Straining Nation or Expansionist Empire?

Benno Weiner reviews Edward Wong’s “At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China.”

By Benno WeinerAugust 3, 2024

• Nonfiction

• Politics

• Memoir & Essay

• Biography & Autobiography

SINCE ASCENDING TO the pinnacle of China’s political leadership in 2012, Xi Jinping has enjoined his party and his compatriots to “tell China’s story well.” This is not a new story but one inherited from his predecessors. It is a story of the humiliation, impoverishment, and fragmentation of a once-proud civilization—one often said to have 5,000 years of history—at the hands of Western imperialism. It is a story of patriotic resistance to Japanese invasion, of liberation and reunification under Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, and of a return to economic prosperity and international might begun by Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping.

All good stories, however, need a satisfying ending. Accordingly, under Xi’s steady stewardship, the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese people”—what he extols as the “Chinese dream”—is now said to be within reach. It is an attractive story for many in China but also for many beyond its borders in search of an alternative to the triumphalism of post–Cold War American hegemony. But it is also a story dictated and enforced from the center: it is constructed through official control of media and the internet, the rewriting of textbooks and curricula, appeals to ethnonationalism in everything from speeches to films, and the silencing of individuals and communities that espouse alternative historical possibilities or future aspirations.

Yet, as the Tibetan poet and writer Tsering Woeser asked soon after Xi first articulated his vision of a Chinese renaissance, “Where are Tibetans in the Chinese Dream?” How would the story change if China’s modern history was narrated not from the halls of power in Beijing but from its literal and figurative edges? From the perspective of Hong Kongers passed between colonial masters, say, or ethnic minorities struggling against the onslaught of settler colonialism and majoritarian state violence, or rural residents left out of China’s economic miracle, or émigrés and their children wrestling with their own identities and their relationship with “the motherland”? What if China’s modern history was told not from the perspective of an aggrieved nation but from that of an expansionist empire?

Edward Wong’s new book At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China, a mix of family history and long-form journalism, is a startling example of the rich, complex stories that can be told when national myths are jettisoned in favor of narratives that privilege people and communities in danger of erasure under the discursive and coercive power of the state. Wong is hardly the first child of Chinese émigrés to write a memoir steeped in kinship—Scott Tong’s A Village with My Name: A Family History of China’s Opening to the World (2017) is a recent one—nor is he the first reporter to explore the lives of China’s disenfranchised or overlooked (an exciting addition from NPR correspondent Emily Feng will be out in the spring). However, few books integrate the past and the present, the national and the individual, the political and the personal, and China’s ethnic and subethnic diversity as successfully as Wong’s. This is made possible by the unexpectedly remarkable life of his father, Yook Kearn Wong, which Edward Wong explores with the purposeful curiosity of a child of immigrants discovering his roots combined with the dogged determination of a first-rate journalist. As a child in the Washington, DC, suburbs, Wong had thought his father, who toiled in Chinese restaurants six days a week, was every bit the hardworking, if unexceptional, Chinese American immigrant. Over time, he would discover that his father’s life had been anything but ordinary.

“I am the son of two empires,” Wong states at the start of At the Edge of Empire. A veteran correspondent for The New York Times, Wong admits that a version of Xi’s story once appealed to him. Following some earlier short visits to China and Hong Kong and then a nearly four-year posting in Baghdad that left him despondent over the “imperial bloodletting” unleashed by American military power, Wong transferred to the Times’ Beijing bureau in 2008 just as the country’s first time hosting the Olympics was heralding China’s return to global prominence. It was an opportunity to connect with his own past while reporting on a land “in the throes of transformation, with its cities of gleaming office towers and artists’ enclaves and striving workers coming in by the trainload from villages, looking to be part of the colossal story of change that the first decades of the twenty-first century promised to deliver.”

However, 2008 was also the year that uprisings engulfed the Tibetan Plateau, followed in subsequent years by the self-immolation of more than 160 Tibetan protesters. It was the year of the horrific Wenchuan earthquake, which, combined with shoddy school construction fueled by corruption, killed thousands of children. A year later, on July 5, 2009, violent ethnic riots erupted in Xinjiang’s capital of Ürümchi, a prelude to the campaign of mass surveillance and mass incarceration of Turkic Muslims that some critics have labeled “cultural genocide.” Wong reported on all of these stories and many others, including 2011 protests against illegal land seizures in the Cantonese township of Wukan, and Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement, the precursor to even larger demonstrations that would shake Hong Kong five years later. By the time Wong left Beijing in 2016, he had a less attractive story to tell. In his words, “the story of China under Communist Party rule is one of a nation straining with all its might to become an empire that surpasses that of America, and that it envisions itself as the inheritor of the rule and the realm of the Qing dynasty.” The irony is that both the United States and the People’s Republic of China claim to be born out of resistance to empire. If they are empires today, as many insist, neither admits to it.

