Response to Franklin Woo's Review of The New Chinese Empire and What It Means for the United States

The review of The New Chinese Empire by the Rev. Franklin Woo (China Review International 11, no. 1 [Spring 2004]) is more an objection to President Bush, the Iraq War, and American empire than an appraisal of my arguments about the nature of the Chinese state and its effects on Chinese domestic and foreign policy. Perhaps the former chaplain, no doubt brilliant at theology, is out of his depth writing about history, political theory, and empire. Yet in China Review International one expects a reviewer to tell readers what the book is about.

A reader of Woo's review (essentially the same review that he also published elsewhere) would be mystified even by the title of my book. I called the PRC an empire for several reasons. Its three largest provinces—Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet—were all historically non-Chinese areas. One third of the PRC exudes a semicolonial atmosphere, as many Mongols, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other "minorities" dislike Han autocratic rule. China is also the only country in the world that claims and expects to acquire substantial extra territories, including Taiwan, dozens of strategically placed and resource-rich islands east and south of China, and probably slabs of Siberia and Kazakstan. In addition, Beijing, like the Chinese dynastic empire, sees itself as the guardian of a doctrine, is paternalistic toward its own people and peripheral folk alike, and rewrites the past for imperial purposes.

Woo prefers to rail about American empire. Quite legitimate, but not the topic at hand. He is not pleased at my reference to the United States as a beacon of democracy and individual freedom, but fails to note that I am pointing to the empirical fact of how tens of millions of Chinese view the United States. My next sentence says "This light on the hill influences the Chinese mind and pressures the Chinese Communist Party." Can Woo deny that? Blinded by his distaste for "the global capitalist jungle," he doesn't seem to see, for example, that hundreds of thousands of Chinese seeking to come to the United States each year are evidence of the appeal of American values and opportunities.

Woo's distinguished career directing a China program at a church council hardly prepares one for his sloganeering. He says that in writing the book I was in the service of the "U.S. military-industrial-academic complex." What does Woo mean by this phrase? What is the evidence that I am in this entity's service?

I will leave it to readers to weigh Woo's climactic sally against my view of the Chinese state. "Nowhere in our more than three weeks there," he says of a trip he and his wife took to China in 2003, "did we experience directly the power of the Chinese state." I am sure the folk in Chinese labor camps, the Christians in jail for being "non-approved" believers, the youth convicted for unacceptable words written on the Internet, and Uyghurs and Tibetans punished for religious activities, among others, would be impressed by the penetration of this testimony.