The Manchu Strikes Back
Horner, Charles
The Manchu Strikes Back by Charles Horner As a Century Unkind to Imperialism draws to a close, it is interesting that in at least one country the imperial spirit may be stirring once again. Of...
...Thus, they came to believe in what we would call cultural imperialism...
...It is a novel development in international politics, and the heirs to the world's oldest empire will not fail to do their imperial best in making the most of it...
...and a spectacular near miss at a pro-Chinese coup in Indonesia in 1965...
...This may take a long while, but then Chinese expansionism has always preferred irreversible results to merely conspicuous ones...
...The 1950s and 1960s, for example, were a time of energetic Chinese involvement in the affairs of the region-intervention in the Korean war...
...the empire's power flowed as far as it could, like a river that eventually disappears into the desert...
...only the Mongols surpassed them in the assemblage of contiguous territories...
...For what we think of as "China" is really the Manchu empire, a creation of the 17th and 18th centuries, so solidly constructed that its achievements and pretensions are still powerful...
...Among the Chinese themselves, the expansion of their influence has become increasingly associated with notions of Chinese solidarity...
...The Manchus also incorporated Taiwan in the late 17th century, a base for expanding maritime power...
...The greatest of the Manchu emperors, Ch'ien-lung (1711-1799, reigned 1736-1796) built on previous conquests and his own so that the Manchus were held in awe throughout Southeast Asia, Korea, and sometimes beyond...
...as the Chinese and their commerce seep into the region, it is only a matter of time before it is reabsorbed into its empire of origin...
...In another 30 years or so, the surviving British and French empires would also expire...
...Given these dour precedents and all they imply for how things tend to come out in the end, should we be surprised that China, right now, uniquely among the great nations, is trying to make itself bigger, not smaller, more consequential, not less...
...No matter: The Republic of China in Taiwan and the People's Republic of China in Beijing for decades have claimed every square inch of the Manchu patrimony, including the territory the Manchus ceded to the Russians when the dynasty was in decline...
...It is ironic, therefore, that Westerners should recall him, if at all, as the emperor who, in 1793, instructed impudent emissaries of the king of England about China's self-sufficiency and uninterest in commerce...
...Long disdained by the emperors, the Chinese overseas turned against the Manchus and became the financial mainstays of Sun Yat-sen's republican revolution...
...By contrast, the commissars in Beijing courted them assiduously, and in recent years overseas Chinese and their billions have made a decisive contribution to China's economic breakthrough...
...Today, the dual success of the Chinese, both at home and abroad, has profound implications for China's power in the world...
...The emperor of Japan may head the oldest imperial household in the world, but his empire, too, is long gone, and there is no prospect that he will get it back...
...Indeed, when the last Manchu child-emperor abdicated in 1912, he handed over to the successor republic a China about twice the size of the one his forebears had initially acquired...
...Charles Horner is senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C...
...So today's China can take up the task where it was left, and it is unsurprising to find an active Chinese presence in the new Central Asian republics, Pakistan, Iran, and the core of the Middle East...
...But we are not used to associating Chinese ideas with Chinese power...
...Of course, we have not been in the habit of thinking of China as an empire, even though the collapse of its last ruling house in 1912 presaged what was about to happen to the Romanovs, Hapsburgs, and Hohenzollerns in Europe...
...All of these had a Communist and not a Confucian gloss, which made them so much a part of the Cold War that it was difficult to see them as a separate Chinese phenomenon...
...China's Manchu rulers also understood that while military prowess could create empire, more was necessary to sustain it...
...Old-fashioned Manchu/Chinese internationalism did not extend to Chinese living abroad, whose communities in those days were neither so rich nor so successful as they would become...
...support of "wars of national liberation" in Malaya, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and the Philippines...
...We may be in the habit of regarding the Chinese as aloof and ethnocentric, but today's China is the product of imperialism and cosmopolitanism on a grand scale...
...In Inner Asia, where nearer regions merge into farther ones, the outer boundary of Chinese power was always imprecise...
...The Manchus are the least heralded and most underappreciated of the world's great empire builders...
...And what good is the title without the territory...
...Ch'ien-lung was, to be sure, the emperor of China, but, great as China was, he thought of himself as a kind of transnational, ''multiethnic'' figure...
...Even the most fearsome empire of all-the Evil Empire itself-now dwells in the dustbin of history...
...that it is more inclined to take on the world than to withdraw from it...
...They promoted Chinese thought about art, philosophy, and governance in the belief that the acceptance of these ideas in East and Southeast Asia would produce natural acquiescence in China's hegemony and, therefore, in their own...
...Vladivostok is just one example of the latter...
...To China proper they had added Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Chinese Turkestan...
Vol. 1 • April 1996 • No. 30
