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James Millward is professor of inter-societal history at Georgetown
University, Washington DC. His books include The Silk Road: A Very
Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013)We shouldn’t talk about ‘China’ as a
continuous, monolithic polity that was
‘always’ where it is today. In the national-
istic official version, ‘China’ has thousands
of years of history. But of course the diverse
lands and peoples of the People’s Republic
of China aren’t the same as the lands of
the Zhou dynasty (c1046–256 BC), any
more than Egypt today under Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi is the same as the Egypt of the pharaohs. There have been
many monarchies ruling different parts of the east Asian main-
land, just as there have been in Europe. Though we tend to call
them all ‘Chinese dynasties’, they weren’t any more politically,
territorially or ethnically continuous or uniform than polities in
Europe following the Roman empire.
Culturally, there are great Chinese continuities. Not only
have Chinese dynasties been influenced by the linguistic,
legal, literary and religio-philosophical traditions of societies
in first-millennium-BC northern China, so were Vietnam
and Korea (conquered off and on by empires based in China)
and even Japan (which was never conquered by a China-based
state). Moreover, Chinese cultural influence lasted and spread
even after the soldiers withdrew – thus one might say that Chi-
nese civilisation, like that of the west or the Islamic sphere, has
comprised a great soft superpower in its value to diverse peoples.
As for hard power, since the fall of the Han empire (202 BC–
220 AD) the most expansive China-based empires were those
deeply influenced or ruled by non-Chinese-speaking peoples.
The Tang (618–907) enrolled Turks and central Asians as
soldiers and officials. Tang Turkic armies briefly conquered
parts of central Asia under command of a Korean general. The
Mongols assembled fragmented regions north and south of the
Yangtze into the Great Yuan khanate (1271–1368) which, after
the fall of the Mongol empire, became the Ming (1368–1644).
Besides the Ming lands, the Manchu Qing empire (1636–
1912) annexed Taiwan, Tibet, Mongolia and the Uyghur
region. The Chinese Communist Party took over most of these
new Qing conquests, but now struggles to fit them within its in-
creasingly Han-centric idea of ‘China’. A true superpower today
would recognise that the greatness of the Chinese tradition lies
in its potential for inclusiveness, not its narrow chauvinism.James Millward“Chinese civilisation has
comprised a great soft
superpower in its value
to diverse peoples”
A 1968 propaganda poster featuring Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese
Communist Party. Economic reforms have since led to huge growth – but
will modern China experience the decline suffered by earlier dynasties?Kublai Khan gives Marco Polo a letter of safe conduct, shown in a medieval
French illumination. The Mongol ruler “drew on China’s traditions of
Confucian thinking to shape his government”, says Rana MitterИЗП
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