The world's longest recorded history

This discussion of Michael Shuman's Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World has to start with an apology: I read the audio book version without having a print copy on hand until afterward. If you are not familiar with the English renditions of Chinese names and dynasties (and I'm definitely not), much of what you hear is hard to hold on to. If my blurb convinces you look into this volume, get a print copy -- it's in libraries.

Shuman's premise is simple and very intellectually healthy:

There is no such thing as world history, at least one that holds the same meaning for everyone. Which world history is important to you depends on who you are, where you live and where you come from. ... Just as we in the West are products of our world history, the Chinese are a creation of theirs.

Just as we are steeped in vague notions of coming from a continuous civilization arising from Greece and Rome, adopting and adapting Christianity in Europe through the so-called Middle Ages, and extending Europe's known world by trade, imperialism, slavery, and the force of "civilized" arms, Chinese people live and breathe a confidence in a multi-millennial, uniquely civilized Chinese past.

... China is different from other empires [that have come and gone.] To a great degree it still exists. China, as a nation-state, is a version of previous, independent Chinese entities that formed in the same general geographic location. The Chinese political system, at its core, has proven remarkably resilient. ... At some periods, often long ones, China was broken into competing states or ruled by invading foreigners. ...Yet the most incredible aspect of China's political history is how often the empire was reassembled. ... If China wasn't unified, its political elite, again and again and again, wished it to be.

Rulers and invaders came and went, but a certain characteristics of a Confucian-inflected polity remained:

 ... the Chinese imperial order was an autocracy. There were no formal constraints on the authority of the emperor. ... Today... top leaders can do as they please, and party cadres, court justices, and civil servants will do as they are so ordered. ... Unlike those of us in the West, the Chinese cannot look back fondly on ancient republics. The political ideal throughout the millennia-long course of Chinese political development has been authoritarian monarchy. ... And as China rises on the world stage, it is bringing with it the baggage it has carried through its long historical journey -- both the honorable and the dishonorable.

Western barbarians (that's us) with their temporarily superior technology and efficiency breached the kingdom in the mid-19th century and Chinese found themselves calling their history into question. Elites wondered, what if these invaders were onto something? What if ...

Chinese civilization was, in fact, not superior. For thousands of years, confidence in their own culture had remained unshaken. The rise and fall of countless dynasties, the invasions of Turks, Jurchens, and Mongols, green-eyed beauties, Buddhist monks -- nothing shook the conviction that Chinese civilization was civilization. ... Now however, the Chinese ran smack into an alternative civilization, that owed nothing to China's own, believed itself to be superior, and had the guns, money and power to back its claims. The experience rattled the Chinese elite to its very bones ... at the beginning of the twentieth century, with China helplessly prostrate before the world's imperialists, [their] enduring confidence in this ancient system had been badly shaken. ...

Twentieth century China endured the collapse of the dynastic imperial authority, an aborted attempt at constitutionalism, the vicious Japanese invasion and occupation at mid-century, and the triumph another Western-inflected force, the Chinese Communist Party. The transitions were bloody and crazy making.

Many Chinese retreated into racial tribalism:

The Chinese had always believed themselves a superior civilization; now they began to perceive themselves as a superior race. The white race may have gotten the upper hand for the moment, the thinking went, but the Han Chinese with their thousands of years of civilization, were surely more advanced that those black, red, and brown peoples -- and of course the steppe Manchus. ... China's long distrust of foreigners was being brewed with hatred of the Manchus [who had imposed the last, failed imperial dynasty], bitterness toward the humiliations inflicted by Western powers, and emerging Western theories about natural selection into a potent stew of Han nationalism ... the [old] empire was seething with ideas, movements, and political and economic forces it had never confronted before.

Shuman sees China's present as a new and likely enduring recreation of the old Chinese civilization that thought itself the greatest and most significant in the world -- now on a global stage.

Deng Xiaoping's reopening of China was among the most momentous events of modern times. It was one of those pivotal hinges in human history, when the future course of our lives is altered forever. The stage was set for China to resurrect its traditional, central role in the world, along the way reestablishing the ancient trade connections of the Middle Kingdom and the other great civilizations, this time on a grander and more global scale than ever before. And through it all, the Chinese history of the world became ever more entangled with the West's. The world would never be the same. 

... Xi [Jinping] himself appears a reincarnation of the empire-building emperors of old. ... Like Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, he is confronting global challenges by strengthening his state and his own position at home and abroad. Similar to Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty, he is capitalizing on the successes of his predecessors to stress the more expansive and universalistic aspects of China's worldview. But perhaps most of all, Xi is spiritual kin of the Ming Dynasty founder, the Hongwu emperor. Both introduced personalized rule to the collegial model that had prevailed before them. ... Xi characterizes himself as the champion of the Chinese nation after a century of humiliations by the Western Ocean barbarians and their allies. ... As we've seen, the Chinese have experienced periods of both great openness to foreigners and foreign ways, and eras of tremendous arrogance and distrust of outsiders. ... Now, under Xi, the pendulum is swinging once again ...

I wouldn't exactly call this book hostile to China -- but I would say that in trying to convey an unvarnished China-centric perspective on the country's relationship to the rest of the world and especially to the Western barbarians, Shuman doesn't smooth out any rough edges. 

There are plenty of other perspectives to read on the civilization of modern China which are much more nuanced. One I've appreciated is Ian Johnson's The Souls of China. I'm no judge of overall accuracy -- China too big and too old be easily reduced to any one historical perspective.