The Emperor's New Road

The Emperor's New Road: China and the Project of the Century
By Jonathan E. Hillman
Published in September 2020
304 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 2/5

This book covers the state of China’s Belt and Road initiative as of September 2020. Somehow, in 2024, it already feels dated. Global geopolitics have shifted so much in the last four years in favor of China that many of the questions that the author asks have much less ambiguous answers.

The author traveled to a dozen projects along the Silk Road in locations such as Sri Lanka, Djibouti, and Kazakhstan. He reports on the progress of various projects.

The most memorable aspect of the book are the many lessons he draws from the European history of colonialism in each location. In many ways, China’s projects reflect similar past projects that Europeans attempted a century earlier. For example, I found his description of Qing Dynasty China’s reluctance to accept the railroad fascinating. Qing officials were concerned about the power that railroads would give to foreigners. They cloaked their reluctance in superstition. The British accepted magical and superstitious reasons for opposition to the railroad literally. This reflect’s modern China’s struggles with convincing countries in Africa and elsewhere to accept their technology.

There is something very annoying about the academic writing style. Academics lack the balls and courage to make any bold observations. They cloak all of their remarks in “this may happen” and questions. They worry that speculation will make them look unscientific. The author asks many blandly framed questions, and doesn’t venture to guess at the answer. This is because modern academia has been taken over by nitwits who think that a piece of paper is equivalent to learning and intelligence.. On one hand, the nitwits love to criticize each other when their speculation turns out wrong. On the other hand, they refuse to speculate out of fear of judgement. The result is that works published by the likes of Yale University Press alway ask questions such as “what effects could this have on Kenya? Only time may tell…” without ever venturing an educated and well framed guess at an answer.

The other problem with academic writing, especially when it comes to economic and geopolitical issues, is the technocratic framing of everything. The human spirit is discounted, and crushed under the mass of policy. Considerations such as freedom are not valued as intrinsic goods, and are weighted by their pros and cons in terms of material factors such as equity and equity. This book suffers from the technocratic framing that many other books in the genre suffer from.

I think that if Jonathan E. Hillman had taken some LSD before writing this, and had not been afraid to speculate (as long as he lets the readers know he’s speculating) he could have written a masterpiece. However, the academic publisher - Yale University Press - should have been the only clue that anyone needed in order to instantly be able to tell that this book would just be another technocratic treatise on the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative.

I learned a lot, but didn’t have very much fun on the way. I will not recommend this book.

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