270)

[Fraser Kinnear · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not what I was expecting, this is mostly a geopolitcal account of China's actions in the South China Sea, explaining both the long-term historical context as well as contemporary motivations.

Recently, China has pushed for more and more control over the ocean between China, Japan, the Philippenes, and Indonesia/Malaysia. These waters serve as valuable shipping routes to control, have enormous petrochemical reserves, and afford food security, which China has always had some anxiety over.

French explains China's relationship with each of its neighbors in turn, with focus on specific geopolitical incidents to provide color.

With Japan, French explains the crisis over the Senkaku Islands, which have been under administrative control of Japan for decades, but which China claims. Recently, Japan officially nationalized the islands (buying them? not quite clear), which spurred waves of government organized protests across >100 Chinese cities, destroying Japanese owned property in China, and inspiring a lot of bellicose rhetoric and drawing formal territorial lines that claimed these islands as China's. Japan's current Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, is strongly nationalistic, and has prodded China frequently since coming to power. Japan had purchased the Senkaku Islands during a time of transition of power fro Hu to Xi, so China saw this move as an affront of the new leadership, and probably predictably overreacted.

Simililar to what we're seeing in the US (and probably elsewhere), China sometimes relies on nationalist rhetoric to stirr patriotic support for it's position. Sometimes, China becomes a prisoner of its own rhetoric: drawing a line in the sand requires holding to your commitments. This sometimes results in foolish violence.

An exaple of this was the Johnson South Reef Skirmish, where Chinese gunned down 64 Vietnamese over "control" of an unmanned reef near the Spratley Islands in the South China Sea. China normally has had good relations with Vietnam, since a brief war in 1979.

Another example is the ongoing debate over the Scarborough Shoal, which China claims despite their being much closer to the Philippenes. This and other locations amount of China pressing on geography containing 40% of the Philippenes energy needs.

International law mandates that waters in a 200 mile radius around inhabited islands belong to the country that owns said island, which is why China has been dredging up land to create fortifications in a man-made archipelago that will stretch 1,200 miles down toward Indonesia.

By launching a crash island-building program, while simultaneously refusing to participate in the legal proceedings brought against it, China was pursuing a strategy that has been widely described as "creating facts on the ground", or better perhaps, "creating facts at sea." It was the approach of a civilization with a very long term perspective on time, a civilization that imagines itself as accustumed to gradually bringing smaller neighbors around to the idea of deferring to it, in favor of their broader interests

This game of hopscotch is likely to be completed in the 2020's, but China has a strategy of influence that has the scope of decades. Another such program is China's plan to eventually absorb independently-minded Hong Kong into the fold of the Party and State. While recent changes to who is allowed to run for office in HK has sparked protest (famously, the Occupy movement a couple of years ago), China also plans to broaden the infrastructure that links HK with a dozen nearby cities (Shenzen, Dongguan, Foshan, Guangzhou, etc), eventually stitching together a 50M populus megacity, that would be ~1/10th of China's economy.

Other grand programs are taking shape, which Frensh quickly touches upon. The largest, Belt and Road, aims to double annual trade with the member countries, and reach a level of trade that dwarfs China's trade with the US.

Of course, much of this growth drives insecurity in for us in the US. French wants to damen those concerns

Having gone very far and very fast over the space of a few short generations, China may very well not be inclined to stop [as only being a regional economic and political power]. Thinking like this does not flow from any obsession with what many in the United States already fancy as a Chinese threat. In fact, what I've set out to do is to normalize China. Having said so much in this book to explain the particulars of its history, this is the place to de-exceptionalize its attitudes towards its strength and power... The US has defense pacts with 68 countries that buy military hardware from us, thereby defraying the cost of investments. China, to the contrary, has "no network of allies who can be counted on to purchase these systems.

Famously, both China and Japan face looming demographic cliffs. Japan will be 30% smaller in 2050 as it was in 2000. It's population shrinking by their entire WWII death toll every 2 years. The challenge of growing old before growing rich in China is even greater than many people realize: it would come about even if the 9% year on year growth that China has enjoyed (which appears to have ended) could have been sustained. Many economists point to Japan's example, and speculate that China, which has long relied upon large capital investment to fuel growth, and ultimately run up enormous debt, which require low growth to pay down. Driven by immigration, the US population is expected to grow by 30% over the next 40 years, while China's population will peak in 2025 and age rapidly after.

