Empire is a dirty word in the postcolonial era. No country today wants to be thought of that way, least of all China, which until 1911 was known as the “great Qing empire.” Instead, the Chinese Communist Party portrays China as a diverse but unified society, with an essential character, a single cohesive history—and a set of rightful borders that, like moral values, are eternal. Discussion of Chinese empire has little place in this vision of China. Western imperialism is the yoke that Mao Zedong cast off and that Xi Jinping still vigilantly combats; there is no Eastern imperialism.
Empire is a dirty word in the postcolonial era. No country today wants to be thought of that way, least of all China, which until 1911 was known as the “great Qing empire.” Instead, the Chinese Communist Party portrays China as a diverse but unified society, with an essential character, a single cohesive history—and a set of rightful borders that, like moral values, are eternal. Discussion of Chinese empire has little place in this vision of China. Western imperialism is the yoke that Mao Zedong cast off and that Xi Jinping still vigilantly combats; there is no Eastern imperialism.
At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning With China, Edward Wong, Viking, 464 pp., $32, June 2024
A new book by veteran New York Times correspondent Edward Wong throttles this view. In At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning With China, Wong asserts that Xi’s “China dream” is the dream of a rejuvenated Chinese empire. Drawing on contemporary scholarship, years of reporting, and his own family history, Wong presents the People’s Republic of China as the successor to the Qing empire and frames many of the leading controversies about China today as those of imperial periphery. These controversies include the genocide in Xinjiang, the occupation of Tibet, the imposition of authoritarianism on Hong Kong, and Beijing’s threats to take Taiwan by force.
His is not a new assertion, but Wong wades into this debate with some unique perspectives. In Iraq, Wong’s first foreign assignment for the Times, he witnessed firsthand the “imperial bloodletting” of America’s war. When he moved to Beijing in 2008, he found a hopeful and ambitious society led by a government promising a peaceful rise and equality among nations. If “any power represented an alternative vision of the future,” Wong thought at the time, “surely it was China.”
But by the time he left China eight years later, Wong writes, “this had become obvious to me: the story of China under Communist Party rule is one of a nation straining with all its might to become an empire that surpasses that of America, and that envisions itself as the inheritor of the rule and the realm of the Qing dynasty.”
A depiction of the Taiping Rebellion in southern China from 1850 to 1864 against the ruling Manchu-led Qing Dynasty. Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Wong’s disillusionment with the People’s Republic follows a similar trajectory as his father’s 50 years earlier, and this is where the heart of the book lies. In tracing out the parallel journeys that he and his father, Yook Kearn Wong, took—from the peripheries of diaspora and British-ruled Hong Kong, to the heart of empire in Beijing, to China’s far western frontier of Xinjiang, and finally to Washington, the seat of American empire—Wong has written a sweeping epic in its own right, one that tells the story of Chinese empire through the lives of the people swept up in tectonic shifts far beyond their control.
The story begins from the outside in, with Wong the father’s childhood in the 1930s and 1940s split between Hong Kong under British colonial rule and Taishan County in Guangdong, and with Wong the son’s childhood in the United States in the 1970s as a member of the Taishanese global diaspora. Yook Kearn was an elementary school student in Hong Kong when the Japanese took control of the city, forcing him and his brother to return to their ancestral village of Taishan, situated in the Pearl River Delta close to China’s eastern coast. It was a fateful move for Wong’s father, placing him on a path that would keep him in mainland China for the next two decades while many of his family members remained in Hong Kong or moved to the United States.
Moving to the United States was a path that many Taishanese had already taken. The county became a top source of emigration out of China in the 19th century as Taishanese men poured into California during the gold rush, and many helped build the transcontinental railroad. The reader gets to follow along with Wong the son as he makes his first visit to his ancestral home in Taishan in 2009 and finds the abandoned family villa his grandfather built in the 1930s. Nature is slowly reclaiming the old house, one of many such now-derelict compounds in the area built with money earned abroad. “Taishan was about movement, about a headlong rush toward the wider world, the one beyond the brick houses and bamboo groves and fish ponds,” Wong reflects. “Sometimes people left and came home again, but more often they left and never looked back.”
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This story of one region within China offers a glimpse into the challenges that the country’s emperors have historically faced in governing such a large and diverse populace. Only in the 20th century did the government formally adopt Mandarin as the national language that all residents must learn to speak (a policy that under Mao and again under Xi has included repression of local Chinese dialects and other minority languages seen as undermining national unity and fostering competing loyalties). Guangdong, in the southeast, has long been seen as a center of rebellion. Southerners in particular chafed under the Manchu rulers who swept in on horseback from the northern steppes in the 17th century, overthrowing the Ming dynasty—the last imperial dynasty to be ruled by the dominant Han ethnic group—and establishing the Qing. This resentment was due in part to what Wong describes as “a sense of ethnic hostility, since many Chinese in the south saw themselves as Han being subjugated by the Manchus, alien conquerors.”
Yook Kearn lived in Guangdong through the Japanese occupation, the resumption of the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists, and the Communist victory in 1949. Inspired in part by the now-ubiquitous propaganda spread by state media, Yook Kearn began to believe in the dream of a new China and turned his eyes toward the capital city of Beijing, where he enrolled in university and then enlisted in the People’s Liberation Army.
