Restless Empire
China and the World Since 1750
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Over the past 250 years of momentous change and dramatic upheaval, China has proved itself to be a Restless Empire.
Tracing China’s course from the eighteenth-century Qing Dynasty to today's People’s Republic, Restless Empire shows how the country’s worldview has evolved. It explains how Chinese attitudes have been determined by both receptiveness and resistance to outside influence and presents the preoccupations that have set its foreign-relations agenda.
Within two decades China is likely to depose the United States as the world’s largest economy. By then the country expects to have eradicated poverty among its population of more than one and a half billion, and established itself as the world’s technological powerhouse. Meanwhile, some – especially its neighbours – are afraid that China will strengthen its military might in order to bend others to its will.
A new form of Chinese nationalism is rising. Many Chinese are angry about perceived past injustices and fear a loss of identity to commercial forces and foreign influences. So, will China’s attraction to world society dwindle, or will China continue to engage? Will it attempt to recreate a Sino-centric international order in Eastern Asia, or pursue a more harmonious diplomatic route? And can it overcome its lack of democracy and transparency, or are these characteristics hard-wired into the Chinese system? Whatever the case, we ignore China’s international history at our peril.
Restless Empire is a magisterial and indispensible history of the most important state in world affairs today.
WINNER OF THE 2013 ASIA SOCIETY BERNARD SCHWARTZ BOOK AWARD
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Trauma, antagonism, and stimulating development are the fruit of China's deeply formative engagement with the world, according to this savvy history. Bancroft Prize winning historian Westad (The Global Cold War), of the London School of Economics, surveys China's foreign relations from the 18th-century Qing dynasty's war in Burma to present-day wrangles over U.S. spy planes, mineral rights in the South China Sea, and the latter-day economic boom that has made nominally Communist China the "champion of free market capitalism." Much of this period is one of military subjection to rapacious foreign powers, but Westad emphasizes the importance of those experiences in making China modern: Western imperialism, he argues, brought economic development and new ideas about democracy and nationalism; Communist China's emulation of the Soviet Union boosted the power and activism of the state; China's post cold war economic boom is predicated on international trade and investment, and business practices imported from abroad. Against the conventional image of an arrogantly aloof and immovable civilization, the author tells a story apart from the disastrous xenophobic detour of Maoism of China's progressive attunement and adaptation to foreign influences. Westad manages to compress a vast and complex history into a well-paced narrative that helps readers understand China's growing centrality in international affairs. 6 maps.
