The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue: Understanding The Great State of China

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

China is one of the oldest states in the world, with a complicated history and rich culture. Now, as the political relationship between China and the United States, and arguably the rest of the Western world, is at its most tumultuous yet, we need a deeper understanding of this ancient country, to see where we could possibly go from here. To give us a glimpse into its history and its dealings with other societies, we speak with Professor Timothy Brook, a historian of China, whose studies span back to the 13th century. Timothy Brook is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of History of the University of British Columbia. He writes on a broad range of political, social, and cultural topics, with a focus on China’s engagements with the world. Brook has published thirteen books, which have been translated into several Asian and European languages. A graduate of Harvard University, he has taught at Toronto, Stanford, and Oxford, and has held the Republic of China Chair at the University of British Columbia since 2004, until this year.  QUOTES: President Xi  Jinping is in this awkward position. He has inherited the Great State modality, but he doesn't think like a Mongol. He thinks like a Chinese who wants to go back to the way the world might have been before the Mongols ever invaded China. This has produced China's greatest foreign policy problems, Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, all of these areas. China has perhaps the most unstable set of borders of any country in the world, and it's precisely because of this historical heritage that they can't think their way out of.   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.     Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/   To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].     To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/   Producer: Marissa Ramnanan  Editor: Adam Karch  Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

These statues have to come down. It's always been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The problem now is it's a pandemic of the willfully unvaccinated. Falling birth rates are good. They're good for our planet. They're good for our societies. We're not responsible for the escalation with Russia. We're not the ones who invaded Ukraine.

I don't think it's fair to portray people of color as victims. It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Hello, Monk listeners. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderate. Welcome to this, our continuing conversations called the Monk Dialogues. These are in-depth Q&As with some of the world's leading minds and brightest thinkers. We like to go deep into some of the big issues that are transforming our world, that are top of mind for all of us.

Listeners to this program will know that China has been an area of focus over the last number of months and even going back through the history of the monk debates, you can find all kinds of great main stage debates on China. This is an issue, again, a topic that we think demands our attention and focus. It's a real pleasure to continue in that vein today with Timothy James Brooke. He's the Republic of China chair at the Department of History and the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia. Tim, as he likes to be known, has had a storied academic career focused in large part on issues around Chinese identity, history.

We're going to get into all that and more with him today. You may know him also as a best-selling author, Vermeer's Hat, the 17th century in the dawn of the global world, a big international bestseller of his in the late 2000s. And the book and the ideas that we're going to spend some time on today, his most recent publication with Harper Collins, Great State, China and the World. Tim, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Thank you, Reggie. It's a pleasure to be here.

Wow. I'm looking forward to this conversation. So let's begin to unpack some of the key ideas in your book, a great state, China and the world. You're encouraging us to kind of think more broadly about Chinese history and the extent to which it can provide us with not sure and fast a roadmap, but definitely some indicators, some big waypoints to figure out our relationship with China today. What's the key thing that you think is missing in many people?

and especially experts, understanding of China and how the Chinese think about their place in the world and the rest of the world. I was motivated to write the book because for the last decade or so, the story coming out of China is that China has always been its own kind of coherent, self-contained civilization, occasionally disrupted from the outside, but basically inward-looking and, you know, and self-creating. And so I've got two things that I'm trying to do in the book. One of the things is to say that China has never been apart from the world.

The history of China has been fundamentally shaped by the world around it. It's not a self-contained story that it can tell about its own history. I want to bring China, in a sense, bring China back into the world and bring the world into China. Because, as I'm repeating again and again in this book, China is not apart from the world. The other thing that I want to argue is that China is not a kind of self-contained culture that can tell its own story by leaving the world out.