[Harry · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the most important skills one learns in studying history is the understanding—easily achieved as a sort of intellectual "yes of course", but less so as bone-deep foundational knowledge—that people think differently in different times and places. Coming as many people do from a centralised Westphalian nation-state it's easy and commonplace to assume that everywhere, everywhen has operated more or less like a centralised Westphalian nation-state. Places had kings instead of prime ministers, sure, or emperors or caesars or whatever, and they might have worn greaves or garters or horsehair helmets, but there's a general understanding that when we look at a map and see Alexander the Great's empire extending across Iran, or the Roman Empire stretching from the Irish Sea to the Persian Gulf, or the valley of Mexico coloured Spanish yellow that these places were places as we understand New Zealand and Australia and Estonia. There were borders, we implicitly assume; there was a clear understanding about mine and thine. There was a national government in a capital city somewhere, and maybe local governments in other cities elsewhere. Things happened slowly, because everyone rode horses, but fundamentally the government made laws and everyone followed the laws and sometimes there were issues and everyone got out their jousting sticks and we all know how that ended.

Leaving aside the idea that everywhere has operated the same way throughout time, Everything Under the Heavens blows apart the assumption that everywhere was even similar at any particular time. French dives into the nuances of how Chinese civilisation, developing in a radically different context to the civilisations of India, Africa, the west and the "Middle World" has understood its place in the world and its relations to other peoples differently and how that ramifies in the behaviour of modern China as a geopolitical actor.

Specifically, French explores the idea of tian xia (comparable to the Southeast Asian notion of a mandala system). Rather than a state with territorially defined jurisdiction and power ending at clearly-understood borders, Chinese civilisation imagined itself as radiating civilisation and political authority from its position at the centre of the world, before which other peoples—appropriately awed and subservient—received the culture and legitimacy which could in China's eyes only come from the emperor's beneficence.

French explores at length the particular ways in which China's self-image has been expressed around its periphery, most notably in its perpetual struggles to enforce the idea that legitimate authority can come only from the Chinese centre (because if the emperor can be challenged by the southern barbarians in Vietnam, the island barbarians of modern Indonesia, or the unlicensed 'emperor' in Japan, how can China's people be expected to take him seriously?). He carries the historical analysis into a lens on China's modern geopolitical behaviour, most notably the presumption of a hierarchical relation between Asian states with China at the top ("China is a big country," the Chinese foreign minister told a diplomat who questioned China's expansionism in the South China Sea, "And other countries are small countries. And that's just a fact"), and China's fixation on territorial expansion—ahem, territorial "recovery"—in Taiwan.

French's work is highly readable and his argument is often convincing, but perhaps because of his journalistic training lacks in the realm of confirming counterarguments. His assertions that a fundamentally Chinese philosophy lies behind much modern Chinese geopolitical behaviour are well-argued, but without some concrete idea of how he thinks non-Chinese civilisations might behave in similar situations (or how he envisions other civilisations with other philosophies understanding the same things he's trying to elucidate with China), it's harder than it perhaps ought to be to judge the convincingness (or significance) of his position.

While I'm happy to accept that presumptions of being the central country in the universe affects China's approach to diplomacy, for instance, it's not always clear exactly how that causes Chinese strategy to differ from United States' construction of distant military bases and deployment of forward assets, or where a hierarchical-with-China-at-the-top historical philosophy is discontinuous with the United States' apparent first-among-equals attitude toward its place in the family of nations.

Mr French's thesis seems to be that China's culturally-engrained tian xia worldview makes it incompatible with, perhaps even allergic to, the possibility of a rules-based as opposed to are-you-or-are-you-not-China-based order, where countries have to compromise on or forgo significant national interests in the pursuit of general peace and stability. That seems to be a reasonable observation and position, but it would have been good to get some clarity on precisely where and how Mr French thinks that differs from the normal behaviour of great powers.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Straightforward, Well-Supported Thesis - But What to Do?

The basic thesis of Howard French’s book is straightforward. For most of its 4,000 year history, China regarded itself, with considerable justification, as the world’s preeminent civilization and, as far as it could see from interaction with cultures in the “known world”, the leading military and commercial power. Thus the Chinese mindset regards as a brief aberration the period of 150 years from, say, 1800 to 1950, in which China’s sovereignty was subordinated to European and American power, and to military defeats and invasion by Japan.

China’s rulers destroyed its ocean-going fleet in 1535 to deliberately isolate the country. (“China should not stoop to fight with pigs.”) Consequently, the country was so isolated from the rest of the world that it wasn’t exposed to Western technology and, unlike Japan, saw no reason to adopt it even as foreigners expanded trade and established sovereign enclaves on Chinese soil.

