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The following is an attempt to help to jump-start discussion of issues in the history of Chinese foreign relations. The subject once was central to English-language scholarship on China, and obviously has not been so through several decades of "China-centered" scholarship. Recently there have been some important moves beyond the "China-centered turn", into interest in the multi-ethnicity of the Qing and several earlier empires, the partial and interactive indigenizations of Buddhism and Christianity, China’s changing interactions with the global economy over the last 500 years, cultural pluralism and boundary-crossing, and much more. There have been several stimulating summaries of this more interactive view of Chinese history, but much remains to be done.

There also are good practical/policy reasons why we need to think more about China’s modes of interaction with the outside world; it's clear that China will be a much more active and interactive factor in the world of the 21st century, and policy-makers and academic interpreters of its contemporary foreign relations need better accounts of earlier phases than are now available to them.

I have asked my graduate students, and with this text I begin to ask other collaborators and co-conspirators, to imagine a short book that would summarize the main lines of what is now understood about the history of Chinese foreign relations, and in the process of so doing lay special emphasis on some interpretive issues that may be especially useful to students of the contemporary scene. It seems to me that thinking about and trying to practice this kind of writing presents very important intellectual challenges. We do it all the time, in providing background for our more detailed investigations and analyses, but we rarely think about it or teach it explicitly to our graduate students. The challenge is to interweave theory and well-chosen (accurate, vivid, not hackneyed) detail, and make them support each other. Often the writer has a nice, coherent exposition going, only to realize that she has left out a whole set of changes and explanations that somehow have to be woven in.

What follow are a first sketch of an agenda-setting statement and suggestions of what a series of chapters might look like. The sketches of issues and the bibliographies appended to them are in every sense works in progress. In months to come I will be seeking advice in more focussed ways, probably starting with Chapter 9, where I feel particularly clueless.

The study of the history of Chinese foreign relations is abuzz with old saws that are getting dull but keep going around: the tribute system, culturalist resistance to learning from foreigners, Chinese identity and alienated cosmopolitanism as a zero-sum game, 100% negative evaluations of connections with the world economy, and so on. In this book we will survey what we know about the history of Chinese foreign relations, evaluate the evidentiary and intellectual weaknesses of the old saws, and attempt to move beyond them in various ways, including attention to networks of human connection as a basic aspect of the successes of imperial regimes, the ambivalences toward things foreign of modern nation-builders, and the contemporary puzzles of "Greater China".

A first run at how we will talk about interactions among empire, nation, frontier, and network would look something like this: The Chinese from Han times on built and often maintained a very large single-centered polity, an empire, partly on a basis of military power but also on a basis of their ability to foster and adjust networks among individuals, especially those between rulers and ministers and between patrons and clients of various kinds. Such a network-built empire rarely was totally controlling of the activities of its subjects, and did not elicit all-consuming devotion and identification in the way a pseudo-kin "we group" or a religion can. It could easily generate centrifugal forces or conflicts if it tried to control or tax its subjects too heavily. Thus expensive conquests often were suspect, and too much contact with foreigners might lead to de-stabilizing connections with them. But this very large empire also had proportionately long and deep frontier zones, into which it was drawn by real and perceived threats, by conflicts between emigrants from the empire and local peoples, and, more rarely than for Europe and some other great civilizations, by the lures of loot and glory. When the western powers kicked down the door of a very defensive Qing empire, China had to become a mobilizing state if it was to survive as one nation among many. The heritages and logics of the self-limiting empire had to be overcome. In the longer run, the heritages of empire and network offer many strengths to the Chinese in an interactive modern world. But there are baffling contradictions between the heritages of a nation in quest of unity and strength, an empire that acknowledges no equals, frontier zones largely within the borders of the modern nation-state, and the energetic network-building that links Chinese in the PRC, in Taiwan, and in the diaspora.

We need to examine and think about some efforts by very able people to summarize some of the issues in this territory. Why are historians writing in this field so lacking in theoretical ambition? Political scientists writing for a policy elite and for the intelligent general reader have different sets of strengths and weaknesses. A famous and contentious historian/social scientists, Andre Gunder Frank, provides another perspective on how to do these things.

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

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

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

Mark Mancall, China at the Center: 300 Years of Foreign Policy. New York and London: Free Press, 1984.

Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998.

Ross Terrill, The New Chinese Empire and What It Means to the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2003.

Chapter 1. Origins and the Qin-Han Transformation.

What were the degrees of variety and commonality among the early "core" cultures of "China"? The constantly changing picture derived from archeology, such as the spectacular finds at Sanxingdui near Chengdu, make this a question that has to be asked anew every year or so. What were the relations between "Chinese", Hua or Xia, and "Barbarians", Yi in the Neolithic and the Bronze Age?