Wong traces Beijing’s history as a settlement established by waves of warring steppe peoples who conquered northern China, creating a series of dynasties—the Khitan, the Jurchen, the Mongols, and the Manchus. He refers to Beijing as the “old capital of the Manchus” and to the final dynastic rulers of China not as “the Qing” or as “China’s imperial rulers” but, again, as “the Manchus.”
This is an interesting—and controversial—framing that Wong employs throughout the book. It’s a conscious choice made to highlight the multiethnic nature of the Chinese empire. In its final centuries of imperial rule, China wasn’t governed by its majority ethnic group, the Han, who comprise more than 90 percent of the population and whose languages and culture have come to define what is meant by “Chinese-ness.” Modern scholarship in China presents the Manchu rulers as following in the footsteps of previous conquering barbarians, who soon assimilated with the majority Han and thus became “Chinese,” leaving little mark on the civilization they adopted.
People’s Liberation Army soldiers enter Beijing to the cheers of the crowd after the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in 1949. Keystone-FranceGamma-Rapho via Getty Pictures
But Wong presents the Manchus’ impact as substantial, even definitive, in creating China as we know it today. He outlines how the Manchus expanded China’s borders larger than ever before, establishing various forms of imperial oversight over vast swaths of territory from Manchuria in the north to the Central Asian Uyghur heartland in China’s far west to Tibet in the far southwest. “The Qing conquests were the culmination of a centuries-old pattern of history in the Asian heartland: cycles of invasion, subjugation, and assimilation that defined what many people call China,” Wong writes.
Unsurprisingly, New Qing History is not popular in the People’s Republic. In a 2015 article published by the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Li Zhiting, a member of the National Qing History Compilation Committee, accused American New Qing historians as viewing “the history of China from an imperialist standpoint” and “regarding the Qing dynasty as ‘Qing dynasty imperialism.’”
Discussions of multiethnic empire in the book become deeply and tangibly personal. Yook Kearn was expelled from the air force academy, perhaps for having family in Hong Kong and the United States, and was sent west on a slow, dust-covered journey to Xinjiang, which he experienced as a form of exile to China’s traditional “realm of banishment.” He lived in Xinjiang for about six years, leading propaganda sessions to train the region’s Uyghur and Kazakh soldiers in the Communist dream of a new China, tending to sheep, and working on farms. He acquired conversational fluency in Uyghur, gained the trust of his superior officers, and applied to become a member of the Communist Party.
Shepherds move their flock back to the farm after the Sunday market in Kashgar, Xinjiang, China, in an undated archival photo.David Butow/Corbis via Getty Images
Some of Wong’s most evocative and wistful prose appears in his descriptions of Xinjiang, informed by his father’s vivid recollections decades later, including his impressions of a small herd of deer fleeing across a snowy plain and the warmth of sleeping on a wooden floor in a remote village after months in frozen Altay.
Wong narrates his own travels to Xinjiang to report on the deepening crackdown on Uyghurs and other Muslim groups and also to retrace his father’s steps. Here, Wong’s experience as a war correspondent in Iraq gives rare authority to his unflattering comparison of Beijing’s militarization of Xinjiang to the U.S. wars on terrorism.
Yook Kearn eventually left Xinjiang to continue his engineering studies in Xi’an. In the next few years, Mao’s purges, his persecution of celebrated general Peng Dehuai, and the Great Leap Forward planted doubts in Yook Kearn’s mind about the direction the party was taking China. Food became scarce in Xi’an, and Yook Kearn became gaunt and malnourished. The final blow to his China dream came in late 1959, when he learned his application to join the Communist Party had been rejected, dashing his hopes to become an airplane engineer and help strengthen the country. “Father finally realized that the party would never trust him, no matter how hard he worked for the cause or what sacrifices he made,” Wong writes. “Mired in their fears, in their ideas of power, in the labyrinth of their own making, they had no reserves of trust or faith or generosity.”
Yook Kearn decided to return to Hong Kong, no easy feat in Mao’s China. His Hong Kong birth certificate and family ties there eventually made his escape from China possible, and the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act in the United States changed his future yet again. The law made it possible for Chinese immigrants in the country to sponsor visas for family members, and in 1967, Yook Kearn’s brother in the United States sponsored his visa. He settled in the Washington, D.C., area—where his son, Edward, was born a few years later. The cycle of diaspora, periphery, and return to empire would begin again.
Frequent chronological leaps in At the Edge of Empire require some effort on the part of the reader to follow the narrative flow, and the large cast of relatives is sometimes difficult to keep straight, such as Wong’s great-grandfather’s concubine’s daughter, who was the half-sister of Wong’s grandmother and also the mother of former U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke—making Locke and Wong something like half-second cousins. But those minor flaws are eminently forgivable and likely unavoidable when telling a tale that spans centuries, generations, and continents.
What Wong witnessed in Xinjiang, and along the other frontiers of Tibet and Hong Kong, disabused him of the idea that the People’s Republic had something better to offer than the reigning superpower, the United States. “There is a clarity to the nature of each imperium in the way it exercises power far from the center. I saw this with America in Iraq, and I saw this with China,” he writes. Yet the decisions these two powers make will continue to shape the world’s future, Wong concludes, meaning that Beijing and Washington have no choice but to find a way to coexist—while the families caught up in these imperial tensions must find their own paths.
Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.
Bethany Allen is a journalist covering China from Taipei. She is the author of Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World. She was previously an assistant editor and contributing reporter at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @BethanyAllenEbr
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