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Howard W. French

Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power Kindle Edition

by Howard W. French (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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From the former New York Times Asia correspondent and author of China's Second Continent, an incisive investigation of China's ideological development as it becomes an ever more aggressive player in regional and global diplomacy.

For many years after its reform and opening in 1978, China maintained an attitude of false modesty about its ambitions. That role, reports Howard French, has been set aside. China has asserted its place among the global heavyweights, revealing its plans for pan-Asian dominance by building its navy, increasing territorial claims to areas like the South China Sea, and diplomatically bullying smaller players. Underlying this attitude is a strain of thinking that casts China's present-day actions in decidedly historical terms, as the path to restoring the dynastic glory of the past. If we understand how that historical identity relates to current actions, in ways ideological, philosophical, and even legal, we can learn to forecast just what kind of global power China stands to become--and to interact wisely with a future peer.

Steeped in deeply researched history as well as on-the-ground reporting, this is French at his revelatory best.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A deep historical and cultural study of the meaning of China’s rise… Fascinating… Convincing.” —The New York Times Book Review (cover)

"Stimulating... This book is a reminder that China’s international relations take place in a historical context going back centuries if not millennia, and Mr. French is an engaging guide through that deeper history." —The Wall Street Journal

“A look at China from the inside as well as from the outside. French knows the country well… He stresses a political history that helps illuminate territorial conflicts between China and its neighbors.” —The New Yorker

“[An] essential reminder about the unparalleled influence of the past on China’s political present… One of the most lucid and illuminating books on China’s conception of power and its place in the world… Fascinating.” —The Times Literary Supplement

“Provocative… Clearly argued… Filled with memorable sentences.” —The New York Review of Books

"Lively and illuminating." —The Guardian

"Impressive... Masterful... An excellent introduction to the complex issues of East Asia and the potential for conflict in this critical region of the world." —New York Journal of Books

"Howard W. French makes it clear China’s sense of national superiority is of more than historical significance... Chilling." —The Globe and Mail

“Compelling… Fluent and interesting.” —Financial Times

“French combines wide scholarship with the instinct of a dogged reporter... Fascinating.” —The Irish Times

“French has curated a history of China’s foreign relations by the light of which current events can be read… A valuable resource for the continuity in the Chinese approach over time.” —The Japan Times

“Nuanced… The detail of [French’s] scholarship and reporting is matched by the suppleness of his prose… This will be a useful, and necessary, starting point for informed discussion.” —Publishers Weekly

"Howard French has tackled what is perhaps the most important issue of our time, and of many years to come, with the vivid prose of a first-rate reporter, the scholarship of an excellent historian, and great human sympathy.” —Ian Buruma, author of Year Zero: A History of 1945

“Everything Under the Heavens is the most persuasive account I’ve ever read of how China's history shapes its foreign policy and that of its neighbors today. A subtle and beautifully written book that offers surprising lessons for how Americans and Asians should respond to China’s rise. Strongly recommended for policy makers and citizens alike.” —Susan Shirk, chair of the 21st Century China Center, University of California-San Diego

“Taking full account of China's achievements and ambitions, without being panicked by them or losing sight of China's vulnerabilities, will be a major challenge for the next generation in the rest of the world—and in China itself. Howard French very lucidly lays out a guide to thinking about the next stage in China's evolution, and the positive signs and danger signals to be watching for.” —James Fallows, author of China Airborne

“In the brilliant Everything Under the Heavens, Howard French offers a sweeping historical view of China’s relentless attempt to build an Asian world order around its unchallenged authority. French’s meticulously reported and beautifully written book is disquieting but essential reading.” —Nayan Chanda, former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review

“In Everything Under the Heavens, Howard French has written an absorbing and penetrating dissection of the deep roots of China's claims to large swathes of the oceans off Japan and south-east Asia, with profound implications for control over vitally important global trade. French understands that China's sense of historical entitlement is both deeply emotional and crudely political, and allows Beijing to pretend to stand with Asia, while standing over it at the same time.” —Richard McGregor, author of The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers

“With Everything Under the Heavens, Howard French brings us a wonderfully well-researched and elegantly written book about what we might call China’s ‘shape memory.’ If you’re wondering why this singular country acts as it does, this volume will go a long way to explaining it." —Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director, Center on US-Relations, Asia Society

About the Author

Howard W. French wrote from Africa for The Washington Post and at The New York Times was bureau chief in Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan, and China. He is the recipient of two Overseas Press Club awards and a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee. He is the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa and China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa; he has written for The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and Rolling Stone, among other national publications. He is on the faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

www.howardwfrench.com --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

National Humiliation

To travel the twelve hundred miles southwest from Tokyo to Yonaguni, a tiny island at the farthest end of the Ryukyu chain, in a single day requires setting out early and flying on one of the two days of the week when the connections match up in Naha, the capital of Okinawa Prefecture.

During the postwar era, Japan has enjoyed a reputation as perhaps the most peaceful major country in the world. But in Okinawa, even from the air there is no escaping how incomplete, or even deceptive, this widely accepted picture is. Upon our final approach before landing in Naha, three of Japan’s white Self-Defense Force (SDF) fighters, spooling contrails in their wake, darted parallel to us in formation. Down below, both at dock and at sea, were SDF coast guard cutters and other smaller ships whose white hulls stood out against the placid-looking blue carpet of the Pacific.

Okinawa is the island where American-led Allied forces famously launched their ferocious invasion of Japan in early April 1945, losing 14,000 personnel while killing at least five times as many Japanese soldiers, along with between 42,000 and 150,000 civilians. Okinawa was captured in order to serve as the springboard for what would have been a far more challenging assault on Japan’s so-called home islands, aimed at capturing Tokyo or forcing surrender. As it happened, the war was brought to an end by the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that August. This hardly meant the end of the American story on Okinawa.

The Americans never left. Over the next seven decades the island became the most important anchor of American power in the Western Pacific, enabling the United States to hedge, or balance, seemingly indefinitely against China, whose mainland lay a mere four hundred miles to the west. From the perspective of the locals, that has made it the unhappy home of about 63 percent of the roughly twenty-five thousand American troops who are permanently stationed in Japan, despite the fact that Okinawa makes up less than 1 percent of Japan’s total landmass.

On the connecting flight to Yonaguni, we strung our way along a necklace of tiny islands that drooped off to the southwest from Okinawa, first past Miyako, then Iriomote and then an assemblage of smaller others—some flat as pancakes and patterned in the green geometric fields of commercial agriculture, others darkly mountainous, their coral approaches ringed by encroaching circular tides. Most of the visitors who come this way are drawn by great surfing or diving or the prospect of a rustic nature retreat, all of which these islands offer in abundance. The specks of land below are of greater interest, however, because they have served as interstitial tissue in the ebb and flow of empires, and today are the focus of an enormous geopolitical contest that has recently resumed in this part of East Asia. It was here, in this watery realm, that China, drawing on a combination of newfound wealth and power and some impatience, was girding for a showdown with Japan, the neighbor that had most persistently defied it over the past thirteen centuries.

For hundreds of years this string of islands, often collectively referred to simply as Okinawa, a name that fittingly means “a rope in the offing,” had been the quasi-independent kingdom of Ryukyu. Throughout much of that time, for China, this tiny monarchy had mostly served as a reminder of the nuisances of the tribute system, because the hospitality costs associated with hosting frequent visits by embassies from such a small vassal state were far out of proportion to the value of bilateral trade, so much so that Beijing made little noise about its loss when Japan annexed the islands in 1879. At altitude on a cloudless day, though, it is easy to understand how important an impediment the Ryukyus may now seem to be for the global aspirations of a rising power that sees itself as increasingly entitled.

