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John E. Wills, Jr., Professor of History, USC. Jwills@usc.edu. Not for quotation or citation without permission. Comments and criticisms urgently requested.

This essay and related projects take on some very large ranges of questions. Who is the presumptuous person who takes them on? It might be a good idea to sketch for you how I came to be involved with them. Back in the Neolithic (1958 and after) I did my Ph.D. at Harvard under John King Fairbank and Yang Liansheng. Early in my studies I somehow got interested in studying the long period of turmoil and dynastic transition in the seventeenth century, and then stumbled on the records left behind by European eyewitnesses of those year, especially Dutch merchants and Jesuit missionaries. The Dutch records seemed especially intriguing and under-exploited, and of course one of the first things a history graduate student is looking for is a fresh set of sources, preferable archival, to draw on and learn from. A long and stressful year at the Algemeen Rijksarchief in The Hague led eventually to a 700-page dissertation, two books, and a third still struggling to be born in 2003. From the beginning John Fairbank was very much interested in what I was learning because it seemed to promise some fresh light on questions that had been central to his own work since the beginning of his eminent career. His stunning achievement in Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast had been to integrate English sources with the Chinese materials newly published in the 1930’s to show the guarded, defensive, and in the short run effective responses of the Qing officials to British aggression in the Opium War (1839-1842). Concessions were made, personal diplomacy assiduously used, to confine foreign contact to a few "treaty ports" and to avoid the necessity of any diplomatic encounter at Beijing which would raise insoluble issues of diplomatic form, since foreign envoys were received at the imperial court only at envoys bearing tribute from subordinate rulers; the embassy sent by George III under Lord Macartney in 1793 famously had been so received, and the ambassador’s refusal to prostrate himself in the usual ketou had produced a great deal of argument, ambiguity, and bad feeling. Any new diplomatic encounter at the capital surely would challenge these ceremonial fundamentals of the imperial order in a situation where the Qing held a drastically weakened hand.

Fairbank found clear evidence of a "tribute system" construction of diplomatic realities all through the documents on the Opium War period, and already had published, in cooperation with Teng Ssu-yü (Deng Siyu) a ground-breaking article on the systematic presentation of the Qing tribute system in compendia of regulations and precedents. From these scholarly starting points it was easy to slip into a mode of generalization in which the tribute system became a master concept for the understanding of pre-modern Chinese foreign relations. It’s there right down to his last book, which he delivered to the publisher two days before his death, and in the writings of many other historians, some of whom make it a continuity since the second or first century BCE. It is not hard to arouse suspicion of a concept that tends to reify a binary of traditionalist China versus a West that is instrumentally rational and open to change. How did such a shaky concept survive so long? Historians have been until recent decades skeptical of theory -- That has changed, but balance or integration of theory and empiricism still are elusive. – and Fairbank was unusually skeptical of theory even for his generation. This became especially clear at the 1965 conference that led to the publication of Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order. I attended this conference weeks after we moved our very young family to southern California where I started teaching that fall, just after the Watts riots. I was the conference’s most junior and most insecure contributor, and the most ready to try to generalize from my peculiar case study.

I have continued to develop my misgivings about the concept of the tribute system in a variety of writings since that time, but no one has noticed very much. In early Qing (c. 1644-1723) there was a tribute system. Dutch and Portuguese envoys were received at the imperial court within its framework. But the ideology and institutions of the tribute system do not go very far in explaining Qing dealings with these foreigners. More useful are a general concept of defensiveness, limiting and controlling all forms of contact between foreigners and Qing subjects, and the dominance of internal political imperatives in the making of foreign policy. In all of China’s imperial history, only during a long Ming century, about 1425-1550, were all foreign relations managed within a unified set of bureaucratic institutions that fully merits the name "tribute system".

And while I tried to find a way to make that argument heard I continued to teach survey classes in Chinese history that came down to the present, and since 1979 I have visited the PRC a good deal. I was in Beijing in the spring of 1999, watching the regime’s shrewd re-cycling of popular anger at the embassy bombing into re-legitimation of order, studying hard, and Party hegemony. (I couldn’t give Chinese questioners any real explanation of the bombing; at one point I was reduced to the half-truth that the CIA came around to American colleges and recruited all the stupidest people.)

So what do people like me have to offer students of contemporary Chinese foreign relations? (My colleague Dan Lynch thinks quite a lot, to judge by our conversations and his courses.) Let me begin with modern history, which we define as 1839-1949, Opium War to Liberation. I would hope that there is no question that the student of contemporary Chinese foreign relations has to have a good sense of some inheritances from this period. The treaties at the end of the Opium War marked China’s entrance into the legally defined community of nation states. (I haven’t quite figured out how to modify that statement to take account of the treaty relations with Russia beginning with the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689.) Other European powers had to deal with the Qing Empire thereafter over territory that at that time was within the actively administered, not just tributary, boundaries of the Qing Dynasty, including the territories we now call Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan. Territories subsequently permanently lost to foreign sovereignty were what now is the Maritime Province of Russia and what now is the Mongolian People’s Republic. (It seems to me that Chinese policy intellectuals making arguments about what "has always been Chinese" would do well to stick to this post-1842 phase; if you take a longer time perspective, you will find that in, say, 700 CE China ruled what is now northern Vietnam but not Taiwan; not a perspective that would promote Sino-Viet friendship.)

The long century from 1839 to 1949 was a century of bullying and encroachment by the foreign powers and a constant sense of Chinese humiliation at their inability to defend themselves effectively. The Chinese have always known that they are a great people, smart, studious, inventive, hard-working, disciplined and ingenious in organizational life, capable of profound and selfless moral commitment. Why were the damned foreigners able to push them around? A well-placed friend in Beijing says, "Before the Opium War, we were not a backward country." Right. We are now developing some new understandings of what Ken Pomeranz at Irvine calls "the great divergence", in which contingencies of European and especially English easy access to coal and to cheap colonial forest and farm products made possible a set of shifts to the use of coal in steam engines and in the making of iron and steel that were at the root of the industrial revolution. (Yes, there is more to be said on this, and there’s a lot of debate now about Pomeranz’ book, but for our purposes it’s the fact of the divergence that’s important, and the demonstration that it was not entirely in essential differences between Chinese and Western cultures.) Add to this Carl Trocki’s picture of the contribution of the opium trade not just to China’s troubles but to the expansion of European capitalism in East and Southeast Asia, and the origins of the divergence become quite a bit clearer. Chinese thinkers and statesmen soon found that there was more to "self-strengthening" than shipyards and arsenals, and the inadequacies and setbacks of their efforts to find political, social, and cultural forms of mobilization and nation-building were at the heart of their frustration, anger, and humiliation. The founders of the People’s Republic were centrally committed to this nation-building quest; Mao proclaimed in 1949 that "China has stood up." Memories of imperialist humiliation certainly are kept alive for reasons of political legitimation, but my sense is that they are real and pervasive. Certainly they were behind the bitterness over the embassy bombing of 1999 and the spy place incident; "They wouldn’t do this to a powerful country." Certainly they must be factored into any reading of Chinese foreign policy today.

But what about longer time perspectives? We frequently read that Chinese views and practices of foreign relations were uniquely resistant to acknowledgement of equality, believing the supremacy of the Son of Heaven to be part of the natural order and, if active domination was not feasible or advantageous to China, isolation was preferable to equality – Sinocentrism, isolationism, the Middle Kingdom complex (still out there in the worries of China’s neighbors, according to a 2002 lecture at USC by Susan Shirk), and yes, the tribute system. They were convenient parts of explanation of a China which, under Mao Zedong, was in many ways isolationist and assertive of its own moral superiority to capitalism and Soviet revisionism. My efforts to scan recent works on Chinese foreign policy for references to this theme still have a long way to go. Even a good book by a smart emigré scholar, Chen Jian (2001, p. 8) contains a passing reference to the "age-old ‘Central Kingdom’ mentality." But in general I’m a bit surprised to find the references perfunctory and almost embarrassed. Political scientists are excessively fond of certain kinds of theory but they are not fools. These millennial-continuity, Sinocentrism, empire-without-equals or empire-without-neighbors tropes just don’t seem to be very helpful in explaining the international interactions of a China that is sometimes angry or pushy but, as Susan Shirk told us, increasingly astute in its multilateralism and immensely interactive in its commercial and cultural life. And hardly anyone seems to ask what are to me the crucial follow-up question after noting that Chinese rulers had a hierarchical view of the world with themselves on top: Who didn’t? And how did Chinese assertions of supremacy differ from others, from popes who divided the globe between Spain and Portugal, or Caliphs entrusted with the propagation of the message of God’s Last Prophet, or even Siamese kings turning the Wheel of the Buddhist Law?

Two very different books open up other ways of drawing on long time perspectives for the understanding of Chinese foreign policy today. Alastair Iain Johnston’s Cultural Realism is a very ambitious attempt to merge contemporary theory, especially of the rational choice variety, with thorough research in pre-modern Chinese sources. Johnston finds both in Chinese military classics like the Sunzi and in documents on conflicts with the Mongols in the 1400’s and 1500’s not the strategy of winning by guile and letting your enemy withdraw or the rhetoric of "cherishing those from afar" but a constant desire to crush and annihilate the enemy. There is far more excellent, sophisticated analysis here than I can possibly summarize briefly. But Johnston doesn’t do a very good job of putting his texts in contexts. The military classics were compiled at a time, roughly the third century BCE, when there was increasing expectation that one or another of the "Warring States" would defeat all the others and establish a single-centered imperial rule over all the culturally-related states of the Central Plain. Would-be advisers and ministers presented to the rulers of the states what they claimed were fail-proof recipes for total victory – Han Fei’s Legalism, the Legalist-Daoist eclecticism of Lü Buwei, Five Agents syntheses of nature lore, the control-oriented Confucianism of Xunzi. The assurances of total victory in the military classics have to be read in this context. And the texts on Ming relations with the Mongols have to be read in the context of a deeply divided polity in which scholar-officials alternated in dominance with emperor-eunuch-soldier coalitions. Projects of total annihilation of the enemy came naturally to the latter, but the former were so deeply entrenched and so indispensable to the unity and legitimacy of the empire that after the great expeditions of 1402-1425 there was no chance that the court could mobilize sufficient manpower and logistic support to send a major expedition into the steppe, much less establish a permanent strategic presence there. One silly emperor led an inadequate expedition and got captured by the Mongols. Another sillier one was just barely kept at home. The policy actually adopted was not annihilation but holding contact to a bare minimum, on the moralistic rationale that nothing could be done with the uncouth, unreliable, and above all insincere Mongols. Johnston here and in his writings on contemporary military affairs seems to see a continuity from the aggressive rhetoric of the old texts to the doctrines of the PLA today. It’s there, but how much should we make of it? At a minimum we should remember that it’s the heritage of the century of humiliation that makes militant rhetoric resonate so widely in popular consciousness today. Text always needs context – an enduring cliché for historians.