French argues that China’s sense of historical entitlement has never wavered, however. As China has gained economic power in the last 30 years, the country’s leaders, especially President Xi Jinping, have sought to reinstate its historical position of global power and influence. This means a more assertive posture in the South China Sea and toward Japan, gradually bringing around its smaller neighbors to defer to its interests and ultimately to challenge the United States as the preeminent power in East Asia and globally.

The author goes into detail throughout many dynasties, tracing the historical relationship between China and its neighbors as it sat atop an world hierarchy. This served to substantiate the book’s central thesis, but readers may find these chapters rather dense and slow going.

French is alarmist regarding China’s adversarial relationship with Japan over the centuries and worries that this cultural conflict could be the basis for an East Asian war, potentially drawing in the US to support its ally Japan. Similarly, China’s aggressive territorial claims in the South China sea and its creation of “unsinkable” air and naval bases on previously uninhabited coral outcrops constitute a threat to Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia and to the power of the US Navy.

China is also trying to create a network of rail and road links not only to Southeast Asia but to India and ultimately Europe, a program that it has dubbed “One Belt, One Road.”

One section of the book that I found interesting was the complex relationship between China and Vietnam from which China expected tribute. The year 1418 saw a Vietnamese uprising against Chinese rule but Chinese attempts to subdue Vietnam had taken place for 1500 years before that time, according to the author.

French argues that as the US got entangled in Vietnam, there was no appreciation of this history and little understanding of the behind the scenes maneuvering by China and Russia to exert influence over their Communist “ally”. The author says that China didn’t really want a reunified Vietnam. China backed the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia as a counter to Vietnam, and encouraged a Vietnam vs. Cambodia cultural rivalry. One unfortunate result was Chinese support of the murderous Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime, which resulted in extermination of a large percentage of the Cambodian population.

After presenting a rather alarmist case about China’s expansionism and the possibility of war, French ends the book by hedging his bets somewhat. He points to China’s demographic challenge with an aging population and the likelihood that the country’s economic growth will slow. China’s arrogance means that it has not developed a wide network of allies as has the US, and China has many borders to defend.

Left unexplored, then, is how US and the international community’s policies to China should take into account the Chinese historical world view and the country’s strengths as well as its vulnerabilities.

[Rāhul · Rating 4 out of 5]

China's economic development and its consequent rise to great power status has been the defining geopolitical reality of our time. In this book, Howard French looks at how with an ascendant China will seek to overturn many of the long-held power balances in the region; balances that were established when China was much weaker. A Chinese quest for space in its periphery and the general Asia-Pacific will not be simply that of a rising power in the post-war system under-girded by US power, but it will be informed by its own historic pre-eminence in Asia. In disputes with its maritime neighbors Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam, a resurgent China seeks to restore not Westphalian state relations but its centrality in the imperial Tian Xia system where neighbors paid tribute to the central Chinese emperor who had a heavenly mandate to rule. The CCP's rhetoric and even its founding ideology may be different and a rejection of China's old ways, but the imperatives of maintaining the support of the Chinese nation bind it to a co-option of Chinese history and an un-apologetically aggressive policy in Asia.

The US Navy, which in the 1990s sailed a carrier battle group through the Taiwan strait in a display of its power over China, is already not invulnerable in the East and South China Seas. French convincingly argues that through a policy of hard military facts on the group (eg: island building in the South China Sea) and soft power (eg: control of market access, diplomatic protection and economic aid to neighbors), China will seek to decisively push the US Navy out of the region step by step. The US response lies in alliances with those standing to lose in this Chinese rise, but such US policy will require strategic discipline, not transactional dealmaking. French argues persuasively that the next few decades offer China a window of opportunity where it has high economic growth and ability to invest greatly in power projection before its population starts to age precipitously, and Chinese strategists would want to make maximum gains in that time to lock in a new status quo in the neighborhood. For the ASEAN countries faced with a question of whether to bandwagon with China or balance it with the USA, American will to continue to project power in Asia will be the decisive factor.

At one level, as this great civilizational state rises, it is only natural that it would seek a place commensurate with its rise. China's own history of pre-eminence surrounded by lesser powers and separated by mountains and deserts from peer powers that it could ignore, however places a question mark on whether a strong China will be content with being a benign great power. The west's unwillingness to give up power in the global system (IMF, world bank, UN) to rising powers and its hypocrisy in proclaiming a "liberal international order" but which is ultimately backed only by western (not international) military power and western (not globally agreed) values also makes one skeptical that the rise of China will be smooth.

