The Chinese Colossus: Is the Middle Kingdom's Past a Guide to its Future?

With a formidable military, a rapidly expanding population, and growing economic prowess, China is emerging as a twenty-first-century global superpower. Even though China is an international leader in modern business and technology, both its attitude toward the present and view of the future are rooted in the past — and we need to understand that connection in order to address the challenges presented by Asia's giant.

In The Mind of Empire: China's History and Modern Foreign Relations (University Press of Kentucky), Senior Fellow Christopher Ford traces China's self-image and its role in the world order from the age of Confucius to today, arguing that despite its exposure to, and experience of, the modern world, China is still strongly influenced by a hierarchical view of political order in ways that could have important implications for twenty-first-century geopolitics.

Senior Fellow Charles Horner's Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate: Memories of Empire in a New Global Context (University of Georgia Press) examines how new views of Old China's imperial history and New China's great transformations since 1979 are interacting with the Modern West to shape culture at home and grand strategy abroad.