China's galaxy empire: Wealth, power, war, and peace in the new Chinese century

Abstract This short but lively book targets a development of enormous contemporary significance: China’s return, after two centuries of decline and subjugation, to a position of prominence in world affairs. The daring thesis is that China is a newly rising empire of a kind never before witnessed: a galaxy empire, so called to emphasize that it is the first to be born of the digital communications era, and to show how the gravitational, push/pull effects of this young, economically, and politically powerful and heavily armed empire are impacting every continent and even reconfiguring outer space, where China is competing with the United States, India, and Europe to become the leading power. The galaxy empire approach rejects clichéd misdescriptions of China as a ‘big power’, hegemonic ‘sovereign state’, or monolithic ‘autocracy’. It explains why the galaxy empire defies older definitions of land, sea, and air-based empires. It offers fresh ways of thinking about major developments, such as the launch of the massive state capitalist Belt and Road Initiative, the rapid rise of a global Chinese middle class, internal colonialism in Tibet and Xinjiang, the growth of the world’s largest standing army and the galaxy empire’s efforts to re-define the US-led ‘rules-based global order’ by means of new currency arrangements, cross-border protocols, bio-protection agreements, and peacekeeping and military operations. The galaxy empire thesis underscores the protean, shapeshifting qualities of this young empire, and it therefore warns against the political and military perils of simple-minded, friend-versus-enemy thinking and Big China, Bad China politics. But it also proffers a forewarning to China’s rulers: while every rising empire aims to shift the balance of power in its favour, no empire lasts forever, and some are stillborn, because they indulge illusions of greatness and reckless power adventures.