Courtesy of Ching-Ching Ni

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These two points help us better understand why the Chinese sense of legitimacy is vastly different from the Western one; for China is not a typical nation-state, but rather a deeply historical and civilizational state. It is an amalgam of the world’s longest continuous civilization, and a super-large modern state with its sense of legitimacy rooted deeply in its history.

An apt analogy would be to something like the Roman Empire, if it had endured into the 21st century—with all its regional and cultural diversities, with a modern economy and a centralized government, with a population nearly equal to that of 100 average-size European nations combined, situated on a vast continent, with its people speaking thousands of different dialects while sharing one written language called Latin.

This kind of state, a product of hundreds of states amalgamated into one over its long history, would become ungovernable if it were to adopt an adversarial political model. Such was the case in China beginning with the 1911 Republican Revolution, when the country attempted to copy the American model and degenerated into chaos, with rival warlords fighting each other and tens of millions of lives lost in the decades that followed.

As a civilizational state, the legitimacy of China’s government is deeply rooted in its own historical tradition, shaped over the millennia since the country was first unified under the Emperor Qin in 221 B.C. China’s one-party governance today may look illegitimate in the eyes of many Westerners, yet it is to most Chinese nothing extraordinary. For most of the past two thousand years, China has practiced a kind of one-party rule: governance by a unified Confucian elite that was selected through public exams (the Keju) and which claimed to represent—or genuinely represented—most if not all under heaven. Furthermore, during much of the one-party-rule era, China was arguably a better-governed, more peaceful and prosperous state than the European states of the same epoch. China began to lag behind Europe when it closed its door to the outside world in the 18th century and missed the Industrial Revolution.

Chinese paramilitary policemen stand guard in front of a sculpture of the ancient philosopher Confucius on display near Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Jan. 2011. Photo by Andy Wong/Associated Press.

Three key concepts have underpinned the Chinese sense of state legitimacy:

The first is the Confucian doctrine of the “mandate of heaven,” which has prevailed since the Han Dynasty (201 B.C. to 220 A.D.). Confucius admonished Chinese rulers that “water can carry a boat but also overturn it,” which meant that unless the rulers worked with diligence to ensure good governance (liangzheng shanzhi)—with a particular emphasis on promoting the country’s unity and people’s livelihood—ordinary people could rise up and rebel in the name of “heaven.” In other words, the Chinese mandate of heaven was not a God-given right; the people’s acceptance of the rulers’ legitimacy rested on the condition that the rulers had to perform. This Chinese idea of a “social contract” between the rulers and the ruled preceded the French philosopher Rousseau’s by over two millennia. China’s leaders today have adapted this idea into a sense of mission to realize the Chinese dream of restoring the country’s standing in the world and creating a more just and prosperous society for all.

Despite its various weaknesses, over the past thirty years the Chinese state has presided over the world’s fastest economic growth and improvement of living standards in human history. Key independent surveys, including those by the Pew Research Center and Ipsos, show consistently that the Chinese central authorities command a high degree of respect and support within the country. The latest Ipsos survey (Oct. 2016) showed that 90 percent of Chinese are satisfied with the track the country is taking, while only 37 percent of Americans and 11 percent of French feel the same about their countries. Depicting China’s polity as lacking legitimacy, or even being on the verge of collapse, is out of touch with China’s reality.

The second concept, which is related to the mandate of heaven, is the idea and practice of meritocracy (xuanxian renneng, or selecting and appointing the virtuous and competent). As Dr. Francis Fukuyama has observed in his book The Origins of Political Order, “It is safe to say that China invented modern bureaucracy, that is, a permanent administrative cadre selected on the basis of ability rather than kinship or patrimonial connection.” China’s Keju system, or civil service exams, was long used to select the most talented individuals into leading positions in government.

The Communist Party of China has adapted this tradition for modern China, building a system for selecting its leaders based on merit and performance. For example, China’s top decision-makers (members of the Standing Committee of the CPC Political Bureau, including President Xi Jinping) have almost all served at least twice as party secretaries or governors of a province, which means, given the size of China’s population, they have administered populations of 100 million or more, and performed well, before being promoted to their top-echelon positions.