In its entirety, Japan takes the shape of an elongated archipelago, a gently curved scythe stretching all the way from the icy ports of Russia south to the doorstep of semitropical fringes of the South China Sea. For the purposes of maritime navigation, the archipelago serves as an immense picket fence that looms off of China’s shores, restricting access to the open waters of the Pacific to a handful of easily guarded choke points. At its southern end, at Yonaguni, the westernmost point of Japan, it also comes within eyesight of Taiwan, just sixty-two miles distant. For this reason, and for reasons of history as well, the Ryukyus have come to powerfully concentrate China’s attention. It is here that this fence is at once its most fragile and strategic, sitting astride critical sea lanes connecting southern China and the vast blue waters of the Pacific Ocean.

During China’s nearly four decades of recent resurgence, Japan has represented many things to Beijing. Early in China’s opening-up period, it was, as noted, an important source of investment, especially during the 1980s. For the second time in its modern history, China saw Japan as a country that it could study and learn from economically and copy selectively as it modernized. Shortly thereafter, as an accelerating China began to pile up successes, Japan became a benchmark to be overtaken in order to affirm that China’s destiny had been redeemed and its true potential was being realized. Although China remains far poorer on a per capita basis, an important milestone was crossed along this path in 2009, when it displaced its neighbor to become the world’s second-largest economy.

But in modern times economics has represented only one dimension of the deeply competitive dynamic between the two countries. Despite its unique “peace constitution,” a legacy of its World War II defeat and American occupation, Japan is inescapably seen by Beijing as a major military rival supported by a sixty-year-old alliance with the United States, and it must be overcome if China is to recover the status it regards as its due in the region. This was stated with striking baldness even for a frequently bombastic Beijing-based newspaper, the nationalist Global Times. In a September 2014 editorial, it declared, “We should try to gain overwhelming advantages over Japan in major areas. Tokyo only shows respect to countries that have once heavily struck it or possess much greater strategic ability.” And since the early years of this century, a campaign to demonstrate this greater capability has been under way, with China sending coast guard, fishing patrol vessels, and even naval ships into the surrounding waters of the Ryukyu chain, as well as aircraft into the skies overhead, both to challenge its neighbor’s claims to sovereignty over the islands and to wear Japan down.

Had it been a theatrical production, this resumed contest between Japan and China could have been titled “The Revenge of History.” Its chief protagonist was a revitalized China, as energized and motivated as an aggrieved legal plaintiff in a liability case freshly recovered from a severe injury caused by the other party’s willful misconduct. And the interim award for damages that it seeks to recover consists of a group of five small islands and three barren rocks, collectively known as the Senkaku Islands, which are adjacent to but geologically distinct from the Ryukyus. Japan has controlled this uninhabited real estate since it annexed the Senkakus in 1895, which may seem like a long time by the standards of the familiar international system that governs our world, but is of course a mere blink of the eye in China’s long history. Chinese imperial records mention the islands as a well-known navigational marker on the seafarers’ route to the Ryukyu kingdom as early as the fifteenth century. But even more important to an aggrieved China is the timing of Japan’s annexation of the islands following its defeat of China, accelerating the collapse of the age-old Sinocentric world.

Yonaguni measures a bare eleven square miles, and its only real town is Sonai. Outside Sonai, one could go for hours without encountering another person. When I visited the island I made a brief stop at a horse farm to ask for directions. There, I struck up a conversation with a worker. He eagerly briefed me on what for him was clearly rare big news. The Japanese government had made a locally unpopular decision to build a radar station on Yonaguni, along with a billet for its newly constituted marines, he said. He pointed to a dramatic escarpment in the near distance where the station was to be built. “Most people here don’t want a base on this island,” he said. “But for quick deployment there is surely no better location.”

Actually, I had already read items in the Japanese press saying that tiny Yonaguni was being put into play in a major way in an intensifying renewal of a competition between Tokyo and Beijing whose origins lay fourteen hundred years in the past. At that time, a Japanese empress named Suiko sent an “embassy” to the Sui dynasty capital, Chang’an, led by a diplomat bearing a letter informing the Chinese court, in effect, that in protocol terms Japan would no longer be content to play the role of an ordinary vassal and considered itself to be on equal footing with the Central Kingdom.

