Chinese Hegemony: Grand Strategy and International Institutions in East Asian History

"As an international relations scholar, political scientist Feng Zhang wants to look at the development of China’s international affairs through the lens of the past. He is a social scientist who works on historical material. He wrote this book a couple of years ago. It deals primarily with the Ming era in Chinese history, and how that particular empire tried to deal with the relations with its neighbours in eastern Asia. And what he argues, and I think it is brilliantly observed, is that many of the Chinese approaches that you see later on in history, both during the Qing empire which followed the Ming at the beginning of the 17th century, and the People’s Republic today, have been much influenced by the arrangements, standards and approaches set up by the Ming empire. And the title gives it away, it is about hegemony. It’s about setting up an international system in which China is definitely at the centre, but without there necessarily being an adversarial relationship with other countries. It is hierarchic, it is hegemonic, but it also emphasises stability and order and, to some extent, reciprocity. He’s not a determinist. He’s not someone who says that, because this was developed as a standard half a millennium ago, it is something that determines China’s relationship to the rest of the world today. He’s quite good at saying that it doesn’t necessarily follow that China’s historical relationships with its neighbours within its own cultural region will be the pattern for the relationships it forms with countries that are further away, and more different from itself. But he is quite insistent on this idea of hierarchy being at the centre of Chinese foreign relations, and not necessarily hierarchy in the sense of China being on top in all matters, but there is a natural hierarchy of states. It is not based on a post-Westphalian idea of sovereignty being equal for everyone, and therefore all states, at least in principle, having the same value. The Chinese approach is very clearly that there are great powers and the smaller states are not equal—which, in terms of how international relations has been conducted over the past 500 years, and not just by the Chinese, is a pretty acute observation."