The Era of Chinese Preeminence
Through many
millennia of Chinese civilization, China was never obliged to deal
with other countries or civilizations that were comparable to it in
scale and sophistication. India was known to the Chinese, as Mao
later noted, but for much of history it was divided into separate
kingdoms. The two civilizations exchanged goods and Buddhist
influences along the Silk Road but were elsewhere walled off from
casual contact by the almost impenetrable Himalayas and the Tibetan
Plateau. The massive and forbidding deserts of Central Asia
separated China from the Near Eastern cultures of Persia and
Babylonia and even more from the Roman Empire. Trade caravans
undertook intermittent journeys, but China as a society did not
engage societies of comparable scale and achievement. Though China
and Japan shared a number of core cultural and political
institutions, neither was prepared to recognize the other’s
superiority; their solution was to curtail contact for centuries at
a time. Europe was even further away in what the Chinese considered
the Western Oceans, by definition inaccessible to Chinese culture
and pitiably incapable of acquiring it—as the Emperor told a
British envoy in 1793.
The territorial
claims of the Chinese Empire stopped at the water’s edge. As early
as the Song Dynasty (960–1279), China led the world in nautical
technology; its fleets could have carried the empire into an era of
conquest and exploration.5 Yet China acquired no overseas colonies and
showed relatively little interest in the countries beyond its
coast. It developed no rationale for venturing abroad to convert
the barbarians to Confucian principles or Buddhist virtues. When
the conquering Mongols commandeered the Song fleet and its
experienced captains, they mounted two attempted invasions of
Japan. Both were turned back by inclement weather—the kamikaze (or “Divine Wind”) of Japanese lore.6 Yet when the Mongol
Dynasty collapsed, the expeditions, though technically feasible,
were never again attempted. No Chinese leader ever articulated a
rationale for why China would want to control the Japanese
archipelago.
But in the early
years of the Ming Dynasty, between 1405 and 1433, China launched
one of history’s most remarkable and mysterious naval enterprises:
Admiral Zheng He set out in fleets of technologically unparalleled
“treasure ships” to destinations as far as Java, India, the Horn of
Africa, and the Strait of Hormuz. At the time of Zheng’s voyages,
the European age of exploration had not yet begun. China’s fleet
possessed what would have seemed an unbridgeable technological
advantage: in the size, sophistication, and number of its vessels,
it dwarfed the Spanish Armada (which was still 150 years
away).
Historians still
debate the actual purpose of these missions. Zheng He was a
singular figure in the age of exploration: a Chinese Muslim eunuch
conscripted into imperial service as a child, he fits no obvious
historical precedent. At each stop on his journeys, he formally
proclaimed the magnificence of China’s new Emperor, bestowed lavish
gifts on the rulers he encountered, and invited them to travel in
person or send envoys to China. There, they were to acknowledge
their place in the Sinocentric world order by performing the ritual
“kowtow” to acknowledge the Emperor’s superiority. Yet beyond
declaring China’s greatness and issuing invitations to portentous
ritual, Zheng He displayed no territorial ambition. He brought back
only gifts, or “tribute”; he claimed no colonies or resources for
China beyond the metaphysical bounty of extending the limits of All
Under Heaven. At most he can be said to have created favorable
conditions for Chinese merchants, through a kind of early exercise
of Chinese “soft power.”7
Zheng He’s
expeditions stopped abruptly in 1433, coincident with the
recurrence of threats along China’s northern land frontier. The
next Emperor ordered the fleet dismantled and the records of Zheng
He’s voyages destroyed. The expeditions were never repeated. Though
Chinese traders continued to ply the routes Zheng He sailed,
China’s naval abilities faded—so much so that the Ming rulers’
response to the subsequent menace of piracy off China’s southeast
coast was to attempt a forced migration of the coastal population
ten miles inland. China’s naval history was thus a hinge that
failed to swing: technically capable of dominance, China retired
voluntarily from the field of naval exploration just as Western
interest was beginning to take hold.