Now let's look at the "Iron Age" transformations in warfare, productivity, culture, and ruling, and notice that about the same time the steppe peoples became mounted warriors! Sophisticated and ceremonious diplomacy among the various states stands at the heart both of early Confucianism and of proto-Legalist "realism". The immense stimulus of rivalry among the states to mobilization of resources, improvement of productivity, and even cultural creativity -- fu guo qiang bing with a vengeance -- will provide a constant foil to our later discussions of defensiveness, the self-limiting state, and so on. A close look at Qin's conquest, development, and incorporation of the Sichuan basin shows its strengths and limits in bringing a variant region into a centralized imperial structure. The Qin building of the first Great Wall and the Qin conquest all the way to modern Guangdong set two sets of problems for the historian of Chinese foreign relations, which will continue in our discussion of the Han. The confrontation with the Xiongnu can be read as a fundamentally defensive response to a real threat and as an manifestation of a conquest-oriented military-dominated heritage of the Warring States. The march to the south can be more easily read as the latter. All this takes on new focus in our attention to the sequence of changes in the reign of Emperor Wu and the arguments used in debates at that time.

Nicola di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise orf Nomadic Power in East Asian History. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

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.

Michael Loewe and Edward L.Shaughnessy, eds., Cambridge History of Ancient China. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Constance A. Cook and John S. Major, ed., Defining Chu: Image and Reality in Ancient China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999.

K. C. Chang, Archeology in Ancient China

H. G. Creel, The Origins of Statecraft in China, Volume 1

Richard Walker, The Multi-State System in Ancient China

Sima Qian, tr. Burton Watson, accounts of foreign peoples in Records of the Grand Historian

Rafe de Crespigny, Northern Frontier: The Policies and Strategy of the Later Han Empire

Chapter 2. Buddhism and the Tang.

Buddhism is the great pre-modern example of the Chinese culture, people, and state adopting and adapting something of obvious foreign origin. There was resistance to its foreignness. There were "domestic" factors that contributed to the adaptation. But in the long run a set of texts, practices, beliefs, even a lot of language, were developed that were Chinese Buddhist in ways that make nonsense of a Chinese-foreign binary. These themes will recur in our later discussions of Chinese Christianities and of twentieth-century cultural, political, and even economic trends.

Buddhism was immensely important for interaction between north and south between 300 and 600 and for the relations of Tang with all its neighbors, and remained very important for the multi-state relations of the 900's-1100's discussed in the next chapter. The dynamism and institution-building that led to the splendors of Tang came out of a multi-ethnic world in the north China plain and its northern borderlands. This multi-ethnic heritage and Buddhism contributed to the striking cosmopolitanism of the culture of the Tang elite and the great capital at Changan.

Stephen F. Teiser, "Introduction: The Spirits of Chinese Religion", in Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Religions of China in Practice

J. Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, pp. 210-296 [best I've found to summarize the "external", social, political history of Buddhism]

John P. Keenan, How Master Mou Removes Our Doubts: A Reader-Response Study and Translation of the Mou-tzu li-huo lun, pp. 1-11, 30-34, 84-88, 102-109.

Christopher Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia

E. H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand

E.O. Reischauer, Ennin's Travels in T'ang China

Chapter 3. The Song and Tenuous Multiplicities.

The late Tang, Five Dynasties, and Northern Song are seen as a period of great economic growth and of social transformation, with a much more productive and commercialized economy and a much broader elite seeking office through examinations. The consequences for foreign relations were paradoxical. Neighboring peoples, stimulated by trade with China and by the example of Chinese prosperity and stable rule, sought to build similar political orders of their own – Japan, Korea, the Khitan Liao, the Tangut Xi Xia, the Jurchen Jin, Nanzhao in modern Yunnan, Vietnam. In many of these societies Buddhism remained very strong, while the Song elite began to turn away from it.

The complex interstate diplomacy of this period involved the northern and southern states of the "Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms", the Song, the Liao, Jin, Xi Xia, and the Korean kingdoms. A frequent pattern had the more productive areas of central and south China paying "tribute" to the rulers of the north. Perhaps the most stable form of this was the relation between Southern Song and Jin. But it was bitterly resented by Song intellectuals and became a factor in their long struggle to turn away from Buddhism and associated cosmopolitanisms and to found state and culture on revived Confucian principles. Northern Song efforts to break with this pattern and to develop a rich state and a strong military foundered on their own excesses and factional controversy in the era of Wang Anshi. The Southern Song combined military stasis with commercial prosperity, most spectacularly in the emergence of Quanzhou as one of the world’s greatest seaports.

