China’s Geo-Politics and Political Developments in the early Twenty-First Century: Uncharted Territory or a Return to Historical Precedents?

Derek Heng, a Department Chair and Professor of History at NAU is presenting: “China’s Geo-Politics and Political Developments in the early Twenty-First Century: Uncharted Territory or a Return to Historical Precedents?“.

The recent constitutional amendments approved by the National People’s Congress of China in March 2018, allowing the Chinese president to remain in office without term limits, has set off a flurry of discussion in the western world about the new political direction that China has embarked upon. Coupled with the implementation of the One-Road-One-Belt Initiative, and China’s assertion of territoriality in the South China Sea in the last decade, the trajectory of China’s geo-political strategy and its internal political developments have presently been cast by Western observers as a pathway into uncharted territory since the 19th century. Importantly, deep soul-searching as to how China’s ascendency and trajectory has been misread by Western governments and policy-makers, remains the narrative of the day. Aptly summarizing the mood in the West during the annual meeting of the Chinese National People’s Congress in March, the Economist Magazine’s cover (March 1st, 2018) declared, “How the West Got China Wrong”. The talk will provide a contrarian view to this supposed fundamental surprise that caught the West, and will make the argument both from the Asian perspective and the perspective of deep history that these developments may be understood as part of a longer cyclical pattern of China’s internal history and external interactions with Southeast Asia that extends well into the first millennium AD. The talk will then postulate the possible trajectories that China will head towards in the near future, and how technological advancements of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries could augment or mitigate those historical patterns.