China's sense of today and its view of tomorrow are both rooted in the past—and we need to understand that connection, says China scholar Charles Horner. In Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate, Horner offers a new interpretation of how China's changed view of its modern historical experience has also changed China's understanding of its long intellectual and cultural tradition. Spirited reevaluations of history, strategy, commerce, and literature are cooperating—and competing—to define the future.
The capstone of modern China was the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 and its rejection of Confucianism, capitalism, and modernity. Yet today's rising China retains few vestiges of what Mao wrought. What then, Horner asks, is post-Mao, postmodern China? Where did it come from? How did it get here? Where is it going?
Contemporary views of the great periods in Chinese history are having a significant influence on the development of rising China's national strategy, says Horner. He looks at the revival of interest in, and changing interpretations of, three dynasties—the Yuan (1272-1368), the Ming (1368-1644), and the Qing (1644-1912)—that, together with the People's Republic of China, provide examples of great power success.
The future of every major country is now connected to China's, and this book explains how China, now seeing itself as the complex and thriving result of the old and the new, is poised to change the world.
CHARLES HORNER, a student of China for four decades, is Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. He has served in the Department of State, taught at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, and been a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and of the Board of Directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the National Interest.
CHARLES HORNER, a student of China for four decades, is Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. He has served in the Department of State, taught at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, and been a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and of the Board of Directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the National Interest.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
A Note on Romanization and the Pronunciation of Chinese xiii
Prologue 1
Chapter 1 A Memory of Empire: The New Past of Old China 15
Chapter 2 The Yuan Dynasty and the Pax Mongolica 22
Chapter 3 The Ming Dynasty and the Pax Sinica 34
Chapter 4 The Qing Dynasty and the Pax Manjurica 54
Chapter 5 The Proletarian Dynasty of Chairman Mao 85
Chapter 6 The History of the World as China's Own 99
Chapter 7 China's Continent and the World City 109
Chapter 8 A Peaceful Rise and Memories of Violence 145
Chapter 9 The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire 157
Chapter 10 "The Chinese People Are a Heap of Loose Sand" 166
