The unimaginably long-lived imperial order finally collapsed in 1911. That fate did not just come out of the blue, though. The powerful emperor Qian Long reigned for a good sixty years (1736–1796), but his successors were of another calibre entirely. After his death, the unmistakeable signs of dynastic decay therefore manifested themselves one by one: Corruption, peasant rebellions, natural disasters, and foreign aggression. China had the misfortune that this time the barbarians did not invade on horseback – as in the previous two thousand years – but by sea, and with gunboats. The elite were not prepared for their arrival. They viewed the threat from Western imperialism through the lens of their time-tested policy towards barbarians: By seducing them, the enemy would inevitably conform to Chinese mores, and recognise the supremacy of the highest civilisation on earth – just as the Xiongnu, Turkic, and Manchu invaders had done. That was a fatal miscalculation, however: The ancient empire did not recognise the new world order it was facing, let alone adapt to it, and was downgraded by the Western powers and Japan to a semi-colonial status. While nothing remains to be seen of what later came to be called the Century of Humiliation (1839–1949), the memory of the destruction of railways, factories, and cities continues to fester. That memory explains the prickly responses of the Beijing regime when its former aggressors do something it does not like, as well as its continual suspicion that the West is again setting out to colonise China – this time not with violence, but with ideas.

The Sun at its Zenith

In the middle of the eighteenth century there was still little that pointed to the impending doom. The sun stood at the zenith of its dynastic trajectory. Economic growth, political stability, and the introduction of new crops from America – sweet potatoes, corn, peanuts – led to a spectacular increase in population: From 138 million in 1700 to at least 430 million in 1850, according to some estimates. As protector and guardian of the written word, Qian Long had all the key literary and philosophical works of the country collected, edited, and re-published.

I began this book with the prospect that China can take three paths: Continuing the current line of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, following the route of Western parliamentary democracy, or going a third way. Once upon a time, in the heady days of the early twentieth century, the introduction of a Western parliamentary system seemed only a matter of time. The general elections of 1912, in which forty million men cast their votes, seemed to ring in the beginning of a new epoch. That hope went up in smoke when President Yuan Shikai refused to recognise the victory of the Kuomintang, abolished the republic and crowned himself emperor. The tone had thus been set for the coming century: Every ruler after Yuan (the warlords, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong and Mao's successors) tolerated no opposition and made clear why his regime was superior to the one before him. The kmt has constituted the only break with this triumph of tyranny, by shedding its Leninist skin in the 1980s and turning Taiwan into a democratic nation. Can the Communists follow that example? Nicholas Kristof, the well-known columnist for The New York Times, thinks that, thanks to the wealth that has been created and China's spectacularly-improved medical care, the Party has nothing to fear from free elections. Because of their popularity in the rural districts, he even expects them to win with a ‘landslide’.

And yet nothing points to a turn towards democracy in present-day China. Democracy is associated with the fall of the Soviet Union, which caused economic and political chaos and – worst of all evils – the collapse of the country. Within the foreseeable future, there will be no deviation from Deng Xiaoping's line that ‘the Party's power has to be maintained for at least a hundred years’. The course set by Deng is further elaborated by Liu Yunshan's ‘first dimension’ (of the five, mentioned in Chapter 5) that the Party is a necessary historical movement because of the failed experiments with ‘constitutional monarchy, imperial restoration, parliamentarism, multi-party system and presidential government’. Nothing points to the existence of a liberal faction inside the top ranks of the Party.