One way to understand the Japanese move to build an early warning station and rapid response base on Yonaguni is simply to regard it as the latest reenactment of this flintiness; a firm and very public statement that Tokyo would not be intimidated by China’s size, its might or its bluster. But unlike in the past, when flintiness was cushioned by the two countries’ coexistence as neighbors with limited contact, now they lived edgily in almost promiscuous closeness.

Another way to view it, however, is simply as prudence. A few months after my visit to Yonaguni, another confirmation of its special place in the looming struggle between Japan and China was delivered by James Fanell, director of intelligence for the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Speaking at a Navy conference in San Diego, Fanell made a surprisingly blunt pronouncement about Beijing’s designs on the area, citing its large-scale military exercises in 2013 to claim that China was preparing for a “short, sharp war to destroy Japanese forces in the East China Sea, following with what can only be an expected seizure of the Senkakus.”

Captain Fanell’s comments were immediately criticized by many in the foreign policy community for their alarmism, and a few months later he was quietly forced into early retirement. But looking at Beijing’s actions in the waters of the East China Sea, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that either China is preparing to do just as Fanell said, or it wishes to instill fear in the minds of the Japanese, and most likely of the Americans too, of such an eventuality.

Since 2010, the narrow seas between the two countries have seen a severe ratcheting up of pressure on Japan as Beijing has used a range of steadily more assertive tactics. In January 2013, a Chinese frigate locked its firing radar on a Japanese destroyer, an action that is customarily taken as a threat of imminent use of force, especially in an encounter between unfriendly countries in contested territory. Under circumstances like these, it is not hard to imagine how a conflict between the two nations could easily break out by accident, as when two fighter aircraft or opposing coast guard vessels collide, with a loss of life.

There are precedents for such dangerous mishaps. The United States and China were plunged into a major bilateral crisis under circumstances like this in 2001, when a Chinese fighter pilot died in a crash after bumping a U.S. Navy EP-3E surveillance aircraft gathering signals intelligence just off the Chinese coast, seventy miles from Hainan Island. The very large power differential between China and the United States at the time prevented military retaliation by Beijing, confining the damage to diplomatic relations.

The gap in power between China and Japan in the contested seas that separate them, however, is much narrower, with Japan widely presumed to hold a tenuous and increasingly vulnerable lead. Practically, this means that even if China has not chosen this as quite the right moment for a direct confrontation, it could prove very hard or indeed impossible for it to back down after a fatal accident, particularly one in which it came off as the initial loser. The main reason for this is history—past history as well as the making of a new and future one.

After taking power in November 2012, Xi Jinping wasted little time setting the tone for his expected ten-year tenure in office. His first trip outside of the capital was to visit troops in the Guangzhou Military Region, telling them that “being able to fight and win wars is the soul of a strong army.” A few months later, just before it began operations, he toured China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, which had been purchased from Ukraine and refurbished. None of this early military signaling by Xi would have been remarkable had it not been accompanied by an increasingly full-throated state campaign of vengeful nationalism.

As anniversaries go, seventy-seven doesn’t have a very special ring, not in China nor in any other culture. But in July 2014, that didn’t discourage Xi from presiding over the largest ever commemoration of what is officially known as the War of Resistance Against Japan, which China says began with the Marco Polo Bridge incident, a showdown with Japanese troops just outside Beijing in 1937. It was as if he couldn’t wait for a chance to exploit anti-Japanese feelings. In his speech, Xi denounced Japanese whitewashing of the past, and vowed that the “Chinese people who have sacrificed . . . will unswervingly protect, with blood and life, the history and the facts.” At the conclusion of his remarks, the crowds of Chinese youth gathered for the event gave it a Maoist hue, collectively chanting, “Never forget national humiliation! Realize the Chinese dream!”

