Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power

by Howard W. French

Hardcover, 2017

Status

Available

Genres

Politics, Government, Law and Public Policy

Publication

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2017]

Description

For many years after its reform and opening in 1978, China maintained an attitude of false modesty about its ambitions. That role, reports Howard French, has been set aside. China has asserted its place among the global heavyweights, revealing its plans for pan-Asian dominance by building its navy, increasing territorial claims to areas like the South China Sea, and diplomatically bullying smaller players. Underlying this attitude is a strain of thinking that casts China's present-day actions in decidedly historical terms, as the path to restoring the dynastic glory of the past. If we understand how that historical identity relates to current actions, in ways ideological, philosophical, and even legal, we can learn to forecast just what kind of global power China stands to become--and to interact wisely with a future peer.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member MaryKohli

Large collections of facts and possibly some non-factual chapters. There is a density to this book. There are chapters I did not get to read. I need to go back, on a leisurely day and take more notes, and plan on doing some fact checking. Several comments in the letters page in the Book Review of

the New York Times, 13 Aug 2017, reflect a different opinion from the author's, from 2 readers.

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LibraryThing member HerbThomas

Addresses an important theme that American policymakers should understand better than they do. Tends to repetitiveness. Excellent prose for the most part, but with occasional muddiness. Excellent on Japan as Well as China. Good on Vietnam. The conclusion is the best part of the book. Final

paragraph: "A China that is treated as an equal with much to contribute to human betterment, but met with understated but resolute firmness when need be, is a China that will mellow as it advances in the decades ahead, and then most likely plateau. That is a China that will grow more secure in its greatness, a China we can live with."

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LibraryThing member dcunning11235

For someone like me (American, generally aware of current events but not particularly aware of e.g Vietnamese-Chinese conflict beyond there being a history of wars and imperialism "a long time ago", etc.) this book was both incredibly eye-opening and a series of, "Oh, right, duh!" moments. I've

read enough to know about Chinese expansion southward over the last couple of mellenia, to know about "Chinese exceptionalism," to know about Chinese imperialism, indigenous racism, etc. I have had a couple of people (as I now think about it, all Vietnamese) express shockingly, ahh, strong distaste for the Chinese, in one case something approaching apoplectic rage.

Ahh, now I see.

Highly readable and timely, and putting forward a cultural and geopolitical explanation (though at one point Mr. French curiously somewhat disavows that he is doing the latter, per se) that makes sense of China's actions, some of the online vitriol I have run into in English (mainly, in my slight experience, from Chinese students in the US, Canada, and Australia), and positions all that to make some weak(-ish) predictions and recommendations.

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