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China Historical Legacy and Worldview
China's long and rich history as the world's oldest continuous
civilization has affected Chinese foreign relations in various
ways. For centuries the Chinese empire enjoyed basically
unchallenged greatness and self-sufficiency
(see The Imperial Era
, ch. 1). China saw itself as the cultural center of the universe, a
view reflected in the concept of the Middle Kingdom (Zhongguo, the
Chinese word for China). For the most part, it viewed non-Chinese
peoples as uncivilized barbarians. Although China was occasionally
overrun and ruled by these "barbarians," as during the Yuan (1279-
1368) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, the non-Chinese usually
retained enough Chinese institutions to maintain a continuity of
tradition. Because the Chinese emperor was considered the ruler of
all mankind by virtue of his innate superiority, relations with
other states or entities were tributary, rather than state-to-state
relations between equals. Traditionally, there was no equivalent of
a foreign ministry; foreign relations included such activities as
tributary missions to the emperor made by countries seeking trade
with China and Chinese military expeditions against neighboring
barbarians to keep them outside China's borders. The first
Europeans who sought trade with China, beginning in the sixteenth
century, were received as tributary missions and had to conform to
the formalities and rituals of the tribute system at the Chinese
court. China's view of itself as the undisputed center of
civilization--a phenomenon called sinocentrism--remained basically
unchanged until the nineteenth century, when the Qing dynasty began
to deteriorate under Western pressure.
A traditional concept related to China's view of itself as the
Middle Kingdom that continues to have relevance is the idea of
"using barbarians to control barbarians." In modern times, this
practice has taken the form of using relations with one foreign
power as a counterweight to relations with another. Two examples
are China's policy of "leaning to one side" in the Sino-Soviet
alliance of the 1950s for support against the United States and
Beijing's rapprochement with the United States in the 1970s to
counteract the Soviet threat China perceived at the time. China's
strong desire for sovereignty and independence of action, however,
seems to have made Chinese alliances or quasi-alliances shortlived .
Another effect of China's historical legacy is its tendency
toward isolationism and an ambivalence about opening up to the
outside world. In imperial times, China's foreign relations varied
from dynasty to dynasty--from cosmopolitan periods like the Tang
dynasty (A.D. 618-907) to isolationist periods such as the Ming
dynasty (1368-1644), when few foreigners were allowed in the
country. Overall, the sinocentric worldview and China's history of
centuries of self-sufficiency favored isolation, which contributed
to China's difficulty when confronted by expansionist Western
powers in the nineteenth century. The debate over self-reliance and
possible corruption by foreign influences or opening up to the
outside world in order to modernize more quickly has continued for
over a century and was still an issue in the late 1980s.
Data as of July 1987
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