When President Xi Jinping took office in March 2013, hopes were high that he would set out on a new, liberal course. The feats of his father Xi Zhongxun strengthened these expectations. As Party Secretary in the late 1970s of the southern province of Guangdong, the elder Xi had played an important role in setting up the ‘Special Economic Zones’ where foreign businesses were allowed to invest in China for the first time since 1949. Xi Sr was not only a reformer, but reputedly also a humanist. During the 1950s he was responsible in Qinghai province for relations between the Han Chinese and Tibetans. The land reforms introduced by the Communists had thrown the local economy into disarray and incited hatred towards the Chinese occupier, but Xi did not respond repressively. He mitigated the worst excesses, and even after the Tibetan uprising against these measures was beaten down, he showed a conciliatory attitude. His flexibility made an impression upon the young Dalai Lama, who in 1954 was staying in Beijing for a few months. The spiritual leader called the elder Xi ‘very friendly, comparatively open-minded and very nice’. He even gave the elder Xi a wristwatch as a present. According to the Dalai Lama's brother, who met Xi Zhongxun at the beginning of the 1980s, he was still wearing the watch at that time.

Xi Jr is reportedly cut from the same cloth, and would like to use the office of paramount leader to realise the dream of his father: A liberal and reform-minded China. For various reasons this argument amounts to wishful thinking. First, it is debatable whether the elder Xi was indeed as liberal as the annals would have us believe. The Sinologist Frank Dikötter has uncovered how at the beginning of the 1950s Xi Zhongxun overtook Mao ‘on the left’ by pointing out to him that the number of victims of the anti-corruption campaign at that time was too low: In the northwest of the country alone, there should not be 340,000, but more than one million people detained.

History, as written by the Party, sees 1949 as a dividing line between the Old and the New China. That is nothing exceptional: Every new dynasty presents itself as the founder of a new order that casts aside its old and depraved predecessor. Since the first days of its nearly seventy-year-old existence, this New China has gone through unprecedented changes: Not only as a result of Mao's ambition to change China into a Communist utopia, but also because of Deng Xiaoping's 1978 decision to liberate both the peasants and businesses – with the result that China is well on the way to becoming the largest economy in the world. The core of this new state cannot be easily interpreted. A hybrid creature has emerged, one that venerates its founder like a demigod, while discarding the bulk of his policies; one that clings to Marxism- Leninism as its state ideology, while behaving like a Confucianist emperor; and one (perhaps the biggest ‘contradiction’) that allows its people to enter the modern world, while telling them that the West and China can ‘in essence’ not be reconciled. In short, a schizophrenic country that does not know what it is, what it stands for or where it is going. Its foreign policy has a similarly split personality: Beijing talks incessantly about the ‘peaceful development of China’ and ‘a harmonious world order’, but in practice its behaviour has become ever more assertive and nationalistic. To understand these two constituent elements – aggression and cooperation – in China's foreign policy better, we must take a closer look at its two creators: Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Despite their difference in policies, both these leaders adhered to the sacrosanct principle that no single leader of the People's Republic tampers with: The sovereignty of China.

The Ideological Basis

The founding of the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949 was accompanied by great optimism.

As China's great reformer Kang Youwei already knew, realising the Great Harmony is going to take centuries. The Party posits that the Lesser Prosperity is around the corner, but that is a domestic objective. Abroad, it is pursuing a ‘harmonious world order’, though what Beijing has brought about seems rather like the ‘Great Disharmony’ – certainly in East Asia. Would a politically-reformed China conduct its affairs differently? It probably would, for a democratically-elected government must direct its energies toward issues like housing, healthcare and employment – otherwise it will not be re-elected. Nationalism causes, in the words of the ‘Tibetan’ Xuan Zang (interviewed in Chapter 6), a ‘briefly burning passion’, but in the long term its base is too narrow to provide an elected government with any legitimacy. This general observation, though, does not do justice to the complexity characterising the foreign policy of every major power. The United States is a democratic country, but in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it has waged many wars sanctioned by Congress. Democracy does also not necessarily lead to an openminded attitude towards the world. The short-sighted policy of ‘America First’ testifies to that. Trump's turning away from the world is, however, not a unique phenomenon in American history. The pitching back and forth between isolationism and involvement defines every major power.

