Chapter 1: The Singularity of China
1 “Ssuma Ch’ien’s Historical Records—Introductory
Chapter,” trans. Herbert J. Allen, The Journal
of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland
(London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1894), 278–80 (“Chapter I: Original
Records of the Five Gods”).
2 Abbé Régis-Evariste Huc, The
Chinese Empire (London: Longman, Brown, Green &
Longmans, 1855), as excerpted in Franz Schurmann and Orville
Schell, eds., Imperial China: The Decline of
the Last Dynasty and the Origins of Modern China—The 18th and 19th
Centuries (New York: Vintage, 1967), 31.
3 Luo Guanzhong, The Romance
of the Three Kingdoms, trans. Moss Roberts (Beijing: Foreign
Languages Press, 1995), 1.
4 Mao used this example to demonstrate why China
would survive even a nuclear war. Ross Terrill, Mao: A Biography (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000), 268.
5 John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman,
China: A New History, 2nd enlarged ed.
(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006), 93.
6 F. W. Mote, Imperial China:
900–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999),
614–15.
7 Ibid., 615.
8 Thomas Meadows, Desultory
Notes on the Government and People of China (London: W. H.
Allen & Co., 1847), as excerpted in Schurmann and Schell, eds.,
Imperial China, 150.
9 Lucian Pye, “Social Science Theories in Search of
Chinese Realities,” China Quarterly 132
(1992): 1162.
10 Anticipating that his colleagues in Washington
would object to this proclamation of Chinese universal
jurisdiction, the American envoy in Beijing obtained an alternate
translation and textual exegesis from a local British expert. The
latter explained that the offending expression—literally “to soothe
and bridle the world”—was a standard formulation, and that the
letter to Lincoln was in fact a (by the Chinese court’s standards)
particularly modest document whose phrasing indicated genuine
goodwill. Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs
Accompanying the Annual Message of the President to the First
Session of the Thirty-eighth Congress, vol. 2 (Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1864), Document No. 33 (“Mr.
Burlingame to Mr. Seward, Peking, January 29, 1863”),
846–48.
11 For a brilliant account of these achievements by
a Western scholar deeply (and perhaps excessively) enchanted by
China, see Joseph Needham’s encyclopedic multivolume Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1954).
12 Fairbank and Goldman, China, 89.
13 Angus Maddison, The World
Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development, 2006), Appendix B, 261–63.
It must be allowed that until the Industrial Revolution, total GDP
was tied more closely to population size; thus China and India
outstripped the West in part by virtue of their larger populations.
I would like to thank Michael Cembalest for bringing these figures
to my attention.
14 Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, Description géographique, historique, chronologique,
politique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie
chinoise (La Haye: H. Scheurleer, 1736), as translated and
excerpted in Schurmann and Schell, eds., Imperial China, 71.
15 François Quesnay, Le
despotisme de la Chine, as translated and excerpted in
Schurmann and Schell, eds., Imperial
China, 115.
16 For an exploration of Confucius’s political
career synthesizing classical Chinese accounts, see Annping Chin,
The Authentic Confucius: A Life of Thought and
Politics (New York: Scribner, 2007).
17 See Benjamin I. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge:
Belknap Press, 1985), 63–66.
18 Confucius, The
Analects, trans. William Edward Soothill (New York: Dover,
1995), 107.
19 See Mark Mancall, “The Ch’ing Tribute System: An
Interpretive Essay,” in John King Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1968), 63–65; Mark Mancall, China at the Center: 300 Years of Foreign Policy
(New York: Free Press, 1984), 22.
20 Ross Terrill, The New
Chinese Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2003),
46.
21 Fairbank and Goldman, China, 28, 68–69.
22 Masataka Banno, China and
the West, 1858–1861: The Origins of the Tsungli Yamen
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 224–25; Mancall,
China at the Center,
16–17.
23 Banno, China and the
West, 224–28; Jonathan Spence, The
Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999),
197.
24 Owen Lattimore, “China and the Barbarians,” in
Joseph Barnes, ed., Empire in the East
(New York: Doubleday, 1934), 22.
25 Lien-sheng Yang, “Historical Notes on the
Chinese World Order,” in Fairbank, ed., The
Chinese World Order, 33.
26 As excerpted in G. V. Melikhov, “Ming Policy
Toward the Nüzhen (1402–1413),” in S. L. Tikhvinsky, ed.,
China and Her Neighbors: From Ancient Times to
the Middle Ages (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981),
209.
27 Ying-shih Yü, Trade and
Expansion in Han China: A Study in the Structure of Sino-Barbarian
Economic Relations (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967), 37.
28 Immanuel C. Y. Hsü, China’s
Entrance into the Family of Nations: The Diplomatic Phase,
1858–1880 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960),
9.
29 Thus the extension of Chinese sovereignty over
Mongolia (both “Inner” and, at various points of Chinese history,
“Outer”) and Manchuria, the respective founts of the foreign
conquerors that founded the Yuan and Qing Dynasties.
30 For enlightening discussions of these themes,
and a fuller explanation of the rules of wei
qi, see David Lai, “Learning from the Stones: A Go Approach to Mastering China’s Strategic Concept,
Shi” (Carlisle, Pa.: United States Army
War College Strategic Studies Institute, 2004); and David Lai and
Gary W. Hamby, “East Meets West: An Ancient Game Sheds New Light on
U.S.-Asian Strategic Relations,” Korean
Journal of Defense Analysis 14, no. 1 (Spring
2002).
31 A convincing case has been made that
The Art of War is the work of a later
(though still ancient) author during the Warring States period, and
that he sought to imbue his ideas with greater legitimacy by
backdating them to the era of Confucius. These arguments are
summarized in Sun Tzu, The Art of War,
trans. Samuel B. Griffith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971),
Introduction, 1–12; and Andrew Meyer and Andrew Wilson,
“Sunzi Bingfa as History and Theory,”
in Bradford A. Lee and Karl F. Walling, eds., Strategic Logic and Political Rationality: Essays in Honor
of Michael Handel (London: Frank Cass, 2003).
32 Sun Tzu, The Art of
War, trans. John Minford (New York: Viking, 2002),
3.
33 Ibid., 87–88.
34 Ibid., 14–16.
35 Ibid., 23.
36 Ibid., 6.
37 In Mandarin Chinese, “shi” is pronounced roughly the same as “sir” with a
“sh.” The Chinese character combines the elements of “cultivate”
and “strength.”
38 Kidder Smith, “The Military Texts: The
Sunzi,” in Wm. Theodore de Bary and
Irene Bloom, eds., Sources of Chinese
Tradition, vol. 1, From Earliest Times
to 1600, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press,
1999), 215. The Chinese author Lin Yutang explained shi as an aesthetic and philosophic notion of what
a situation “is going to become . . . the way the wind, rain, flood
or battle looks for the future, whether increasing or decreasing in
force, stopping soon or continuing indefinitely, gaining or losing,
in what direction [and] with what force.” Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (New York: Harper, 1937),
442.
39 See Joseph Needham and Robin D. S. Yates,
Science and Civilisation in China, vol.
5, part 6: “Military Technology Missiles and Sieges” (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 33–35, 67–79.
40 See Lai and Hamby, “East Meets West,”
275.
41 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. E. S. Haldane and
Frances Simon, as quoted in Spence, The Search
for Modern China, 135–36.