Haunted by Chaos
China’s Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
An American Interest Top Book of the Year
“Khan has unraveled the mystery of Chinese grand strategy, showing why insecurity lies at the root of Chinese power projection… Readers will not find a shrewder analysis as to why the Chinese act as they do.”
—Robert D. Kaplan, author of The Revenge of Geography
Before the Chinese Communist Party came to power, China lay broken and fragmented. Today it is a force on the global stage, and yet its leaders have continued to be haunted by the past. Drawing on an array of sources, Sulmaan Wasif Khan chronicles the grand strategies that have sought not only to protect China from aggression but also to ensure it would never again experience the powerlessness of the late Qing and Republican eras.
The dramatic variations in China’s modern history have obscured the commonality of purpose that binds the country’s leaders. Analyzing the calculus behind their decision making, Khan explores how they wove diplomatic, military, and economic power together to keep a fragile country safe in a world they saw as hostile. Dangerous and shrewd, Mao Zedong made China whole and succeeded in keeping it so, while the caustic, impatient Deng Xiaoping dragged China into the modern world. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao served as cautious custodians of the Deng legacy, but the powerful and deeply insecure Xi Jinping has shown an assertiveness that has raised both fear and hope across the globe.
For all their considerable costs, China’s grand strategies have been largely successful. But the country faces great challenges today. Its population is aging, its government is undermined by corruption, its neighbors are arming out of concern over its growing power, and environmental degradation threatens catastrophe. A question Haunted by Chaos raises is whether China’s time-tested approach can respond to the looming threats of the twenty-first century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Khan brings a polyglot command of primary and secondary sources to bear in an authoritative treatment of Chinese statecraft since Mao Zedong, focusing on grand strategy, or the process of "weav together different categories of power to win and keep a state." Exploring Mao's success in reestablishing "Greater China" after several decades of post Qing dynasty fragmentation, foreign occupation, and civil war, Khan argues that most of China's major political and diplomatic initiatives of the last 50 years including the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward were designed with the power and cohesion of the state in mind. Mao's late-1960s Cultural Revolution, however, remains an unsatisfyingly aberrant exception to Khan's framework. Nevertheless, through his conceptual lens, the PRC's vast and diverse constituencies, porous and often disputed borders, regional perils and promises, and painstakingly deliberate rise as global economic giant all tend to make sense as responding practically to existential concerns about the country's survival. Given China's outsize presence on the world stage, Khan's insights into the underlying rationale of its leadership will afford his own effort an audience beyond the field of international relations.
