History of China/Chapter 29

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History of China

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Chapter 29: China and the World — Foreign Relations, War, and Diplomacy

1. Introduction: The Middle Kingdom and the World Beyond

China's relationship with the world beyond its borders has been one of the defining themes of its history — a story of cultural influence and military confrontation, of diplomatic sophistication and imperial arrogance, of openness and isolation, of strength and vulnerability. For much of the past two millennia, China understood itself as the center of the civilized world — the "Middle Kingdom" (中国, Zhongguo) around which lesser peoples and states orbited in varying degrees of deference and subordination. This sinocentric worldview — embodied in the tributary system that governed China's relations with neighboring states — was not merely a diplomatic convention but a comprehensive cosmological framework that placed the Chinese emperor at the apex of a universal hierarchy ordained by Heaven.

The encounter with the modern Western state system in the nineteenth century shattered this framework — humiliatingly and violently. The "century of humiliation" (百年国耻, bainian guochi), from the First Opium War in 1839 to the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, saw China reduced from the self-proclaimed center of civilization to a semi-colonial state, exploited by Western powers and Japan, and forced to accept the norms and institutions of a Western-created international order. The recovery of sovereignty, independence, and great-power status has been the central objective of Chinese foreign policy since 1949, and the history of that recovery — from the Korean War through the Sino-Soviet split, the rapprochement with the United States, and the rise to global power in the twenty-first century — is one of the most consequential diplomatic stories of the modern era.

This chapter traces the history of China's foreign relations from the tributary system through the Silk Road era, the trauma of Western imperialism, the complex diplomacy of the twentieth century, and the emergence of China as a global power in the twenty-first century. It is a story that illuminates not only the history of China but the history of the international system itself — for China's relationship with the world has been a central factor in the making of the modern global order.

2. The Tributary System: China's Pre-Modern International Order

The tributary system (朝贡体系, chaogong tixi) — the framework through which China managed its relations with neighboring states for most of the imperial period — was one of the most enduring and distinctive international systems in world history. Unlike the European system of sovereign states, which was based on the formal equality of independent political entities, the tributary system was hierarchical — it assumed the superiority of the Chinese emperor (the "Son of Heaven") and the subordination of all other rulers, who acknowledged Chinese supremacy through the performance of ritual tribute.

The mechanics of the system were elaborate and carefully prescribed. Foreign rulers or their envoys traveled to the Chinese capital, performed the kowtow (叩头, koutou — the prostration of three kneelings and nine head-knockings) before the emperor, and presented tribute goods. In return, they received the emperor's recognition of their authority, gifts that were typically more valuable than the tribute they had presented, and the privilege of conducting trade with China. The tributary relationship thus combined diplomatic recognition, commercial exchange, and cultural prestige in a single institution — and for many of China's neighbors, participation in the system was a source of legitimacy, profit, and access to Chinese culture and technology.

The tributary system was not static but evolved over time. During the Han dynasty, the system was used to manage relations with the Xiongnu and other steppe peoples — sometimes through the dispatch of tribute (including, most famously, the marriage of Chinese princesses to barbarian chiefs) and sometimes through military campaigns. The Tang dynasty, which presided over one of the most cosmopolitan periods in Chinese history, maintained tributary relations with a vast array of states stretching from Korea and Japan to Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. The Ming dynasty formalized the system most elaborately, establishing detailed regulations governing the frequency of tribute missions, the routes to be followed, the goods to be presented, and the protocols of audience and gift exchange.

The tributary system was remarkably flexible in practice. While the rhetoric of Chinese superiority was maintained, the actual relationships between China and its tributaries varied enormously — from the close cultural and political ties between China and Korea (which was the most faithful tributary state) to the distant and largely commercial relationships with states in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. Many relationships that were described in Chinese sources as "tributary" were, from the perspective of the other party, nothing of the kind — they were diplomatic or commercial relationships conducted on terms of equality, or even superiority, that the Chinese court chose to interpret as acknowledgments of Chinese supremacy.

The tributary system was challenged and gradually undermined by the arrival of European powers in East Asia — powers that insisted on the principle of sovereign equality and refused to accept the rituals of subordination that the tributary system required. The Macartney Mission of 1793 — in which the British envoy Lord Macartney refused to perform the kowtow before the Qianlong Emperor — was a symbolic confrontation between two incompatible international orders, and the eventual triumph of the Western system over the Chinese system was one of the most consequential transformations in the history of international relations.