Morris Rossabi, ed., China Among Equals

Paul J. Smith, Taxing Heaven's Storehouse: Horses, Bureaucrats, and the Destruction of the Sichuan Tea Industry, 1074-1224

H. Franke and D. Twitchett, eds., Cambridge History of China, Vol. 6. Hugh R. Clark, Community, Trade, and Networks

Angela Schottenhammer, ed., The Emporium of the World: Maritime Quanzhou, 1000-1400

Billy K. L. So, Prosperity, Region, and Institutions in Maritime China: The South Fukien Pattern, 946-1368

K. A. Wittfogel and Feng Chia-sheng, History of Chinese Society: Liao

Ruth Dunnell, The Great Kingdom of High and White

Keith W. Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1983.

Chinese culture and society were more affected by, and more comfortable with, their place within the cosmopolitan world empire of the Mongols than has generally been understood. In many ways the commercial prosperity and openness to the world of Southern Song continued under the Yuan. But the turmoil of the Yuan-Ming transition produced a decisive break with those trends, and stability was achieved only on much less commercial and much more "Neo-Confucian" foundations. The Ming system of foreign relations, the only real "tribute system" in all of Chinese history, can be read as a Neo-Confucian systematization of the experience of world empire under the Mongols. It also provides the type cases, in the building of the Great Wall and the persistent refusal to deal with the Mongols because of their "insincerity", for concepts of defensiveness and dogmatism in Chinese foreign policy.

Arthur Waldron, The Great Wall of China, Ch. 9, 10.

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

Chapter 5. China and the Maritime World, 1517-1683.

The world of Manila, Macau, Batavia, Hoi An, Ayutthaya, Xiamen, and Taiwan was made by the maritime Chinese. It became the conduit for a long inflow of silver that had profound effects on the Chinese economy and society. Roman Catholicism and Chinese conversion to it were normal features of this milieu. For historically contingent reasons maritime China was deeply estranged from the Qing state and its dominant elites, and this estrangement contributed to the elites' profound ignorance of the maritime world that would batter down China's doors in the Opium War.

D.E. Mungello, ed., The Chinese Rites Controversy.

Wills, Pepper, Guns, and Parleys: The Dutch East India Company and China, 1662-1681. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Wills, Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K'ang-hsi, 1666-1687, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Wills, ed., Eclipsed Entrepots of the Western Pacific: Taiwan and Central Vietnam, 1500-1800. Aldershot and Burliington VT: Ashgate, 2002.

Chapter 6. Great Qing Among the States: North China, Inner Asia, and the Age of the Land Empires.

Between 1600 and 1800 Great Qing and Muscovy transformed the map of Inner Asia and ended the millennial dominance of the mounted archer. Qing statecraft, on this frontier almost entirely Manchu and not Han, was as well-informed, aggressive, and effective in Inner Asia as it was defensive and clueless on the coast. The emergence of a self-conscious society of Hui (Chinese Muslims) and the very important roles of Tibetan Buddhism were other key features of this world.

Pamela Crossley, Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1999.

Mark Elliott, The Manchu Way

Evelyn Rawski,The Last Emperors

James Millward, Beyond the Pass

Mark Mancall, Russia and China

Joseph Fletcher, "Ch'ing Inner Asia c. 1800", Cambridge Hist. of China, Vol. 10.

Eric Widmer, The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission

Dru Gladney, Chinese Muslims

Jonathan Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

The production and export of tea, largely paid for by imports of silver, was a fundamental feature of the prosperity of Great Qing. The management of trade at Canton/Guangzhou was a triumph of defensive statecraft and merchant conscientiousness. The growth of opium addiction in China and importation of the drug from India turned all this around. And new forms of Christianity interacted in new ways with Chinese folk religion in the great Taiping movement.

Paul A. Van Dyke, Port Canton (USC dissertation).

Wakeman, Strangers at the Gate

Polachek, The Inner Opium War

Brook and Wakabayashi, eds., Opium Regimes

Cambridge Hist. of China, Vol. 10.

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

It's important to begin our discussion of the age of foreign intrusion and Chinese resistance by giving it a bit of geographical shape. There now is a whole shelf of good recent books about Shanghai. Our knowledge of other treaty ports and of concessions and zones of various kinds is more patchy. Everywhere we will find foreigners and Chinese engaged in processes of mutual adaptation and co-optation.

Albert Feuerwerker, "The Foreign Presence in China", in Cambridge History of China, Vol. 12

Betty Peh-t'i Wei, Shanghai: Crucible of Modern China Linda Cooke Johnson, Shanghai: From market Town to Treaty Port, 1074-1858. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.

John Schrecker, Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism

Stanley Wright, Hart and the Chinese Customs

S.A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses

and a truly amazing number of good books about 20^th century Shanghai …

Chapter 9. China in the World Economy and the World Power System, 1860-1920.

