My second example arises from lessons learnt from other people’s histories, especially those of modern national empires. Chinese leaders have been studying the emergence of the nation-states in Western Europe for a long time now, and noted how many of them were established when earlier empires disintegrated (the classic case of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century has been compared with the United States as the first new nation created out of the British empire). Of particular relevance to China was that some nation-states had expanded to create their own national empires by the nineteenth century. The success of the Dutch, the British and the French set the standards of modern imperial success, and later nation-states (like Germany) so admired them that they set out to build their own national empires.

In Asia, closely emulating both the German and British empires, the Japanese followed suit. The Chinese are well aware that the later entrants to imperial rivalry and the contest for territory were more urgently aggressive than those that existed before them. However, they also note how others are today using the Germany and Japan analogies to speculate about China’s nationalist future, and they have been prepared to counter such analogies by policies and actions that would render such comparisons unjustified. Some recent examples are China’s self-conscious use of phrases like ‘peaceful rise’, ‘peaceful development’, and ‘social harmony’ as ultimate national goals. One might also include the new Confucius Institute program that emulates the British Council, Alliance Française and Goethe Institute, which are symbols of post-imperial efforts to dilute traditional notions of power projection.

That is one side of the coin. The other side derives from the history of new and smaller nation-states being created out of failed and declining empires, something that larger nation-states and successful empires had encouraged. The best examples were the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires that many Chinese leaders carefully studied. Some of the new entities ended by becoming colonies of other empires—notably those of Britain, France and Russia. Yet there were also examples of the old imperial cores themselves becoming residual states, like that of Austria and, even more strikingly, that of modern Turkey. Decades later, this was repeated with the defeat of Germany and Japan, followed afterwards by Britain, France, Netherlands, Portugal and, after 1990, Soviet Russia. In each case, an empire more or less retreated back to the original nation-state.

China saw early in the twentieth century that this same fate could befall imperial China if empires like Russia, Japan and Britain each had their way. Japan went the furthest by detaching Taiwan and Manchuria and trying to control several Chinese provinces as parts of the Japanese empire. Russia helped to establish an independent Mongolia and failed in Xinjiang, but British India seemed only half-hearted about recognising Tibet as a distinct polity. China was fortunate. By pursuing their own, often competing interests, the Great Powers ultimately accepted Chinese sovereignty over territories defined by Qing imperial borders. The end of the Second World War confirmed those borders when Taiwan and Manchuria were returned to China. In that way, China was an unusual example where the nation-state-to-be was more or less the previous empire—the Manchu empire becoming the Chinese nation, one might say.

China’s rise today is tied to its ability to make this emperor-state equal to China the nation-state. Most members of the United Nations that recognise the People’s Republic of China have accepted this, but debates about Taiwan, Tibet and the Uighur cause in Xinjiang remain. Such discord reflects shifting views about the security of post-Second World War boundaries. Of course, some of these views were by-products of the Cold War that used all varieties of nationalisms and localisms against international communism. But the threats to Chinese ideas of its national borders remain. Soviet interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia had troubled Mao Zedong, and the so-called Brezhnev doctrine was fiercely rejected at the time. More recently, China is not alone in watching the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the invasion of Iraq with apprehension. An age that threatens regime change, when the supposed sanctity of a country’s sovereignty can no longer be taken for granted, calls for close attention to the lessons of other peoples’ histories. The Chinese know that these lessons could apply to China itself. If such threats persist, it could feed into the nationalist agenda of those who place China’s unification and survival above other goals. That would be a severe test of what the Chinese might have learnt about the need to contain heightened calls for robust nationalism in a suspicious neighbourhood, and to do it before that became too difficult for the leaders to control.