Abstract
This book’s intellectual core is contained in its third chapter: the communist manifesto in the 21st century. Peter Nolan believes that, whereas Marxism is poorly understood in the West, it is well understood by, and centrally important to, the Chinese Communist Party. Whereas much of communism (loosely defined) has unwittingly been realized in the developed West, China’s leaders are working to achieve their version in their country.
Nolan may be right that China’s leaders are guided by Karl Marx, but (not being privy to the ever-secret discussions in Zhongnanhai) we cannot know that. The rest of us can only judge by the leaders’ conduct, which seems to be primarily informed by nationalism (the continuation of Qing expansionism), Leninism (powerful party), and Stalinism (political repression), none of which are paid much heed by this author.
Ideology can be a wonderful tool, but unless it is grounded in reality it can lead us astray. That is the problem with this book. The first two chapters comprise a historical overview of the political economy of the Silk Road. Aside from Marxism, Nolan’s understanding of the history of the area is mainly informed by mid-20th century scholarship that has now been largely superseded (John Fairbank) if not discredited (Joseph Needham). Game-changing 21st-century works on the subject, such as those by Johan Elverskog (Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), Peter Frankopan (The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, New York: Knopf, 2015), Valerie Hansen (The Silk Road: A New History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), and James Millward (The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), do not appear to have been consulted.
Historic Chinese imperialism is made to sound much more benign than the European varieties. (Try explaining that to a Dzungar, if you can find one whose ancestors were not slaughtered by the Qing.) Terms such as ‘violent intrusions’ and ‘terrorist warfare’ are reserved for European exploits. (Japan, long a major player in the Maritime Silk Road, is hardly mentioned in this book, whereas places like Australia and New Zealand, which were not, receive considerable attention.) Although Russian and Soviet treatment of non-Russian acquisitions is handled in a fairly neutral manner, one gets the sense that the author prefers the Mao way of eliminating the various nations, after promising anyone independence who wanted it. The Soviet model, which unfortunately allowed the survival and eventual independence of the various Central Asian republics (p. 33), was all too redolent of the ‘notorious’ European artificial nation-building in the Middle East (p. 40).
Although the book’s second chapter starts out by picking up on Xi Jinping’s One Belt, One Road, it is mostly about the historic continental and maritime Silk Road networks, which now form the basis of some of China’s geographic ambitions. Those who are inclined, say, to accept China’s claims to islands near the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam, will be happy with the author’s handling of these issues; those who are not will find it nonsense. At any rate, it is unfortunate that the author conflates those matters with the Senkaku Islands question. (Actually, China considered the Senkaku Islands to be Japanese until less than a half-century ago. Then, after resources were suspected to exist in the area, the islands were redesignated ‘China’s Diaoyu Islands’, which Nolan accepts.)
The author has major issues with the 1992 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which he feels has disadvantaged China. Actually, it is land-locked countries like Mongolia and Central Asia which lost out with UNCLOS. Maritime countries like China, with its long coastline (not to mention the Paracel Islands and Taiwan), benefited greatly from the new 200-nautical-mile-wide exclusive economic zones. Thus, Beijing made a calculation that, even if it were to follow the rules, it stood to benefit from the new regime and, accordingly, happily ratified UNCLOS. The author makes much of the fact that the United States acquired vast exclusive economic zone waters, but this was the result of having driven out the Japanese from so many Pacific islands – not so much a matter of UNCLOS as the way victor’s justice played out at the end of the Second World War. And China, having been on the winning side of the war, was also a major beneficiary of all that.
In contrast to UNCLOS, China elected not to sign the 1997 Convention on the Law of Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses. This convention, which concerns the waters that are absolutely vital to the dozen Silk Road nations downstream from China, is not mentioned in this book. So One Belt, One Road is not so much about belts and roads as it is about ‘oneness’ – with China the one in control and benefiting.
The book’s long last chapter, ‘Translating the term “class struggle” into Chinese’, is surely the oddest. Much of it is actually about Britain (or Britain-based thinkers). Unfortunately for the author’s thesis, in China itself the whole idea of class struggle is simply dead.
Nolan believes that if East and West are to live in some sort of harmony, profound global adjustments need to be made – mostly by the West. ‘Marx’s insights … can be a source of enhanced mutual understanding’ for this (p. 79). One has only to breathe the air in Beijing, or witness the global deforestation driven in part by China, to appreciate the inadequacy of these insights in the 21st century.