The third concept of legitimacy derives from the Chinese philosophy of political governance, including, among other things, the two distinctive concepts minyi and minxin. The former approximately refers to “public opinion,” and the latter to “the hearts and minds of the people,” and the pair was first put forward by Mencius (372 – 289 BC). Minyi, or public opinion, can be fleeting and change overnight (especially in today’s internet age), while minxin, or “hearts and minds of the people,” tends to be stable and lasting, reflecting the whole and long-term interest of a nation. Over the past three decades, the Chinese state has generally practiced “rule by minxin.” This allows China to plan for the medium and long term, and even for the next generation, rather than for next 100 days or until the next election, as is the case with many Western democracies.

To sum up, while the West has for so many years engaged in promoting the Western political model in the name of universal values, China has pursued its own experiments in the political domain since 1978, drawing lessons from the disastrous Cultural Revolution, in which ideological radicalism expunged China’s governance traditions and dashed people’s hope for prosperity and order. Thanks to this effort, China has since managed to varying degrees of success to re-establish a connection with its own past as well as borrow many useful elements from the West.

China’s meritocratic system today is essentially a mechanism of “selection plus election,” with the former originating from China’s own tradition and the latter imported from the West. Pioneered by China’s late leader Deng Xiaoping, this institutional arrangement has succeeded in ensuring an orderly transition of power for this vast country over the past three decades, and this year may mark a new milestone as the CPC will convene its 19th National Congress.

However imperfect, this system is in a position to compete with the Western political model. Indeed, it would be inconceivable for the Chinese system today to produce an awkward leader like Donald Trump.

The Chinese experience since 1978 shows that the ultimate test of a good political system is how well it ensures good governance as judged by the people of that country. The stereotyped dichotomy of “democracy vs. autocracy” sounds so hollow in today’s complex world, given the large numbers of poorly governed “democracies” around the world. China’s experience may eventually usher in a paradigm shift in international political discourse from the dichotomy of the so-called democracy vs. autocracy, to that of good governance versus bad governance, with good governance taking the form of the Western political system or of a non-Western one. Likewise, bad governance may take the form of the Western political system or a non-Western one.

It follows that, from the Chinese point of view, the nature of a state, including its legitimacy, has to be defined more by its substance, i.e. good governance broadly acknowledged by the people of that country rather than by mere correct procedures. China emphasizes substance over procedures, believing that ultimately the pursuit of right substance will evolve and produce the right procedures, appropriate to each nation’s own traditions and conditions. A plethora of uncertainties are gripping the world today for reasons directly related to how government legitimacy has been defined by the West, and it’s high time to pause and reflect on this issue, and in this context, that China’s age-old wisdom and well-tested practices may be interestingly relevant.

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California is trapped—caught in the dangerous space between two menacingly authoritarian regimes that want to fight each other.

One regime is headquartered in Beijing, and the other is about to take power in Washington D.C. But when viewed from the Golden State, it’s striking how much they have in common.

Both are fervently nationalist, full of military men, and so bellicose they are spooking neighbors and allies. Both, while nodding to public opinion, express open contempt for human rights and undermine faith in elections and the free press. Both promote hatred of minorities (anti-Tibetan and anti-Uighur stances in China; anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim stances in the U.S.).

And both regimes are captained by swaggering men (President Xi Jinping in China; President-elect Donald Trump in U.S.) who tend to their own cults of personality and pose as corruption fighters while using their power to enrich their own families.

Most frighteningly for Californians, both regimes seem to see advantage in escalating conflict with the other. Both leaders have encouraged hatred of the other’s citizens (Xi has embraced ultranationalists who compare American treatment of the Chinese to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, while Trump has called China a “deceitful culture”). The incoming American administration is threatening to raise tariffs and label China a currency manipulator, actions that would likely start a trade war. The Chinese administration is provoking confrontations in the South China Sea while the new American strongman embraces Taiwan—actions that could start a real war.

All this leaves California with the enormous challenge of navigating U.S.-China tensions in a way that protects our people, our economy, and our values. And that will require tricky diplomacy that doesn’t take sides, for we need to maintain relations with both regimes. After all, we live under the laws of the United States, but are irretrievably linked to China, a vital partner in the trade, culture, technology and education sectors that distinguish California in the world.

