Introduction:

The latest addition to Zhang Yongle's systematic investigation of modern Chinese legal and political ideas in times of crisis and transformation is titled Shifting Boundaries, A Global History of the Monroe Doctrine (此疆尔界：门罗主义与近代空间政治). At first, the focal point of Monroe Doctrine in this book seems to be a huge deviation from the strong China-centric problematic in Zhang’s previous monographs. Although demonstrating a high academic rigorous in the discipline of intellectual history, this book is far from being a conventional investigation of the concept Monroe Doctrine.

This book does not want to treat Monroe Doctrine as a static and self-contained notion that travels across borders. Instead, it focuses on tracing the mechanism which links Monroe Doctrine with imperialism during its global transition and transfusion. Apart from looking at its development within the US, the book brings in Großraum in Germany and pan-Asianism in Japan and China into the discussion of the global journey of Monroe Doctrine, depicting a complicated and transnational network of ideas. As we can see from Zhang’s discussion, the fundamental principle of Monroe Doctrine, although manifes-ting in different forms, has predominantly been based on the imperium claim of space.[1] However, can we understand China by using the same principle?

Interestingly, Zhang noticed that the life of Monroe Doctrine in China took an intriguing and inward-looking turn in China. The discourses of Monroe Doctrine in China were overwhelmingly focusing on establishing autonomy on a sub-state, rather than inter-state level.[2] Comparing to their counterparts in the US, Japan and Germany, Chinese intellectuals and political activists were more inclined to interpret Monroe Doctrine as a justification for self-determination (自主) when the term was firstly translated into Chinese from Japanese sour-ces.[3]

The peculiar case of China is what makes the book exciting. It also brings forward the main problematic of Zhang’s meticulous survey of the global intellectual journey of Monroe Doctrine. In the beginning of his introduction, Zhang refers to Mark Leonard’s What Does China Think?.[4] This could be taken as one of the main issues driving Zhang’s investigation. Roughly in the 1990s, Western scholarship began to actively ask the questions such as why China clings to its Leninist traditions. How long Chinese communism will last? What will come next?[5] Moving into the 21st century with China steadily rising up to its current position of being the second largest economy in the world, questions turn into a more assertive statement. In both public media and academic writings, Western-centric narratives claim that China will assume the position as the new global hegemon.

No one is able to provide definite answers to those questions or convincingly prove the claim. The overarching assumption behind these enquiries is utterly Western-centric. A popular justification for failure to answer those questions is from Lucian Pye in 1992 and made popular by Henry Kis-singer in his account on the rationale of Chinese foreign policy making. Lucian states that China is a “civilization pretending to be a nation-state.”[6] Since China is only pretending to be a nation-state, as this premise suggests, the contem-porary social science theories have to be “recalibrated” when applying to the study of China. Hence, Pye came up with the term Confucian Leninism, suggesting that the uniqueness of contemporary communist China is the result of the marriage between “long-standing Chinese cultural traditions” such as its patrimonialism and imported modern ideas such as Leninism. Alternatively, one should simply accept, like Henry Kissinger suggests, the singularity of China and try to make sense of China from within its own “civilization,” or in Chinese wenming (文明).

However, by advocating the uniqueness of China, we are actually implying that the universalism of social theories stands firmly and strong. It is China that has problems. Henceforth, we often could hear the judgement that China is not a “conventional nation-state” that needs to be treated with care or even as an abnormity. However, could it be that the crystal ball we use to comprehend the world that is broken? Or maybe it’s not a crystal ball after all. Otherwise, we would surely see China would follow suit the Japanese way of understanding Monroe Doctrine and become regional hegemon with a global ambition. Why it was not the case? The answer to this question lies partially in Zhang’s compa-rative historical investigation.