It is not convincing to let several dynasties to speak for a completely different type of government, or to let an admiral to speak for the nation. The cases and historical figures are biased, at least not sufficient to make a compelling conclusion in the traditional sense of social sciences. The author may be right that China is no exception, but that is because nobody is an exception in the international system. If the Chinese history tells us something, that is to make us double doubt the possibility of a benevolent hegemon.

the myth of walt as an academic is truly worthy of his followers conspiracy theories...

hey steve, when's that hatefest conference at harvard?

As it should, realist IR theory—just like any IR theory—is based on an examination of a long historical record. Certainly and especially encompassing the whole of the last century or two.

But it seems to me that this can miss big changes: It's one thing, for example, to look at the history of the last couple of centuries and conclude that nasty competition is always going to exist and push is very often going to come to shove between great powers over "competing interests."

But what happens when those "competing interests" don't arise due to territorial disputes/aggressions/aggrandizements?

Those, after all, were what were seen as the great evil before and leading to WWII, and what the int'l community then particularly condemned. And that lesson was so deeply imbibed that it was this that George H.W. Bush said particularly impelled him to kick Iraq out of Kuwait.

So aside from Taiwan, which itself is an unusual situation in many respects, do we really expect China to become territorially aggressive?

If not, and it is not, then I wonder just how much and how serious the friction is going to be between China and her neighbors and the U.S. Especially since we seem to have already swallowed China's absorption of Tibet. (And sit back and somewhat enjoy the troubles Tibet gives to China for doing so, as well as the troubles China has with its Moslem province(s).)

Take territorial disputes out of the realist equation and I suspect you get a very different picture of things. Indeed, do so for example in the Mideast with Israel and the occupied territories dispute and I at least could see all the remaining issues resolving themselves far more readily than they have, with much cooler passions at work.

People tend to argue over principles, but fight over land.

Maybe the writer decided to not mention the Tang as they were Buddhist and the Han as they were so ancient. But the Tang era was very open, ideologically and ethnically, and expansionist. Lots of outside cultural influences at that time, influences that remained even when China went xenophobic later on.

Also the Han was expansionist. The territorial conquests of both dynasties are part of China's claim to ownership of Xinjiang and their conquests and foreign policies underlie the old claim to cultural and political paramountcy in East Asia.

"...and these beliefs usually continue a heavy dose of fiction." ~ Yuan-kang Wang

JOHN MEARSHEIMER:

"....To make the case that they are exceptional, nations invariably have to invent heroic stories about themselves. As Stephen Van Evera notes, “Chauvinist mythmaking is a hallmark of nationalism, practiced by nearly all nationalist movements to some degree.” Those myths, he argues, “come in three principal varieties: self-glorifying, self-whitewashing, and other-maligning.” Of course, those myths are directly linked to the nation’s understanding of its history, which is why Renan said that “historical error is an essential feature in the creation of a nation.”...

SOURCE - "Kissing Cousins: Nationalism and Realism", by John J. Mearsheimer, University of Chicago, May 5, 2011
PDF - http://irworkshop.sites.yale.edu/sites/default/files/Mearsheimer_IRW.PDF

While I usually enjoy Dr. Walt's blog, I do have noticed a change in his inclination. I used to see Steve as a prudent middle-of-the-roader, but now I think I'd have to count him as a right-wing-to-be. Well, indeed, personally I don't know Dr. Walt at all and I might have been wrong at the beginning.

I just don't understand why Steve had invited this Wang to contribute such a piece. The article is fictive in many ways and many argument is just groundless. For example, "...and in general China was expansionist whenever it enjoyed a preponderance of power", could Dr. Wang please explain how he decided that China "in general" was expansionist?

