Stephen R. Halsey. Quest for Power

The idea that the period 1839–1949 was the “era of humiliation” in which China, the “sick man of Asia,” struggled against successive waves of foreign imperialism is a powerful one with remarkable staying power. Stephen R. Halsey’s Quest for Power: European Imperialism and the Making of Chinese Statecraft joins a growing chorus of works that question this broad characterization. Where others saw dissolution and decline, particularly in the last decades of the Qing Empire (r. 1644–1912), Halsey highlights dynamism, transformation, and resilience. Even proponents of the narrative of weakness and decline have had to acknowledge that China (or at least some parts of it) managed to avoid the direct colonization and annexation that was the fate of nearly 85 percent of the world’s land surface during the era of high imperialism. But while previous explanations may have focused largely on external factors that led to this outcome, Halsey highlights the internal changes that gave rise to a growing capacity of the Chinese state to attain what he labels “the minimal threshold to retain its independence” (147).

China · Dynamism · Empire · Independence (probability theory) · Political economy · Political science · Power (physics) · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies