The Spectacular Rise of China as a Superpower Perhaps Only Now Compels Us to Recalibrate Existing Discourses of Empire

and postcoloniality, but China has been an empire in the modern sense since the mid– eighteenth century, when it conquered vast lands north and west of “China proper.”1 his history has been largely hidden from view because of two unacknowledged obsessions: the fetishization of Western empires over other empires and the prevailing discourse of Chinese victimhood at the hands of Western empires. he rise of China would not have caught so many by surprise if our vision had not been persistently clouded by our privileging of the oceanic (i.e., Western) mode of colonial expansion, which paradoxically centered the West as the most deserving object of critical attention and intellectual labor. It also would not have been a surprise if we had looked back at the Manchu conquests of inner Asia, which presentday China largely inherited and consolidated in a continuous colonial project. Postcolonial theory as we know it, particularly its critiques of orientalism, may prove irrelevant or even complicit when we consider how the positions of Chinese intellectuals critical of Western imperialism and orientalism easily slip into an unrelective nationalism, whose lip side may be a new imperialism. he Chinese discourse of victimhood sufered at the hands of Western empires, oten bordering on victimology, has efectively displaced this unrelective nationalism, even though that victim experience had a limited scope and duration in the imperial history of the Manchu empire and its successors, the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China. he entity we know today as China has inherited or recolonized the vast majority of the territories conquered by the Manchu, such as Tibet, Xinjiang (literally, “new dominion”), and Inner Mongolia, not to mention Manchuria, more than doubling “China proper.” Now when China proclaims its supreme concern for “territorial integrity” from a putatively postcolonial standpoint against earlier Western imperialist aggressions, it is simultaneously making imperial claims on the territories annexed from the Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongolians. the changing profession