What did the foreigners want out of China? What did they get? Why were there a "scramble for concessions", 1895-1900, and then changing patterns of foreign rivalry? What did the Chinese learn from all this?

Robert F. Dernberger, "The Role of the Foreigner in China's Economic Development, 1840-1949", in Dwight H. Perkins, ed., China's Modern Economy in Historical Perspective

Michael H. Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914, Ch. 5

Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988, Ch. 7

Ralph Huenemann, China and the Iron Horse

Lillian Li, China's Silk Trade

Chi-ming Hou, Foreign Investment in China

To many Chinese, missionary efforts were at least as offensive as efforts to grab special rights to mines and rail lines. But the missionaries found they had to learn from China, that when they did some Chinese took a great interest in their messages, and that they also were taken to be, and could effectively present themselves as, providers of secular knowledge about the sources of Western strength. Periodical literature and Western-style higher education were two of their more successful and distinctive innovations.

Daniel H. Bays, ed., Christianity in China: Froim the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Paul A. Cohen, "Christian Missions and their Impact to 1900", Cambridge History of China, Vol. 10.

Suzanne Wilson Barnett and John K. Fairbank. eds., Christianity in China: Early Protestant Missionary Writings

Irwin T. Hyatt, Jr., Our Ordered Lives Confess: Three Nineteenth-Century American Missionaries in East Shantung.

Paul A. Cohen, Christianity and China

Susan Chan Egan, A Latter-Day Confucian

Norman J. Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge’s Oriental Pilgrimage. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002.

Ryan Dunch, Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857-1927

Serious efforts to transform the defensive, self-limiting Qing Empire into a modern nation-state that could effectively mobilize its economic and human resources to become a rich state with a strong military and thus survive in the modern world began about 1900, both inside the Qing polity and among its opponents. All participants in this effort recognized that there had to be much basic learning from foreign examples if China was to be able to resist foreign aggression. The example of Meiji Japan was especially important. The Japanese and others were of course ready to provide advisors of all kinds and thus to increase their own influence. The mutual co-optation of May Fourth radicals and Moscow in the 1920's was another phase of this contradictory process.

Douglas R. Reynolds, China, 1898-1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan.

D. R. Howland, Borders of Chinese Civilization: Geography and History at Empire’s End. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996.

Michael H. Hunt, "The May Fourth Era and China's Place in the World," in K. Lieberthal et al., eds., Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries

William C. Kirby, Germany and Republican China

The modern Chinese urban bourgeoisie and the modern intelligentsia (zhishi fenzi) were the products of long and intense Sino-foreign interaction. Modern written Chinese, with its vast amount of new vocabulary and altered styles, was a product of this world of "translingual practice". There surely were alienated individuals and phenomena within it, but it does not make sense to assume a priori that everything about it was alienated, torn between Chinese identity and the attractions of a foreign modernity. Lu Xun will do as an example of a moralistic condemnation of the hypocrisy of traditional society and of a magnificently successful practice of the cosmopolitan creative life.

Leo Ou-fan Lee,"Modernity and its Discontents: The Cultural Agenda of the May Fourth Movement", in K. Lieberthal et al., eds., Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries

Lu Xun, "Revenge", "Hope", "What Happens After Nora Leaves Home?", "The Secret of Being A Joker", in Lu Xun, Silent China [chosen to highlight his cosmopolitan range of allusion and connection]

Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice.

Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power

Jerome Grieder, Hu Shih

Paul Pickowicz, Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai

Xiaobing Tang, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity

The beleaguered Soviet state and its confrontation with Japan were major factors in the great conflict between the Kuomintang and the Communists. Advisors, reporters, images, guns flowed in all directions. Who was a patriot and who a collaborator? The answers were very different indeed in Yan'an, in Chongqing, in Mukden, in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, and in Cold War Taipei and Beijing.

Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby, Thunder Out of China.

Barbara J. Brooks, Japan’s Imperial Diplomacy: Consuls, Treaty Ports, and War in China, 1895-1938. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000.

Odd Arne Westad, The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Is it "Da Zhonghua" or "Da Zhongguo"? Can Chinese skill in networking of all kinds facilitate the interaction of Chinese people in the PRC, Taiwan, and the diaspora? Can the Chinese get beyond the heritage of the Qin unification and find viable ways of interacting with each other without the constraints and contradictions of a single-centered polity? These are very important problems for all of us, not just for the Chinese, in the world of the next century.

Murray Rubinstein, ed., The Other Taiwan

Tu Wei-ming, ed., The Living Tree

Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor.

Lynn Pan, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Overseas Chinese. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

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