3. The Silk Road and Maritime Trade: China in the Pre-Modern Global Economy

China's connections to the wider world were not limited to the formal diplomatic framework of the tributary system. For centuries, China was linked to Central Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and ultimately Europe through networks of trade, migration, and cultural exchange that transmitted goods, ideas, technologies, and religions across vast distances. The most famous of these networks — the "Silk Road" (丝绸之路, Sichou zhi Lu), a term coined by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877 — was in fact a complex web of overland and maritime routes that connected the Chinese heartland to the Mediterranean world and beyond.

The overland Silk Road — which traversed the deserts, mountains, and oases of Central Asia — carried Chinese silk, porcelain, and tea westward, and brought gold, silver, precious stones, horses, glass, and woolen textiles eastward. But the Silk Road was far more than a trade route — it was a corridor of cultural transmission through which Buddhism traveled from India to China, Islam spread across Central Asia, Nestorian Christianity reached the Tang capital of Chang'an, and technologies including papermaking, gunpowder, and the compass were transmitted from China to the Islamic world and eventually to Europe.

The maritime Silk Road — the network of sea routes that connected China's southern ports to Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and East Africa — was equally important, and in some periods more important, than the overland routes. Chinese maritime trade reached its zenith during the Song and Yuan dynasties, when the ports of Quanzhou, Guangzhou, and Hangzhou were among the busiest in the world, and Chinese merchants and sailors traveled as far as the east coast of Africa. The voyages of Zheng He (1405–1433) — which dispatched massive fleets to Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and the coast of East Africa — represented the most dramatic projection of Chinese maritime power in history, though their abrupt termination and the subsequent withdrawal from overseas activity has been the subject of enduring historical debate.

The question of why China withdrew from maritime expansion after Zheng He — abandoning the seas at precisely the moment when European powers were beginning their own age of overseas expansion — is one of the great counterfactual questions of world history. The explanations offered by historians include the fiscal costs of the voyages, the opposition of the Confucian bureaucracy (which viewed overseas trade as a distraction from the empire's continental concerns), the strategic priority of the northern frontier (where the Mongol threat remained pressing), and the absence of the competitive, decentralized political structure that drove European overseas expansion. Whatever the cause, China's withdrawal from the maritime sphere left a vacuum that was filled by the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and eventually British — with consequences that would reshape the world.

4. Conquest Dynasties: The Mongol and Manchu Experience

China's foreign relations included not only its diplomatic and commercial engagement with the world beyond its borders but also the recurrent experience of conquest by non-Chinese peoples — an experience that fundamentally shaped Chinese identity, political culture, and attitudes toward the outside world. The two most consequential conquest dynasties — the Mongol Yuan (1271–1368) and the Manchu Qing (1644–1912) — together governed China for nearly four centuries and created the territorial, ethnic, and political framework within which modern China exists.

The Mongol conquest of China — completed by Kublai Khan in 1279 — was part of the largest empire in world history, stretching from Korea to Hungary. For the Chinese, the Yuan dynasty was an experience of foreign domination — the first time that all of China had been conquered by a non-Chinese people. The Mongol rulers imposed a system of ethnic hierarchy that placed the Mongols at the top, followed by the "Semu" (色目, Central Asians and Persians), the "Hanren" (汉人, northern Chinese), and the "Nanren" (南人, southern Chinese) at the bottom. The Chinese examination system was suspended for much of the dynasty, and Chinese were excluded from the highest positions of power.

Yet the Yuan dynasty was also a period of extraordinary cosmopolitanism. The Pax Mongolica — the stability imposed by Mongol rule across Eurasia — facilitated trade, travel, and cultural exchange on an unprecedented scale. Marco Polo's famous account of his travels to the court of Kublai Khan (whatever its reliability in detail) reflects the reality of a world in which Europeans, Persians, Arabs, and Chinese interacted in ways that had previously been impossible. The Yuan capital of Dadu (present-day Beijing) was a cosmopolitan metropolis where Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and Daoists coexisted, and where goods and ideas from across Eurasia converged.

The Manchu conquest of China in the seventeenth century created a different kind of conquest dynasty — one that adopted Chinese political institutions more thoroughly than the Mongols had done, while maintaining a distinct Manchu identity and a multiethnic imperial structure. The Qing dynasty expanded China's territory to its greatest historical extent — incorporating Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan — and created a multiethnic empire that was governed through a combination of Chinese bureaucratic institutions, Manchu military organization, and flexible frontier policies adapted to the diverse peoples under Qing rule.

The significance of the conquest dynasties for Chinese foreign relations is profound. They demonstrate that "China" has never been a fixed, ethnically homogeneous entity but rather a dynamic, multiethnic civilization that has been repeatedly reshaped by its interactions with non-Chinese peoples. The modern territory of China — including the vast frontier regions of Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Manchuria — is largely the creation of the Qing conquest, and contemporary China's claims to sovereignty over these regions are based on the historical legacy of a Manchu dynasty that was, by origin, as "foreign" as the British or Japanese who later encroached upon Chinese territory.

