An emergent China and the weight of history
History lessons
Confucian conceptions of order
Power and order in other Chinese traditions
Western assumptions about international order
Sinic universalism in theory and practice
The prehistory of foreign engagement
Engagement and status conflict
Through formal equality to inferiority
China's loss of its dependencies
Imperial denouement
Intellectual ferment in the Nationalist era
Mao and the Middle Kingdom
China and the foreign other
Conceptual currents
China imagines its world
and its future.