A sustained conflict between China and the U.S. could produce all kinds of new restrictions on the flow of money and people, with devastating results for California. Our public universities rely both on federal funds from D.C. and top-dollar, out-of-state tuition fees from Chinese students to subsidize the education of Californians. So any Trump restrictions on foreign visitors—or retaliatory Chinese limits on overseas study and travel—could blow up the University of California’s business model. It also would damage the University of Southern California, the city of L.A.’s largest private sector employer, which heavily recruits Chinese students.

Our state’s signature industries—Silicon Valley and Hollywood—depend on consumers who live under both regimes. And our most promising ventures—from virtual reality and artificial intelligence technologies to major developments (like the San Francisco Shipyards in Hunter’s Point, to just name one)—rely on our ability to bring together manufacturers, investors and technologists from China and the U.S. In a trade war, both regimes could decimate innovation and development with restrictions on foreign investments.

And with both regimes so quick to escalate nationalist rhetoric, it’s quite possible that both Chinese nationals and Chinese Americans in California could become targets of bigotry and hate crimes. Our housing market relies on Chinese buyers, who spend an estimated $9 billion a year on homes here. A backlash against Chinese investors buying homes (and using them only part of the year) could produce discrimination and hurt our housing market, which in turn would damage the already underfunded public schools our taxes support.

How then can California handle such a conflict?

First, by protecting our people (especially Californians of Chinese ancestry) and our institutional connections to China with the same fervor the California government is rallying to protect our undocumented immigrants against Trump’s threats of mass deportations. This California diplomacy will be especially hard given the hyper-sensitivity of the autocrats in Beijing and D.C. to the slightest of slights; just as Trump lashes out at Saturday Night Live parodies, Xi and his loyalists see the Kung Fu Panda films as American warfare against them.

And, second, by reminding both regimes—in friendly but firm ways—that we are opposed to conflict because the U.S. and China need each other more than they appear willing to acknowledge.

Californians who doubt this would do well to consult John Pomfret’s masterful new book, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present. Pomfret, an American journalist long posted in China, employs telling details (the tea thrown into Boston Harbor was from Xiamen; an 1860s California attorney general campaigned against Chinese prostitutes while importing his own) to show how profoundly the two countries have shaped one other’s development, and just how vital their relationship has become to the world.

“The two nations have feuded fiercely and frequently, yet, irresistibly and inevitably, they are drawn back to one another,” he writes. “The result is two powers locked in an entangling embrace that neither can quit.”

California’s role in this difficult period should be to tell the story of its own deep ties to China, while serving as a model for a productive relationship, argues Matt Sheehan, author of the forthcoming book Chinafornia: Working with Chinese Investors, Immigrants and Ideas on U.S. Soil.

Sheehan, who also publishes the weekly Chinafornia Newsletter and provides communications consulting for Chinese and U.S. companies, says now is an important time for California officials and businesses to seek out areas of productive cooperation with Chinese counterparts, especially in areas like manufacturing and fighting climate change.

“I think of California as a living laboratory for a more practical, productive version of U.S.-China relations,” he says.

But not all collaborations with China would be helpful. Our technologies companies shouldn’t be aiding the U.S. surveillance state or assisting the Chinese government in suppressing human rights, as Facebook is reportedly doing by developing a newsfeed that would empower censors.

We also shouldn’t play to anti-Chinese prejudice, like some California unions have done in opposing trade agreements and advancing union organizing. One noxious—if ridiculous—example is a current push by the hotel workers’ union to block the sale of the Westin Hotel in Long Beach (where the union has an organizing campaign) to Chinese interests on grounds that it’s so close to that city’s port that Chinese ownership would threaten national security.

One possible model for California’s strategy going forward might be Anson Burlingame, whom President Lincoln dispatched to Beijing to represent the U.S. during the Civil War. Burlingame’s approach, as described by Pomfret, was to commiserate with the Chinese (we have our terrible rebellion with the South, you with the Taipings) as a basis for collaboration. His work ultimately produced the Burlingame Treaty, which banned discrimination against Chinese workers in America, welcomed Chinese students to U.S. educational institutions, and opened the way for Chinese immigrants to become American citizens.

Today, Burlingame’s accomplishments are mostly forgotten, but his name belongs to a highly desirable suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region boasting one of America’s most prosperous populations of Chinese Americans.

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As their country has become the “world’s factory,” hundreds of millions of Chinese people have been lifted out of poverty. At the same time, China has become one of the most polluted places in the entire world.

In researching a new book, Siqi Zheng and I traced the rise of China’s urban pollution. We were trying to understand three things: Why has pollution increased so sharply? How has pollution impacted the population? And how is the government responding to the issue? In the end, we documented an encouraging trend. Newfound demand for a clean environment—”blue skies”—from the growing Chinese middle and upper classes creates a compelling incentive for Beijing and local officials to clean up Chinese cities.

China’s environmental problems are tied to its rapid industrialization. When Mao Zedong became the leader of China in 1949, he ruled over relatively few cities, and they were not industrialized. Early Communist Party leaders located factories near the Soviet Union, China’s main trading partner at that time, and didn’t prioritize environmental protection. Pollution in the country began to worsen in the 1980s, when then-leader Deng Xiaoping launched a new economic development strategy focused on industrialization and increasing exports. Due to the country’s low wages, subsidized energy prices, and weak enforcement of environmental regulations, China soon became the world’s factory. Everything, it seemed, carried a “Made in China” label.

But Chinese cities soon began to suffer from the effects of the black smoke produced by expanding heavy industry and from burning coal to generate power and wintertime heat. Between 1980 and 2012, China’s annual consumption of coal increased from 679 to 3,887 million tons. Today, China is the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions. Based on 2011 data, China produced 28 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions while the United States produced 16 percent of total emissions.

These emissions sharply increase the risk of climate change and greatly decrease quality of life. According to World Bank data from 2013, China’s citizens are exposed to roughly five times the levels of particulate matter as people in the United States. This pollution comes from burning coal as well as a sharp rise in the consumption of high-sulfur gasoline, which fuels the growing number of private vehicles on China’s roads.

Chinese people are noticing the change. Over the last 30 years, China’s economy grew at a rate of 10 percent per year, slashing the share of its population living below the poverty line from 84 percent to 13 percent. Over the same period of time, improvements in medical care and diet have lengthened life expectancy at birth from 66 to 73 years. But despite such progress, Chinese urbanites must reckon with the reality that the nation’s standard of living is not improving as quickly as its economy is growing. In surveys, many report lower life satisfaction than economists typically predict for a rapidly growing economy.

The central government is listening. Since the early 2000s, it has increasingly emphasized sustainable growth and has focused on reducing pollution and mitigating the risk of climate change. On one level, this shift is a surprise: Why would China engage in regulation that could kill the golden goose of industry, raising the cost of production and threatening the nation’s edge as an exporter of manufactured goods? But basic economics provides an explanation. Wealthier people are willing to pay more to avoid risk. They demand safer products, safer food, safer housing, and a cleaner environment. So as a growing middle and upper class demands its blue skies, a central government that seeks to preserve its power and credibility has strong incentives to stop polluting.

It also has a better chance of convincing local officials to devote more attention to environmental challenges. In recent years, Beijing has been changing the performance evaluation and promotion criteria for local officials. Instead of rewarding them purely for output, China now includes environmental goals in performance metrics. Mayors, especially in richer and better-educated cities, also face pressure from the public. With the relaxation of the nation’s domestic passport system and the liberalization of the labor and land markets, Chinese urbanites are able to vote with their feet and move to cleaner cities. Just as in the United States, where homes in nicer areas sell at a premium, apartments in Chinese cities and neighborhoods with better air also fetch higher prices.

Chinese urbanites wear air pollution masks when pollution is elevated.

