The Military History of China, from the Qing Dynasty to the Present

Harold M. Tanner’s War in Modern China is an excellent broad synthesis covering three thousand years of Chinese military conflicts in a compact cohesive readable narrative. For a reader interested in understanding trends in any major power’s military development, Tanner provides a template for analysis clarifying the directions and motives in history. Most usefully, China’s historical military priorities are offered as recurring principles to distinguish between China’s core and peripheral interests.

Modern China’s ten chapters begins with an overview of China’s ancient history, tracing broad directions of expansions and conquests, leading up a deeper dive into the Qing Dynasty, most familiar as the precursor of “Modern China”. The Qing collapse leads to the Republic of China (ROC) which suffers through a Warlord Period of competing military fiefdoms. All along Tanner’s narrative, the militarization of societies, the need for militarization, and the costs of militarization are established guideposts on which to consider the subsequent rise and fall of Guomindang “Nationalist Party” nominal rule over the ROC, the victory by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the possible directions for the current People’s Republic of China (PRC) regime. Modern China easily disposes of the ridiculous claim that China “never invaded” other nations, still often ignorantly repeated by eager CCP proxies and apologists (but to be fair, was also claimed in Frank Capra’s Battle of China film, of the U.S. World War II propaganda Why We Fight series).

Tanner’s first chapter sets the ancient physical and human geography that shapes Chinese warfare, clarifying why certain regions function as strategic cores, channels, or peripheries. All major dynasty expansions out from the Shang Dynasty central plains core are covered, from the Han to the Ming, along with their domestic struggles.

The next three chapters cover China’s Qing Dynasty (non-Han minority rulers, also known as Manchus from Manchuria), from its expansions 1644-1830 to become history’s fourth largest empire. They cover increasing weakness from internal unrest and foreign attacks 1830-1884 including the Taiping Rebellion and Opium Wars, and imperial collapse 1884-1910 from further wars including Japan and the Boxers, despite desperate attempts at modernization. The Qing Dynasty establishes the baseline for China’s military and political perspectives as the reference for China’s victimhood mantra of the supposedly western foreigner-imposed “Century of Humiliation” which today still guides CCP nationalistic stridency.

The chapter on nation-building 1911–1928 covers the anarchic Warlord Period of disruptive internal wars even as the Guomindang’s Northern Expedition partially reunifies the ROC under Chiang Kai-shek. The Nationalist Decade 1928–1936 tracks parallel developments of the Guomindang’s attempted consolidation of the ROC while Japan encroaches as China is still fractured by internal conflicts, including CCP insurgency. China’s complicated Civil War, alliances and multi-party war against Japan 1937–1949 describe the Guomindang’s erosion, coupled with the CCP strengthening towards establishing the PRC. With the CCP victory, Tanner shifts back to a single “China” on the early PRC 1950–1962 military efforts, including against South Korea, Tibet, and India, to consolidate political authority internally while deterring foreign threats.

The chapter on “Triangulation” 1962–1979 tracks how the PRC played in the Soviet and U.S. Cold War environment while protecting China’s core interests, including the PRC’s clashes with the Soviet Union and Vietnam. Tanner closes by discussing the PRC’s strategic aims from 1979 to 2025: revisionist expansion, reactive defense, or a renewed great-power rivalry; with continuing focus on Taiwan, South China Seas, and India.

Modern China generally avoids ideological explanations, preferring to focus on Tanner’s recurring core versus peripheral interest dynamics, tying military outcomes onto economics and realpolitik; rather than onto romanticized revolutionary glamor, simple charisma, or force. Tanner's repeated sober holistic template gives little satisfaction to champions of the Left or Right, but focuses on institutional priorities, regardless of ancient imperial traditions or post-modern utopianism.

Readers who want operational treatments of Chinese military history may find that Tanner’s clear listing of conflicts is a good leading point for deeper study. However, Modern China’s focus on recurring broad principles tends to deemphasize contingent factors such as specific leadership or the anecdotal bread and butter narratives of more battle-intensive accounts.

Modern China. by its scope, is necessarily a somewhat monolithic approach to “China”, which often overlooks how a large country with subcultures and regions may have differing experiences depending on where one focuses. China’s imperial past also fosters that blindness when China, similar to many of the world’s current countries, had no deep unifying identity based on a single ethnicity until the 19th Century.

