Everything under the heavens: how the past helps shape China's push for global power

Xi Jinping's China is rapidly expanding its influence. Last August, it unveiled a naval base in Djibouti, in the strategically vital Horn of Africa. In December, it took control of the Sri Lankan deep-water port of Hambantota, giving it a foothold in the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, it has continued building bases on disputed islands and contesting its neighbours' claims in the South China Sea. China's ‘belt and road initiative’ (BRI), an international economic development and infrastructure programme, now encompasses over US900 billion in spending and stretches from Rotterdam to Dar es Salaam and Jakarta. But all this is to what end? Everything under the heavens, by American journalist Howard W. French, tries to answer this question by drawing on Chinese history and culture. French's grasp of Japanese history enables him to explore the saga of the disputed, strategically crucial Ryukyu Islands, which border Taiwan and lie on Japan's extreme south-west tip. ‘A pacified south’ is an especially illuminating chapter: French traces Sino-Vietnamese relations from the past to the present, to illustrate the long-standing origins of Vietnamese resentment towards the Chinese. A fascinating vignette of the history of Sino-Japanese relations (pp. 195–98) does similar work for Japan. Moreover, discussions of famed fifteenth-century Chinese explorer Zheng He (pp. 95–106) and the little-known history of Srivijaya, an old Malay kingdom (pp. 115–21), nicely contextualize south-east Asia's present.