Chinese are just humans beings (forgive my plain English), and just like all the other human beings, we were, and still are and ought to be in the future, entitled to erring. I admitted that what we did to Vietnam was not right, at least not in a way that we are prompting now. However, China has never said that our seeking a peaceful rising was grounded in the truth that we had never did anything bad to our neighbors -- no we never said so. I hope everyone here to just judge using your own mind that, whether you really think it is fair to classify China as a "expansionist". If so, then what you would call Great Britain, Russia, and United States in 1800s? (Just don't want to mention The Third Reich and Imperial Japan). The harm China did to its neighbours is far less than others did to China.

I do not have an IR background, but instead, engineering. I am interested in IR as a hobby. Me mentioning the other countries above DOES NOT mean that I think they are BAD, but to the contrary, I have good feelings to most of them. I have a couple of good friends from United States, South Korea and Europe, thanks to the time when I was doing my graduate study in the US. We are still in touch and I even have the photos of my foreign friends' children they sent to me when they became parents for the first times in their lives -- and I was so happy to see their great achievements and enjoyed the title of "uncle".

All in all, my view is that promoting harmony and seeing/saying good of others are far better than mulling over a disputed issue like a warmonger.

China has had a foreign policy of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other nations for the past half century. This has been a very consistent policy and many nations in the world trust them for this reason.

This essay is funny. It claims the policy is based on a myth because the Song dynasty (in about the year 1000, when Europe was in the depths of the dark ages) and the Ming dynasty (in about 1450 a half century before Europe discovered the Americas) were aggressive expansionist empires. So therefore we should be suspicious of China. Going back 500 to 1000 years back to breed suspicion is totally nuts. That is like saying we should make war on the Canaanites because of their despicable behavior 2500 years back (oops, some nations still do). Nevertheless, those histories are not how modern nations should judge each other.

I lived in China for a year and found it one very fascinating place. Lack of personal privacy made it very oppressive for me but I left with tremendous respect for their history and culture. Based on behavior over the last century, I do believe China is a much more trustworthy nation in its dealings with other nations than are the US, Europe or Russia. I think that is one reason China is gaining so much acceptance in Africa and South America. Interesting, don't you think, that China has gained more oil contracts in Iraq in the last decade than any American based oil company.

I find it amusing in 'myth 2' he cites Chinese... when in fact the voyages he speaks of where instigated by the Yuan dynasty', who were the Mongolian invaders who ruled China during China's most prosperous time in history.

By the time the ships had returned a year or so later the Yuan dynasty had been overthrown, and then China went back to its own 'closed door' mentality, and poverty I might add.

The Chinese are always historical revisionists. This example is no exception. Just because they lived in the mainland, it doesn't automatically make them Chinese (as much as most Chinese would like it to).

China was conquered by the Mongolians, pure and simple. Get over it. And just because inner Mongolia is now part of mainland China, is not equal to 'they' were at that time Chinese.

The worst people in the world to talk about Chinese history are the Chinese themselves due to this obtusification of facts.

I have a few counterpoints for YK Wang. 1. In the past, the tribes around China do not have Confucian culture. They believe in military power and force only in settling any dispute. So in any border dispute, military confrontation is unavoidable. The Chinese excursion into the territory of Mongol and Vietnam to settle the border dispute are the examples when the then China is strong enough and doesn't confirm that China is an expansionist or land grabber. The recent China-India and the Vietnam border wars are another examples that China is not an expansionist like Western powers. China withdrew completely and returned all prisioners of war and offer to negotiate. USA wikk station thousands of troops in Iraq, Afghan even though USA declare withdrawal from those countries. China settled the dispute with Vietnam peacefully while India refused. The present Chinese government entered Tibet peacefully by negotiaitons. China use the period of peace to build up strength and bide its time until it had developed the capabilities to demand the revocation of any unfair treaties and restrictions. Don't forget that China had been invaded and occpied too. 2. Antagonistic confrontatons between strangers are unavoidabble. But Zheng He does demonstrate the peaceful nature of Chinese power compared to that of the West during those eras. 3. The Great Wall is a defensive structure, no matter how you look at it. China use offense for defensive purpose and not for offensive purpose as in the West. In the West peace means invasion and occupation, human rights means torture. "One mountain cannot accommodate two tigers." but humans are not tigers. We have Confucian and Christian beliefs, freedom democracy and human rights!

