Perhaps few other actors had their standing in international life as profoundly transformed by the end of the Cold War as China. The increasing attention to Beijing's global outreach seems to confirm the variety of new roles and attitudes that it has embraced in world politics. The established purview is that it is the complex interaction between the turbulence of the post-1989 period and the ability to maintain consistent levels of economic growth that have allowed China to demonstrate an enhanced confidence and ability to fashion international relations. These developments appear to attest both to the transformations in and the transformative potential of Chinese foreign policy attitudes. At the same time, there is a growing interest in (as well as anxiety about) the prospective trajectories of Beijing's international interactions.

Responding to such anxieties, Christopher A. Ford suggests that while impacted by current contingencies, the future of China's involvement in global politics will be framed by attitudes based on interpretations of the past. Thus, in a rare move among current commentators, his analysis re-engages with the notion and practices of China's strategic culture. Such a perspective makes it possible to draw an unusually vivid account of the practices and frameworks of China's external agency that will be welcome by students, scholars and policy-makers alike. As Ford indicates, looking back at past experience will necessarily provide indeterminate outcomes on the particulars of Chinese foreign policy making. However, “as inhabitants of an insular political system and the inheritors of a monist political ideology that conceives of international order in fundamentally hierarchical terms, idealizes interstate order as tending toward tributary universalism … modern Chinese statesmen would seem to carry heavy cultural baggage” (p. 273). It is because of the weight of this ideational baggage that Ford looks at the cognitive grammars provided by China's strategic culture.

In this respect, the patterns of China's foreign affairs present an intriguing intersection of the discursive memory of the past with the contexts of the present and the anticipated tasks of the future. Thus, the insights provided by history “spell out the causal sinews of the world as it exists at all times, making them fundamental reference points for decision-making at any, and every, point” (p. 14). Such an attentive engagement with the conceptual contexts of Chinese strategic culture makes for an unusually perceptive account of the evolution of the notions, patterns and practices animating China's foreign affairs. Like most commentators, Ford draws attention to the significance of the Confucian tradition on the ongoing re-articulation of China's perceptions of international order, self-identity and global role(s). Yet, in contrast to most, he demonstrates that the canon of Confucianism should not be perceived as a constraining straitjacket, but as an enabling platform for entrepreneurial innovation. In fact, borrowing from Confucius himself, Ford indicates that Chinese policy-makers can be perceived as “co-worker[s] with antiquity” (p. 17).

What emerges is a strategic culture premised on the fusion of complex innovation and its creative contextualization within past experience. In the course of his discerning process-tracing, Ford draws a vivid picture of the underpinnings of Beijing's international interactions. His prescient analysis draws attention to the historical absence of long-term sovereign coequality in Chinese foreign affairs. Thus, in contrast to the experience of world politics developed in the West, the Confucian tradition has developed a hierarchical worldview reinforcing the superiority of Beijing. According to Ford, this outlook illustrates the “effective denial of the existence of what we would call today international relations” (p. 103) in China's interactions with other actors.

As he notes, almost no other polity was recognized as China's sovereign co-equal. As the title of the book indicates, Beijing's purview of interstate order has traditionally reflected “the mind of empire” – the tendency (if not always explicit desire) towards universal hegemony. Hegemony in this setting should not be misconstrued as domination (in the Western sense of the term), but as recognition of the primacy of Beijing. As Ford demonstrates, owing to particular historical context, the experience of empire – as opposed to international law or international institutions – has come to provide the answer to anarchy in Chinese strategic thinking.

It is through such a thorough analytical engagement with the subject of his observation that Ford's volume offers a compelling tracing of the trajectories of China's international interactions. Thereby, his account of Beijing's external outlook offers a much-needed and an erudite contextualization of China's emerging international agency. The book provides an extremely thoughtful reconsideration of the dominant frameworks for the explanation and understanding of Beijing's external outlook. Not surprisingly, therefore, the volume will benefit immensely those interested in the history and strategic culture of China's foreign policy. Ford's book will also be invaluable for the purposes of teaching and theorizing the ongoing transformations in global life as a result of China's increasing centrality in world affairs.