Howard French offers a gripping account of the historic origins and upcoming trends of the great geopolitical churn accompanying China's rise. Despite splendidly covering the impact of China's rise on its maritime neighbors however, it excludes the two other swing powers in region who share land borders with China- India and Russia. They lie outside China's historical sphere, but China's rise is affecting their calculations as well in ways that might swing the US-China global power dynamic in the mid-21st century.

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Howard French has written a new book on China's rise in the world and its growing influence on contemporary geopolitics. His prior book on China's policies in Africa was outstanding and focused on development efforts that had been receiving scant attention elsewhere. In this new book, French French argues that a careful reading of China's history, especially its tradition of being a dominant state in a tributary system, helps to explain its current behavior under its recent leadership. The focus of the book in on a number of issue areas that are not well known in the West, For each, French provides an historical context and then outlines the current developments in each area to establish his case for historical continuity. His focus is on two maritime areas -- 1) China's actions in the East China Sea in establishing its priorities versus Japan on disputed islands with a very mixed historical record, and 2) China's highly controversial moves to extend its control over the South China Sea, putting it into increasing conflict with Vietnam, the Philippines, and even the US. French covers other areas as well, such as China's moves to reinvogate the Silk Road with a massive series of investment and infrastructure projects in South Asia and Central Asia. He even raises issues with Russia along the way.

French is a clear supporter of a realist perspective on world politics and how China fits in. His presumption is that China is pursuing its own interest and power political priorities. In this sense, he conflicts with those who have solely concerned themselves with China's economic rise and its increasing links with American business. In this, he is consistent with other analysts like Robert Kaplan or Graham Allison that view China's behavior as thoroughly understandable when taken in a broader historical perspective. He is not a radical, however, and his judgments come across as thoughtful and measured.

The problem with this line of analysis is that it depends on the close reading of policy documents and the fostering of close ties with insiders in the senior policy circles of a host of foreign governments. In this sense, he is presenting a general argument that is consistent with how sophisticated observers of China and the US have come to understand contemporary dynamics. Put more simply, this a high end up to date version of analysis by wise men. There is a lot to be said for this, of course, but such perspectives frequently fail to pick up on real discontinuities. It is good reading, but "caveat emptor" of course.

Unlike many of these analyses, French adds some value at the end of his book when he tempers the trends he has spent the prior chapters discussing with the aid of macro demographic factors that imply that China's growth may be peaking and that it will need to face serious demographic and social policy crises in the not too distant future. This rings true and is a strength of the book.

The writing is wonder and there is little about the book that is ponderous. It is also fairly up to date, as policy analysis books go, with a 2017 publication date.

Overall, it was enjoyable and better than I had expected.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read on China's rise and the associated geopolitics.

It focused on interpreting China's decisions through its history - in effect, understanding the world as the Chinese see it, illuminated by historical reference points and motivations that are usually opaque to non-Chinese. The key takeaway being that the Chinese probably never believed in the system of international relations among equal states, and are looking to restore something akin to their historical memory of a world centered around "tian xia", or "Everything Under the Heavens", where China is the central reference point and other nations come to it as supplicants.

There are fascinating sections on the history of the Strait of Malacca, Zheng He's voyage, the Ryukyus, Vietnam, and Sino-Japanese relations, which are alone probably worth the price of admission. But the meat of the book ends up being his narratives of China's gamesmanship in the South China Sea and East China Sea, which read like the play-by-play action film they basically are.

After arriving at the Conclusion, I was feeling pretty certain that things are not going to go very well over the next few decades, largely because of the centrality to China of the idea of its inherent superiority and its related distaste for international institutions. But in this last section of the book French provides a quick review of the literature on China's growth, and suggests reasons why China's aggressiveness may actually be a sign of weakness - or more precisely, a clever attempt by Xi to take advantage of China's current momentum now, before its demographic problems consign it to a version of the middle-income trap for the foreseeable future.

He ends by saying that America has two main advantages over the long term: first, it has a strong fertility rate, of 2+, largely due to immigration, and second, it has a set of values which are widely respected, at times even by its adversaries.

I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in China and geopolitics, as a summary of recent events for at least the next few years, and for the foreseeable future as one of the best summaries I've seen of the history of China's relationships with its neighbors.

