Book description
Over the past 250 years of momentous change and dramatic upheaval,
China has proved itself to be a Restless Empire.
Tracing China's course from the eighteenth-century Qing
Dynasty to today's People's Republic, Restless Empire shows how
the country's worldview has evolved. It explains how Chinese attitudes
have been determined by both receptiveness and resistance to outside
influence and presents the preoccupations that have set its
foreign-relations agenda.
Within two decades China is likely to depose the United States as
the world's largest economy. By then the country expects to have
eradicated poverty among its population of more than one and a half
billion, and established itself as the world's technological
powerhouse. Meanwhile, some - especially its neighbours - are afraid
that China will strengthen its military might in order to bend others
to its will.
A new form of Chinese nationalism is rising. Many Chinese are angry
about perceived past injustices and fear a loss of identity to
commercial forces and foreign influences. So, will China's attraction
to world society dwindle, or will China continue to engage? Will it
attempt to recreate a Sino-centric international order in Eastern
Asia, or pursue a more harmonious diplomatic route? And can it
overcome its lack of democracy and transparency, or are these
characteristics hard-wired into the Chinese system? Whatever the case,
we ignore China's international history at our peril.
Restless Empire is a magisterial and indispensible history of the
most important state in world affairs today.
Odd Arne Westad is one of the world's foremost experts on both the
Cold War and contemporary East Asian history, having won the Bancroft
Prize, the Michael Harrington Award and the Akira Iriye International
History Book Award for his seminal book
The Global Cold War
. A Professor of International History at the London School of
Economics, he is also co-director of LSE IDEAS, a centre for the study
of international affairs, diplomacy and grand strategy.