China’s cities track this variation in home prices and have also used more novel sources of information to study the demand for a better environment. In recent years, the rise of the Internet and social media, coupled with new technology such as cheap air pollution monitors, has increased public awareness of local pollution challenges. Many people use Weibo, China’s equivalent to Twitter, to express concerns about pollution. We have documented that Chinese urbanites purchase more air filters and air pollution masks when pollution is elevated. This shows that people are aware of pollution levels and are willing to take costly actions to protect themselves. The wealthy are the most likely to take such precautions, which suggests that quality of life disparities will worsen unless pollution is improved.

Several promising trends in China’s rich coastal cities suggest that significant environmental progress is likely to take place. Manufacturing is land intensive, so as urban rents rise, industrial activity is leaving the major cities and taking pollution with it. In addition, second- and third- tier inland cities can offer lower electricity prices to manufacturers, making them increasingly attractive destinations for labor and energy intensive industries. Happily, “dirty factories” do not simply migrate from one city to another. The new factories opening up in China’s western cities are more likely to feature clean, modern engineering technology.

China is also making a major strategic investment in the green economy. Since 2007 it has been the world’s largest producer of the photovoltaic cells that produce solar energy; in 2014, exports totaled $14 billion. China’s domestic market for renewable energy is also huge, as the country aims to increase its non-fossil fuel energy capacity to 15 percent of total primary energy consumption. Research and development in renewables is expanding, with the help of engineering professors from top institutions such as Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Science.

China’s post-industrial economic growth will depend on the health, well-being, and happiness of its people—who increasingly clamor for a better environment. It is no accident that so many Chinese people enjoy visiting San Francisco and Los Angeles—high-amenity cities that attract and retain the skilled. Leadership in Beijing has a great incentive to build similar urban centers that could accelerate China’s transition to the knowledge economy.

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Chinese photographer Chen Man has been witness to the dizzying modernization of China of the last 20 years. She recalls growing up in the quiet hutongs (alleyways) of Beijing, at a time when people were mostly riding bicycles to get around. Now most of those hutongs have made way for high-rise apartments, as Beijing becomes one of the most crowded cities in the world–and one of the most polluted due to the vast number of private cars.

These days Chen has been spending more time in California, partly because she’s married to a Chinese American and they have a young child. She’s also enjoying a large solo show, “Chen Man East-West,” which occupies both floors of L.A. Louver, an art gallery in Los Angeles’ Venice neighborhood. Having heard of her reputation beforehand–she’s famous in China, hardly known here in the U.S.–I went for a preview of the exhibition one afternoon and had a chance to talk with her.

Now in her mid-30s, Chen grew up in the post-Mao era—a fast-paced world defined by hectic commercialism and an influx of Western visitors, goods, and culture. In one of her talks, she has referred to the West obliquely by saying, “We love to drive your cars, drink your coffee, and carry your handbags.” There’s a rueful irony in her voice as she says this. She’s been exposed to American and European movies, magazines, and advertising, and one can see those influences in the provocative photography in L.A. Louver’s main gallery downstairs. Meanwhile, her more sedate brush paintings and calligraphies are upstairs.

Chen began drawing and painting as a small child, and later attended the Central Academy of Fine Arts, one of the most important Chinese art schools. She took up photography while there, and worked her way into shooting for Vision Magazine, which sounds to me like a combination of Vogue with hipper street elements. “I learned to do everything for my work: lighting, make-up, styling,” she says during our conversation. “In those days there weren’t those specific jobs. Well, not much even today.” These skills have served her well in creating her striking images, which combine studio photography and digital manipulation.

The large photographs in the exhibition are her personal creations. She loves to juxtapose the old and the new, the traditional and the avant-garde. Some look like shots from a slick magazine–a fashion model dressed in bright red, holding a bright red flower, with the Heavenly Gate of the Forbidden City behind her, or another model in a bright red dress and red high heeled shoes, posing with young men in striped T-shirts and bicycles in what looks like one of the few remaining hutongs in Old Beijing.

