Timothy Brook - Great State: China in the World

Not being a writer of big books, I found the proposal of my British publisher Andrew Franklin that I write this book daunting. I prefer small craft to cruise ships. On the other hand, publishers sometimes see what authors cant, so I thank him for launching this project and hope for his sake that the boat floats.

What I have written is not a ponderous tome that slogs through eight centuries of Chinese history dynasty by dynastyor, at least, I hope thats not what is on offer. Rather, I have tried to craft an account for general readers of how China has been in the world since the thirteenth century and what that has meant for the world and for China. I have organized the book not as an elucidation of grand themes but as a series of thirteen moments across seven centuries that reflect significant facets, to me at least, of the historical relationships between China and the world. I want to give readers a chance to see what has happened in particular, concrete situations, before asking you to think about Chinas relationships with the world today.

Two basic ideas drive this book. One is the recognition that China has never not been part of the world, either in the past or in our own day. We have no way to understand China if we separate it from the world. The other is that the fundamental principles guiding the Chinese state today were established not in the late third century BCE, which is where Chinese history usually goes to discover its emergence as a unified state in a long string of dynasties, but in the thirteenth century CE, when China was absorbed into the Mongol world. The Mongol occupation had a profound impact, shifting China from the older dynastic model to a form that, following Mongol usage, I call the Great State. Without this concept we are without a key tool that is needed to understand China from the perspective of history.

The idea that China has always been entangled in the world is one that historians of China now generally recognize. In taking this approach, I write simply as part of my generation. The idea of China as a Great State, by contrast, is new and largely my own. The inspiration for this idea goes back to my mentor Joseph Fletcher, though the credit for bringing me across the threshold of this idea must go to my colleague Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene. Perhaps the strongest prod, though, has been the burden of my own experience. In my twenties, for reasons I have never fully fathomed, I decided to study China. I thought that if I examined the far side of the world, I might make better sense of my own; but then China asserted its own questions, and I wanted to answer those. In those days, most of the frail bridges between China and the world had been swept away. I thought they needed to be rebuilt. Here in the twenty-first century, two remain still to be built. One is the bridge between the China of history and the China of now. The other is between China today and a world that has become increasingly troubled by its expansive presence. This book is dedicated to working on that first bridge in the hope that, by encountering China as it was, we might be in a better position to see China as it is.