Organized directionally more than chronologically, At the Edge of Empire moves between temporalities, veering between retelling Yook Kearn’s journey—from China’s far south to the northern regions of Beijing and Manchuria, west to Xinjiang, and then back again—and recounting the author’s own pursuit of his father’s vanishing footsteps half a century later. Born into a moderately successful merchant family in colonial Hong Kong, Yook Kearn and his elder brother Sam witnessed Japan’s opening attack on the British colony in December 1941. Shipped to the relative safety of the family’s “ancestral home” in rural Guangdong, the boys experienced slices first of world war and then of civil war.

As the communist victory seemed imminent, the brothers’ paths diverged. Sam left to study in the United States. Yook Kearn, a member of the first class to graduate high school under the new communist government, chose to stay to help build “new China” (“Xin Zhongguo”). This was a choice that millions of Chinese faced in the first years of the People’s Republic, especially those in the southeast with transnational connections. As the Cold War descended on East Asia, however, once-porous borders hardened, often turning temporary family partings into indeterminate, sometimes permanent, separations. Against his parent’s wishes but brimming with patriotism, Yook Kearn moved north to help defend his nation at the outbreak of the Korean War. He had tested first into university in the nation’s capital and then into a highly selective air force training program in the frigid Manchurian city of Changchun. Wong writes that “the two brothers had ended up on opposite sides of a geopolitical chasm.” While Sam attended George Washington University, “Father was signing up for ‘the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea.’”

Yook Kearn would not see his family again for more than a decade. Yet, in a sense, they traveled north with him, or at least their shadows did. He had dreamed of flying fighter jets over Korea and of joining the Communist Party. However, he was the child of Hong Kong capitalists with relatives in the United States. Rather than being sent into combat, Yook Kearn was shipped west in 1951. A monthlong journey by train, truck, and finally sled took him from the Han Chinese heartland through the last gate of the Great Wall and into the deserts and grasslands of Central Asia. He had been assigned to guard an outpost on the furthest edge of the newly established People’s Republic of China in what is now known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Stationed along the Soviet border in the Altay region, he found himself living amid Kazakhs who wore “tall hats made of white felted wool” and spoke an unintelligible language. In the 1940s, Altay had been home to the short-lived, Soviet-sponsored East Turkestan Republic, and Yook Kearn initially served with Kazakh remnants of the ETR army. Before long, however, the Kazakh force was dismantled and its soldiers dispersed among overwhelmingly Han Chinese units of the People’s Liberation Army. His superiors explained that he and the Kazakh soldiers with whom he now served “had equal stakes in the future of China.” For a young Cantonese man, Beijing and Manchuria provided a dose of culture shock. Altay, however, “felt alien” entirely.

Yook Kearn’s sojourn in Xinjiang and his son’s travels there a half century later provide some of the book’s most compelling imagery and anecdotes. Xinjiang is also the setting in which Wong most fully explores the nature of Chinese empire. The modern Chinese state has a complicated and contradictory relationship with the concept: it views itself as a victim rather than a practitioner of imperialism, while simultaneously claiming to be the natural successor to what is often said to have been the world’s most enduring imperial system, the “Chinese Empire.” As historian James A. Millward argues, this sleight of hand relies on the promotion of a “euphemized” version of Chinese history as a “continuous political entity,” in which empire-making and colonialism are sanitized by terms like “dynastic cycle,” “tribute system,” and “Sinicization.” This framework, in which China doesn’t invade but “unifies” and “reunifies” lands that have been indivisible parts of China “since ancient times,” casts a powerful spell in the country—and also among textbook publishers, think tanks, and policymakers in the United States and elsewhere. In truth, as Wong writes, Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia, Taiwan, and “China” itself were all conquered over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries by armies under the command of Manchu rulers who had built the powerful Qing state in Northeast Asia before establishing their capital in Beijing. Wong writes, “Father and the other Han soldiers at the original garrison had been the modern-day iteration of the Qing imperial troops who had settled here.”

For the majority of Manchu rule, as in Mongolia and Tibet, Xinjiang was governed as a separate imperial possession from the Qing’s Han Chinese territories. This began to change in the late 19th century when, facing encroachment from Russia and other imperialist powers, Xinjiang was made into a Chinese-style province and opened for Han settlement. Yook Kearn now found himself part of the first wave of a new, massive, state-sponsored campaign of settler colonialism meant to secure China’s Central Asian borders, to feed, clothe, and power China through state farms and extractive industries, and to alleviate population pressures amid postwar demobilization. Yook Kearn’s final posting in Xinjiang was with the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a military-aligned “agricultural garrison system,” often referred to simply as the “bingtuan” or the Corps, that to this day remains the bulwark of Han colonialism in Xinjiang.