5. The Western Impact: From the Opium Wars to the Unequal Treaties

The arrival of Western powers in East Asia in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries — first as traders and missionaries, then as military aggressors and imperial overlords — transformed China's foreign relations more profoundly than any event since the Mongol conquest. The story of the Western impact has been told in earlier chapters of this volume; here, it is considered from the perspective of its significance for China's place in the world.

The Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860) were the decisive events — the moment at which the sinocentric world order collapsed and China was forcibly incorporated into a Western-dominated international system on terms of inequality and subordination. The "unequal treaties" (不平等条约, bu pingdeng tiaoyue) that followed — including the cession of Hong Kong, the opening of treaty ports, the granting of extraterritoriality to foreign nationals, the imposition of fixed tariff rates, and the payment of indemnities — stripped China of the attributes of sovereignty that the Western international system claimed to respect and reduced China to a status that contemporary observers described as "semi-colonial."

The impact of Western imperialism on Chinese foreign relations extended beyond the immediate material losses. It shattered the intellectual framework within which China had understood its place in the world — the assumption of Chinese cultural superiority, the universality of Chinese civilization, and the legitimacy of the sinocentric international order. The humiliation of defeat at the hands of peoples whom the Chinese had regarded as barbarians (夷, yi) forced a profound reassessment of China's strengths and weaknesses and a desperate search for the sources of Western power — a search that drove the successive reform and revolutionary movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Sino-Japanese relationship was a particularly painful dimension of this transformation. Japan — which had been a tributary state of China and a borrower of Chinese culture for centuries — modernized rapidly after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and inflicted a devastating military defeat on China in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. Japan's transformation from student to master, from cultural subordinate to military superior, was deeply traumatic for Chinese self-conception — and the subsequent Japanese invasion and occupation of large parts of China (1931–1945) left wounds that continue to shape Sino-Japanese relations to the present day.

The "century of humiliation" that began with the Opium Wars has become a foundational narrative of modern Chinese national identity — a story of suffering and resilience that legitimizes the Chinese Communist Party's claim to have restored Chinese sovereignty and dignity, and that provides the emotional fuel for contemporary Chinese nationalism. The determination to "never again" submit to foreign domination is one of the most powerful forces in Chinese foreign policy — and understanding the historical roots of this determination is essential to understanding China's behavior in the international system today.

6. The PRC and the Cold War: From Isolation to Engagement

The founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 inaugurated a new era in Chinese foreign relations — one shaped by the dynamics of the Cold War, the ideological competition between communism and capitalism, and the determination of the new government to establish China as an independent and respected actor in international affairs.

The PRC's initial foreign policy — summarized by Mao Zedong's declaration of "leaning to one side" (一边倒, yibiandao) — aligned China firmly with the Soviet Union and the socialist camp. The Sino-Soviet alliance, formalized by the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance of 1950, provided China with economic aid, military equipment, and technical assistance that were essential to the new state's survival and development. China's entry into the Korean War in October 1950 — when Chinese "People's Volunteer Army" forces intervened against the United Nations forces approaching the Chinese border — was both a defense of national security and a dramatic announcement that the new China would not tolerate foreign military threats on its borders.

The Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s and 1960s — driven by ideological disagreements, personal rivalries between Mao and Khrushchev, and conflicting national interests — was one of the most consequential developments of the Cold War. The rupture transformed the global balance of power, ending the illusion of a monolithic communist bloc and creating a triangular dynamic among the United States, the Soviet Union, and China that reshaped international relations for the rest of the century. The border clashes between Chinese and Soviet forces along the Ussuri River in 1969 raised the specter of nuclear war between the two communist powers and accelerated the rapprochement between China and the United States.

The Sino-American rapprochement — initiated by Henry Kissinger's secret visit to Beijing in July 1971 and consummated by President Richard Nixon's historic trip to China in February 1972 — was a diplomatic revolution that transformed the Cold War landscape. The Shanghai Communiqué of 1972, in which the United States acknowledged that "all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China," established the framework for Sino-American relations that has endured — with increasing strain — to the present day. The normalization of relations in 1979, under the Carter administration, was accompanied by the severance of formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan and the establishment of the "one China policy" that remains the foundation of American China policy.

