Feng Zhang, The Strategist: Is China Ready to Resume Its Imperial Glory?
Since assuming the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership in November 2012, Chinese president Xi Jinping’s great ambitions have become well known. Domestically, he’s advanced the grand goal of what he calls the China Dream: ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people’. He has surprised virtually every observer by the speed and efficiency with which he’s consolidated power in the party and military. Xi is now seen as China’s most powerful leader after Deng Xiaoping, if not Mao Zedong.
The two major pillars of Xi’s assertive foreign policy—security activism predominately in the maritime domain, and economic diplomacy by way of the so-called ‘one belt, one road’ policy—suggest that Xi isn’t content with making China a great power in the region and beyond; he also wants to make China a leading and even dominant power in key areas of Asia–Pacific regional relations. Indeed, as a keen student of history, Xi may be trying to restore the role of China in the contemporary East Asian system to its historical height during the era of the Chinese empire (221BC–1911AD).
WNU Editor: Some in China may be dreaming of a return of its imperial past .... but I suspect that many of China's neighbours are not enthusiastic on such a prospect.
China's empire was always an idiosyncratic sort. The PRC already controls most of the actual physical empire at its greatest extent, they're just missing some parts to the north and Taiwan. Other than that their empire usually had more to do with cultural and political influence, soft power so to speak. This is something completely different, wholly unrelated to the imperial past and more out of a European playbook.
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