In Haunted by Chaos, Sulmaan Wasif Khan, a historian of China's foreign relations, carries out the ambitious project of depicting the contours of the grand strategy of the People's Republic of China. Informed by theories of foreign policy analysis and grand strategy and making use of both published and unpublished Chinese sources, Khan emphasizes the common driving force behind China's grand strategy and the continuity of the country's arsenals of power to fulfill its strategic objectives over the past seventy years despite drastic changes in leadership style and the international environment. His core argument is that Chinese leaders after Mao Zedong “all saw China as a brittle entity, in a world that was fundamentally dangerous” (p. 3). To serve the fundamental goal of preserving a fragile state in a menacing world, Mao and his successors combined the use of force, diplomacy, and political economy.
In the five main chapters, Khan traces how the objective of keeping the state intact shaped the grand strategy of the Chinese government under Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. Khan's expertise in China's ethnic frontier and borderlands, which he demonstrated in his acclaimed book Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy,Footnote 1 enables him to offer a compelling interpretation of Mao's grand strategy of pursuing reunification in the first chapter. The Chinese Communists decided to forcefully weave Xinjiang, Tibet, and other frontier regions into the new state—despite earlier promises of self-determination—to prevent Western imperial powers from using the frontiers to threaten China's unity. Such geopolitical concern was largely a continuation of the “old-fashioned geopolitical thinking of an empire” (p. 40). In the second chapter, Khan deemphasizes ideology and characterizes Mao's Cold War grand strategy as a bid for the balance of power by securing “support or at least neutrality from the superpowers, friends where it could get them, and, ideally, buffer zones between its far-flung outposts and the rest of the world” (pp. 53–54).
The overarching goal of China's grand strategy—to protect the state from threats from within and without—remained the same in the post-Maoist era, whereas economic power became more salient as a tool to achieve China's strategic objectives. Khan elaborates on this argument in the next three chapters. Chapter 3 explains Deng's strategy of “fixing China's internal problems by looking outward” (p. 145). To save the post–Cultural Revolution state, Deng's domestic and international agendas were essentially intertwined. In his chapter on the Jiang and Hu eras, Khan extols the “virtue of dullness” (p. 170) in their prudent and calm pursuit of grand strategy, especially when dealing with the rather unpredictable Americans. By “keep[ing] China on the course Deng had set” (p. 208), the two leaders demonstrated flexibility in handling specific issues without jeopardizing long-term objectives of the country.
Toward the end of the book, Khan discusses two major changes in China's pursuit of grand strategy under the current administration: Xi has brought the cult of personality, which was abandoned after Mao's death, back into the set of strategic tools, and he has strived to secure the state “with greater urgency and vigor” (p. 211). In the book's conclusion, Khan argues that leaders after Mao shared the same understanding of statehood that they sought to defend—that “there was a Chinese state of which the [Chinese Communist Party] was the rightful governing party” (p. 237).
Haunted by Chaos is an admirable effort to trace the strategic goals of China over the course of its contemporary history. Khan does so successfully by centering the theme of statehood—that is, putting a fragmented state back into one piece to ensure its survival and strength. Here, Khan makes an insightful observation that for China, like many powers in history, “success fuels insecurity and ambition” (p. 40) because of the higher cost of losing the state. This argument sheds light on the increasing assertiveness of China's foreign behaviors under the current administration. The change of course in China's international relations in recent years has been largely a product and a continuation of the grand strategy formulated by previous leaders rather than the result of Xi's idiosyncrasy. When analyzing each leader's perception of the threat to the Chinese statehood, Khan pays close attention to their personal experience during their formative years—Mao witnessing a fragmented China under warlordism, Deng spending years overseas in France, Jiang and Hu climbing the political ladder as technocrats, and Xi working in a remote village in northern China during the Cultural Revolution.
Echoing some of the classic studies of grand strategy, Khan emphasizes the conditioning effects of geography on China. In particular, he contends that having many neighbors, while presenting challenges, simultaneously offers opportunities—“the more players there were, the easier it was to achieve a balance of power favorable to Chinese national security” (p. 239). This observation highlights the significance of investigating China's relations with its Asian neighbors as they are, instead of treating them as a by-product of great power politics. Moreover, the complicated geopolitical conditions forge a strong link between China's diplomacy and its state building, which have largely been studied as separate topics in existing historiography.
A book covering the evolution of China's grand strategy over seventy years in under 250 pages, quite understandably, leaves some important questions unanswered. For instance, what is the root of Chinese leaders’ strategic instincts about protecting statehood? Is it a legacy of the emphasis on the centralizing state in the Chinese political tradition or mainly a response to the fragmentation of political authorities in the modern era? Another example is Khan's presentation of the role of emotion in China's foreign conduct. Khan argues that sometimes emotion superseded grand strategy in shaping Beijing's behaviors, such as those related to Taiwan or relations with Japan. A more in-depth analysis of the patterns behind the shifting influence of emotion would be helpful because it is relevant to the fundamental question of the extent to which the Chinese government, especially when dealing with international crisis, behaves as a rational actor.
Few arguments made in Haunted by Chaos are entirely original. Taken together, however, they should promote vibrant conversations among specialists on contemporary China over the theoretical tools and analytical approaches to studying the rising power's foreign behavior. General readers who are interested in Chinese politics and foreign relations will also find this timely addition to the scholarship of China's grand strategy an informative and readable work.
