are so accustomed to view geopolitics in terms of nation-states that we assume they are the building-blocks of global interaction. The nation-state is a towering presence—an ethno-political tectonic plate on the world map. This is especially so with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). So powerful is the idea of the Chinese nation-state that, in the West, only a few Chinese individuals are known by name: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping, Zhou Enlai—maybe the Empress Cixi or, for Sino-philes, Lin Zexu, Liang Qichao, and Lu Xun. Everyone else merges into the deep red of the PRC flag. The few gold stars floating on a sea of unhumanity—the handful of people in a place where the state has leveled almost everyone else—determine the course of the whole enterprise. Most of us take this state of affairs for granted.
With one notable exception: Charles Horner. A longtime Hudson Institute scholar, formerly on the staffs of senators Henry Jackson and Daniel Moynihan, Horner is the author of the authoritative two-volume history, Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate: Memories of Empire in a New Global Context (2002) and Grandeur and Peril in the Next World Order (2015). In these—and in his latest, A China Scholar’s Long March—Horner delves among the Chinese archives and in the country itself to find the real China.
Read Full Article »