Myths are the products of rhetorical statements perpetrated on the gullible and uneducated.

Much of today's southern China is the product of Han military expansion, reactive toward aggression from the South or proactive in deliberate conquest.

One could say that Han expansionism was not particularly brutal. Once a subject submitted, it became the charge of the central government against external (third party) aggression.

Acculturation and assimilation within the same race has been a recurring social phenomenon in human history. The world accepts such as a normal and acceptable, objectively or subjectively per member states’ own domestic reality. This is why most Chinese in the South are Hans.

Tibet and Taiwan are already parts of China so the same tested and proven Chinese tradition of assimilation and integration will eventually prevail, and has to be allowed to prevail per international recognition.

China may well have approached diplomacy as a civilization state and other countries may have reciprocated in considering Chinese claims, but such claims have been recognized and are therefore no longer just claims but concrete diplomatic reality.

"The US acknowledges the Chinese claim that Taiwan is a part of China". Acknowledge: to recognize the claim or authority of; Webster def 3.

Tibet has not been a result of deliberate conquest. Tibet willingly accepted Qing China's suzerainty against external aggression and internecine rivals (the latter by Mongolian proxy that was part of China).

After Qing proclaimed sovereignty over Tibet, Tibet still actively sought aid from Qing China against third party aggression. Willing or not, the weak had to accept China’s sovereignty aginst the greater external threat.

Democracy was a moot concept in Tibet as more than 90 percent of the Tibetans were illiterate serfs. The line between active suzerainty and sovereignty has been thin enough and deemed insignificant by the international community. Tibet as a part of China is diplomatic reality.

"Also the Han was expansionist. The territorial conquests of both dynasties are part of China's claim to ownership of Xinjiang and their conquests and foreign policies underlie the old claim to cultural and political paramountcy in East Asia."

Much of Xinjiang was retaken by Qing China.

China does not have just claim on Xinjiang; Xinjiang is a part of China as China's claim on Xinjiang has been recognized.

China has claims on some parts of the SCS. This is not yet the end and the Chinese has indicated that it has claims but also says that it is open to negotiation.

China might has approached diplomacy as a civilisation state, but has gained some fruits by member states accepting this approach in some and not accepting in others. Such is the diplomatic finality.

China really is different from the USA, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia in one very important respect. It is that for the most part China has not expanded into area where the people were racially quite different from the Hans.

I think social progress in these rootless ideal-driven states has the side effect of causing oblivion to history, or denial.

The USA has struggled far longer and more strenuously on racial differences, namely physiognomy, than any ethnicity; even the Slavic whites, Catholics, and Italians eventually became a part of the white melting pot long before any Civil Right movements for blacks and other racial minorities.

Natalie Wood, born Nikolaevna Zakharenko, was Russian. For a long time, many non-Anglo-Saxon whites just changed their name to become Anglo-Saxon. Just as a Wood can be Russian in America, a Chen can be Tibetan in China.

Also, there really is little racism (rigorous put) in China. The Chinese public likes their ethnic minorities, who perform with conviction and talent. The theme generally is “diverse but united”, with a lot of ethnic superficialities. I think one is wrong to scoff at such, as they are effective.

If black and other racial minorities in the USA could become white by dressing or speaking in a certainly way, there will be no Civil Rights or Black English in the USA. Minorities eventually will be thrilled to be a part of the majority, irrespective of what their parents once thought. If there is “cultural genocide”, then cultural suicide will be the greatest social thrill for many minorities, eventually all. Ask Obama Senior or OJ Simpson or Marcus Allen if they preferred cultural preservation or "cultural genocide". The latter I think.

