The clash of victimizations: Donald Trump's fixation on fallen glory and festering grievance is uncomfortably close to the story China tells about itself.

• Author: Kurtz-Phelan, Daniel
• Position: On political books - Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power - Book review

Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power

by Howard W. French

Knopf, 352 pp.

Countries, like people, tell themselves stories in order to live. They look to the past, its travails as well as its triumphs, and from that raw material they craft stories. These stories offer lessons and goals. They provide legitimacy to leaders and cohesion to communities. They generate meaning and direction for the present.

The problem is that no two countries tell the same story, even when describing the same events. One country's glory is another country's grievance. One's founding myth is another's crowning shame. In international relations, such dissonance is dangerous. Governments quarrel over what history makes rightfully theirs. Resentment over old offenses overrides powerful incentives to cooperate. Interests, threats, pride, justice--determinants of war and peace are defined by stories that never overlap exactly and often clash catastrophically. The past is never dead; it is kindling for future conflict.

"History offers the best foundation for anticipating and understanding China's motivations and behavior in shaping the world to come," writes journalist Howard French in Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power. But there are the facts of history, and then there are its uses. In seeking an answer to one of the most important questions in foreign policy today--"What kind of power is China likely to become?"--French's real concern is the latter: the stories China tells itself.

The core element in those stories, as French surveys them, is the notion of tian xia--"under heaven," a phrase meant to capture the "half-idealized, half-mythologized past" in which China dominated the world it knew. Over millennia, French writes, imperial China built "one of the most remarkable international systems that human civilization has ever seen--a unique form of what has sometimes been described as an extremely loose and distant brand of indirect rule by China over a very considerable slice of humanity." In the mid-1800s, this "Pax Sinica" was picked apart by outside powers--the advent of a "century of humiliation," which, the story goes, ended only with communist revolution in 1949. Now, French argues, "[everything about its diplomatic language says that [China] views the western Pacific as it once did its ancient known world, its tian xia, and that it intends for the region to return...