In 2020, the world faces a new and assertive China, one eager to play a central role on the world stage. But is this China really so new? Respected sinologist Timothy Brook believes it is not. In Great State: China and the World, Brook tells 13 stories from the last 700 years of China’s past, each of them peeking into the Chinese people’s relations with the outside world. As a convincing argument that China’s diplomacy has been guided by a consistent framework over the centuries, Great State leaves much wanting. But as a narrative introduction to key episodes in China’s foreign relations that is accessible and even riveting, this book is a smashing success.
Each chapter of Great State follows a similar framing. Placed at the front of each is a plate image (a reproduction of a painting, a map, or a photograph) that is connected in some way to an episode in the history of China’s relations with the outer world. Brook proceeds to describe the intricacies of these images in lavish detail, showing what they reveal about the minds and perceptions of their creators. Having set the scene and transported his readers to the past, he then shifts his focus from images to individuals. Most chapters of Great State focus on two people, one Chinese and one a foreigner, connected to one another by a strange flow of historical events. Sometimes, these will be high-born individuals at the center of great affairs of state (e.g., a dalai lama and the Qing prince sent to negotiate with him); other times, the relationship Brook describes will be more mundane and private (e.g., a Catholic missionary in Nanjing and his convert).
Unlike many academic historians, Brook is a terrific storyteller. But he does more than just stitch his sources together into a compelling story — he also uses his narrative skills to show how historians sift through conflicting and confusing sources to craft a coherent understanding of the past. Many of Brook’s chapters are presented as mystery tales whose full details must be uncovered and pieced together by the historian and his readers. Some of them, such as Brook’s investigation into whether the 13th-century Black Death ever came to China, are compulsively readable. Great State is one of those rare books that will both resonate with a general readership and whose chapters may be usefully assigned to undergraduates to teach them the “historian’s craft.”
If there is a weakness to Brook’s approach, it is that many of his narratives have a questionable relationship with his book’s central argument, which is that the same eternal questions — Do outsiders threaten China’s social order or strengthen it? How should an empire with claims to universal authority deal with the people who dwell outside its borders? — have dominated China’s thinking about the outside world for eight centuries. Many chapters deal directly with these questions, but many others, including an absorbing account of European merchants’ difficulties with Chinese thieves and the aforementioned chapter on the plague, do not. It is not clear why Brook chose to focus on those episodes instead of others that are more directly relevant to his main themes. He could have discussed, for example, Beijing mandarins’ six-century-long struggle to develop stable relations with the Mongol confederacies to their north or the seesaw politics of China’s western frontier in the early 1900s, when Soviet commissars and Chinese warlords struggled for control of the region now known as Xinjiang. Without chapters focusing on key events like these, elements of Brook’s thesis seem oddly underargued.
Central to Brook’s conception of China’s foreign relations is the idea of the “Great State.” As Brook tells it, this idea originated with the Mongols, who believed that their political mandate “entailed the right to extend the authority of [their empire] out across the world, incorporating all existing polities and rulers into a system in which military power was paramount.” This conception of statehood was inherited by the Chinese dynasties that ruled after the collapse of the Mongol Yuan dynasty in 1368. Brook describes it as so important to these Chinese that “part of knowing you were Chinese was knowing you stood under the canopy of the Great State.”
This may be true, but the stories that anchor Great State do not prove it so. Nor is the continuity of “Great State” thinking clear in the episodes he does cover. Among historians of China, it is somewhat of a trope that the Chinese of the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Ming Dynasty reached its apogee and fell into decline, turned inward and abandoned their commitment to the universalistic ethos of the early Ming. It was in those early years the Ming sent giant treasure fleets to the coast of Africa and India demanding recognition and tribute. Brook tells that story and tells it well. But the episodes Brook chooses for the latter years of the dynasty, stories of Chinese merchantmen and thieves living thousands of miles away from the “Great State,” which will not protect them, or of the Korean castaways who wash up on Chinese shores only to be barred by suspicious mandarins from speaking with ordinary people, strengthen the impression that China spent these centuries turned inward.
One doubts that these incongruities in Brook’s broader argument will bother most readers. Even the chapters that seem to disprove the book’s ostensible thesis are a delight to read. Each of the chapters stands by itself, and any reader with a smidgen of interest in world history will be absorbed by Brook’s carefully constructed set pieces. Great State may not provide a full framework for understanding China’s relations with the outside world, but it does provide a fascinating peek into the lost worlds of China’s past.
Tanner Greer is a journalist and researcher focused on contemporary security issues in the Asia-Pacific and the military history of East and Southeast Asia.