And I focus in this book particularly on the Mongols. The Mongols invaded China in the mid-13th century, stayed there as military occupiers for a century. Chinese usually tell the Mongol occupation as a kind of unfortunate disturbance, an unfortunate rupture in their own history. And the historical argument I'm trying to build in the book is that, no, this was not a brief rupture that ended. It was a transformative experience that has fundamentally changed Chinese political culture and that is still with us today. Fascinating, Timothy. Let's begin to unpack that a bit more.

what do you see as the reactions to the Mongol invasion that begin to shape, as you say, this Chinese identity that has now been with us for the intervening centuries? And maybe, again, we need to reflect on, understand a little bit better in order to understand the China that's speaking us today, the China of Xi Jinping. The Mongols made a huge difference to the history of Asia until Jenghis Khan emerged as the ruler of the Mongol people and beyond in 1206. Until that time, Asia was broken up into these zones that their boundaries shifted, but different cultural zones that coexisted that were in conflict and China was one of those zones. Jenghis Khan came to power, he declared that he was founding a Mongol state whose mission was going to be to expand outward and include as much of the world as they could manage to conquer. So it's a conquest mentality. It's a mentality that says there is no outward limit to this country that I rule. I can.

continue to expand this country as long as I have the capacity to do so. And this becomes the Mongol vision in 1206. It takes a couple of decades for the concept of the great state to emerge. It's a Mongol term, the Iq Ulus. And what it says is that a country is its own space. It's an Ulus, a community, a space. But the Iq Ulus, the great state, state is something that goes out beyond that. So the Mongols had their Ulus, and Jenghis Khan declared himself

the ruler of the Mongol Ulus in 1206, but gradually as he expands outward, they coined this new term, the Ikulus, the great state. It starts being used in correspondence between the Great Khan and the Pope, as a matter of fact. That's the first time we see this concept written down because the Pope wrote to the great Khan to say, there's a lot of violence and conflict going on in your part of the world. Can you dial it down? And he wrote back to say, we are the appointee of the eternal God. And it is, in fact, our duty to expand outwards and to create this great state. The Mongols, it takes the Mongols a while to move into China. They do it under Kubalai Khan in the 1250s, the 1260s. And eventually Kubali establishes himself in Beijing. This becomes the capital of his

Mongol Empire. Now in English, we usually talk about this as the Mongol Empire. But I've decided I want to use the Mongol term. The term great state describes something different than the image we, most of us have in our heads about what imperialism is all about. We think of the British Empire or the French Empire. I think that this is a different process and we have to capture the dynamic of that process by going back to the Mongol term. Now, I'm not going to ask anybody to learn the phrase Iqulus, but I think great state is a phrase they can pick up. What this does, why this is, why this has a lasting effect is that the Mongols are in China for a century. In 1368, they're finally driven out. The Mongol royal family sort of,

of goes into a chaotic, conflictual situation. Chinese rebels rise up. They drive the Mongols out of the country. And yet the man who leads the new regime, a man by the name of Zhu Yan Zhang, sees himself in exactly the same mold as Kublai Khan. For him, Kublai Khan defines what a ruler is. and he's the ruler of a great state.

He's the ruler of a space that has no fixed outer boundaries. There's a very steep pyramidal structure of power so that the emperor is way up above even his first set of advisors. It's power that culminates in one family, and it requires the personalized submission of all other rulers in the region. So that it's not that China seeks to control Vietnam, for example. It's that the ruler of China establishes the ruler of Vietnam as his vassal and expects to be respected as the ruler of a great state. And the impact of the Mongols has been huge all across Asia. So Asians

understand this. The Vietnamese, the ties, in fact, the people in India understand that there was this great state and that China has now emerged to take on the role of the great state in the world. So that's why I think there has been this huge impact. You see it again and again in the documents of the Ming dynasty, which the dynasty that follows the Mongols, the period with which I am most familiar. You see this again and again. And one of the most provocative ways you see it is they put the word big or great in front of the name of the dynasty. So the official title of the Ming dynasty is not the Ming dynasty.

It's the great Ming dynasty. But that misreads the grammar of the phrase, and the phrase is actually the great state of the Ming, or the Ming great state. And so China through the Ming and then through the Qing, the Manchus take over China in the 17th century, they very much identify themselves with the Mongol tradition. They come in.

