Prologue

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hen I was in my twenties, Father showed me a small black-and-
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white photograph of himself that I h had never seen before. He
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placed it in the palm of my hand ass we sat together

t in the living room of
shingto DC. It had been taken in China
shington
my childhood home outside Washington,
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in the 1950s. His eyes glimmered,

meered, and
a his skin had none of the lines of
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ilitary uniform
age. He wore a plain military u and a cap. I ran a finger over a
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darkened spot in the center o of the cap. A shadow there. Father said that’s
where the red stararr ha been, the symbol of the People’s Liberation Army
had be
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of China. Afterer he mailed

ma the photo to his father in the British colony of
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Hong Kong,, his father

fa
f rubbed out the star, fearful of what the authorities
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might do if they saw it. Father got the photo back after he left China and
reunited with his parents in Hong Kong. He brought it with him when he
moved to America, this keepsake of the revolution.

I am the son of two empires. I was born in Washington and grew up

in Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb along the Potomac River, when there
was talk of the Cold War and containing Communism and preventing
nuclear Armageddon. Those were the years of Nixon to Reagan, an arc
when global politics was dominated by a titanic struggle between agents
2 at t h e e d g e o f e m p i r e

of two ideologies, or rather two systems of power. The Berlin Wall fell in
my final year of high school. Radio deejays played “Wind of Change” by
the Scorpions. The Soviet Union dissolved, and America became unri-
valed in the world. We talked about these events in my household and in
classrooms and schoolyards, and I read about them in newspapers, which
seemed to me, with their correspondents in Washington, New York, and
far-flung world capitals, to be chroniclers of the American century.
There was a surviving Communist power in the world, one that was
more obscure to most Americans but better known to me. China, the
motherland. My parents were village children in the south as the nation
tried to repel Japanese invaders in the Second World War. But B there was

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no peace after the surrender of Japan. A civil war ar between
betwe the ruling

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Nationalists and the rebellious Communists reignited. ignited. Mao Zedong and
gnited. M

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his Red Army won, forcing the Nationalists U retreat to the island of
ts to re
ret
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Taiwan. In 1950, Father was in the first class lass from his high school to grad-
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uate into a China governed by the Communist ommun Party.

ommuni
The zeal for realizing the revolution,
olution, for
f building up the People’s Re-
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public, burned in the hearts of many citizens. Father went north to Bei-
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jing for university. On October ctober 11, 1950, the one-year anniversary of the
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founding of the People’s e’s Republic,

le’s Rep
Repu Father marched with soldiers, work-
ers, and students in front
ffront of Mao, who stood waving to them atop Ti-
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ananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace. They believed Mao would lead
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China in reclaiming
aimin its past glory and standing up to American imperial-
aiming
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ism. That fall, the American military advanced against North Korean and
Chinese forces on the Korean peninsula. The Communist Party exhorted
all citizens to aid in the war effort, warning that the American army could
march into northeast China and onward to Beijing.
Father enlisted in the People’s Liberation Army. He spent most of the
next decade on the frontiers, as his military career took surprising turns.
He went to corners of the country that the vast majority of Chinese have
never laid eyes on. Places of beauty and of strife. He trained for the air
force in Manchuria, near the Korean front. Then he spent years in Xinji-
ang, the northwest region that is home to Turkic-speaking Muslims, the
 prologue 3

Uyghurs and Kazakhs, a land that rulers in Beijing have sought for centu-
ries to control. Father saw the extent of the Chinese empire, and he wit-
nessed Mao’s efforts to resurrect its power.
I knew nothing about those parts of Father’s life when I was growing
up. When I was a child, I sometimes watched him put on a red blazer and
black pants to go to work at Sampan Cafe, a Chinese restaurant. For de-
cades, this was the only uniform that I associated with him, until he
showed me the portrait of himself that he had sent to his father while he
was in the army.
He is not someone who revealed much. What sharing there was didn’t
come naturally, so I didn’t prod when I was younger. r. On the nights he

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came home early from the restaurant, he didn’t sit on the eedge of my bed

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regaling me with stories, ones about his life orr even made-up
m ones, the

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kind many parents tell their children. He disappea
U disappeared most Sundays be-
disappe
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cause he was a co-owner of a takeout restaurant,
estauran Chin’s Kitchen. On Sat-
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urdays, the one day he had off from m work,

work we sometimes sat at my desk
looking at sheets of numbers, algebra o geometry or calculus homework.
gebra or
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He knew numbers. I would le learn

arn later
la that he studied engineering after
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his days in the army.