For most, being sent to Xinjiang was a lifetime deployment, and, according to Wong, “Father felt he was doing his part to secure the edge of the empire.” Still, he longed to return to “inner China” and, in 1957, took advantage of an opportunity for soldiers to apply to university. Passing the entrance exams, Yook Kearn was assigned to a polytechnic university in China’s ancient imperial capital, Xi’an. In Xinjiang, he thought “he had won the trust of the party.” In Xi’an, Yook Kearn slowly realized it “had not been enough, and would never be enough.” Based on his “murky” family history, Yook Kearn’s efforts to join the CCP were repeatedly rejected and he was denied employment in sensitive industries.

Shaken by the massive famine generated by the disastrous Great Leap Forward, and the elite power struggles and campaign politics of Maoist China, “Father could now see,” Wong writes, “that the path forward was fraught, both for him and for his country. He had to find another way.” In 1962, Yook Kearn slipped across the border from Guangdong to the Portuguese colony of Macau. From there, after a decade-long absence, he made his way back to Hong Kong, where he would meet Wong’s mother. In 1967, as anti-colonial riots gripped the British colony, the couple would join Sam in the United States.

Yook Kearn’s long and winding path—one that took him from Hong Kong to Manchuria, from Xinjiang to Xi’an, and then to the United States—is hardly typical. Yet, at times, At the Edge of Empire comes precariously close to aping the narrative arc found in dozens of English-language exile memoirs—stories of patriotism and commitment turned to disillusionment, leading finally to the choice to abandon the homeland. What sets At the Edge of Empire apart is Wong’s decision not to depict Maoist China as a singular moment of inexplicable madness and betrayal, as it so often appears in the slew of works by or about members of the Cultural Revolution generation. Instead, he connects his father’s life to both the imperial past and Xi Jinping’s present in ways that emphasize continuity rather than rupture. Consequently, current obsessions of the Xi regime, such as its now-clear intent to create a singular Chinese nation of “common destiny,” are shown to have longer historical trajectories. Wong’s father, as a successor to the Qing soldiers who once patrolled Xinjiang,

had witnessed some of the first efforts to dismantle non-Han nationalist groups, including the Kazakh and Uyghur units of the Fifth Army Corps. Decades later, the campaigns were all-encompassing, aimed at quashing the slightest signs of any grassroots push for greater autonomy in Xinjiang.

Another difference from so many so-called “Cultural Revolution memoirs” is that At the Edge of Empire is never clear why Yook Kearn was so intent on Party membership. In sharp contrast with many “born under the Red Flag,” Yook Kearn doesn’t appear to be motivated by a belief in socialist utopianism or a faith in Mao Zedong. His memories might be colored by later experiences, or this might be reflective of many in his generation who were drawn not to the CCP’s ideology, which few outside its ranks initially understood, but to its promises of a return to national greatness. Either way, the absence of ideology in his father’s account is carried over into Wong’s historical analysis, which focuses more on state power than transformative ideas. While important for countering jingoist narratives of national rejuvenation, the result at times is to construct an alternate story that perhaps draws too tight a comparison between the Qing Empire, Mao’s socialist period, and the self-proclaimed “New Era” of Xi Jinping. For instance, Xi may be “trying to harness the instinct for showmanship and mass spectacle that had helped make Mao such a potent authoritarian force,” yet politically and ideologically, the two men remain far apart. Xi has not conducted “Mao-style campaign[s],” as Wong suggests. For all his many faults, Mao had a faith in the “masses” while distrusting his party. Xi is closer to an old-style Leninist whose insistence on reinstalling party discipline and on top-down political purges is more in line with the politics of Mao’s first-generation comrades, such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, than that of the “Great Helmsman.”

And, although it occupies similar space on the map, the PRC is not the Qing. For instance, there was no ethnic majority nor any ethnic minorities in the Qing Empire. Instead, except in times of crisis, the Qing employed a variety of indirect methods of rule to govern diverse, discrete populations. After 1949, the CCP sought to create a unified political unit upon the footprints of the old empire by promising ethnic equality and political autonomy to what were now designated “minority nationalities,” including Kazakhs, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and dozens of others. Over the following decades, however, these foundational promises were repeatedly undermined by Han-centric impulses that manifested in the marginalization and persecution of the non-Han Other. Since the 2008 uprising in Tibet and the 2009 riots in Xinjiang, “unity through difference” has been abandoned. In its place, the Xi regime has pursued an approach to ethnic affairs that promotes unity through assimilation. Seen in this light, recent efforts to enforce a singular Han Chinese identity upon ethnic and subethnic minorities, from Xinjiang and Tibet to Guangdong and Hong Kong (which have been well reported by journalists, including Wong), may not be an indication of a nation straining to become an empire. Rather, they may be signs of a former empire straining to complete a violent, century-long transformation into a Chinese nation-state.