They established their own great state. And so China, from the 13th century to the 20th century, was a great state and understood itself as a great state. This kind of disappeared from Chinese public consciousness. The way Chinese are taught about their history in school, and it's largely the way it gets taught outside China, is that China was unified in 211 BC. and then it's been a series of dynasties from the Chin dynasty then all the way down to the Qing dynasty that falls in 1911, as though it's kind of one clean storyline and every chapter of the story in a sense tells the same story.

So what I'm trying to argue for, and it's a difficult ask because everybody has been trained to think of China as this continuous entity. I'm asking that we recognize that the Mongol invasion of the 13th century transformed the political imagination of the Chinese and transformed China's relationships with the rest of Asia. I mean, yes, China before the Mongols came was often in conflictual relationships with its neighbors. But the new great state ideology was one that gave them the confidence

and they felt the authority to be able to command as they should be able to command as far as their reach should take them. This is fascinating, Timothy, because it really, as you say, it runs counter to a lot of our own kind of perceptions of Chinese history. Absolutely the continuity. We don't see the rupture of the Mongol invasion, as you say, a recasting of a Chinese. Chinese sense of identity and nationhood. If you flash forward to the 20th century and even to now, do you see those historical antecedents being kind of picked up in the rhetoric of Mao Zetong, in even Chairman Xi today?

Is this, in other words, is this a kind of live meme, if that's the right way to put it, in Chinese kind of thinking about national. identity, state craft, China's role geopolitically in the 20th century, and now at this kind of era of increasing global tension between the United States and China in 2022. I think that this is exactly what has happened. The challenge for me as a historian is to really understand how to explain this to a culture that has been in which this political imaginary is so strong and yet he is unrecognized. If you had asked Chairman Mao, what do you know about the great state? He wouldn't have had a clue of what you're talking about. If you asked

Xi Jinping today, what is a great state? He would have no idea. Because they come out of this revolutionary period of the first half of the 20th century. The Qing dynasty falls apart. There are problems with European imperialism. The Japanese invade in the 1930s. I mean, it's a, the first half of the 20th century is so tumultuous that the kind of the historical shaping of China got lost through this revolutionary period. So Mao comes to power in 1949. He declares that the Chinese people have stood up. He declares the founding of the People's Republic of China. For him, his relationship to his historical tradition is one which says,

we Chinese deserve to have our place in the world. We're a long and venerable civilization. But he didn't really have a kind of granular sense of what happened in Chinese history. Although I will say one thing that Chairman Mao identified with the founder of the Ming Dynasty. This was Zhu Yuan Zhang, the man who drove out the Mongols, and then declared the founding of the Ming great state. So I'm not sure whether my explanation would probably make no sense to Mao. And yet Mao looked to that man as the architect of the state that he wanted to create. and so we had the People's Republic of China.

I think if we move forward to the present head of the country, Xi Jinping, she would have no concept of the great state, and nor would he want it. Because the great state is, it's a huge problem for the current leadership. The current leadership understands China as filling the boundaries created by the Manchus in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Qing great state. That means that they control huge vast tracts of inner Asia that is occupied by Tibetans, by Uyghurs, by Kazakhs, by Mongols. The fact that Beijing claims authority over those territories is based entirely on this

great state mentality. Before the great state, China's way of managing other peoples, if they came within Chinese borders, was to sinusize them, to make them Chinese, give them Chinese names, get them to adapt to Chinese culture and become Chinese. The Mongols were not interested in making anybody into a Mongol. They were simply interested in imposing their sovereignty over other peoples. China did this through the Ming and Qing dynasties, so that China today, the People's Republic today, rules vast territories in which there are originally no Chinese people. There are these other peoples. These other peoples do not see themselves as Chinese. And this is then led to this tragedy of the last five or six years of the People's Republic throwing well over a million