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At moments, I gott a glimpse

glim behind the curtain. One winter after-
noon, Father and d Mother
Moth he were driving me and my sister through Wash-
Mo her
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ington to visitt our gra

grandmother in Chinatown, and the two of them were
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speaking loudly
udly ini Cantonese in the front about something. I stared out
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the window at the boarded-up rowhouses. Mother turned to us. Commu-

nism did something to your father, she said. He’s set in his ways. He won’t
change.
I sensed pain there, a wound that I didn’t want to press on. At least not
yet. They each had their histories from long before I was born. I later
learned that Father had made a change, long ago. At a precarious mo-
ment, he had made a decision to take his life in a different direction. A
choice about ideas and dreams, agency and freedom, nation and home.
My parents said their farewells to China and Hong Kong at different
points, under different circumstances. But they never left entirely. No
4 at t h e e d g e o f e m p i r e

Chinese immigrant I know has ever done that. Another memory: A sum-
mer night sitting together in our basement watching the women’s volley-
ball final of the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, the United States
versus China. My parents shouted out with glee when the Chinese team
won the gold, jumping around almost as wildly as star spiker “Iron Ham-
mer” Lang Ping and her red-clad teammates. “We’re cheering for China
because it’s our homeland,” Mother told me.
I started learning things decades later, by having long conversations
with them and other family members and by looking through old letters
and photographs. It began before I entered graduate school at the Univer-
sity of California at Berkeley and continued throughoutt my studies
st there.

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I was pursuing parallel inquiries: one into the history,ry, society,
societ and politics

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of China, through coursework and conversations nss with pprofessors, and the

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other into my family history. I spent time with ith my p
U parents and my uncles
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and aunts around Washington and San Francisco,
Francisc and in particular with
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Father’s older brother, Sam, who had d grown up with him in Hong Kong
and Guangdong Province and had come com to America in 1948 to attend
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university. As I was starting toouunearth the past, I made trips every year to
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China and Hong Kong. That stoppedstop when I went to New York to work
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for The New York Times. es.

es
I was living in downtown
dow ow Manhattan when terrorists flew commercial
downt
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jetliners into the

he World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11,
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2001. That violence

olenc and America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq con-
olence
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fronted me with questions about the nature and reach of empire, about
the forces that oppose it and the ones it seeks to suppress. On the day I
turned thirty, I left New York to cover the Iraq War.
Five years later, I moved to Beijing as a correspondent. It was then that
the country and my parents’ lives began opening up to me in a way I had
never imagined. I now had the time to piece together past events that had
remained in the shadows, and to see the connections among people and
places and eras. Beyond that, it was exhilarating starting a life in a nation
in the throes of transformation, with its cities of gleaming office towers
and artists’ enclaves and striving workers coming in by the trainload from
 prologue 5

villages, looking to be part of the colossal story of change that the first
decades of the twenty-first century promised to deliver.
For someone just arriving, it seemed like China’s leaders and its people
were working every muscle of the country to build the future. It repre-
sented the opposite of the abyss I had seen in Iraq. Years of reporting
there on the disintegration of a country had left me pessimistic about the
nature of humanity and the wielding of power. Two Iraqi colleagues,
Khalid and Fakher, were among the many killed in violence that would
ultimately result in the loss of about three hundred thousand lives. The
destruction and carnage had been more shocking because they were the
direct consequence of American actions. They had been en per
perpetrated by a

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nation—my nation—that just a decade earlier had been ha handed a historic