Today, the PRC is held together by the military force of the CCP, and a myth of unity supposedly based on Marxist, Maoist, or Xi Jinping thought. China however, as Tanner shows, has had three thousand years of repeated unifications, breakups, and reunifications. The PRC dynasty is still less than a century old, a significant but slow blink in Chinese history, a relative shortness of which those CCP members versed in history are well aware.

China, like most large historical empires, used to be a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural power bound largely by imperial force promising stability and security. Today’s PRC has Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream” of re-establishing the boundaries and power of previous Chinese Powers, specifically that of the Qing Dynasty. This current Dream, however, is not like any wistful nostalgia of former imperial powers limited by old trade, communication, transportation, and military methods.

China is now in the hands of a regime controlling the world’s second largest economy in a modern globalized economic network. It's also a military environment with parties of intercontinental reach, and a world-wide diaspora of potentially dangerous fifth columnists hidden among genuine transplants loyally contributing to their adopted homes. These potentially sympathetic, indoctrinated migrants, perhaps blindly entranced by the glories of the past while ignorant of the present, sometimes are even consciously aided by those “declining” indigenous portions of host non-Chinese societies so obsessed with their own flaws that they fail to recognize CCP realities.

Under such modern globalized conditions, the rules which Modern China spell out, its general template for how imperial powers have for centuries conducted their military affairs, whether Chinese or Non-Chinese, are limited. Tanner’s valid historical analysis may misconstrue the military future of China, except in the broadest of terms, by the advances in globalized integration and technological advances.

China well into the 20th Century could not project its military strength very far from its borders. And lacking the industrial development of the West, old China could not project any imperial ambitions, or solidify any imperial control, as the Europeans were able to once their Industrial Revolution took root. Nor could the old China distribute its culture and soft influence without the intercourse and trade links of the modern era. That old China, the China with which Tanner develops Modern China’s valid thesis, diverges once modern factors are considered in their entirety.

And the impact on reverse is also true. If Modern China is read too narrowly, Hong Kong and Taiwan would be merely islands on the PRC’s peripheral border. Yet, Hong Kong’s former existence was a nagging reminder of CCP’s own flawed economic management. Having no military power at all, Hong Kong still needed to be thoroughly subdued for CCP’s own political comfort. Meanwhile, democratic Taiwan is an ideological dagger at the CCP heart, a type of consideration which ancient Chinese rulers never needed to face from similarly vested contemporary monarchies and empires. Taiwan poses no military threat, but Taiwan’s democracy threatens the CCP’s one-party rule supposedly required by China’s vastness and Chinese “nature”. Similarly, religious threats, such as from Islam, Christianity, or even Falun Gong, seldom would in the past have had the reach that current technology allows, which can threaten CCP authority without any military force at all. Even the arguably semi-religious Taiping Rebellion needed actual armies to spread its threat against the Qing.

Modern China skims over such issues perhaps too lightly. The PRC today can dream of being a world power without accountability, relying on China’s past victimhood as a shield against accusations. But unlike in China’s past, PRC economic tentacles reach far deeper than China’s old silk and tea trade. And thanks to its Communist label, the PRC often has within potential competitors a willing global army of fellow travelers and useful idiots who can be co-opted or fooled to do the CCP’s bidding, without need for any military action. Foreign adversaries now also can be attacked via remote instantaneous cyber warfare or space-based weapons. An analysis based in China’s past understandably does not emphasize such modern developments.

But it would be a mistake to suggest that Tanner’s analysis has no value. Modern China’s consideration of core and peripheral priorities does and always will have critical diagnostic implications. Short of all-out conflict, up to and including nuclear exchanges; core and peripheral priorities will provide a foundation for diplomatic and deterrent calculus. A reader might need specialized monographs on specific topics for more detail, or extrapolate more carefully what modern aspects of global competition mean for future Chinese military developments; but Tanner’s Modern China is an excellent template for under-standing historical military policies, not only for China but for any other military power.

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Our Reviewer: Ching Wah Chin, a member of NYMAS, has lectured and written widely on East Asian History. His reviews include The Pacific War and Contingent Victory: Why Japanese Defeat Was Not Inevitable, Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City, The 1929 Sino-Soviet War, War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat, Future War and the Defence of Europe, Nations in the Balance: The India-Burma Campaign, December 1943-August 1944, Ring of Fire: A New History of the World at War, 1914, All the World at War, On a Knife Edge: How Germany Lost the First World War, China's Spies, and The Greater Second World War

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Note: War in Modern China is also available in hard cover & e-editions.

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