This slim volume seeks to discern where China will go in the next few decades in light of its leaders' understanding of history. Explicitly miming Joseph Levenson's trilogy on the roots and meaning of the 1949 revolution, this book explores the origins and nature of the 1978 reforms and their potential consequences for the world. Written in an engaging style, the book should reach its intended readers, including specialists and generalists.
Charles Horner rightly insists that China was “far more than just a country” (p. 2) and that the very meaning of its name warrants close examination. China has defined and redefined itself over time as its own and world circumstances require; “apparent consensus has never precluded sharp and spirited debate about proper policy” (p. 11). In recent years, the Yuan dynasty, once regarded as an age of humiliating “barbarian” conquest, has been reevaluated as a time of cosmopolitan commerce in which China became a significant part of a Eurasian world order. The Ming, previously criticized as a period of despotism and stagnation, has been rehabilitated as an age of maritime expansion and commercial integration into a global economic system. The Qing, once blamed for China's defeat at the hands of “Western” powers and Japan, has been recently reinterpreted as a powerful empire that greatly expanded China's borders, population, and economy during the eighteenth century.
Subsequent Chinese efforts to transform their civilization to accord with Western models of wealth, power, and morality have proved disappointing to Chinese and outsiders. Christianity transmuted into Taiping ideology brought death to tens of millions. Marxism morphed into Maoism caused the death of millions more. Even American-style commerce and consumption pursued during China's recent “rise” may foster alienation and conflict, resulting in global disasters even greater than those of the last century.
In passing, Horner notes the Han-period debate over markets and state management, the Three Kingdoms' celebration of military tactics, Tang cosmopolitanism (including Islam), Song experience in price controls and relief policy, Republican diplomacy that preserved most Qing frontiers, early awareness in the People's Republic of China (PRC) that “Africa and Latin America … comprise the soft underbelly of the world's hegemon” (p. 98), and later PRC growth in urban population from 170 million to 540 million combined with the expansion of foreign trade from 10 percent to 70 percent of gross domestic product (pp. 119, 135). Wisely refraining from any strong predictions, the author cautiously ventures that “China's Peaceful Rise seems both a theoretical and practical possibility” (p. 137).
This intelligent, informed, and insightful romp through China's historical experience has a few blemishes. The introduction to Romanization systems is witty, but there are several mistakes, both typographical and substantive, in using the two major systems. There are statements in the text not documented in notes, notes to sources not in the bibliography, items in the bibliography not used in the text, unpublished papers in the bibliography cited without indication of authors' permissions, and relevant sources missing from the bibliography.
There are also major questions of interpretation. Horner is pleased to live in “the greatest age in the history of the world” (p. xii), but he embraces many clichés from the Cold War. He equates Hitler to Stalin to Lin Biao (pp. xi, 89), decries Maoist “tyranny,” “totalitarianism,” and “madness” (pp. 5, 21, 86, 148, 178, 194), declares that “Mao waged a brutal campaign against China” (p. 198), and charges the PRC with backing the overthrow of the Indonesian government in 1965 and conducting a “massacre in Tiananmen Square” [sic] in 1989 (pp. 8, 18, 88). He acknowledges the “strategic hegemony” of “the U.S. empire,” but he comments gingerly on U.S. “involvement” in Vietnam and writes that the United States “inserted” its forces into Cambodia, as opposed to the P.R.C., which “invaded” Vietnam (pp. 136, 186).
Interested in “postmodernism,” Horner remains entangled in modernization theory. He perpetuates the standard dichotomy between “traditional China” and the “modern world.” He acknowledges that there are different definitions of—and paths to—modernity, but he assumes that it is a necessary and universal stage prerequisite to “something else” beyond it (pp. 10, 13, 14, 77, 123, 140, 142).
While celebrating “the benign worldwide ascendancy of the United States,” Horner claims that China's multinational empire “runs contrary to the twenty-first century's ideas about identity and autonomy for ethnic groups and their cultures” (pp. 195–96). Here, he is a victim of some “new Qing” historians' insistence that the Mongol Yuan and Manchu Qing were “not Chinese at all” (pp. 16, 27, 54, 172, 176). He is also misled by contemporary Uighur and Tibetan expatriates who claim that their people simply want independence from China (pp. 57, 88, 181). Sadly, the really interesting question of what it will mean to be Chinese by the middle of this century is not fully addressed—let alone answered—in this volume.