"So aside from Taiwan, which itself is an unusual situation in many respects, do we really expect China to become territorially aggressive?"

WhetherTaiwan should have the right to "self-determination" is not the most important question to Americans. 'Self-determination", in fact, is a rhetorical phrase that suggests that countries should be equal and have self-determination, not ethnic/political groups within each country.

The most important question is whether mainland China's design on recovering taiwan forebodes that we will not be able to get along with China.

I do not think that China's design to recovery Taiwan forebodes that we will not be able to get along with China, or that we will have to impeded China from any expansion.

Taiwan has far too much historical baggage to be a barometer to gauge Chinese potential expansionism.

Taiwan once claimed all of China and vowed to recover the Chinese mainland.

Taiwan took much Chinese cultural relics from Beijing, as the only chinese govt

Taiwan took much of the Chinese treasury from mainland China.

Taiwan felt motivated to walk out of the UN when the PRC was admitted.

It is natural and predictable that mainland China considers Taiwan, and not Vietnam or Korea or Japan, a part of China.

Well, the other important consideration, alone sufficient, is that we will never know what Taiwan really wants, a destructive war for just some chance of independence, or negotiation toward a niche within China, under greater and greater pressure from the mainland.

If China used brute force on Taiwan, US visceral reaction may compel us to aid Taiwan, but when few or any deaths have occured, can the USA start a war capriciously or presumptively? I am quite sure the answer will be no. The mainland will pressure Taiwan more and more, likely targetting Taiwan's vulnerable energy link, with little actual force, plenty of standby. This is a sure win for the mainland to recover taiwan; the USA will do little to thwart such a gradual plan.

With 293 languages & even more ethnicities, implausible is accuracy of any generalization about China. Analysis of the past to arrive at answers for the present properly concerns not the history of China, but the histories of its diverse peoples, which together form the mosaic from which appropriate conclusions can be derived. The past itself remains unsettled; a good way for those of us posting here to spend retirement, actually, would be to get together with an archeologist I know & spend a few years related to one of many, many manuscripts describing specific events in specific times. The government would welcome such endeavors, & the likelihood of significant findings is quite high.

This caveat notwithstanding, the statements by the author accord with my reading. Mention should be made of the dual nature of the Great Wall (constructed over four dynasties). Yes, it protected, but its construction was immensely costly in terms of money & lives. Have seen a fabulous photographic exhibit by one who only photographed the great wall! Here's the UNESCO website:

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/438

walty, read below...this is the REAL world..unlike your ivory tower bullshit.

http://blogs.jpost.com/content/dangerous-alliance-faux-liberals-and-islamists

Modern China, like most countries, is a state crafted from relentless expansion against less-organized peoples with lower culture. But for China, that has been going on for a whopping four thousand years. In fact, the inexorable Chinese expansion did not stop until the Western powers really involved themselves in East Asia during the 19th century.

From Xia (which ruled an area so small that it was said to be entirely flooded when the Yellow River rose) to Qing (which, through its nomadic connections, conquered all of the non-Han areas that modern China now rules), there has been an enormous expansion in both the boundaries of the Chinese state and the definition of being Chinese.

For it would have been profoundly weird for a 'Chinese' in 1500 BC to consider anyone not from the Yellow River basin as Chinese. About a thousand years later, the Sinosphere expanded enough to include a lot of the areas north of the river Yangtze - but no Shanghai or Hong Kong as of yet. Even centuries after the birth of Christ, it was common for the northerners to look down upon southerners as barbarians. But the effective authority of the Chinese state still did not reach far beyond the Han areas even as late as the Ming dynasty. And the Han areas comprise only half of China's landmass today.

So, China really is a country like any other, and its people are also like any other nations - they expand when they have power over their neighbours. It is patently nonsensical when people harp about the peaceful nature of the Chinese civilization, and while Stephen Walt makes the same case that most people here do, he does not make it strongly enough.

