IT WAS in the mid-1800s that Wei Yuan articulated many of the themes that came to define the work of China’s twentieth-century modernizers. When the first Opium War broke out, Wei found himself in a ringside seat. Having repeatedly failed the imperial civil-service exam after a promising early academic career, he wound up advising provincial officials and accumulating a small fortune as an investor in the salt trade in the city of Yangzhou along the Yangtze River. There in 1842, he witnessed British warships steaming past after a successful attack on Shanghai. Wei’s response to the trauma of China’s defeat at the hands of a British force of only a few thousand men combined precepts from ancient Chinese philosophy with insights from his observation of modern statecraft and warfare. Wei did not turn to the traditional reservoir of Chinese thought, Confucianism, but rather drew on a rival school called “Legalism.” Where Confucianism propounds “benevolence, ritual propriety, and social harmony” as the “only legitimate and effective basis for good government,” Legalism stresses the need to “enrich the state and strengthen its military power” (fuguo qiangbing, which is alternately translated as “rich country, strong army” and from which the term fuqiang is derived as an abbreviation). In the place of the Confucians’ rule by virtue, Legalists argue for rule by law, defined as a system of incentives wielded by a ruler to ensure his subjects’ loyalty. Schell and Delury write, “These ancient Chinese realpolitikers had no patience for what they considered the moralistic blather of the Confucians. Since they put little stock in good intentions, wealth and strength alone were the ultimate arbiters of a policy’s success or failure.”

Realpolitik in this context refers to a purely pragmatic, results-based approach not only to domestic rule but also to foreign relations. As Schell and Delury note, Wei believed that Western powers like the British “promote trade by sending out soldiers,” so that “soldiers and trade are mutually dependent.” This idea was to persist in the minds of Chinese elites, including Sun Yat-sen, who wrote in 1894:

In the West the interests of the state and those of commerce flourish together. . . . National defense cannot function without money, and money for the military will not accumulate without commerce. The reason why Westerners are ready to pounce like tigers on the rest of the world and why they bully China is also due to commerce.

Wei’s emphasis on wealth and power and his attraction to Legalism—or, at least, his skepticism about Confucianism’s claim to a monopoly on civilized ways—may have helped him resist the traditional Chinese impulse to reject all things foreign as inferior. In a treatise on the first Opium War, Wei argued that China needed to accumulate wealth and power to recover its imperial greatness. In other words, it needed “self-improvement and self-strengthening” (zixiu ziqiang), which it could only achieve by “borrowing”—that is, acquiring and copying—technology from abroad while enacting governmental reforms at home. This impulse to appropriate certain Western means and employ them toward the end of strengthening China against the West would become a key theme of Chinese modernizers, as would the Legalist spirit of realpolitik. With weak states condemned to be prey for strong states, China must work to amass its own wealth and power, deferring as necessary to its superiors while trying to learn from and, where possible, weaken them. Schell and Delury point out that Wei endorsed the idea of weakening China’s Western adversaries by playing them off against each other, or “yiyi zhiyi” (“using barbarians to control other barbarians”), a classic Chinese stratagem. Finally, self-strengthening would require intelligence about foreign states to identify their points of vulnerability, and diplomatic finesse to divide up hostile alliances. After the first Opium War, Schell and Delury explain, Wei regretted that the Qing had possessed too little knowledge of foreign relations in the outside world to exploit the tensions between Britain on the one hand and France and the United States on the other—despite the fact that both the French and the Americans had offered the dynasty support.

WEI’S INTELLECTUAL heir, Feng Guifen, built on Wei’s ideas of self-strengthening and copying “techniques and methods” from foreign powers. Like Wei, Feng had proceeded all the way to the point of the imperial-level civil-service exams and then stumbled, and he lived at a time of great tumult, the period of the second Opium War and China’s enormous internal conflagration, the Taiping Rebellion. Schell and Delury highlight the query Feng posed in the wake of China’s defeat at the hands of French and British coalition forces, and in the aftermath of a civil war that left twenty million dead and effectively sounded the death knell for the Qing dynasty: “Our territory is eight times that of Russia, ten times the size of America, one hundred times bigger than France, and two hundred times England. Why is it that they are small and strong, yet we are big and weak?” Feng offered his response in an 1860 manifesto, Dissenting Views from a Hut near Bin,¹ that echoed Wei: “If we use Chinese ethics and teachings as the foundation, but supplement them with foreign countries’ techniques for wealth and power, would it not be ideal?” For those who remained skeptical, Feng reasoned, “If a system is no good, even though it is from antiquity, we should reject it; if a system is good, then we should follow it, even if it originates from uncivilized peoples.”

