But amid the focus on specific Chinese leaders, economic figures, and hard power is a more basic, but no less important question: What does China actually want?

Sleeping giant

For centuries, China stood at the center of world affairs, its various dynasties expecting tribute from the foreigners they often labeled “barbarians.” But by retreating from the world, China sealed its fate. Half a millennium ago, Western powers began to overtake the Middle Kingdom. Chinese power receded while the West’s rose.

By the 1830s, China’s so-called “century of humiliation” began. The Qing dynasty lost a succession of wars, beginning with the so-called Opium Wars against the British. 

China was forced to sign the “unequal treaties” and other agreements that opened its markets to foreign goods and foreigners themselves, some of which established self-governing enclaves separate from the rest of the population. These enclaves had their own police forces, governments, and military garrisons and were a permanent finger in the proud nation’s eye.

Yet, it wasn’t just European powers who carved up China.

Century of humiliation 

While China had been slow to modernize, Japan had undergone one of the most remarkable transformations in modern history. Beginning with the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the island nation embarked on a series of reforms that stunned foreign observers.

In less than a generation, Japan went from a feudal nation to a global power. By 1905, the Japanese defeated the Russians, marking the first time an Asian nation beat a nominally Western power since the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

From 1894 to 1895, China and Japan fought a war that the former lost decisively. Outrage against foreign powers became volcanic, leading to the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Once again, foreign powers, including Germany, the United States, and others, intervened after so-called “boxers” (martial arts was then called “Chinese boxing” in the Western press) attacked foreigners, from tradesmen to the many missionaries who lived in China. 

SEAN DURNS: A NEW WORLD ORDER IS HERE, AND IT’S HERE TO STAY

Yet again, China was forced to sign additional treaties and make more concessions. The Qing dynasty eventually buckled under pressure, and China descended into a period of internal strife and warlordism that lasted from 1911 to 1949. 

The Republic of China, declared in 1912 by warlord Sun Yat-sen, was effectively stillborn. Much of the country descended into chaos.

China’s neighbors saw an opportunity, and Imperial Japan invaded the country. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union escalated its involvement, sending spies, political advisers, and others to support different factions. 

Imperial Japan’s occupation came to an end in 1945. An estimated 15 million to 20 million Chinese people died as a result of the Sino-Japanese War. China had suffered the second-highest total casualties of any nation during World War II, with overall casualties exceeding 30 million. 

In 1945, the Chinese Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-Shek and the Chinese Communist forces of Mao Zedong restarted the civil war that they had paused to deal with the Japanese. Mao and his communists had been content to let Chiang and the nationalists fight the Japanese for them.

Chiang’s exhausted forces ultimately lost the civil war, and the Chinese Communist Party seized power in 1949.

For more than one hundred years, China had been torn apart by almost ceaseless war, both from within and without. In the annals of modern Western history, the Chinese experience is without parallel. Yet somehow, Mao, its new “emperor,” managed to inflict greater terror. 

Mao’s attempts at modernization, the so-called “Great Leap Forward,” killed no fewer than 45 million of his own people in less than four years. Many of them starved to death in the countryside in what is almost certainly the worst government-created famine in history.

The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Mao’s societywide purge in the wake of these failures, led to another approximately 2 million deaths over the course of a decade.

The 20th century was a century of horrors, with two World Wars, the Holocaust, and other industrialized genocides, the advent (and use) of nuclear and chemical weapons, and a decadeslong Cold War. Yet the Chinese experience during this period, and in the preceding decades, is arguably singular. No other nation experienced such a prolonged period of upheaval.

It is impossible to understand modern China without understanding its horrific birth. The scope and scale of her losses — routinely descending into the tens of millions — is difficult for many Westerners to contemplate, let alone understand. 

The “century of humiliation” left China aggrieved, resentful, and suspicious — and not only of Western powers or neighbors like Japan. It is also, at some level, suspicious of itself.

The internal strife calls to mind another seminal period in Chinese history, the Warring States period (475-221 BC), in which seven different states fought for supremacy for more than two centuries. This, and the many periods of famine that have unfolded in Chinese history, have left a lasting fear of disorder. 

Insecure superpower

At the dawn of the last Cold War, the famed U.S. diplomat George Kennan argued that Soviet leaders had a “neurotic view of world affairs.” Kennan believed that underneath Russian bellicosity was a deep-seated insecurity. This applies to China, too. And China, perhaps even more than Russia, has a long history of turning on itself and inflicting tremendous self-harm.

China is also keenly aware that its return to global prominence is very much a return. Its rulers view themselves as the center of power. They consider the events of the previous centuries to be historical aberrations from the status quo in which they ruled and reigned, and others suffered what they must.

There are other parallels beyond the Soviet Union.

Modern China has similarities to Kaiser Wilhelm’s Imperial Germany. Both were deeply worried about being encircled. Both were born from war (“blood and iron,” as Otto von Bismarck famously said). Both had historical memories of foreign invasion and occupation (the Thirty Years’ War, in Germany’s case). Both had experienced a dizzying economic rise. 

Both sought, as Wilhelm famously put it, their “place in the sun.” And in some respects, it is perfectly normal for nations to want a position of power commensurate with their newfound status. Nations whose interests increase often seek the means to protect them. The problem, however, arises from wanting more.

The good news? The West has been here before. It has dealt with deeply insecure and newly powerful nations. The bad news? It has, on occasion, ended in a cataclysmic war that tore the world asunder. 

Bismarck did his level best to avoid a roll of the “iron dice.” The world wasn’t so lucky after Bismarck was ousted and Kaiser Wilhelm II began calling the shots. How it will fare with Xi and his successors at the helm remains to be seen. 

China wants to conquer Taiwan as part of its “national rejuvenation.” It wants to supplant the U.S. and become the world’s sole superpower. What is more, it feels that it is owed as much. What it is willing to do to achieve these objectives is an open question.

TRUMP’S CHINA VISIT IN THE REARVIEW

History, however, is clear: China is no stranger to war or deprivation.

Yet Beijing’s current rulers haven’t fought a great power war in decades, and its citizens have grown accustomed to a higher standard of living. The same, however, could be said for the U.S.