The Real Empire

The New Chinese Empire

And What It Means for the United States

by Ross Terrill

Basic, 432 pp., $30

China's New Rulers

The Secret Files

by Andrew J. Nathan and Bruce Gilley

New York Review, 150 pp., $21.95

Chinese Military Power

Report of an Independent Task Force

Council on Foreign Relations, 104 pp.

Annual Report on The Military Power of the People's Republic of China

Department of Defense, 52 pp.

HOW TELLING IS IT that critics (and even some advocates) of the Bush administration's foreign policy routinely refer to "the American empire" and Washington's "imperial burden"--while ignoring the fact that the People's Republic of China is the sole major multicultural empire left in the world? More than a third of China's territory is populated by non-Chinese. Its three largest provinces--Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang--are home to non-Chinese civilizations. And, throughout the People's Republic, a cacophony of languages are spoken, many of which are as far from Chinese as English is. What's more, China openly expects to expand its rule to include ocean areas far beyond its coast and the strategically central island of Taiwan. The fact that Taiwan is home to a separate and democratic state doesn't seem to make the slightest bit of difference to Beijing. Whatever difficulties lie in describing America's global preeminence and the character of its foreign policy, there should be no philological impediment to calling China what it is: a large empire with even larger imperial ambitions.

There are, of course, any number of reasons for the inability to see China clearly. In part, it's because China has made remarkable economic progress since the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, and analysts get overly focused in tracking the ups and downs of China's modernization. But this kind of political myopia is nothing new. For much of the last half of the Cold War, an amazing number of scholars and commentators had a difficult time bringing themselves to conclude that the Soviet Union was a qualitatively different animal from the states that populated the free world. Ultimately, that was because they couldn't acknowledge that the West was home to decent and just states, and the Soviet Union was, in fact, "an evil empire." If there was a problem then in seeing what was self-evident, it's hardly a surprise that it continues to be a problem today.

Looking past what is right in front of them, far too many Sinologists and foreign-policy strategists fail to take account of the essential character of the Chinese state. The result is a serious misunderstanding of how the People's Republic of China rules, how it relates to other states, and what its behavior might be in the years immediately ahead. To long-standing China-watcher and journalist Ross Terrill's credit, he reminds us in his new book, "The New Chinese Empire," what the obvious is: "Repeatedly, American and other officials, commentators, and scholars skip over the fundamentals of the authoritarian Chinese state. Often there is a plausible reason: culture is destiny, or economics is destiny, worthy analysts believe; politics will take care of itself as society evolves. . . . But, for the coming years, politics is destiny for the PRC." Let others describe the nuts and bolts of the present regime. Terrill sees his task as setting out China's governing architecture.

And China's politics is that of an imperial state: governing over Chinese and non-Chinese alike largely by fiat; seeking to extend that rule over even more people, if necessary by force; and insisting on its right to do so by a modern version of a mandate from heaven.

ACCORDING TO TERRILL, the ugly truth of Chinese history is that China has never abandoned the empire. Even after the demise of the last Chinese dynasty in 1911, China's new "republican" rulers, Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, reverted to imperial form. At the end, both tossed aside the ideal of a federal and democratic China in favor of the top-down ways of traditional China. And, of course, once Mao came to power, any hope that China would shake off this legacy died. Mao did not create a new China, let alone a "new man" as many in the West claimed. Ruling as a "neo-emperor"--issuing deadly edicts from above, surrounded by a "court" of family and political eunuchs, and receiving homage from the nation's workers, who bowed before his picture at the start and end of each work day--Mao left a legacy that amounts to nothing short of "a counterrevolution against the 1911 revolution."