China's diplomatic opening was accompanied by a rapid expansion of its international engagement. The PRC replaced the Republic of China as the representative of "China" at the United Nations in 1971, taking both the General Assembly seat and the permanent seat on the Security Council. China established diplomatic relations with the majority of the world's states, joined international organizations, and gradually integrated itself into the institutions and norms of the international system from which it had been excluded for decades. The era of revolutionary isolation gave way to an era of pragmatic engagement that laid the groundwork for China's emergence as a global power.

7. Reform-Era Foreign Policy: "Hide Your Strength, Bide Your Time"

The reform era that began in 1978 brought a fundamental reorientation of Chinese foreign policy — from revolutionary ideology and support for global revolution to pragmatic engagement and a focus on economic development. Deng Xiaoping's foreign policy dictum — "hide your strength, bide your time" (韬光养晦, taoguang yanghui) — encapsulated a strategy of low-profile diplomacy designed to create a stable international environment in which China could pursue economic modernization without provoking hostility or confrontation from the established powers.

This strategy was remarkably successful. China's integration into the global economy — culminating in its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 — was accompanied by the development of diplomatic relationships with virtually every country in the world and by a carefully cultivated image of China as a "responsible stakeholder" in the international system. China participated actively in multilateral institutions, contributed to United Nations peacekeeping operations, and pursued a policy of "peaceful rise" (和平崛起, heping jueqi) — later renamed "peaceful development" (和平发展, heping fazhan) — that sought to reassure the international community that China's growing power did not pose a threat to the existing order.

China's relationships with its Asian neighbors evolved significantly during the reform era. The normalization of relations with Japan, following the signing of the Treaty of Peace and Friendship in 1978, was accompanied by Japanese economic aid and investment that contributed to China's early development. Relations with Southeast Asian nations were transformed from the hostility and suspicion of the Maoist era — when China supported communist insurgencies in the region — to the cooperative engagement of the reform era, symbolized by China's accession to the ASEAN Regional Forum and its proposal for a China-ASEAN Free Trade Area. The establishment of diplomatic relations with South Korea in 1992 — despite the objections of North Korea — reflected the pragmatic, economics-first orientation of reform-era diplomacy.

The Tiananmen crisis of 1989 produced a brief period of international isolation — as Western governments imposed sanctions and condemned the Chinese government's use of force against the pro-democracy movement — but the isolation was short-lived. The end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the rapid growth of the Chinese economy created powerful incentives for the United States and other Western powers to engage with China rather than isolate it. The "engagement" policy — based on the assumption that economic integration and diplomatic contact would encourage China's evolution toward a more open political system — became the consensus approach of Western governments for the next three decades.

8. The Xi Jinping Era: China as Global Power

The ascension of Xi Jinping to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012 marked a decisive break with the low-profile diplomacy of the reform era. Under Xi, China has pursued a more assertive, ambitious, and confrontational foreign policy — reflecting the country's vastly increased economic and military power, the leadership's confidence in the Chinese model, and a strategic assessment that the international environment has shifted in ways that both require and permit a more proactive approach.

The Belt and Road Initiative (一带一路, Yidai Yilu, BRI) — announced in 2013 — is the most ambitious international development program in history, involving infrastructure investment, trade agreements, and diplomatic engagement across Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America. The BRI encompasses ports, railways, highways, power plants, telecommunications networks, and industrial zones in over 140 countries, financed primarily through Chinese loans and investment. Supporters describe the BRI as a contribution to global development; critics see it as a mechanism for expanding Chinese geopolitical influence and creating debt dependency among participating countries.

China's military modernization has been equally dramatic. Defense spending has increased at double-digit rates for most of the past two decades, and the People's Liberation Army has been transformed from a large but technologically backward force into a modern military with advanced capabilities in every domain — including nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, naval power (including aircraft carriers), cyber warfare, space technology, and artificial intelligence. The construction of artificial islands and military installations in the South China Sea — in waters claimed by multiple neighboring states — has been the most visible manifestation of China's growing military assertiveness and has provoked alarm among China's Southeast Asian neighbors and the United States.

The Sino-American relationship — the most important bilateral relationship in world politics — has deteriorated sharply since the mid-2010s. The causes of this deterioration are multiple: the failure of the "engagement" hypothesis (as China became more authoritarian rather than more liberal under Xi Jinping); economic frictions including trade imbalances, intellectual property concerns, and technological competition; territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas; the Taiwan question; and the ideological dimension of a rivalry between an authoritarian one-party state and the world's leading democracy. The trade war initiated by the Trump administration in 2018, the technology restrictions imposed on Chinese companies, and the increasingly confrontational rhetoric on both sides have led many observers to describe the relationship as a "new Cold War" — though others caution that the degree of economic interdependence between the two countries makes the Cold War analogy misleading.

