What Does China Want?

China’s Perception of Its Own History

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China is in the news, almost all the time. In their lengthy reviews and in-depth reports, experts often manage to expound on the rise of China.

Sometimes it’s about China’s economy, such as a recent Wall Street Journal article titled “China’s Economy Won’t Overtake the U.S., Some Now Predict”.

Sometimes it’s blunter, like this headline from a recent piece in the Foreign Policy journal: “What Does China Want?” The authors of this article suggest that “China doesn’t want to be a superpower… It wants to be the superpower.” (Bold emphasis added).

There is so much we don’t know about China’s history, and our guest believes “that’s a problem, especially as China grows more powerful… on the global stage.”

Michael Schuman, who is a nonresident senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, joined us from Beijing to talk about history — that is, China’s version of world history. This is a long view of a long history in which one thing remained constant: China’s status as a superpower!

So, what did China as a superpower look like?