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

‪A beautifully written account of the cultural and historical context of China’s approach to geostrategic power. The key driver is not ideology, but to ensure that the barbarians submit and pay tribute to their civilizational superior.‬

Rooted in the Confucian principle of hierarchy, there simply is no tradition of states coexisting on a theoretical basis of equality — and this is absolutely the case for cultures in China’s “near abroad” who are customarily viewed as culturally derivative, subsidiary, and on the margins of the celestial empire. The only proper position for a foreigner with respect to the Chinese was “kowtowing” (e.g. engage in ritual prostration and symbolic submission) to the Chinese emperor. (The “full kowtow” was a standardized ritual of submission that entailed kneeling three times and prostrating oneself nine times, taking care to touch the forehead to the ground each time.) Whenever a new king in a peripheral kingdom was crowned, it would occasion “the dispatch of an imperial investiture mission from China, whose purpose it was to preside over the enfeoffment of a local leader, a ceremony in which he accepted his role as a vassal, without which, according to the rules of the tribute system, he could not officially call himself king.” Kings who would not submit in this way were crushed either by force of arms or, more commonly, by becoming enveloped in trade with China, making them effectively dependent.

The book consists mainly of an historical account of this guiding global governance philosophy, called tianxia, meaning “all under the heavens” — referring to China’s position at the center of (and in ultimate authority over) the world. French looks at the development of this system in East Asia during the last two millennia, its collapse in the late 19th century during China’s encounter with the technologically superior raw barbarians from the West, and then interprets post-1949 Chinese history as in essence an attempt to reconstitute the tianxia system. The two long set-pieces involve an analysis of how the two biggest countries in China’s orbit, Japan and Vietnam, have to a greater and lesser managed to maintain a degree of independence from China, despite China’s commitment to the tianxia system.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

A measured, comprehensive account of China's rise through a historical and cultural perspective. There is a lot to say about the still largely enigmatic China - and much HAS been said - but French takes an approach which accounts both for the historical trends - both ancient and recent history - and ideological underpinnings of the present authoritative system. In a sense, this book combats the alarmist narrative which has been sounding in journalistic circles since the era of China's economic miracles, especially the potential for China, a new superpower of the East, to challenge and even topple the established liberal world order of the 20th century. Even as French assures these warnings as overblown, he carefully points out a deliberate pattern of behavior of the CCP which has roots in the dynastic conception of a world with China at the center, an ideological and cultural truth which drives many of Xi's decisions today, indeed, implicitly understood by most contemporary Chinese.

Ultimately, China's future is far from certain, and while economic and demographic forces now bear down on the Beijing's ambitions, how China navigates this perilous strait - and how the world with Washington at its head reacts to these decisions - will be a subject of utmost interest and scrutiny. It is impossible to understand the present without first understanding history, and China's is one which stretches back for 5000+ years. What this book offers is a critical - if not completely thorough - look at this history, and how it might influence, even dictate, the world of tomorrow.

[Andrew Carr · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tend to like journalists diving into big topics and history, as they can bring attention to issues and provide an on-the-ground analysis that is fresh and different to those of scholars. Geoff Dyer's The Contest of The Century, or Bill Hayton's South China Sea are good recent examples on China. It's a genre I like to read, and I was keen to dive into this after having it recommended to me.

French's book trades the journalist's shoe leather for a broad romp through history, but unfortunately never quite seems to find a sense of balance and perspective. The book is relentlessly critical of China and for all the obvious learning and research can sometimes feel skin-deep in its analysis. Even if the basic thesis of China seeking today to emulate its past centrality is plausible, I don't feel much closer to understanding the nature or significance of that argument.

The writing is generally clear, and some sections are strong. In particular I enjoyed the extended discussion of Vietnam and its relations with China. The setting of the analysis into a clear relationship provided a structure and opportunity for nuance that often seemed lacking in the rest of the book. Perhaps I'm not the intended reader, but too often the chapters felt like rehashed copies of Economist articles, speculating and skipping from issue to issue without a lot more behind it.

It's not a bad book, it's just not clear what exactly this book brings that isn't done better elsewhere.

[LJ Lombos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well narrated account of how China’s complex history plays a significant role in its current affairs with its neighbors. It is not so often to find a good read on this niche topic that goes deep on the country’s past without boring your audience. Excellent starter for all levels of curiosity.

On a more critical note, I do not share much of the author’s deterministic views of how the West (i.e. United States) can move forward with its relationship with China at the latter pages of the book. There also seems to be a clear lack of agency by other countries, especially ASEAN states, which remains a common conclusion trap for authors exploring this topic. Hence, readers should be careful when reading the subtle cheerleading lines of American exceptionalism in its pages. It also failed to account the growing and considerable sentiment among the American public towards their country’s continued international leadership. That would have explained the updated afterword from the author which harks a more cautious optimism.