A democratic China will still fight to defend its ‘core interests’, just as today's regime does not engage in power politics alone. It also conducts an active soft-power policy, provides concessional loans to developing countries on a large scale and supplies soldiers for un peacekeeping missions. But despite these necessary nuances, an authoritarian China is more inclined to pursue military adventure than a reformed China will. The logic of nationalism as a new source of legitimacy requires it to do so. The psychological impetus for this expansion of power – the yearning for reputation and respect – weighs heavier on a regime that is unsure of its domestic legitimacy than for a democratically-elected government; and certainly, when that same regime regularly plays the humiliation card for past ills inflicted on China.

With eighty million members and four billion dollars in foreign currency, the Party (i.e. the Communist Party of China) is the largest and richest political party on the face of the earth. Having founded the People's Republic of China in 1949, the cpc has already been in power for nearly seventy years, yet shows absolutely no signs of tiring of government. Quite the contrary. In his farewell speech as Party Secretary in October 2012, Hu Jintao said that the Party will never take ‘the wrong path of changing its banner’. For those who failed to understand this metaphor, Hu made his meaning crystal clear: ‘We will never copy a western political system.’ Xi Jinping is equally explicit in his aversion towards Western democracy, and asserts that ‘Chinese democracy’ means improving its ‘consultative democracy’, not abolishing the oneparty state. Aside from these ideological nuances, the core question is whether the political system is capable of solving the country's gigantic social and economic problems. Driven by state investment and exports, China has since the beginning of the 1990s realized average growth figures of 10 percent per annum: But the expiration date for that model is in sight. China is one of the most polluted countries in the world: According to a recent report from the World Health Organisation, air pollution alone is killing nearly three million people each year – and that is just one form of pollution claiming countless victims. The second, very visible effect of the economic boom is the growing gap between rich and poor. After the United States, China has the largest number of billionaires in the world, flying in private jets and buying châteaux in France. Its Wirtschaftswunder has a flip side, though.

The history of China is long, and it is monumental. In the middle of the second millennium BCE, in the central basin of the Yellow River, a culture arose that lived in large, walled cities, wrote in pictographs, waged war in chariots, and venerated its ancestors. Later known as the Shang dynasty, this political entity viewed the surrounding peoples as barbarians. In the eleventh century BCE, the Shang was replaced by the Zhou dynasty, which rapidly fell apart into warring states. Even so, each of these kingdoms felt it was part of a shared and superior culture. In 221 BCE, the kingdom of Qin united the country, and an empire emerged that in its prosperity and military might rivalled that of the Romans, simultaneous in its ascendancy ten thousand kilometres away. The king of Qin was a despot. But in his reign, he standardised weights and measures, unified the writing system, connected the country with roads, and kept the northern barbarians at bay through a series of defence works that would, after subsequent dynasties, become known as the Great Wall. He called himself Qin Shi Huangdi – the first emperor of the Qin – and boasted that his bloodline would rule for ‘ten thousand generations’. Qin Shi Huangdi governed the country with an iron fist: Countless peasants were drawn into slavery by threat or deceit to carry out major public works, and legislation was executed in cold-blooded terms. A man failing to report a family transgression was hacked in two. After the death of the first emperor in 210 BCE, major peasant rebellions arose, and the Qin was soon replaced by the Han, a dynasty with a greater capacity for endurance: It did not fall until four hundred years later. The Han set the trend for the two thousand years that followed. It elevated Confucianism to a political doctrine and introduced the principle of meritocracy: The country's administrators were not selected for their family background, but for their knowledge and virtue.