Uyghur men into prison camps and submitting them to thought reform to try and not just de-Islamicize them, but de-weigerize them to turn them into compliant Chinese. And this would never have occurred to Jenghis Khan. He would not see the sense of it. So she's in this awkward position. He has inherited the great state modality. But he doesn't think like a Mongol. He thinks like a Chinese who wants to go back to the way the world might have been

before the Mongols ever invaded China. And this has produced China's greatest foreign policy problems. Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, all of these areas. China has perhaps the most unstable set of borders of any country in the world. And it's precisely because of this historical heritage that they can't think their way out of. Because the way you would think your way out of it was to say, okay, we're going to reorganize this as a kind of federal system with the possibility of detaching the parts. Now, famously, this is what the Soviet Union did in the 1990s. It allowed, I shouldn't say allowed, but it had to.

negotiate the separation of entities that had been brought in when Russia was also a great state. And Putin is now fighting this. And Putin is trying to get back and recreate the Soviet Union and get rid of these separate states like Ukraine, reabsorb them into his great state. And so Xi Jinping sees that going on. I can imagine that the Chinese Communist Party is watching Ukraine very closely because this could be a model that they choose to take up or choose not to take up, depending on how it sorts itself out. But it's created this vast conundrum for the Chinese communist leadership that would require a solution that they can't imagine, a solution of devolving sovereignty to the peoples whom

history has captured and put inside our boundaries. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. I have a favor to ask you, please consider becoming a monk member. Membership is free and you get access to a series of great benefits, including a 10-plus-year library of some of our best debates, dialogues, and podcasts. You also get a free monthly newsletter featuring the debates that we're watching around the world. and you get a specially curated Friday weekly monk members only podcast that focuses on the big international events and trends shaping our world.

All of that, again, free at www. www.munkdebates.com. I hope you'll consider joining and becoming part of our community. Now, back to our program. In a sense, you're saying there's a kind of absolutism that becomes formalized in in the Chinese notions of the roles and functions of the state, and particularly in the role and function of the ruler, the emperor, as endowed with absolute authority,

you know, potential kind of universality in the decisions that they make and their ability to interpret, you know, the historical role or mission for China. How do you think this affects Chinese actions today outside of China? I mean, you've talked about Vietnam, again, a long history, as we know, of China subjugating to greater or lesser degrees neighboring powers around it. Because our perceptions, Tim, are that, and again, some of this may be Chinese propaganda, their perceptions are, you know, that China is not an imperial power. It doesn't seek conquest. It is, you know, dedicated to the cultivation of its civilization within its territorial, imagined physical community.

This is the mantra of almost all Chinese, that China has never been, an empire has never conquered other territories. And it's a hilarious claim because as I do in the book, Great State, I had a cartographer draw me up three maps of what China looked like over the last seven centuries, and it goes from a country that is a certain size to a country that is twice as big, and then to a country that is three times as big. The only way you expand your territorial sovereignty is by conquering other peoples. You don't knock on the door and say, excuse me, we would like you to make you part of China. Would you like to join and expect them to say yes?

it doesn't happen. So in fact, China is the product of an Asian form of imperialism. And as I said earlier, I think, I'm trying to avoid using the Western concept of empire. I wanted to capture the Asian quality of this by calling it a great state. And so we have a world today in which the three largest and most powerful countries in the world, the United States, Russia and the People's Republic of China, have come about through the process of imperialism. The Americans moved west across the North American continent as colonizers. The Russians moved east as colonizers of Northern Asia. And then the Chinese moved west to colonize inner Asia.

So the three great powers today are all the products of imperial expansion. You can't explain the power of these three countries in any other way. And I think the entire emphasis of Chinese propaganda and education is to prevent Chinese from imagining that they have done this. Because much of the kind of self-serving ideology of the 20th century has been to pitch China as a victim. It's the victim of European imperialism of Japanese imperialism. Chinese are peace-loving people. they have been victimized by the history of the last two or three centuries. But I think that story is simply a way to cover over the fact that China in its borders today

was created through this expansionist, absolutist project that has been carried out since the Mongol period. Fascinating stuff, Tim. So let's extrapolate the great state theory to the current tensions over Taiwan. How do you think this could help us understand Chinese motivations, the intensity of their attachment to the goal of reunification? Let's pull back the curtain here a little bit. try to insert your theory into what has now become arguably the biggest geopolitical flashpoint in the world outside of Ukraine.

