China is a paradox. It describes itself as a peaceful nation, yet its core values and classics stem from a historical period known as the “Era of Warring States.” The moral teachings of Confucius, who emphasized harmony and peace, vie with the Machiavellian advice of his contemporary, the master military strategist Sun Tzu, in shaping popular perceptions of Chinese views on conflict.

These two books—both from Columbia University Press’s fine series on “Contemporary Asia in the World”—are offered as guides to the ideas shaping China’s foreign policy. Given the paradoxes of China’s character, it should perhaps not be surprising that they lean in opposite directions: David C. Kang emphasizing China’s uniquely peaceful imperial history and Zheng Wang focusing on the extreme violence and near-continuous wars from 1840 to 1945 and their legacy.

East Asia Before the West addresses a much-neglected but profoundly important question in international relations: Why was Imperial China constantly at war with, and frequently conquered by, the relatively small nomadic tribes to its north and west, while by contrast China maintained a virtually undisturbed peace for centuries with the much more powerful and centralized states to its east and south, namely, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam? After all, by Western precepts of realism, these more powerful states should have been in frequent competition, leading to overt conflict. Yet from 1368 to 1898, China fought only one war against Vietnam and one against Korea, while Japan invaded the mainland only once, in Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s unsuccessful attempt to conquer Korea in the Imjin war of 1592–98.

Kang offers an original and perceptive answer, explaining that the Western concept of international relations based on competing nation-states simply did not apply to East Asia. Instead of Westphalian territorial competition and power balancing, East Asia developed a system of international relations based on status and hierarchy. In this system, China was the core actor, but not merely as the largest state (for after all, size offered no guarantee of power in the face of the smaller nomadic invaders). Rather, China’s dominance was above all cultural, as its system of writing, its classical philosophy, religion, and statecraft, and its administration were voluntarily adopted as models by the elites of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. While all these states remained strongly conscious of their separate national identities, their elites were willing to participate in a tribute system that recognized China as the cultural center of East Asia, as long as this system legitimized the position of these elites in their own countries, and as long as China made no territorial or other infringements on their nations.

The nomads of northern and central Asia, however, did not recognize this cultural supremacy; they simply saw a rich agrarian society ripe for plunder whenever a strong chieftain could unify the tribes and discipline them for sustained war. When China’s dynasties were weakened by fiscal and administrative crises, the nomads could even take the Chinese capital and wrest control of the empire.

The strong Confucian states took their economic gains through trade, however. Kang shows that the “tributary” system was not just an honorific or token set of economic exchanges. Rather, it provided a framework for a peaceful but enormous trade in cotton, silk, silver, copper, and other goods comparable to trade among European states. For this reason, Chinese and Japanese merchant vessels were not prepared to compete in arms with European merchants who appeared off their shores from the sixteenth century onward, and indeed had trouble understanding why the Europeans were so keen to establish forts and use naval warfare as a tool to promote trade. China, of course, at first tried to fit the European newcomers into the tributary framework, and were outraged that European captains and ambassadors treated China as “just another nation” rather than as the center of a complex cultural/hierarchical system of international relations. Still, both the Chinese and the Japanese managed to keep European merchants confined to a few designated ports until the nineteenth century, when steam-powered vessels finally gave the Europeans the ability to impose their view of competitive trade and national interests by force upon the Asian system.

Kang thus bemoans the Western destruction of the relatively peaceful tributary system, seeing the latter as an enormous success in coordinating political and economic relations among powerful neighboring states for centuries, allowing vigorous trade while virtually preventing war. Does this mean that China, Japan, and Korea are now condemned to simply function as Westphalian competitive states, using force and diplomacy for national advantage? And what does this mean given the rise of China as once again the largest economy and dominant military power in the region?

Wang answers these questions by looking at the ways in which, since 1991, China’s leadership has worked to inculcate a modern Western-style, state-based nationalism in its people, in order to create a new foundation of legitimacy for the Communist Party’s rule. Never Forget National Humiliation, though at times a bit pedantic in detailing China’s historical monuments, party platforms, and textbook development, is nonetheless a brilliant examination of recent developments in China and should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand its view of the world. No other work shows how patiently and deliberately China’s leaders have worked to develop and instill a near-paranoid nationalism, using a mythology of victimhood and resentment of foreign powers, and how much that nationalism shapes and constrains China’s modern international relations.

Wang points out that starting in 1840, with its first international defeats at the hands of maritime powers in the Opium War, China entered into a series of traumas that challenged its self-perception as the cultural center and leading nation of the world. Because the marauding nomads, even when they had conquered China, had always adopted traditional Confucian administrative and cultural norms, such defeats would sting but they did not overturn the faith of Chinese elites in the primacy of their own culture. The defeats in the Opium War were another matter. These defeats manifested China’s technological inferiority, and subjected China to the demands of foreigners who rejected its claims to cultural dominance.

