When China Rules the World

Apart from its extraordinary longevity and bursts of efflorescent invention, the most striking feature of Chinese history is the fact that while Europe, following the fall of the Roman Empire, fragmented into many parts, and ultimately into many nations, China was already moving in exactly the opposite direction and starting to coalesce. It is this unity that has ensured the continuity of its civilization and also provided the size which remains so fundamental to China ’s character and impact. Unity is one of the most fundamental propositions concerning Chinese history, if not the most fundamental. If Europe provided the narrative and concepts that have informed not just Western but world history over the past two centuries, so China may do rather similarly for the next century or so, and thereby furnish the world with an entirely different story and set of concepts: namely the idea of unity rather than fragmentation, that of the civilization-state rather than the nation-state, that of the tributary system rather than the Westphalian system, a distinctive Chinese notion of race, and an organizing political dynamic of centralization/decentralization rather than modernization/conservatism. Given the nodal importance of Chinese unity, the year 211 BC – marking the victory of the Qin, the end of the Warring States period (403-221 BC), and the beginning of modern China – will become as familiar to the world as 1776 or 1789. Qin Shihuang, the first Chinese emperor, who not only bequeathed the Terracotta Army but founded a dynastic system which was to survive until 1911, will become as widely known as Thomas Jefferson or Napoleon Bonaparte, if not much more so.

There are many other aspects of Chinese history which will reconfigure the global discourse: the fact, for example, that China has been responsible for so many of the inventions that were subsequently adopted elsewhere, not least in the West, will help to dispel the contemporary myth that the West is history’s most inventive culture. For our purposes here, the voyages of Zheng He, which predated those of Europe ’s great maritime explorers like Christopher Columbus, can serve as an example for this process of reconfiguration. It is widely accepted that, in ships that dwarfed those of Europe at the time, Zheng He embarked on a series of seven voyages that took him to what we now know as Indonesia, the Indian Ocean and the east coast of Africa in the early fifteenth century. The voyages of the great European explorers like Vasco da Gama and Columbus marked the beginning of Europe ’s long-running colonial era. For the Chinese, on the other hand, Zheng’s voyages had no such consequence. There was no institution in Ming China that resembled a Navy Department and therefore, as the historian Edward Dreyer suggests, ‘there was no vested interest to argue the case for sea power or for a blue water strategy, nor did China exercise what later naval theorists would call “control of the seas” even during the period of Zheng He’s voyages.’ [1234] Zheng’s voyages never had a sequel: they proved to be the final curtain in the Ming dynasty’s maritime expeditions as China once again slowly turned inwards. Zheng’s missions were neither colonial nor exploratory in intent: if they had been, they would surely have been repeated. They were influence-maximizing missions designed to carry out the very traditional aim of spreading China ’s authority and prestige in what was its known world. The Chinese had no interest in exploring unknown places, but in making peoples in its known world aware of the presence and greatness of the Chinese empire. Zheng He’s expedition lay firmly within the idiom of the tributary state system, though his journeys took him much further afield than had previously been the case. [1235]