China, the sleeping giant, the middle kingdom, the inscrutable republic of a billion entrepreneurial Marxists lurking behind a Great Wall, is destined to claim the attention of the world in the foreseeable future. And as its economic power continues to multiply, and underwrites China’s traditional view of its destiny, that attention will largely be devoted to contending with the challenge of Chinese power. So the questions are: How do the Chinese see themselves in global terms? And what, if anything, can the West do about it?

Enter Christopher A. Ford, a Hudson Institute fellow and former diplomat, who has given much thought to the sources of Chinese thinking about the outside world. Specifically, he is struck by the common themes encountered in the Analects of Confucius and the life and work of Hugo Grotius, the 16th-century Dutch legal theorist widely considered the father of international law.