Consistent with Wei’s recommendation that China improve its knowledge of foreign powers (e.g., to facilitate playing them off against each other), Feng lobbied the throne to sponsor education in foreign studies. Schell and Delury note that his request was granted despite opposition from Confucian proponents of the classical Chinese curriculum. Today, China sends more students abroad than any other country, and China may also train the largest number of English linguists of any non-English-speaking state. While some of this effort is in the service of diplomacy and commerce, much of it is also part of self-strengthening—building up China’s military power. A recent report by the nonprofit Project 2049 Institute disclosed that the part of the Chinese military thought to house its cyberunits is the largest employer of well-trained linguists in China.

Feng’s message about self-strengthening gave rise to an eponymous reform movement in Beijing, and in 1896 the provincial official Zhang Zhidong even successfully petitioned the Empress Dowager Cixi for permission to establish a “Self-Strengthening Army.” Meanwhile, Feng’s endorsement of Wei’s notion of copying from the West helped to ensure that this concept would endure. As Schell and Delury note, Zhang also formulated the self-strengtheners’ famous motto: “Zhongxue weiti, xixue weiyong” (“Chinese learning should remain the core, but Western learning should be employed for practical use”). By the beginning of the twentieth century, Sun Yat-sen was using self-strengthening language to argue for the adoption of not only Western know-how but also the latest Western form of government, republicanism, and the overthrow of the Qing: “The future of China is like building a railroad. Thus if we were now building a railroad would we use the first locomotive ever invented [i.e., dynastic rule] or today’s improved and most efficient model?” Yet Sun evinced only a practical interest in republicanism. In his famous 1924 declaration of the “Three Principles of the People,” he qualified his support for rights and liberty with concern about unity and the collective: “The individual should not have too much liberty, but the nation should have complete liberty. When the nation can act freely, then China may be called strong.” Later in his life, Sun came to admire another foreign political model, Leninism, because of its ability to generate party discipline, underscoring his merely instrumental embrace of republicanism as the most promising new political technology to deploy in the service of China’s essence.

THE THINKING of the late Qing and Republican eras has influenced Chinese statesmen from Mao and his successor Deng Xiaoping to the current generation of CCP officials. They all have spoken of exploiting xiyong (Western function) while preserving zhongti (Chinese essence). Mao talked of adapting Marxism to China’s circumstances; Deng advocated importing Western market-based economic know-how while building socialism “with Chinese characteristics”; and the latest incarnation of this approach involves aggressively “borrowing” Western industrial and military technology. Witness China’s massive efforts to extract U.S. intellectual property using cybertechniques along with more traditional forms of espionage.² Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery, but in this case it should be interpreted as evidence of a consistent and enduring ambition on the part of Chinese elites. The goal, again, is not to become like the United States insofar as the United States is a democracy and supporter of the post–World War II international system. It is rather to preserve CCP rule and make China as strong as possible so that Beijing can establish a new global order on its own terms.

What would a Chinese-dictated world order look like? The details are murky, but it is nonetheless possible to identify certain contrasts with the current order. Rather than starting with the dignity of the individual and the entitlement of all human beings to certain fundamental rights, protected by law, the Chinese order would be premised upon the existence of the collective and the priority of its stability. Where Washington promotes liberty, Beijing would substitute the aim of datong (“Grand Harmony” or “Great Unity”). Part of Wei Yuan’s unorthodox approach to Confucianism was that he believed that instead of proceeding cyclically, with the rise and fall of dynasties, history was actually linear, progressing toward a utopian era of “Grand Harmony.” Schell and Delury explain that Wei belonged to a school of thinkers who contended that even Confucius understood history this way, and he secretly authorized the use of realpolitik methods “to keep the world orderly” until the arrival of datong. As with Wei’s conception of self-strengthening and its requirements, his view of realpolitik as the means and datong as the goal lived on well after Wei’s lifetime.