In two of her series, she refers to ancient Chinese philosophy using semi-nude female models to add an over-the-top level of fantasy. The images in “Five Elements,” she says, are about cycles, and how one element evolves into the next, and how the old and the new exist side by side in today’s China. For each “element” (also sometimes defined as “phase” or “process”), she juxtaposes two photographs – a large one on the wall that features a powerful goddess and a smaller one on the floor that shows a middle-age woman, in a real-life setting. One of my favorites is “Earth,” showing a demon woman rising from a fissure in the road, naked like a dark Venus–she has caused an earthquake, and buildings behind her are burning and collapsing. Meanwhile she looks out coolly, her hair flying and her hands strategically covering her crotch. The counterpart photograph is of a stout, smiling woman in some kind of factory–she’s the salt of the earth, a working stiff.

Upstairs at Louver is the other side of Chen Man–the side that studied traditional Chinese brush painting and calligraphy. Her brushwork is highly skilled, both controlled and expressive. About a dozen works on paper are here, portraits of monk-life figures and Chinese characters. One couplet of calligraphy hangs on the wall, in two frames. Both feature the word “meng” (or dream) in Chinese, with a smaller character below saying “inner” in one and “outer” in the other. Here we see the Buddhist influence in her work, and her understanding that the material world is illusion. And at the same time, she is a realist: “All reality is a phantom, all phantoms are real,” she has said.

“Chen Man East-West” runs through Jan. 31.

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Beijing was in a state of heightened anxiety and had been for weeks. Each day in the run-up to the National Day parade, the security measures seemed to get a little bit tighter. Our apartment building had a distant view of Jianguomen, which is the main east-west avenue that runs through the center of Beijing, traversing Tiananmen Square along the way, and which was to be the main parade route. During rehearsal the Sunday before, we were told not to go onto our balconies.

“What happens if we do? Will we be shot?” a neighbor jokingly asked. The building manager replied in a deadpan manner, “Maybe; who knows?” All the pigeons in the city were locked up and kite flying was banned, presumably to prevent undesirable threats to the safety of airspace. On the day itself, the two blocks on either side of the route were closed off to passersby. The 2009 event was to be the 60th anniversary of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, the first parade in a decade, and only the fifth time since the 1950s that such an event had been held. But, unlike in previous October 1 parades, no ordinary people were allowed to line the route and watch the festivities. The center of Beijing was hermetically sealed off from the city’s residents. For everyone but the invited crowd of VIPs and journalists, this was a television-only spectacle. Despite the country’s booming wealth, China’s rulers can often seem insecure, looking anxiously over their shoulders at the people they govern. In the weeks leading up to the parade, they had conducted a crackdown on human-rights lawyers, and three months later they ordered an 11-year jail sentence for Liu Xiaobo, the democracy activist who would later win the Nobel Peace Prize. The heavy-handed security was fruit of this nervy mindset.

A few hours before the parade was to start, I watched a stream of maybe 50, maybe 100 buses pass by, all with a regulation 30 meters in between them. The first group stood out because of the bright clothes of the excited young people inside—this bus orange, that one green, another blue. The next group were filled with soldiers in dress uniform, some trying to catch a last-minute nap, their heads pressed against the glass. With precision timing, they were being ferried to their starting places for a three-hour-long spectacle which was at times intimidating, at times impressive, and at times folksy, but never anything but meticulous. Like the morning mist, which lifted to make way for bright sunshine, the pre-parade paranoia quickly evaporated. By midday, 200,000 soldiers and civilians had taken part in the procession, and I did not see a single foot put wrong. It was a display that mixed North Korean mass choreography with the sort of swagger the Soviets used to muster for May Day. The kids in colored T-shirts that I had seen on the buses filled the vast expanse of Tiananmen Square to hold up cards that formed gigantic phrases: “Obey the Party’s Command,” “Be Loyal to the Party,” and “Long Live the Motherland.” For an hour, the military showed off the very latest of its hardware, the product of two decades of double-digit spending increases. There were the J-10 fighter jets, China’s first homegrown jets, and a long line of DF-31A intercontinental ballistic missiles, which have the range to hit Los Angeles, and which the Xinhua News Agency later described as “remarkable symbols of China’s defense muscle.” A decade before, much of the weaponry on display had been bought from Russia; this time it was all developed at home.

