Like Henry Kissinger's 2011 On China and Robert Luttwak's The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy, Dellios and Ferguson trace China's strategy to classical Chinese philosophies. Holding the Middle Kingdom together and keeping back the barbarians required complex and ever-changing mixtures of the passive yin, which used prestige and flattery, and the active yang, which used armed expeditions. The benevolence and stability of Confucianism was always paired with the hegemony and compulsion of the legalist school. Today, this corresponds to China's insistence, on the one hand that its "peaceful rise and peaceful development" aim at a "harmonious world but, on the other hand, engaging in a naval buildup to secure the "first island chain" aims at "area denial" to the US fleet. Dellios and Ferguson take old Chinese thought seriously--perhaps too seriously--as Beijing's underlying motivation. Possible modern explanations--angry nationalism due to the "century of humiliation," John Mearsheimer's realism, or protection of resource lifelines--play lesser roles. Beijing, the authors indicate, seems to aim for a reconstruction of its tianxia (all under heaven), its benevolent rule of a harmonious world. From this, readers cannot neatly distinguish a peaceful from an expansionist China. Recommended. Graduate, research, and professional collections

Choice Reviews

This is a long overdue book, where two Western scholars begin to examine the evolving Asian century from a Chinese political and cultural perspective. They explain and explore the Confucian geopolitics that have already been remarkably successful in the face of daunting challenges and that must command much greater Western attention in the future.

Reginald Little, International Confucian Association