Karl Marx believed that capitalism would succumb under the weight of its own contradictions. ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ runs the risk of meeting the same fate, because its ‘contradictions’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century are as staggering as they are many: A capitalist economy led by a Leninist party; a Socialist state with greater income differences than most capitalist countries; an upcoming power whose defence budget grows at more than 10 percent annually, yet who promotes peace and harmony. Our Western mind is not equipped to make sense of these contrasts: We need a clear-cut explanation. The co-existence of different realities confuses us − all the more so when they reside in one and the same person. The Qian Long Emperor, a refined man of letters and patron of Buddhism, slaughtered nearly one million Dzungars in the middle of the eighteenth century. The no less refined poet, Mao Zedong, was responsible for the deaths of many more victims. And to give a recent example: How can Xi Jinping foster an almost blind reverence for Mao, while still wanting to modernize the country economically? As the Sinologist Orville Schell has said, ‘Modern China is best understood by those capable of embracing contradictions.’

Classical Chinese philosophy is fascinated by duality. Taoism teaches that the existence of opposites is a natural phenomenon: Yin is not worse than yang, but by keeping nature in balance they drive it forward in an eternal rhythm. Opposition to this duality, or wanting to ‘harmonise’ its antipodal character, is useless. The best thing one can do is to surrender to it; that is why, for the followers of Lao Zi, living a virtuous life means the casting aside of civilisation.

An unnatural glow lights up the warm summer night. At the Southern Gate of the Forbidden City, right under the six-metre-tall portrait of Mao Zedong, a tank has been set ablaze. Flames leak out and shoot way up into the air, giving the bloated countenance of the Great Helmsman a sinister glare. Screaming feverishly, an enraged mob circles the steel skeleton shimmering in the heat – as if they mean to exorcise the evil that is bound to come. Though this one tank has been rendered harmless by the demonstrators on Tiananmen Square, everybody knows that more of them will follow.

Then, all of a sudden, panic sets in, rage turns abruptly into fear. ‘The army's coming, they’re coming from the west, from Mengtougou!’ Rudderless, the mob starts to drift, unsure what to do next. The flower-power mood of the previous weeks has dissipated, evaporated into the threatening glow of the muggy night. For just a moment, cheerfully crackling fireworks break the spell, but my Chinese friends realise more quickly than I that it is something completely different. ‘Take cover, they’re shooting!’ Screaming, thousands of people run in every direction, taking cover behind trees and low walls at the edge of the square.

In one long sprint I run in the direction of the Peking Hotel and hide behind a planter. The intensity of the fireworks increases, as if gigantic firecrackers were being shot from every rooftop in Beijing. The immeasurably large square catches all the sounds and throws them back: The ra-ta-tat of shots, the cries of fear and rage, the dull rumble of the tanks that come rolling in from the west. My next sprint brings me into the lobby of the Peking Hotel. Recovering my breath, I look around and see it is deserted, but in the corner I spot a couple of public telephones. It is three o’clock in the morning, and I have been on the move since the evening started. In a world without cell phones, I had virtually disappeared from the face of the earth – it was high time to tell my wife that I am still alive.

There are many conceivable models for shaping China's future political landscape. Western circles often speculate about a ‘third way’, one that will occupy the middle ground between today's autocratic system – Communist in name only – and Western parliamentary democracy. Opinions amongst Chinese thinkers are more pluralistic, and often more radical as well. Especially since the 19th Party Congress held in October 2017, many openly preach a ‘Chinese Model’ that opposes the West. It is hard to parse this wide-ranging discourse into neat trends. In his book China Goes Global, David Shambaugh distinguishes at least seven schools – a lot fewer than the hundred that existed, it is said, during China's Golden Age of philosophy (fifth century BCE), yet their existence does show the liveliness of the ongoing intellectual debate.

The most glaring difference is that between nationalists and internationalists. What connects the former group is the sense that China is a great, ancient, and unique country whose time has come to resume its legitimate role as a major superpower. According to this school, Western technologies and processes can contribute to the achievement of that goal, but cannot be allowed to change the essence of China. While the internationalists do not argue for a slavish imitation of Western liberalism per se, they do resist the chauvinist noises proclaiming Chinese culture to be of a unique and higher order. They are in favour of a convergence of East and West, and believe in the Doctrine of the Mean which was already advocated by Confucius. In the realm of economics, the nationalists argue for a large-scale nationalisation, viewing the privatisation of state businesses as the cause of the great income disparity and acute corruption that plagues present-day China. These excesses, according to the internationalists, cannot be fought by returning to the days of Mao's ‘iron rice bowl’ but by expanding Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms with political reforms, such as the separation of Party and state.