Yes. This is a fascinating and disturbing issue. You use the term reunification, which is the term the Chinese like to use. The idea of unification as a political principle is one that the Mongols introduced to China. I'm just going to stick that in as a historical footnote. If I go back and read the dynastic histories and they talk about the founding of dynasties, they never talk about unifying. They talk about establishing authority over China, not about unifying China. That becomes a pitch the Mongols make.

And so that's with Chinese ideology today picks that up. So the idea of reunification is very much an idea from the era of Kubolai. although Shijing Ping would have no notice of this. And it's become an intense conflict. I think for two reasons. Reason one is that and is the domestic reason that the Chinese Communist Party grounds its legitimacy

in the fact that it has driven off all of the imperialists and has created China for the Chinese. When the party came to power in 1949, Taiwan was not part of that unification. In fact, China only invaded and conquered Taiwan at the end of the 17th century.

I say only because China has a long history. But Taiwan becomes part of China in the late 17th century through military conquest. China loses Taiwan at the end of the 19th century to Japan. and then in 1949, when the People's Republic is founded, the nationalist regime that was of Jiangxiaq that was opposed to the communists fled to Taiwan. So the Chinese communist rhetoric is that our goal is to bring all of China into the People's Republic, and for them, Taiwan is part of China.

Now, Taiwanese, the Aboriginal people of Taiwan don't see themselves as Chinese. they see themselves as captive of one Chinese faction or another, because they too are a colonized region. So that's, I think, one reason why this has become hugely intense. The idea that Taiwan could have an independent political existence is so unacceptable to Chinese people who have been taught that Taiwan belongs to China since time immemorial. But the other intensification has to do with who else is in the region. When China invaded Taiwan in the late 17th century, Japan had sort of closed itself off from its international affairs. The Dutch were on Taiwan in a colonial capacity, but their presence was weak.

So there was really no other power in the region that would have had any interest in Taiwan. That's changed entirely. We have Japan. We have the Philippines. We, of course, have the United States, which has military-based. throughout Asia. South Korea is also hugely interested in what is going on here as well. So you have a kind of multipolar security situation here, which I think puts the Chinese leadership in a panic. They don't know what to do. They have to reassert their authority over Taiwan,

whereas the solution is blindingly obvious, which is request the 10th, Taiwanese government hold a plebiscite and ask Taiwanese, do they wish to reunify with China, or do they prefer to become an independent state? Do it through a popular plebiscite. The plebiscite would pass, and then the problem would go away. And this is the frustrating thing for those of us who have, well, someone like me who has studied and been concerned about China his entire career, that the Chinese communist leadership won't give up the things that if they gave them up would give them a much easier path into the world and a much calmer place in the world. Instead, they have to ramp up the language of conflict in a way that is a threat to world peace.

And at this point, of course, Russia is the current largest threat to world peace, but China's just nudging in there behind them. And the threat to world peace, I think, is huge and entirely unnecessary. And to no one's benefit in the end. Taiwan's been an independent country since 1949. Taiwanese don't think of themselves as Chinese. So why should the world step back and say, okay, you know, send over your airplanes and your ships and take this territory? It's the worst 19th century imperialist thinking that you could imagine. And here we are in the 21st century and it sits in front of us. I think it's appalling. You're listening to Timothy Brooks, the Republic of China chair, the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. We're talking about his

best-selling book, a mustery, great state, China and the world. So where does this all go, Timothy, I think it's fascinating that you've, again, history, you know, doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. We have this kind of, as you've explained to us, this, this kind of traumatic and game-changing event for China, the Mongol invasion, that we've either misinterpreted or underplayed, and that, you know, history in a sense is weighing, as pushing down on the Chinese identity today, its choices, its options in the world. I mean, are we to accept, Timothy, that China as a result in the same way that Russia was traumatized, maybe worse than China by the Mongol invasions? And, you know, there's that argument that as a result, the Russians

will always be more oriental than Occidental, that their absolutism, their authoritarianism, you know, emerges from those dark chapters in their past. How are we to think about China into the future, you know, hopefully as an ally, but also maybe increasingly as an opponent? Well, this is a question that's difficult to answer, but I'm glad you phrased it in the way in which you did. I said earlier that the U.S., Russia, and China are the three great powers at the moment. And it's curious that two of those three great powers are the legities of the Mongol Empire. And this, I think, is underscoring the point that I'm trying to make, that the Mongol reorganization of your Asia was so profound that we're still living it with its consequences today.

