Chapter 2 surveys some different ways in which Asia features in the Irish literary imagination from Lafcadio Hearn and W. B. Yeats to the present. Ronan Sheehan’s Foley’s Asia, dealing with a celebrated nineteenth-century Irish sculptor of imperial monuments, and Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times, set in Hong Kong against the backdrop of a ‘rising China’, are its contemporary examples. In early twentieth-century writing, Asia represented an exotic non-modern alternative to Western modernity. Later, it served as a backdrop to the fall of the British Empire. More recently, it suggests a strange new hyper-modernity with which the West will have to catch up. In all versions, Asia is conceived somewhere between the exotic and apocalyptic, a world at once tantalizing and threatening.

The introduction first provides the general background and motivation for the book. Catching up to America was an explicit development goal for China set by Mao Zedong in the 1950s. But Mao’s approach to economic development ended in disaster. Since 1978 when Deng Xiaoping launched economic reform, China has experienced arguably the most rapid economic rise in world history. The introduction then raises the main questions to be addressed in the book. What has led to China’s rapid economic rise? When may China overtake the United States to become the largest economy? Is there a China model of development that can be emulated by other developing countries? Why is China’s economy slowing down? Will deteriorating US–China relations slow it down even further? The introduction then points out that the real puzzle with Chinese growth is not why China has grown faster than all developed countries, but why it has grown so much faster than other low- and middle-income developing countries. Next, it lays out the content and structure of the book chapter by chapter. Lastly, it describes the global comparative perspective the book has adopted in its analysis of China’s economic rise.

This chapter explores the political, social, and economic conditions that have shaped the turn to history since the 1990s. Those conditions include the break-up of the Soviet Union and the ‘end of history’ narrative that accompanied a decade of ambitious liberal expansionism, the crisis of liberal internationalism triggered by the war on terror and the financial, energy, food, asylum, and climate crises of the early twenty-first century, and the shift in geopolitics caused by the rise of the BRICS and particularly of China as an economic power. International lawyers in practice and the academy have drawn on past events, practices, records, and cases as argumentative resources in adjudicatory settings and in broader debates over how to understand, justify, or resist the transformation of international law. The turn to history eventually began to be understood as a project that should be distanced from the argumentative practice of international law and measured against the empiricist protocols of academic historians. This chapter returns it to the context of international legal argumentation from which it arose, in order to gain a better understanding of the turn to history as an intervention in present struggles over the meaning of international law.

Some worry that international peace may some day be punctured either by the rise of China as a challenger country or by excessive assertiveness by Russia backed by its large nuclear arsenal. Each wants to play a greater role on the world stage, but they are both trading states and do not seem to be territorially expansive (except for China on Taiwan), and do not have the wherewithal or, it seems, the ambition, to “run the world.” Indeed, there is a danger of making China into a threat by treating it as such. The dispute between Russia and neighboring Ukraine in 2014 was a unique and opportunistic escapade that proved to be costly to the perpetrators. Russian cybergeek interference in the 2016 US presidential election scarcely constituted a security threat: election fake news simply became higher and deeper. China, Russia, and Iran may present some “challenges” to U.S. policy, but none really presents a palpable security threat requiring large standing forces. Indeed, all three seem to be descending into stagnation. The current “new Cold War,” then, is quite a bit like the old one: an expensive, substantially militarized, and often hysterical campaign to deal with threats that do not exist or are likely to self-destruct.

China’s transition to the nation state, on a deep level, is incomplete. Tibet and Xinjiang remain the peripheral holdouts. At the policy level, the demise of class universalism deprives the central state of the institutional principles of legitimate government to project universal legitimacy in the two historically least incorporated regions. At the institutional level, the autonomous system has nurtured key conditions for ethnic mobilization for these two groups: politicized identities and ethno-territories. Among the contextual factors responsible the Soviet dissolution – core ethnic regions, weakening of previous social contracts, and democratization – only the Tibetans and Uighurs possess core ethnic regions and were particularly disadvantaged by economic liberalization due to their distinct ascriptive features. The absence of democratization, along with China’s demographic/territorial core, precludes a breakaway by these two groups, but large state outlays suggest continuing challenges for national integration. Despite various reform platforms, socialist autonomy – compromising autonomy but distributional benefits – remains the prevailing vision under the current political leadership. In the international arena, ethnic strife places constraints on China’s security and foreign policy behavior as well as on its international reactions.