Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate
Memories of Empire
in a New Global Context
by Charles Horner
Georgia, 232 pp., $34.95
Charles Horner advances a number of different ideas in his new book, but the central one is this question: Which historical referents are used by China's current leadership to justify current positions or policies, or to predict the future?
Central to his thesis is the possibility that a Chinese intellectual writing in this day and age can--unlike his predecessors--"contemplate China's current and anticipated weight in the world [with] . . . a reasonable expectation of national success rather than one of national disaster." In other words, Horner seeks to explore "the new past of old China."
These 'pasts' include a rewriting of Yuan dynasty history not as one of subjugation by the Mongols, nor as part of someone else's empire. Instead, that era is now portrayed as an early indication that an affluent, coherent regime based in China could, in fact, rule effectively. The Ming dynasty is no longer depicted as one of crude, brutal rule, but rather, the current scholarship on that era "makes it appear not merely grand and innovative, but grand and innovative in ways that seem wholly connected to China's contemporary circumstances." Here Horner cites the origins of Chinese capitalism, an increasingly urban civilization, and of strategic thinking, including the Chinese explorer Zheng He, whose voyages are now being aggressively marketed by the Chinese government as precedent for China's "peaceful rise" and "going out" strategies. The Qing dynasty is now heralded for significant cultural advances, citizen involvement in the state, and a multiethnic society.
Of course, most governments and their agents have a healthy appetite for revisionism, so to the extent Horner is trying to advance a theory one does question why the origins of this policy can be found in that era's history. And a few of the connections appear somewhat tenuous, particularly in the chapter on Mao, where glimmerings of Communist revolution and strategic behavior are seen in everything from the game go to the literary classic The Water Margin. This is not necessarily wrong, but it becomes more difficult to grasp what the particular referents are and are not.
There are a number of compelling subthemes. One is Horner's description, in an effort to frame the central question, of his own experiences studying China, and trying to discern what his contemporary Chinese counterparts would have been taught. He reminds us why we should respect the first generation of modern China scholars--Derk Bodde, John Melby, He Bingdi--and understand what kinds of information they did and did not have access to. This is a brief but evocative and effective reminder of what scholars can, at their respective times and places in history, know about China.
Another theme concerns the practice in China of historiography, which according to Horner is -counterintuitive in a number of respects. Think history is written by the winners, and born of a sense of validation and triumphalism? Think again. Horner describes the laborious practice by which a new dynasty would assess and document the failings of its predecessor, typically in an effort to avoid those mistakes and justify its own rule.
And think history is written by historians, free of interference? No, Horner reminds us: Through the end of the Qing Dynasty the task was, in fact, reserved to the state itself, not to independent thinkers. Mao, writes Horner, "pushed the practice of using the past to serve current political purposes to the extreme" and Chinese historians' emancipation from state control did not begin until after the Cultural Revolution.
One of the author's real contributions is to describe the delicate dance ongoing since the beginning of the reform era, in which Chinese historians have been able to explore their past more freely, reestablish independent scholarly institutions, and have contact with their counterparts outside China. And yet some of those historians remain influenced by the prevailing political winds: Zheng He may have been a great explorer, but some contemporary historians believe he is a liability rather than an asset, as his actions could be construed as gunboat diplomacy, or imperialism. Other historians' analysis takes them in the other direction; Horner cites one scholar's equation of sanitized versions of the Boxer Rebellion with Japan's omission of its less admirable acts in modern history as a contributing factor to the closure of a popular scholarly journal in 2006.
As Horner writes in his chapter on the Qing, "the study of . . . epochs in Chinese history may prove highly subversive, precisely because it is very edifying." The uneasy relationship between authoritarianism--be it the Mongols or the crumbling Qing or resurgent Maoists--and reconstructions of Chinese history remains one of the most consistent phenomena in China's past, present, and likely future.
Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, is the author of China, Cambodia, and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.