Book Review Essay

Tom Miller, a former journalist and now senior analyst at Gavekal Research, is a China expert who has spent years in the country and Asia more broadly, and can speak and read Chinese. This is his second book; the first one, China’s Urban Billion was published by Zed in 2012. He is in an excellent position for having written China’s Asian Dream, which focuses on China’s strategic vision and actions to reclaim what it sees as its rightful place as the undisputed leader in Asia. The book gives a systematic and lively treatise of China’s aspirations on the continent and in the world. It paints a picture that poses significant challenges not only to the neighboring countries in the region, but to the West and the United States in particular. The first part of the book provides a broad historical and geopolitical context, including a brief overview of China’s long history and its humiliation by Britain and the British East Asia Company in the First Opium War (1839–1842) and the 1842 Treaty of Nanking that forced China to open its ports to foreign trade. After that, in 1895, followed the defeat in the Sino-Japanese war, no less by a country that China regarded a little brother. Then in 1931 Japan invaded China’s northeast setting up Manchukuo, a puppet state. In 1937, a full-out war broke out followed by Japanese domination for years to come. These were humiliations that China has never forgotten (although Mao later thanked Japan for the invasion, as it eventually enabled the successful Communist takeover in 1949). After this background, Chapter 1 tells about the ongoing effort by China to establish a “New Silk Road,” what it calls “One Belt, One Road,” connecting China to its neighbors through both terrestrial and maritime routes eventually leading to Europe. The initiative is linked to financing by the Silk Road Fund and the newly established Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The aim is to tie Asian countries more tightly to China’s sphere of interest through extensive investment in infrastructure. This proactive strategy, as Miller points out, is a clear departure from China’s earlier foreign policy established by Deng Xiaoping that “diplomacy must serve the greater goal of domestic development” (p. 26). The current President Xi Jingping has taken a much more aggressive stance in promoting Chinese interests abroad.