“The Chinese dream of great national rejuvenation” was how Xi often put it. It is the kind of watchword or slogan that Chinese leaders since Mao have adopted, drawing on an imperial tradition of reign slogans. But where most of Mao’s successors have waited several years, even until the second of what is traditionally a mandate of two five-year terms, before announcing the organizing thought behind their presidency, Xi proclaimed his from the very start. The Marco Polo commemoration was by no means a one-off, either. Under Xi, a spate of other propaganda initiatives have been regularly orchestrated with the aim of reviving and channeling popular ire toward Japan.

In January 2014, the northeastern city of Harbin opened a memorial hall for the Korean independence activist Ahn Jung-geun, who assassinated Japan’s first prime minister, Hirobumi Ito, in 1909. The following month, two new national holidays were introduced, both of them focused on Japan: the “War Against Japanese Aggression Victory Day” and the “Nanjing Massacre Memorial Day.” For good measure, the government commissioned the $6 million construction of a full-size replica of an eighty-meter-long warship sunk by Japan during the Sino-Japanese War, intended as a reminder to the Chinese people of their country’s defeat in that conflict. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01HA4JUKE
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (March 14, 2017)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 14, 2017
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 50107 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 317 pages

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Howard W. French

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Howard French is a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Prior to joining the Columbia faculty, in 2008, he was a reporter and senior writer for The New York Times, where he worked as a foreign correspondent for more than two decades. During this time, French served as the paper's bureau chief in Shanghai, Tokyo, Abidjan and Miami (covering Central America and the Caribbean).

French's documentary photography has featured in solo and group exhibitions on four continents, and collected by the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum in St. Louis.

For more information about his work, please visit his website: howardwfrench.com or follow him on twitter: @hofrench.

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Sean K.

Misleading Title, Pointless Speculation

Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2017

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Despite its sweeping subtitle, the scope of the book on China’s past history and its push for global power is quite narrow. The former is limited to the tributary system that courts of ancient China employed to deal with its neighbors, while the latter amounts to no more than a recitation of the territorial conflicts, both current and in the recent past, that China has been involved with in the Far East. There is scanty description of China’s hundred-year humiliation in the hands of Western Colonial powers and Imperial Japan, and there is no reference to China’s unique culture, an essential part of its history for its understanding. Important facets of power pertaining to geopolitics and global economy are nowhere to be found.

Throughout its long history, China spent considerable effort managing its relations with its neighbors, which it sometimes invaded, and by which it was sometimes defeated and even conquered. In this respect, it was no more aggressive than many other ancient empires. More as a means of pacification, Chinese courts of various dynasties exacted tributes from neighboring countries that they had defeated in battles but found inconvenient to rule directly, in return rendering them gifts that were often worth more than the tributes. At times, this tributary system worked in the reverse: it was the Chinese emperors that paid tributes to the “barbarians”, and even offered up princesses for marriage. No doubt this system has its root in the feeling of cultural superiority harbored by the Chinese emperors and their officials over their neighbors, whom they held in subservience. The author focuses on this attitude and speculates that it continues to guide the behavior of China toward its neighbors in the Far East and beyond. He makes it an encompassing explanation of China’s action, even including adoption of the strategy of carrot and stick and the proposals of bilateral negotiations to settle territorial disputes. This is hard to believe considering how complex the present world is and how many sites of power exist. Neither is it credible that the feeling of un-tinged cultural superiority persists in a China that has experienced and to a large extent assimilated with the Western culture. There are many more Chinese college graduates who know about Shakespeare, Newton, Washington than similar crowds in the West who know about Li Po, and Sun Yat-sen (I cannot find a Chinese scientist of Newton’s stature). Many more Chinese play piano and violin than westerners play pipa and erhu. In any case, it is doubtful anything is to be gained from the author’s perspective for China’s neighbors in managing their affairs with China. They can do no better than trying to deal with China as with any country that looks after its own interest, without worrying too much about what deep roots drive its behaviors.