China’s splendid
isolation nurtured a particular Chinese self-perception. Chinese
elites grew accustomed to the notion that China was unique—not just
“a great civilization” among others, but civilization itself. A
British translator wrote in 1850:
An intelligent European, accustomed to reflect on the state of a number of countries enjoying a variety of different advantages, and laboring each under peculiar disadvantages, could, by a few well directed questions, and from very little data, form a tolerably correct notion of the state of a people hitherto unknown to him; but it would be a great error to suppose that this is the case with the Chinese. Their exclusion of foreigners and confinement to their own country has, by depriving them of all opportunities of making comparisons, sadly circumscribed their ideas; they are thus totally unable to free themselves from the dominion of association, and judge everything by rules of purely Chinese convention.8
China knew, of
course, of different societies around its periphery in Korea,
Vietnam, Thailand, Burma; but in the Chinese perception, China was
considered the center of the world, the “Middle Kingdom,” and other
societies were assessed as gradations from it. As the Chinese saw
it, a host of lesser states that imbibed Chinese culture and paid
tribute to China’s greatness constituted the natural order of the
universe. The borders between China and the surrounding peoples
were not so much political and territorial demarcations as cultural
differentiations. The outward radiance of Chinese culture
throughout East Asia led the American political scientist Lucian
Pye to comment famously that, in the modern age, China remains a
“civilization pretending to be a nation-state.”9
The pretensions
underlying this traditional Chinese world order endured well into
the modern era. As late as 1863, China’s Emperor (himself a member
of a “foreign” Manchu Dynasty that had conquered China two
centuries earlier) dispatched a letter informing Abraham Lincoln of
China’s commitment to good relations with the United States. The
Emperor based his communication on the grandiloquent assurance
that, “[h]aving, with reverence, received the commission from
Heaven to rule the universe, we regard both the middle empire
[China] and the outside countries as constituting one family,
without any distinction.”10 When the letter was dispatched, China had
already lost two wars with the Western powers, which were busy
staking out spheres of interest in Chinese territory. The Emperor
seems to have treated these catastrophes as similar to other
barbarian invasions that were overcome, in the end, by China’s
endurance and superior culture.
For most of history,
there was, in fact, nothing particularly fanciful about Chinese
claims. With each generation, the Han Chinese had expanded from
their original base in the Yellow River valley, gradually drawing
neighboring societies into various stages of approximation of
Chinese patterns. Chinese scientific and technological achievements
equaled, and frequently outstripped, those of their Western
European, Indian, and Arab counterparts.11
Not only was the
scale of China traditionally far beyond that of the European states
in population and in territory; until the Industrial Revolution,
China was far richer. United by a vast system of canals connecting
the great rivers and population centers, China was for centuries
the world’s most productive economy and most populous trading
area.12 But since it was largely self-sufficient,
other regions had only peripheral comprehension of its vastness and
its wealth. In fact, China produced a greater share of total world
GDP than any Western society in eighteen of the last twenty
centuries. As late as 1820, it produced over 30 percent of world
GDP—an amount exceeding the GDP of Western
Europe, Eastern
Europe, and the United States combined.13
Western observers
encountering China in the early modern era were stunned by its
vitality and material prosperity. Writing in 1736, the French
Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Du Halde summed up the awestruck reactions of
Western visitors to China:
The riches peculiar to each province, and the facility of conveying merchandise, by means of rivers and canals, have rendered the domestic trade of the empire always very flourishing. . . . The inland trade of China is so great that the commerce of all Europe is not to be compared therewith; the provinces being like so many kingdoms, which communicate to each other their respective productions.14
Thirty years later,
the French political economist François Quesnay went even
further:
[N]o one can deny that this state is the most beautiful in the world, the most densely populated, and the most flourishing kingdom known. Such an empire as that of China is equal to what all Europe would be if the latter were united under a single sovereign.15
China traded with
foreigners and occasionally adopted ideas and inventions from
abroad. But more often the Chinese believed that the most valuable
possessions and intellectual achievements were to be found within
China. Trade with China was so prized that it was with only partial
exaggeration that Chinese elites described it not as ordinary
economic exchange but as “tribute” to China’s
superiority.