A Stimulating Analysis of China Present—and Past

[ 210 ] asia policy A Stimulating Analysis of China Present—and Past Jonathan Fenby A review of Charles Horner Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate: Memories of Empire in a New Global Context Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009 u 232 pp. Charles Horner has written an important and carefully argued book that suggests new ways of looking at China’s modern history and ends with a stimulating conclusion that “China” and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are not the same thing. “The two never got along very well with each other,” he adds, stating that Mao Zedong waged “a brutal campaign” seeking the destruction of China, but that China “fought the PRC to a standstill and then went on to defeat it outright” (p. 198). I would argue for a rather more nuanced verdict. The PRC still seems to me quite powerful internally, and the Communist Party, if it has atrophied in some respects, has adapted in others, to quote the title of David Shambaugh’s excellent recent study on the subject.1 But Horner’s conclusion is the logical conclusion to a story that he starts with the Yuan Dynasty and that traces fascinating links between past and present. His parallel conclusion is that “rising China is not now, and will not be, the creation of only a handful of isolated politburo members in Beijing, but the result instead of the now always-changing give and take of life throughout the Chinese world” (p. 197). Again, I would offer a modification—the major economic decisions made at the central governmental level in the later part of 2008 show that the leadership remains important to shaping China, and the internal security straitjacket that envelops China and so provides an essential element in the character of today’s country is maintained from the top. Those points aside, the essential value of this book is that it makes one think again and again about what has constituted China over the centuries since the Yuan Dynasty and the implications for the 21st century. The overview of how the telling of that history has evolved, both in the West and in China, 1 David Shambaugh, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). jonathan fenbyis author of The Penguin History of Modern China. He can be reached at . [ 211 ] book reviews is worth the price of the book alone, particularly when Horner draws a line linking the different views of the Ming naval expansion, for example, or explores the Taiping, or highlights the role of violence in history after 1800. His treatment of the multicultural, multiethnic nature of Qing rule—from its heights under the Qianlong emperor to its “negotiated fall”—expertly compresses recent historical re-evaluation. He brings out the complexity of that dynasty’s approach to ruling China as part of its much broader empire, and has telling passages on the way that the need for change was enunciated a couple of decades before the launch of the May Fourth Movement. The “conceptual legerdemain,” to use Horner’s phrase, of the Communist regime in transforming capitalism from a creed imposed by greedy foreigners into a system said to be rooted in Chinese history has been a considerable post1978 achievement. The role of capital has, indeed, been extremely important, due to the availability of a lake of Chinese savings (and, more recently, a flood of cheap loans from state banks). In that sense, China is more capitalist than the West, with wages playing a smaller role in the overall composition of GDP. But one must not forget that major factor inputs, such as land, labor, and capital markets, remain regulated by politically driven controls, as do the prices of such key inputs as electricity and water. Given imperial efforts at similar controls, it may be that today “China is China” once more, free from the imported constraints of Maoism-Marxism imposed from above after 1949. But there is no shortage of awkward questions that this book brings out, even if it cannot provide a complete answer to all of them; “Chineseness,” as the author notes, is an elusive concept. There is, to start with, the...