Great State Quotes

“Shanghai was not alone in holding postwar trials. They were held everywhere, and it is worth asking why. What was gained? They were less about reestablishing the rule of law than about creating what Tony Judt has tagged as "the postwar." The Second World War ended in 1945, but the postwar went on. This was an era in which the victors who had prevailed, sanctified by the sacrifice of those who had worked and fought for that victory, could not be questioned. This condition lasted for decades, perpetuated through curricula and public entertainment in an almost endless loop of self-congratulation that brooked no alternative. The Gaullists in France, the Communists in China, The Nationalists in Taiwan, and the list could go on: the war gave them the right to impose their terms on the people they ruled.”
― Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World

“What is ‘neo’ about today’s neo-hegemony is the remarkable ease with which autocratic state leaders all over the world tell their citizens the most preposterous lies and have them believed. This is not a hegemony of force, but a hegemony of willing compliance.”
― Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World

“(Hong Kong government bureaux were ordered in 2018 to stop referring to the recovery of Hong Kong as its ‘return’, so as to create the impression that it had never left the fatherland.)”
― Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World

“If most Chinese are blind to their country’s imperialism in Tibet, it is because a potent brew of Communist ideology and Confucian superiority has taught them to see themselves purely as imperialism’s victims, not its perpetrators, as though the one must exclude the other. That China might have caused ‘national humiliation’ for any other state or people other than itself is beyond the capacity of most Chinese to imagine.”
― Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World

“What is curious about Chinese expansionism compared with the other four permanent members of the Security Council is that China’s enlargement since the Mongol invasion has been driven primarily by the non-Chinese who conquered it. China became a mega-state not by conquering others so much as by being conquered by others. What the Mongols and Manchu ruling families of the Yuan and Qing Great States wrought, the Chinese ruling families of the Ming, the Republic and the People’s Republic have chosen to perpetuate.”
― Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World

“Some insist that China has never been a colonial power that grew at the expense of other states, but, to state the bleeding obvious, it is simply not possible to create a country on this scale without conquering and absorbing territory that was once under other jurisdictions.”
― Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World

“The one-China, two-China problem exists thanks to the enduring fixation on unification as a Chinese ideal. It is an ideal that every regime since the Yuan Great State has had to declare as its guiding light.”
― Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World

“Three years after Liang’s execution, the Nationalist Government fled to Taiwan and the Chinese Communist Party claimed its inheritance as China’s postwar successor regime. The postwar era lasted longer in some places than in others. In China, arguably, it hasn’t ended.”
― Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World

“The Gaullists in France, the Communists in China, the Nationalists in Taiwan, and the list could go on: the war gave them the right to impose their terms on the people they ruled.”
― Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World

“The standard account of the war highlights countries fighting for their survival against foreign states, and many were indeed facing just such existential threats, but many struggles were also internal. Collaboration is the issue that best exposes these struggles. The reality behind Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 was not China divided against Japan so much as China divided against itself.”
― Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World

“for the first time in history Chinese had the legal right to leave the country to work abroad. What made the 1866 convention so different from earlier ad hoc arrangements is that it obliged the Qing to recognise the right to return. That had always been the sticking point. It wasn’t that hard to leave to China without authorisation, but if you returned, you faced capital punishment.”
― Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World

“It is certainly true that, as Chinese nationalists like to point out, the signing of treaties and the opening of treaty ports in China were achieved at gunpoint, the stronger forcing the weaker to submit. That acknowledged, open markets had become such a basic principle of international relations by the mid-nineteenth century that it could be said that Britain was simply demanding that the Qing meet international standards, and not attempting to encroach on Chinese sovereignty. Britain wanted to shore up conditions for the benefit of private British trade, not set up more colonies to manage.”
― Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World

“Free trade is not as innocent as it sounds. In practice, the doctrine has only ever arisen when stronger states insist on access to the goods and markets of weaker states.”
― Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World

“What opium provided was the liquidity for Britain to buy American cotton. To reduce the connections to their simplest: British plantations produced opium in India, the opium was shipped and sold in China, the silver that paid for this opium was shipped to the United States to buy raw cotton, which was shipped to England to manufacture cloth, which was shipped to India (where the company had been successful in suppressing the native cotton textile industry), the proceeds of which then bought more opium.”
― Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World

“Even though Europe and China sustained roughly similar populations (about 120 million people in 1600) and were spread over roughly the same area (10 million square kilometres), Europe remained a patchwork of small sovereignties whereas China found itself over and over again reunified as a single state.”
― Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World