The introductory chapter offers a succinct description of the content of the book. Succeeding chapters, describing separately China’s territorial disputes with Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam, sprinkled with the author’s conversations with random individuals, and quotes from an unconventional academic analysis of the birth of modern Chinese nationhood (namely, it benefited from Philippines’s war of resistance to American imperialism), seem unfocused and rambling. Most of the materials are readily available in the Internet, which has of course the advantage of being up-to-date for rapidly developing events the book describes. The concluding chapter is oddly out of place. It makes no reference to the bulk of the book’s arguments. Instead it harps on the coming demise of China owing to its aging population, from which the author appears to draw comfort after painting a dark picture of a rising China.

The Chinese phrase tian xia occurs incessantly in the book. It literally means under the heavens, and is how the ancient Chinese referred to the world. It is still used nowadays in many idioms, always with the same meaning. It appears in a classic poem thousands of years old, boasting of the wide dominion of the then emperors. Seizing upon this, the author misappropriates the phrase to connote arrogance and subjugation, and uses it to codify an unfavorable view of China.

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wsmrer

Two very different books here

Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2017

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The author is an incredibly well informed journalist and a masterful story teller but difficult to read after a point because he is captured with the concept of tian xia one under heaven the ancient Chinese concept of the Emperor being the centre of the universe and all subservient to him, the broader reading being the Middle Kingdom is paramount others owe tribute.
For French this concept as he mentions has ancestral roots flowing back to his grandfather and father and “although it was not a guiding motivation in my research,” he carries that perception as driving Chinese actions in past and contemporary settings and this heavily colors his analysis. Add to this the subtitle ‘China’s Push for Global Power’ and you have a negative reading of Chinese actions as self centered threatening and ominous. Book One.
This part is slow going at times and you may want to skim for the unifying ‘tian xia’ summaries.

Book Two is his Conclusion.
He lets go of trying to show the historical China and settles into an insightful rendering of China as it is and as it likely will be in coming decades and the interactions with its many neighbors in the pursuit of Xi Jinping’s ‘One Belt One Road.’*

For those who are concerned with China’s impact on America as China moves into position as another world power his analysis should be comforting, America will do well he believes.

*There are two other works that covers the topic without an ideological cover than are compliments to French’s and focuses on China’s role in its current scheme for leadership: China’s Asian Dream: Empire Building along the New Silk Road by British journalist Tom Miller. Excellent coverage of details and possible conflicts.

And a most recent release: Asia's Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century, by Richard McGregor that covers French’s Book One history without the driving ‘tian xia’ overlay, for often very different outcomes worth knowing.

24 people found this helpful

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Sarge II

Thouroughly researched, very well-written

Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2019

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Howard French dissects China's fixation for harmonious hierarchy in the Indo-Pacific, citing historic roots of regional dependence and animosity with Mainland and connecting it with Beijing's current bid to become the preeminent world power. French's in-depth look into China's often tumultuous political and economic relationship between Vietnam and Japan (despite the similarities of the two with the Mainland) sheds light on the historic mistrust of both countries toward their larger neighbor.

Chapter Six' focus on the South China Sea and the 2018 afterword grounds French's analysis, taking into consideration Beijing's courtship of the ASEAN vis-a-vis the maritime dispute and Donald Trump's revision (or disruption, depends who you ask) of decades-long US foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific.

While the book sometimes takes a US-centric approach, I still learned a great deal due to French's use of concepts in International Relations theory.

This is a must read for any academic, political analyst, or politician who seeks to better understand how China's history colors its current policies.

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Amazon Customer

内容が充実して、読んで良かった!　[Content-rich & worth reading]

Reviewed in Japan on March 17, 2021

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この本の著者は、洞察力があり、書かれていることは基本的に明確で、十分な根拠があると分かります。
著者はこの本を作るために多くの資料を深く読み込みました。筆者の主張のすべてに同意するわけではないが、それでもこの本を読んで良かった。 [ I found this book insightful, basically clear and well-reasoned. The author has done a lot of careful reading to produce this book. Although I do not agree with all of his points, still I enjoyed reading it. ]

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