Swaine and Tellis’ main theme in Interpreting China’s Grand Strategy arouses similar misgivings. Why, considering the immense changes in context from even 1800, much less 200 or 600, should we expect any continuity in "grand strategy"? If there are continuities, they need to be explained not in terms of a reified strategic mentality but in terms of the persistent logics of the Chinese situation, especially its curious relations with its frontiers and the implications of its vast space of internal bureaucratic unity. In fact the authors do a pretty good job of making some of these connections. The book is widely read and comes up with some very important findings. In particular, it highlights the analytic importance of a peripheral zone where Chinese regimes always sought at least a buffer zone and sometimes real control. Here historians could help flesh things out by making distinctions among real projection of Chinese power with garrisons and resident commissioners; recognition with Chinese titles of local headmen over whom little control was possible; and purely symbolic assertion of suzerainty. Swaine and Tellis don’t seem to really notice how much this intermediary zone was coming more under Beijing-centered control under the Qing, as a result of the energetic campaigns of the Manchu Banners, the astute use of garrisons and resident officials, and the demographic pressure of growing Han Chinese settlement.

Students of contemporary foreign relations who would like to read and think more about perspectives from China’s past are much better provided with useful summaries and guides than they were a few years ago. The books on my list by Cohen, Holcombe, and Waley-Cohen all are thoughtful and eminently reliable. All emphatically and convincingly reject the old picture of an isolationist and supremacist China. All are under-theorized, especially in attention to contexts of internal political change. Cohen’s is strongest on political and military dimensions of the modern period, and sometimes leans toward the author’s own specialization in American relations with East Asia. Waley-Cohen’s book is much more interested in cultural and religious interchange than Cohen. I have a hard time knowing what to say about this richly stimulating book which so often seems to me to make a point less clearly than it might; I keep thinking how easy it would have been to suggest clarifications in the editing process. I think Holcombe’s is the best of these three books, the only one that shows signs of extensive reading in sources and modern scholarship in Chinese and Japanese, nicely interweaving the histories of language, religion, trade, and ethnicity. A bit more could have been done to link some of the interconnected changes to political and cultural transformations within China, like that under Emperor Wu of the Han around 100 BC and that in north China in the 400’s CE. Much reliable court-centered political narrative also can be found in the big summary by the very distinguished F.W. Mote, and in the glacially-appearing volumes of the Cambridge History of China.

If I’m going to damn with such faint praise the contributions of friends and eminences, do I think I can do better? At least I think I know how to try, and I have a strategy for doing it I’d like to ask you to help me think through. I have had a project for several years for a summary history of Chinese foreign relations now called Empire, Nation, Frontier, Network. This is one of those books for which no one author ever knows enough, but which probably will profit from a unity of vision and interpretation. I have used it several times in a graduate course in the history of Chinese foreign relations, in which one of the assignments for every student was to write a draft of one of the chapters. This is a kind of writing we don’t often teach our students, and I think it’s very important. I am thinking of getting my basic ideas into circulation, and seeking help with bibliography and conceptualization, by posting the fundamentals below on a website. Now all I need is the right combination of time and borrowed websmarts to figure out how to do it. Please see the separate text that presents some chapter-by-chapter agenda statements and highly preliminary bibliographies.

Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Warren L. Cohen, East Asia at the Center: Four Thousand Years of Engagement with the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

John K. Fairbank and Denis Twitchett, general editors, The Cambridge History of China. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978 et seq.

Charles Holcolmbe, The Genesis of East Asia, 221 B.C.-A.D. 907. Honolulu: Association for Asian Studies and University of Hawai’i Press, 2001.

Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

F. W. Mote, Imperial China, 900-1800. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Global Political Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Michael D. Swaine and Ashley J. Tellis, Interpreting China’s Grand Strategy: Past Present, and Future. Santa Monica: RAND, 2000.

Carl A. Trocki, Opium, Empire, and the Global Political Economy. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History. New York and London: Norton, 1999.

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