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My Take | China was never an imperialist state

  • During its long history, Chinese dynasties were as often the victims of outside aggression as they were invaders of foreign land

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A woman walks by a an alleyway on May 10, 2023 in the traditional village of Xixinan, Anhui Province, southern China. Photo: Getty Images

Was China ever an imperialist state? There was in the past few weeks a lively debate between two scholars about precisely this question in Pearls and Irritations (P&I), the Australian current affairs online journal, with one arguing it was and the other it wasn’t.

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It is, of course, a highly controversial question. In recent years, critics and apologists have tried to answer this question in the affirmative or negative to prove that contemporary China is either a benevolent or malevolent contemporary power, to prove or disprove “the China threat”.

On this particular point, it’s really a fool’s errand. As they always write into financial products sold to customers, “past performance is not indicative of future results”. The same goes with China or any other country. This doesn’t mean the past has no bearing on the present and future.

However, what really intrigues me about the P&I debate is not so much their conclusions, but the way they present their arguments and evidence.

When you have already drawn your conclusions, what you tend to do is to collect evidence that supports them and ignore or downplay evidence that doesn’t.

Now, I am not criticising those two scholars. I am just as guilty. I do that in this column space practically every day. And it’s almost inevitable we all do that.

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