China's foreign policy under Xi Jinping represents, in many ways, a return to the historical pattern of a great power asserting its primacy in its own region and seeking recognition and respect from the wider world. The "Chinese Dream" (中国梦, Zhongguo Meng) — Xi's signature slogan — explicitly invokes the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" (中华民族伟大复兴, Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing) as the ultimate goal of Chinese policy, implying a return to the centrality and greatness that China enjoyed before the "century of humiliation." Whether this aspiration can be achieved peacefully — and whether the international system can accommodate the rise of a power that does not share the liberal values on which the postwar order was built — is the central question of twenty-first-century international relations.

9. China and Its Neighbors: A Panoramic View

China's relationships with its neighbors — the states and peoples on its periphery — have been shaped by geography, history, culture, and power in complex and varying ways. A brief survey of the most important bilateral relationships illuminates the diversity and significance of China's neighborhood diplomacy.

The Sino-Japanese relationship remains one of the most consequential and troubled in East Asia. The legacy of Japan's invasion and occupation of China (1931–1945) — including the Nanjing Massacre, the use of biological weapons, and the system of "comfort women" — continues to be a source of deep resentment in China and a persistent irritant in bilateral relations. Disputes over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, over Japanese prime ministers' visits to the Yasukuni Shrine (which honors Japan's war dead including convicted war criminals), and over the content of Japanese history textbooks have repeatedly strained relations. Yet the two countries are deeply interdependent economically, and the management of the Sino-Japanese relationship is critical to the stability of East Asia.

The Korean Peninsula has been a focus of Chinese foreign policy since the founding of the PRC. China's alliance with North Korea — forged in the Korean War and maintained, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, ever since — gives China leverage and responsibility in the management of North Korean nuclear proliferation and in any eventual resolution of the division of the peninsula. China's relationship with South Korea, established diplomatically in 1992, is primarily economic — South Korea is one of China's largest trading partners — but has been complicated by the deployment of the American THAAD missile defense system on South Korean territory, which China views as a threat to its security.

China's relationships with the countries of South and Southeast Asia have been shaped by the competing dynamics of economic opportunity and territorial dispute. China's claims in the South China Sea — which overlap with the claims of Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia — have been a persistent source of tension, exacerbated by China's construction of artificial islands and military installations. The Sino-Indian relationship, the most important bilateral relationship in Asia after the Sino-American and Sino-Japanese, has been marked by a combination of economic engagement and strategic rivalry — including the unresolved border dispute that led to war in 1962 and that continues to produce periodic military confrontations along the disputed frontier.

Russia has been China's most important continental neighbor throughout the modern era. The Sino-Russian relationship has oscillated between alliance (in the 1950s), confrontation (in the 1960s and 1970s), and the current "strategic partnership" — a relationship that falls short of a formal alliance but involves extensive diplomatic coordination, military cooperation, and a shared interest in counterbalancing American power. The extent to which this partnership represents a durable alignment or merely a marriage of convenience between two authoritarian states with divergent long-term interests remains a matter of debate.

10. Conclusion: The Return of the Middle Kingdom?

The arc of China's foreign relations over the past two centuries — from the self-confident center of a sinocentric world order, through the humiliation of semi-colonial subordination, to the recovery of sovereignty and the emergence as a global power — is one of the great stories of modern history. It is a story that continues to unfold, and whose outcome will shape the international system for generations to come.

The central question of Chinese foreign policy today is whether the rise of China can be accommodated within the existing international order — or whether the world is heading toward a fundamental restructuring of global power that will produce either a new order or a conflict of catastrophic proportions. China's leaders assert that their country seeks peaceful development and a "community of shared future for mankind" (人类命运共同体, renlei mingyun gongtongti) — a vision that emphasizes cooperation, mutual benefit, and respect for diversity. Critics argue that China's actions — its military buildup, its territorial assertions, its economic coercion, and its authoritarian domestic policies — are inconsistent with this rhetoric and point toward a revisionist power seeking to reshape the international order in its own image.

The history of China's foreign relations offers no simple predictions about the future. It shows that China has been both a source of stability and a source of conflict in the international system — that the Chinese state has sometimes been remarkably tolerant and accommodating of foreign peoples and ideas, and sometimes brutally aggressive and expansionist. It shows that China's behavior in the world has been shaped by internal dynamics — by the stability or instability of the government, by the state of the economy, and by the ideological orientation of the leadership — as much as by the external environment. And it shows that the relationship between China and the world is not one-directional — that the world has shaped China as profoundly as China has shaped the world.

What is certain is that the story of China and the world is far from over — and that the coming chapters of that story will be among the most consequential in human history.