Military parades have been a feature of Chinese statecraft for centuries. During the Qing dynasty (1644 to 1912), victory ceremonies were often organized for the emperor to demonstrate his authority, and under the Communists they have been revamped for television. Geremie Barmé, an Australian expert on Chinese culture, recalls that in 1984, which also happened to be the year of Deng Xiaoping’s 80th birthday, a group of students from Peking University held up an impromptu sign during the parade that said “Hello Xiaoping.” As this was not in the script, the television cameras missed it. Once the event had finished, the spontaneous greeting was restaged and edited into the official broadcast. In 2009, the television highlight was the contingent from the Beijing Women’s Militia, who marched in precise fashion past the podium in red miniskirts and knee-high white boots, and who, Chinese media later revealed, were all models specially chosen for their uniform height. The main audience for the parades was the domestic one, which was to be both entertained and cowed by the organizational capacity of the Chinese state. But China is too big and too important for such an event to go unnoticed overseas. China’s leaders knew that images of its bristling military display would be beamed around the planet and seemed untroubled if the outside world was also a little intimidated. “It represents the realization of the great revival of the Chinese nation as a result of tireless struggle,” as the army described the event.

Before the military parade reached Tiananmen Square, the soldiers stopped in a long column along the main avenue to be reviewed by then President Hu Jintao. He was standing in the back of a Red Flag, China’s homegrown limousine, his head and upper body visible through the sunroof as it drove past the troops. Hu, a gray bureaucrat skilled at the inner workings of the party, went out of his way to cut a dour public profile, an almost deliberate anti-cult of personality. Dressed in a Mao tunic buttoned to the top, and with his dyed black hair immaculately coiffed, he seemed at first to have a slightly comic air, and I chuckled when a colleague quipped about his resembling an Austin Powers villain. Yet, as he boomed into the microphone in front of him “Tongzhimen hao” (“Greetings, comrades”) and “Tongzhimen xinku le” (“Thanks for all the suffering, comrades”), his voice, echoing all around the vast square, was a little chilling. Stern-faced, he returned to the podium at the gate of the Forbidden City, right above the giant oil portrait of Mao Zedong, and stood on the same spot where 60 years earlier Mao had declared that the “Chinese people have stood up.” Flanked on both sides by the other eight members of the Communist Party’s Standing Committee, the body that really runs the country, all dressed in dark business suits with red ties, Hu addressed the crowd. “Today a socialist China, geared toward modernization, the world, and the future, stands rock-firm in the East,” he declared. It was his biggest applause line.

Just over two decades before, the same square had been the scene of bloodshed. In the streets surrounding Tiananmen, Chinese soldiers massacred hundreds—maybe thousands—of Beijing residents as they tried to clear the student-led protests. Realizing their legitimacy had been called into question, Chinese leaders would sit somewhat meekly for years afterward as foreigners lectured them on the need to change their political system. Bill Clinton once told his counterpart, Jiang Zemin, that the Chinese Communist Party was “on the wrong side of history.” The scars from those events contributed to a desire among China’s leaders to maintain a low profile overseas and to focus on development at home. Shortly after the massacre, Deng Xiaoping devised his famous slogan to define Chinese foreign policy, advising his colleagues to taoguang yanhui—literally, “hide the brightness and nourish obscurity.” Deng knew that the resurgence of China’s economy would stir anxieties in the U.S. and across Asia, where many festering rivalries remain—even more so after the 1989 display of authoritarian muscle in Tiananmen. Deng realized that only by emphasizing humility and a willingness to cooperate could China develop its economy without provoking a regional and international backlash. For two decades, China looked inward and focused on rebuilding.

Yet, sitting under the baking sun in Tiananmen Square that morning, I felt Hu Jintao was delivering a very different message—the words of a risen China, not a rising China. He was telling the country and the world not only that the Communist Party was still very much in charge, but that it was also pursuing a path that was moral and right. China, he suggested, was now an important nation with legitimate interests, and it would not be afraid to defend them. Nations do not change tack overnight, of course, but the parade brought to the surface powerful forces that had been building for some time. It represented a symbolic turning point in modern Chinese history, when it became hard to ignore the way the Deng Xiaoping formula of self-restraint was crumbling and the new era of geopolitical competition with the United States that was emerging. The socialist rock in the East wanted to escape from the shadow of the West.

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