What kind of state is China? New Zealanders who went to the Terracotta Warriors exhibition at Te Papa last year know one version. China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang buried his army facing not north or west out to lands beyond the border but facing east back into China’s heartland. So right from the beginning the Chinese state has been inward-looking, focusing on the Han heartland and interested more in control than conquest.
The Great State looks at how China relates to the world Photo: Supplied
That’s one possibility, says historian Timothy Brook in The Great State: China and the World, except that was more than two thousand years ago. In the last seven centuries, China has been engaged in a very different debate, he argues.
The Chinese believed that the state was embodied by the Emperor who was the son of Heaven and commanded all under heaven, known as “tian xia”.
But when China was invaded first by the Mongols, to establish the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), and later the Manchu, the Qing (1644-1912), the conquerors brought the idea that China could be part of empires that stretched well beyond its borders. All under heaven could stretch far beyond Chinese skies and tian xia could be imposed on others.
Brook argues this idea stayed in the Chinese political bloodstream, waxing and waning in strength, even after conqueror dynasties collapsed; the Mongol Yuan was followed by the Han Ming (1368-1644) and they in turn by the Manchu Qing, which massively increased the borders of China, and then the Republic of China (1912-1949) and the People’s Republic (1949-). Each regime believed to some degree in the Great State because how could it be less powerful than its predecessor, says Brook.
The idea goes some way to explaining the question at the heart of one of the most popular books on China, 1421: The Year China discovered the World by Gavin Menzies, still a bestseller in airport book shops. Why did the Ming send a giant fleet out into the world in 1421? They assumed the world wanted to pay deference and tribute, says Brook. After the giant fleet proved so expensive, they just kept assuming it without bothering to send fleets to enforce it.
Historian Timothy Brook Photo: Supplied
There was an entire bureaucracy, the Ministry of Rites, to fit all foreign interactions with the Emperor into the framework of deference and homage. Brook entertainingly documents the misunderstandings between European traders turning up to demand “free trade” and the Chinese bureaucracy who assumed it should benefit the Seat of Heaven. Donald Trump take note; trade talks between the West and China went off track from the get-go.
Brook looks at this idea of a Great State through the eyes of 13 figures; pirates, generals, a Confucian traveller, castaways, lawmakers, Mongol brides and bureaucrats. Two of the most entertaining chapters revolve around Court arguments whether to have any dealings with the Europeans; first whether to allow in the Jesuits, second the traders. Both were eventually granted access. Right from the start there were strong voices that China did not need them.
Brook also reminds us the downside of being so globally enmeshed; pestilence. In a chapter, which rings horribly true in a world of Covid-19, he sets out the carnage wrought by the Black Death along the trade routes of the Mongol empire from the Middle East to China. He scours the dynastic records. Some of it is grim. A record says that at one site, “the sound of wailing thundered across the landscape.” A physician in a city under siege by the Mongols in 1232, recorded how “each day at each of the capital’s 12 gates, between one and two thousand corpses were taken out. This went on for almost three months.” It’s possible, Brook argues, that the plague was brought in the saddle bags of traders and soldiers east along the Silk routes to China from areas we now think of as the “-Stan” nations, as well as west into the Middle East and Europe. Latest research on the plague’s genomes seems to point to China suffering one of the original strains of the plague, possibly originating in Uzbekistan, before it began to mutate into different versions which infected Europe in a “Big Bang”. Whatever the truth, it seems to have travelled through the Mongol Empire before wrecking the Mongol dynasty in China as peasants facing pestilence, famine and death overthrew their rulers. It’s a salutary lesson.
Brook argues that this idea of a Great State in China stands in contrast to experience on the other end of the Eurasian landmass. In Europe, the Treaty of Westphalia to end the Thirty-Year War enshrined the idea that all states are equal. Followers of the Great State, on the other hand, assume one nation is more powerful and it deserves deference.
Mongol leader Kublai Khan founded China's Yuan dynasty Photo: Supplied
The Great State is an entertaining read; it’s also visually appealing. Brook, the author of Vermeer’s Hat which looked at global trade through six paintings by Johannes Vermeer, loves maps. He can’t go past an old map without stopping to unpick its assumptions. He ponders a Chinese map labelled (almost with a shudder) “Ten Thousand Countries” showing one edge of Eurasia with a fractured mass of European states but the other with a large super-state.
The book is teeming with characters. It moves easily between a grand theory of Chinese politics and ordinary people living it. Every now and then you do wonder if Brook has conjured a whole canvas from just a few lines in an historical record.
At the end, Brook refuses to say outright whether he thinks ideas of a Great State are still circulating in the Chinese political blood stream today, though it seems quite clear he probably does. He points to the modern example of the One Belt, One Road which involves China building infrastructure around the world to link countries to itself in trade.
If there is a flaw, it lies at the heart of Brook’s theory. He sees China as quite distinctive, a Power for most of its history and grappling with the idea of projecting power beyond its border. But what if China is not distinctive at all? Maybe all Powers tend to act like this; insisting on their superiority, patrolling the world’s corridors, linked to the globe for goods and power, jostling to be first. Great Powers tend to want to be Great States.