The defeats of the Opium War were just the beginning; they were followed by further incursions by Westerners, leading to the Boxer Rebellion against the foreigners in 1900, which was in turn punished by fresh invasions, reparations, and occupation. Then from 1894 to 1945, China experienced an even greater humiliation and destruction, this time at the hands of the Japanese—their former tributary! Japan first captured Korea and Taiwan, then Manchuria, and then in 1937 invaded the heart of China, sacking the major cities and inflicting the infamous massacre in Nanjing. The entire century from 1840 to 1945 was thus an exceptional and devastating period of defeat, humiliation, and massive suffering for China at the hands of foreigners.

Nonetheless, Wang shows that when the Communists came to power, Mao downplayed the depredations of the foreigners. For the Communists, the essential struggle was that of the peasants and proletarians against capitalists, above all at home. The Russian foreigners became invaluable allies (at first), and the unifying goal was class struggle led by the party against world capitalism. It was this struggle that would empower the Chinese people and lead them to a glorious future.

All of this fell apart by 1991. The party’s incessant pushing of class struggles, from the Great Leap Forward to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, starved and impoverished China. When communism was overthrown in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union collapsed, the party was left without a credible reason for its hold on China. In the late 1980s, tentative talk about democracy and awareness of the economic success of westernizing Korea and Japan and the West itself among elites led to the student-led tumults centered on Tiananmen Square that echoed throughout the country. Despite the initial successes of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, after the naked force used in the center of Beijing, China’s leadership stood exposed and without a clear tie to the people they claimed to be leading.

Thus, the leadership adopted a new plan, minimizing the Maoist class struggle. Instead, they worked to convey an image of China as a historically great nation that had suffered a century of grievous defeats and humiliations at the hands of foreigners that neither the imperial nor Nationalist governments had been able to halt. It was only the Communist Party that had been able to end the humiliations and raise China once again to the status of a great power in the world. The party thus positioned itself as the guardian of China’s national interests, the only power capable of “saving” the country and restoring its glory and dignity.

Wang shows how this story is now embodied in monuments, inscriptions, textbooks, news stories, and all kinds of official propaganda, and is drilled into the new generation of students. He makes sense of why we see such large and intense public demonstrations against Japan whenever issues arise regarding Japan’s acknowledgement of its war crimes, and of why China can talk so much of peace yet be so militantly nationalistic about issues close to home.

Taking Wang’s and Kang’s books together, it is clear that simple Western ideas of international competition based on realist theories of state-based rivalry do not apply in the same way to China. That is, no matter how great the economic rivalry may grow between the United States and China, there is virtually no chance that China would do what Japan did in 1941 and try to strike across the Pacific at America. China is simply not interested in attacking other countries for the sake of making economic gains. Rather, it wants to restore its position as the dominant cultural and political “pole” of Asian international relations. As long as it is allowed to “rejuvenate itself” and resume its “normal” historical position, it will rise “peacefully” as its leaders proclaim.

As the party has now recast itself as the guardian of China’s national integrity and dignity against encroachment by foreigners, however—hence, the widespread reproduction across China of the phrase that serves as Wang’s title: “Never forget national humiliation”—it is led to be forceful in the extreme, almost manic, in opposing what it sees as attacks on its claims to the historical territory of China. Whether this means assertions of Tibet’s right to autonomy, or treating Taiwan as a politically independent entity, or even Philippine or Vietnamese or Japanese claims to scattered islands off the coast, the party is bound to react to any foreign claims to Chinese territory as attacks on the very legitimacy of the party’s right to lead China.

These books show that the rest of the world will not be successful in treating China as “just another nation” for whom a balance of forces and reasonable national interests will guide its behavior. The old tributary system is gone, replaced by a new and somewhat paranoid nationalism based on a history of victimization at the hands of foreigners. Yet China’s policy aims to restore something like that tributary system, with recognition of China’s primacy in East Asia as its main goal, and respect and parity with other nations of the world equally important. At the same time, the extreme nationalism that the party has fomented as the new basis of its legitimacy leads it to take stances that might seem irrationally intense regarding territorial disputes, but which are unavoidable given the political strategy the party has adopted.

The best hope for the future would be that a new generation of what Wang calls “middle leaders” in China—intellectuals, journalists, professionals, and artists who can shape opinion but who do not wield power—will steer China away from rabid nationalism, and instead promote a Kantian vision of China as a free country among other free countries that will benefit from free trade and a liberal peace. That would of course mean an end to complete party control of Chinese society, and while that day may come, perhaps sooner than we expect, it is not here yet. Meanwhile, so long as the party maintains control and relies on a victim-based nationalism as its main legitimizing principle, both books will provide the best insights into the mindset of China’s leaders regarding the country’s place in the world.