As a historian, this is clear to me. But I think most people, for most people, history is a kind of, you know, a little bit of color that you put in the background to tell people where they come from. There's not this sense that history, in fact, grounds every decision we make, every thought we have. Nobody comes up. There are no new ideas in the world. We are only struggling with the old ideas and trying to shape them in ways that make sense to us today. So as a historian, I mean, it's taken, and I should say, it's taken me the length of my career to become clear about this issue. It's an issue that I've struggled with as a scholar ever since I went to graduate school and now I feel I have some clarity. How to get that

story out to people is a real challenge, which is why I wrote the book, A Great State. Now, in the book, I'm fairly careful not to say, here's the lessons for the future. Because as a historian, I'm really not good on the future. I can tell you what's created the, how things lay on the landscape as they do now, and then I have to ask my readers to think forward to where this is going. I mean, my goal as a historian is that by making a new understanding of the situation in Asia available, that people can start to reflect and think, All right, if this is the situation that China finds itself in, surely there are ways that reasonable people on all sides can begin to rethink that situation.

And so, as the point I made with Taiwan, there is no necessity for China to invade Taiwan. That's a completely historically manufactured necessity. not a necessity in 2022. Now, of course, I'm the historian who sits in his study to think about these things. I'm not the politician who's out there trying to make decisions. The best case scenario would be reform of the United Nations so that the United Nations could play the role that it was created for in 1945, which is to negotiate conflicts in the world in a way that allows the world never to have to go through another world war. And the United Nations has lost that capacity because of the three great powers that control the Security Council. So that would be,

if we wanted to look for a place for action right now, it would be the reform of the United Nations. Of course, I'm speaking in rather idealistic terms here, because the entrenched interests around the UN are so powerful that the idea of the obvious solution to that problem is get rid of the five permanent members of the Security Council. That would then perhaps open the path to a kind of more reasonable international organization trying to do with these kinds of conflicts that are coming up. I don't, I don't, in the foreseeable future, I don't see Chinese picking up my book and saying, oh, now I understand that history. We don't have to go, we don't have to go to war with Taiwan. We don't have to throw Uyghurs into prison camps. We don't have to flood Mongolia and Tibet with Chinese people to water them down through a kind of ethnic, ethnic devalurization of the peoples who live there.

We don't have to do any of that. And that's not going to happen. A Chinese edition is about to be published in Taiwan, but it won't circulate in the People's Republic. And I don't expect my ideas to have much of an impact there. But I wrote the book more for people outside China to give them a sense of the rich complexity, but also the fairly clear picture that emerges once we start to think of Asia in these Asia. terms. And as I say, my hope is that this will help to produce greater clarity about what looks like political necessity today, but tomorrow could be seen as unnecessary. Well, Timothy, thank you

so much for this conversation. I think it's evident from the book and your words on this program that you've done the heavy lifting, you've done the years of thinking, and you've shared with us, I think, a really interesting and new way to conceptualize China today and our own kind of perceptions of Chinese motives and our own interpretation of what the Chinese are saying back to us at a moment, unfortunately, again, of increased geopolitical competition, and we hope not, but the possibility of, great power conflict. So thank you so much for coming on the monk dialogues today and sharing your

analysis and insights with our community. You're welcome. And Roger, thank you for the questions that you asked because they took me to exactly the things that I felt needed to be said. I've enjoyed the conversation. Well, I hope you enjoyed that monk dialogue. I certainly did. We'd love your feedback and suggestions on what you've just heard, other dialogues or topics that you'd like us to explore. Please send us an email right now to podcast at monkdebates.com. While you're online, check out our website, triplew monkdebates.com.

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