On 7 June 1989, three days after Tiananmen Square had been swept clean, I went to my office just outside the city centre. It was in the Guoji Dasha (‘International Building’), a high-rise office building on the Jianguomenwai, the eastern portion of the wide avenue that criss-crosses Beijing from east to west. The scars from the military advance of the People's Liberation Army were still everywhere to be seen: Burnt-out busses, uprooted trees and bullet holes in the walls. The streets usually crawling with masses of people were deserted. In many places banners against the government were still hanging: ‘Bloodshed must be answered with blood!’ ‘Death to Premier Li Peng!’

I parked my grey Jeep Cherokee a short walk away from the office, went into the abandoned lobby of the building and took the lift to the fifth floor. When I entered the small amro-Bank office, the crystal-clear light of Beijing streamed serenely through the windows. There were stories going around that the offices of foreign businesses had been searched by the Public Security Bureau, but there was no evidence of that. The tray with the outgoing mail on my desk was full of stacks of paper, patiently waiting for the office staff who had been sitting at home for weeks. I took a few important documents, like insurance policies, out of their folders, grabbed the money out of the safe, and sat down behind my desk. Aimlessly, I looked out across the wide deserted lanes of the Jianguomenwai. The window was open, the curtains rustled softly in the wind – the traumatised city was shrouded in an unreal silence.

The rumble of heavy vehicles yanked me out of my slumber. I jumped up and looked outside. In a long and threatening ribbon of potential violence, tanks and open lorries with soldiers were driving in from the west. It seemed as if they were going to drive past our office building, but suddenly the very first vehicle stopped. One soldier after the other jumped out onto the street and ran for the bushes, seeking cover. A commanding officer barked orders, and all eyes and gun barrels were aimed at my office building. Then all hell broke loose.

In 1999, the American journal Foreign Affairs published the article ‘Does China Matter?’ The answer given by its author Gerald Segal was devastating: ‘Odd as it may seem, the country that is home to a fifth of humankind is overrated as a market, a power, and a source of ideas. At best, China is a second-rank middle power that has mastered the art of diplomatic theatre: It has us willingly suspending our disbelief in its strength. In fact, China is better understood as a theoretical power – a country that has promised to deliver for much of the last 150 years but has consistently disappointed.’ In 2018, this opinion is no longer tenable. China has grown into an economic superpower. Its market for cars is bigger than that of the United States; four of the ten biggest banks in the world are Chinese; and through its large-scale investments, the economies of most African countries have been unrecognisably changed. And we could go on like this for a while. Even so, Segal's position is not altogether outdated, for mentally China is still not ready for global leadership. It remains – as substantiated convincingly by David Shambaugh in his book China Goes Global: The Partial Power – an introverted country that does not want to take the lead in world affairs. ‘It is punching below its weight,’ as Americans so nicely put it.

But as with most things in modern China, this position of reticence is changing as well. China increasingly manifests itself as a regional, even global power, fighting pirates off the coast of Somalia, evacuating its nationals from Libya and Yemen, and holding naval exercises with the Russians in the Mediterranean. Domestic developments are the reason for this willingness ‘to take some actions’. Since the 2008 Olympic Games, control of Chinese society has been tightened: State-owned businesses have regained the influence they had lost under Zhu Rongji (China's premier from 1998–2003), the presence of the Party in people's everyday lives has intensified, and enthusiasm for political reforms has evaporated. Abroad, this situation translates into a more assertive and more nationalistic policy.