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opportunity to use its position as an unchallenged nged superpower
enged su
s to help

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lead the world into a better place. Instead, d, American
UAmeri
Amer leaders took their
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country down the path of imperial bloodletting i the aftermath of the Sep-
dletting in
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tember 11 attacks. Those in the American political class stayed in denial for
erican p
pol
years about what they had done.
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When I stepped off an ai airplane

rplane in a gleaming new Beijing airport
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terminal on a warm night ht in April

Ap 2008, I thought that if any power rep-
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resented an alternative vision of the future, surely it was China. Back

ve visio
then, the path off progress
proggre its leaders had taken since the catastrophes
pr
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under Mao and nd the violent

vi suppression of protests in 1989 seemed to sig-
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nal a turn toward

oward more enlightened ideas.
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But as with so many things in which one invests a measure of blind

hope, the reality turned out to be different, as it had for Father. By the
time I moved out of China at the end of 2016, this had become obvious to
me: the story of China under Communist Party rule is one of a nation
straining with all its might to become an empire that surpasses that of
America, and that envisions itself as the inheritor of the rule and the
realm of the Qing dynasty. The party is doing so in an era when only
ashes remain of all the other imperial powers of that age, and when the
6 at t h e e d g e o f e m p i r e

moral failings of empire have been well documented, from the British to
the Ottomans to the Russians. And yet, Xi Jinping, China’s ruler, has
equated the dream of empire with his leadership in deeds and words, in
his talk of the great rejuvenation of China.
Many ordinary Chinese share the dream. It is rooted in a common
telling of millennia of history that begins with an ancient Yellow River
civilization and continues through the conquest of kingdoms by the first
emperor, Qin Shihuang, and reaches a zenith with the commercial, artis-
tic, and intellectual ferment of the Tang and Song dynasties. It is a myth
of the motherland of an ethnic Han people whose culture and civilization
hold dominion, so much so that even invaders with great martial prowess
at mar

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became Chinese. This was the history I learned when I began b
be studying

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China. Then I came across historians and writers different perspec-
rss with d

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tives. They told narratives that centered on the idea
U ide that China’s history,
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even up to the last century, was defined d by cycles
cycle of alternating rule be-
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tween people from China proper and d nomadic

nomad or semi-settled people of
noma
the Asian steppe and forestlands, s, ones whose
w societies were as rich and
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complex and powerful as those the Chinese. Several dynasties were

ose of th
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established by those peoplesles from Inner Asia, notably the Mongols in the
ples
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thirteenth century and d the MManchus in the seventeenth century. It was

the Manchus, the founders
fou der
foundde of the Qing dynasty, who carried out con-
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quests to form a vast em

empire with China at its heart at a time when similar
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imperial powers
wers were rising across the Eurasian continent.
ers w
we
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By 1800, the Qing court in Beijing ruled one-third of the world’s pop-
ulation and 10 percent of its landmass. The empire stretched from the
Central Asian steppe to the Tibetan Himalaya to Chinese coastal towns.
Then the leaders of the Qing surrendered control of parts of their empire
to European powers, the United States, Russia, and Japan after defeats in the
Opium Wars and other conflicts. Decades later, they were overthrown by
rebels who wrapped themselves in the banner of ethnic Han national-
ism, and who claimed they would restore their state as one of the world’s
great powers. These Han elite helped spread the powerful idea of the
modern Chinese nation as a continuation of the sprawling, multiethnic
 prologue 7

Qing empire. The new rulers, the Nationalists, adopted that project and
struggled to fulfill it until they were overthrown by Mao, who made the
same promises to reinvigorate the nation.

In the twenty-first century, the world is discovering that the Com-

munist Party is on the verge of realizing that dream, decades after the
country imploded under Mao’s poisonous policies. Today, the party holds
on to much of the territory that the emperors of the high Qing brought
together through war and diplomacy. And the party’s dominion could
grow. The Chinese military is expanding its presence nce across disputed
ce acr

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borderlands, from the South China Sea to the Himalayas.
Himala
Himalay The party

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seeks to bring the democratic island of Taiwan n under iits rule.

