World Power History Tour Pivot to Asia

The first leg of the World Power World History Tour is complete. We have toured through American history together. Now, like the USA claimed to do under Obama, we pivot to Asia, or if you prefer Eurasia, the World Island.

First stop on the tour is China.

Overview of the China World History Tour

Over eight weeks we will discover China together. I will share what I have learned each week. I will recommend history and cultural texts that offer fresh perspectives on world history, literature, leaders, civilization-states, and the momentous changes today.

And through the whole eight weeks, I will be taking deep dives into one essential text for understanding Modern China: Klaus Mühlhahn, Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping (2019).

Historian of China, Rana Mitter, whose books I will also introduce you to on the tour reviewed this modern classic.

Klaus Mühlhahn has provided a new, wide-ranging history of modern China. Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping impressively fulfills the goals of a major survey history of China, offering both extensive coverage of different types of history (political, social, and cultural among them) as well as case studies, examples, and human stories that bring life to the centuries that have brought China to modernity. It is set fair to become a standard work for the 2020s and beyond.”

My approach to the deep dive post for paid subscribers will be different to the American tour. I will follow this one book in the deep dives through the whole eight-week tour. We will go in chronological order through the four major periods of modern Chinese history in Making China Modern:

• The Rise and Fall of Qing China 1644 to 1900

• The Chinese Revolutions of 1900 to 1948

• Remaking China through Socialist Transformation and the Cultural Revolution, 1949 to 1976

• China Rising from 1976, Deng Xiaoping’s Great Transformation to Contemporary China

For the weekly Saturday book recommendation posts, I will follow a similar pattern to the American tour. On this leg of the tour, sadly however, I do not know the language. Some readers may well know Chinese literature, history, politics, and culture better than I do. Many readers may be, like me, curious to know more and yet be frustrated with the biased presentation of China in academic, geopolitical and media representations in the West.

Especially over the last ten years, Western attitudes to China have become regrettably hawkish and polemically cartoonish. Democracy vs Autocracy rhetoric has surged. Passionate views on issues such as Taiwan are expressed but sometimes mixed with propaganda messages that serve US interests. In Australia, there has been a systematic “Red China Scare,” and former government officials, such as Michael Pezzullo, openly canvass preparing the country for war with our major trading partner.

Books of that ilk will not be recommended here. But nor can I honestly present Chinese voices in Chinese language. I have chosen books that make sincere, scholarly attempts to understand China. Most are written by Westerners, but as with Rana Mitter, a British South Asian man who is fluent in Chinese language and resident now in the USA, they are not the kind of ranting stooges of the USA empire who have inflamed the “Red China Scare” in Australia. I have screened out the worst geopolitical propaganda, whether sponsored by China or the West, but all scholars have their bias, and in these times even the best scholars succumb to social pressures to conform with party lines. I have done my best to choose books I have learned from and that you can learn from too.

In the deep dive post on Wednesday, I will preview the full China World Tour in more detail. In this week’s post we are taking a week’s rest from our frantic travelling pace, making a short stay-over at the airport in our imagined Hong Kong, and reflecting on our personal encounters with China, and what we have learned on the tour of America.

Reflections on my Encounters with China

This world tour series is not the first time I have written on China on Substack or YouTube. But it is the first time I have tried to be more orderly about interpreting for others China’s history, its changing role in the world, and the differences between image and reality in the Western imagination.

I travelled to China in 2003. It was prior to the Beijing Olympics. The hutongs of the old city were being cleared. There was a visible presence of ‘authoritarianism’ or at least an enforced official line in public communications. I was lucky enough to have been referred by an Australian arts administration friend to one of her counterparts at a Beijing Museum. She showed me around the Summer Palace. I saw the scars of the Cultural Revolution, which had long intrigued me. I touched the damage of the British looters who fired the palace and gardens in 1860, a scandalous act of vandalism by the benign British Empire. It made up for my personal neglect of Chinese history and culture at university. But I could not find a history book that really spoke to me and helped me make sense of the vast, diverse, rich literature that is the history of China.