Some readers missed the points of the article.

Chinese, like Americans, Israeli, Latvians etc. view their traditions, values etc. as unique. And that can be translated as exceptional.

And there is a considerable discrepancy with such INTERNALLY standard view on the nation with actual history and with the foreign perceptions.

Neither Chinese history not Chinese ideology is very simple, but Confucianism somehow was the most stable ideological system. I think Communism is closer to more statist/authoritarian Legism then to Confucianism, but Legism is also associated with Bad Rulers. The concept of Bad Rulers is very important in Confusianism, and perhaps the current rulers try to show that they are not Bad.

As Good Rulers, the current leaders should value harmony over expansion. This can create positive contrast with Western Barbarians like Americans.

It is of course convenient that the most expansionist dynasty, that is responsible for the current boundaries of China, was non-Chinese and thus not obliged to be Good Rulers. But, as we learn from Betalover, Qing conquered Tibet in a uniquely benevolent manner. Actually, more then once, but each time, very benevolently. The English were actually very impressed with Chinese institutions and copied some, including benevolent conquest. For example, queen Victoria approved the petition of Fiji islanders to be admitted to the British Empire.

The conquest of Xinjiang is not described in detail by Betalovers. If I recall, Dzungar Mongols who controlled it were exterminated. Now they do not complain (some survived and live near the mouth of Volga river), so nobody dwells on the topic.

I think that the principle of non-expansionism will feature in West-Chinese confrontations. We view ourselves as uniquely benevolent and from time to time we find to our utter amazement that this is not appreciated by China. Most recently, where we see humanitarian crisis in Syria and as we try to formulate ways to help the suffering population (Sen. McCain proposed air strikes) China sees an attempt of expansions that should be resolutely resisted.

I read proposals that we should simply explain our case properly to Chinese government and then surely it will see the light and, say, join crippling sanctions on Iran (and earlier, on North Korea). Do they want to be evil? But, in actuality, Chinese government has no problem convincing its population that this is the West that is evil in this instance.

"The conquest of Xinjiang is not described in detail by Betalovers. If I recall, Dzungar Mongols who controlled it were exterminated. "

I think they were given the chance to give up, but they did a Branch Davidian.

I think this computer science term can be used.

One can say that China has never waged a war of aggressiion for 3000 years.

The implicit truth is that the Hans are continually created by assimilation.

At one moment in time, as a snapshot, the Hans have not invaded any country. This is not far-fetched and indeed is the crux of it all.

Those who assimilates are happy; a social environment that is conducive to assimilation, aka "cultural genocide", is conducive to happiness of human beings, not any cultural preservation. The USA recent progressive ethos validates this concept.

Ethnic cultural identity is the most vicariously coveted --parents on behalf of offspring--social burden.

If there is "cultural genicde", then cultural suicide must be the greatest sociological thrill for many minorities. Ask Obama Senior or OJ Simpson or Marcus Allen if they prefer cultural preservation or "cultural genocide".

The alledged grief of "cultural genocide" is entirely subjective; indeed, objectively the "cultural genocide" of the Tibetans or the Hawaiians (US Senate rejection of the Akaka Bill of 2000) is a cause for celebration, not lamentation.

"Aha, the most recent war China fought was aggressive:"

China has not fought aggressive wars for over two centuries. Han expansion into southern China took place more than a thousand years ago.

War with Vietnam was in response to the latter's aggression in Cambodia.

While it happened, the US's position was that China fought a war that the US might had to fight.

The ideological situation was more complex as the Cambodian govt was committing atrocities on Cambodians based on ideolgical fervor. There was the issue of sovereign right as well as the popular ideology of its limitation.

Well annette, it is about 6:30 in the morning right now in Iran... they'd have to be getting crackin' pretty early if they were making nuclear weapons as we speak..

"Is rio orange war always comparateur forfait mobile inevitable ?"
MaximB