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The nation’s economic might allows the party to reach into realms that
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the emperors could never have imagined. ed. From the internet to artificial
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intelligence, from higher education to Holl

Hollywood, China is reshaping the
Holly
world, and we are only beginning ng to grasp
gra the significance of that. Much
gr
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of the world now treats China naa as one

on of the preeminent powers. During
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the Qing, envoys from distant lands

l paid homage at the court, and they
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are doing so again. I have st

stood in Tiananmen Square during a military
sto
parade, as Fatherr di
did in 1950, and watched as leaders from across the
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globe—Brazil and Ru Russia and South Korea—clapped in the stands next

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to Xi. Together they gazed down on tanks, missiles, and rows of march-
her th
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ing troops.
Many Chinese citizens are naturally proud of the restoration of their
nation, pride that is magnified by the party’s nurturing of the fires of pa-
triotism and nationalism. The state has told them in classrooms and films
and news articles of a century of China’s victimhood at the hands of
Western powers. But there is something else too that undergirds their at-
titude: a profound belief in their own innocence. It is the same innocence
that the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr says infuses the national character
of America. While evil can be done to these societies, they can do no evil.
This sense of innocence is what allows an empire to choose to walk paths
8 at t h e e d g e o f e m p i r e

of darkness in the name of doing good, with the unwavering support of

its citizens.
What I experienced in nearly a decade living in Beijing, the imperial
metropole, is only a small part of how I came to see China in this light.
Just as important is what I have witnessed along the frontiers, those areas
that include Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia—the same
contested spaces that were important to Father during his time in China.
There is a clarity to the nature of each imperium in the way it exercises
power far from the center. I saw this with America in Iraq, and I saw this
with China.
Father not only went to the frontier as a soldier, butut was born into it.

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His family came from Guangdong Province, considered dered papart
p of the bar-

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barian kingdoms of Yue by Chinese rulers of ancient
ncient times. In my report-
cient tim

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ing across southern China, I saw how different rent tho
U those regions were from
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the north, and it helped me understand better the th diversity of the land as
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much as anything else I witnessed. Those aareas of Cantonese speakers

that my parents’ families called d home were liminal spaces, transition
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zones between China and thee outsideoutsi world. The people from there
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bound China to America long beforebe the current era of globalized trade.
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I have ancestors and relatives who looked outward and made the leap, to
elatives w
Southeast Asia, to o Brazil,
Bra il to Canada. They negotiated passages, tempo-
Braz
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rary homes, permanent

rmanen homes. Was it any wonder, then, that this south-
ermanent
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ern rim was the origin

ori
or point for rebels and intellectuals who questioned
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the power of the imperial courts in the north, and who led movements to
topple them?
That is how Father came to Beijing and the northern lands: as an out-
sider, as a subject from the distant reaches of the empire.
I came too as an outsider, as an agent of another empire whose mission
was to document this one.
We made separate journeys, but his came to inform mine. I write here
of them. Or rather, I write of how we have each remembered moments in
those journeys.
 prologue 9

He is ninety-one now, and he tells me some things will never fade from
his mind.
A night when he slept in an alpine meadow under the stars, a saddle as
his pillow.
A day when he watched fellow soldiers with rifles try to hunt deer on
a snowy desert plain.
Years ago, as we sat together after dinner, he told me he still remem-
bered the words to “The East Is Red,” the anthem that most Chinese citi-
zens learned by heart in the 1960s. Father cleared his throat and sang the
words in Mandarin with no hesitation, even though it had been decades
since he had last done this.

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The east is red, the sun is rising

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From China comes Mao Zedong U
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He strives for the people’s happinessess
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Hurrah, he is the people’s greatat savior!

savior
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After he finished, he sat back

back on the couch and gave me a faint smile.
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At that moment, he was again ththe young man in a tan uniform with a red
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star on his cap riding on horseback

hors
hor through the high valleys of the north-
west, there at the edge
edg of empire.
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