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It is commonsense now to say that the world is in the midst of a grand shift of power from the West to the East. Due to its rapid economic growth, large territory and population, modernizing military and glorious civilization, many commentators have concluded that China will not only be the next superpower, but is destined to dominate the twenty-first century. People in China and around the world thus are asking about Beijing's plans for the future: What are China's grand objectives? What will it do with its new power? Will China buck the historical trend of dissatisfied powers to "peacefully rise" within the current international system, as its official policy tells us? How will Beijing reshape international norms and institutions as it shifts from being a rule-taker to a rule-maker?
In the 2000s the trend among scholars was to see China's values converging with Western ones as its economy and society became more integrated into the international system. In Social States: China in International Institutions, 1980-2000, for example, Alastair Iain Johnston argues that Beijing has been socialized into international norms through its growing practice of multilateral diplomacy (Johnston 2008). Rosemary Foot and Andrew Walter go even further to argue that China is more of a status quo power than the United States--at least during the George W. Bush administration (Foot and Walter 2011). According to this view, the future is located in the West (although maybe not the U.S.), and involves the innovation and distribution of international society's new values and institutions.
While the trend in the 2000s was to look to future convergence between East and West, this Trends essay examines books that look to the past--China's imperial history--not only for China's future but also that of the world. Rather than figure China's modernization as a process of socialization, which they would criticize as "Westernization," books as diverse as Martin Jacques's When China Rules the World (2009), Liu Mingfu's Zhongguo meng [The China Dream] (2010) and David C. Kang's China Rising (2007) each argue that China has its own modernity, which is not only different from the West but is actually its opposite. According to this view, which is promoted by both academics and policy-makers,...