A few years ago, I tried again sporadically. Some titles from that late attempt have made their way to my list of book recommendations for this tour. But it was not until 2022, when the NATO-Ukraine-Russia War intensified the ‘Red China Scare’ in Australia, that I started to engage with broader, better literature on the history of China.

The ‘Red China Scare’ was a personal shock. I had known over decades scholars, politicians, community leaders, business leaders, government officials and artists who had sought to build bridges between Australia and China. Why were we burning those bridges now in the service of American Primacy? Was it racism, American colonialism, or servile elites? Was China rising or about to collapse? Was China authoritarian or a Confucian socialist democracy?

I was lucky enough to explore these questions through books and interviews with guests on my YouTube channel, including Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Marie Favereau, How the Mongol Horde Changed the World (including of course ruling China under the Yuan dynasty), Warwick Powell, Sophie Loy-Wilson, and Sam Roggeveen.

I reviewed histories and films of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in Red Memory. Dread Trauma (16 December 2023).

In March 2024 I reflected on why Australian foreign policy turned its back on the Asian century. Why did “the intelligence of multicultural Australia not translate to our leadership’s understanding of the new multipolar world?” One explanation I offered was socio-cultural. We turned our relationship with China into a transactional business deal, not a rounded social, cultural, political relationship.

First, our leaders developed, in a fragmented society, a transactional relationship to the multicultural base of our society. Its potential has not translated to new political ideas or broader engagement with the world. For example, we did business with China; but did not learn to live with the real China in all its complexity. Domestically, the political parties took the low road of ethnic branch stacking and community grant-making, rather than the high road of reimagining the Australian role in the world through the eyes of its highly diverse community.

Jeff Rich, Why did Australia misunderstand the multipolar world?

This narrowing of humane relationships into trade and security concerns led Australia into its China Scare trap. History can restore the fullness of the many bonds between the peoples of China and Australia, and between China and the wider West.

Late last year, I asked:

How can citizens of the West free themselves of historical illusions about China that drive the world to war? How can history help us to imagine a world order better than our present world order of United Nations? How can history help us to imagine Different Nations that live in Harmony?

Chinese History after the ‘Thucydides Trap’ (9 December 2024)

I hope this world tour of China helps you find answers to these questions, wherever you live in the world.

Reflections on the World Tour of America

The China Tour begins next Saturday. In my final deep dive post on Wednesday, Snow White, Trump’s Cultural Revolution and the USA’s Lost Soft Power, I closed out with the reflections at the end from Felipe Fernández-Armesto Millenium: A History of Our Last Thousand Years. He was not an American Atlantic Romantic.

“The period of ‘Atlantic supremacy’ has been brief; if a period of Pacific Rim initiative does indeed succeed it, it will probably be briefer. … [From a long-term perspective historians will] see our millennium as continuous with the last and the next; characterized, say, by brief challenges from Islam and the west to an otherwise almost continuous history of Chinese preponderance.”

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Millenium, pp. 708-709

These prescient words were published thirty years ago in 1995. Initiative has shifted, with growing rapidity over the last five years. The world is pivoting away from the USA, and so is the world tour. While we travel to China, India, Europe and Russia for the rest of the 2025 world tour, we will doubtless recall memories of America and catch glimpses of its influence on other civilization-states.

But let us not leave our former hegemon behind without reflecting on the lessons and best moments of this world tour of America.

My three magical creative moments from the tour were:

• My interview with Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt’s Vision of Freedom | Walter Benjamin's Poetry of History

• Manifest Destiny Meets Machismo: The Strongman Tradition in American Politics

• My Song of Fire and Ice in the USA, Barack Obama: the Prince who was promised, and failed.

My deepest lesson was the surprise shift in the cultural influence of the USA in the world marked by the success of Ne Zha 2 and Deep Seek AI.

What are your reflections on how the world tour has shifted your understanding of America in the world?

Thanks for reading

🙏❤️🌏

Jeff