How History Affects Chinese Conduct

As China’s power and influence continue to grow in Asia and beyond, many analysts look to Chinese history to understand how a strong China will behave and view the world in the future. Many of these attempts to apply an historical lens engage in gross simplifications and misreadings of the relevance and meaning of hundreds of years of Chinese thought and behavior. China is often viewed, incorrectly, as if it existed as a monolithic whole over centuries, possessed the same political and security outlook at each stage of its development, and behaved as a modern nation state does today. In particular, some observers blithely assert that China always sought to dominate its world in hard power terms, often succeeded in doing so, and will naturally seek such a position of dominance in the future.