This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on June 29, 2020 - July 5, 2020

History is being unveiled in real time today, not as fact, but as entertainment. John Bolton’s sensational book, which reveals chaos in the White House, is living history published only nine months after he stepped down from the powerful insider position of national security adviser to President Donald Trump. Thanks to freedom of information in the US, we enjoy living history on a real-time basis, rather than Chinese dynastic history that can be released only after the death of the last emperor. Strictly speaking, official secrets cannot be declassified until 50 years after the events.

In this age of instant gratification and monetisation of political service, no one can wait that long.

Getting Bolton’s revelations from Trump’s tweets and CNN daily, we need to read older histories to put our present chaotic age into the proper context. Bolton, for example, belongs to the generation of elite national security experts who see history within the Greek historian Thucydides’ (431-404 BC) tradition, defining war as driven by “fear, honour and interests”.

He still sees history from a Western-centric worldview. British empire poet Rudyard Kipling’s phrase, “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”, set off the myth that the West developed its own path to hegemony absent any influence from the East. Western historians forget that their sources of Greek philosophy and science came via Arab libraries in Alexandria, Istanbul and the Islamic civilisation of Andalusia (occupation of Spain from 711 to 1492).

Having a longer and more painful history, Asians see the world as interactively reflexive. In a world bound by global climate change and human networks, Eurasia and the US are inextricably entangled. You cannot see East-West rivalry in absolute, zero-sum, “we are good, they are evil” terms.

The worst evils are done with good intentions but good can come out of bad events and historical mistakes. By painting people who disagree with the US as “evil”, the US may have created enemies where there were only critics or competitors. The result is that the US has blundered into one war after another without any good exit plans. Bad American leadership creates huge global collateral damage.

Given the intense conflict between the US and China, how should Bolton’s tell-all memoir be viewed by Chinese historians?

It is no coincidence that Western history has been linear and cyclical in thinking, because the American empire is more of an outward expansion of European culture that then spanned the globe through dominance of the seas, air and space and, today, cyberspace. Geographically, the US is guarded by the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, with no military threats from its northern neighbour Canada nor the smaller Mexico in the South. No one can rival her nuclear armoury and hardware.

In contrast, China is geographically bound by deserts to her West and North, and mountains and jungles in the South. Throughout history, she has faced invasions from hordes in the North or internal civil wars and rebellions.

It is no wonder that Chinese history is insular, making Chinese philosophy more systemic and inward-looking because the Chinese elites saw the struggle for power around the central plains, dominated by the capital, and around the emperor as the centre of power in the central kingdom.

Trumpian White House politics, as described by Bolton’s book and other million sellers (Bob Woodward’s Fear and Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury) are instantly recognisable by the Chinese as palace politics between sons-in-law and daughters, an inner circle and outer networks, of kinship, alumni, class or creed.

How would today’s events be judged by the classic works of two Chinese grand historians, Sima Qian (145-86 BC) and Sima Guang (1019-1086 AD)? Sima Qian wrote his monumental Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) because he offended the Han Wudi (Military Emperor 157-87 BC) and was given the choice of death or castration. He chose the latter to finish his masterwork, which covered Chinese history from the early beginnings to the early Han dynasty. The book, comprising 130 chapters and half a million characters, is full of famous stories that still come alive in their telling for almost every child in China.

Sima Qian was brilliant in his description of how different emperors, officials, warriors and businessmen operated, with keen observation of character and values (good, bad or evil) that shaped policy, events and history. John Bolton would be rated as an ambitious official, confident of his abilities and willing to make allies and enemies alike in the snakepit of palace politics. Because he was sidelined by the powerplay, he chose to expose his former boss as “not fit for office”. Reading his memoirs, you can almost smell how his friends and rivals knifed him backwards, sidewards and digitally.

In contrast, almost exactly 1,000 years later, Song Dynasty (960-1279) historian Sima Guang was more a politician than historian. He was senior minister (but powerful because he was also teacher) to the young Emperor Yingzhong. The emperor became enamoured of Sima Guang’s contemporary political rival Wang Anshi (1021-1086), famous in history for attempting comprehensive reforms that failed.

Having competed and lost the policy battle for reforms, Sima Guang retreated to write an official history that spanned China’s history from the Warring States period (475-221 BC) to 959 AD, which marked the end of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (907-960). China’s history is an unending cycle of fragmentation and unification, held together by a Confucian bureaucracy that was simultaneously a boon as well as a corrupt bane. But the system has endured and outlasted invaders, rebels and reformers alike.

Sima Guang’s Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government (Zizhi Tongjian) took 19 years to complete and contained 294 volumes and three million characters (six times the size of Records of the Grand Historian). What is special about the Comprehensive Mirror is that it is a teaching manual for the emperor and his ministers, with case studies of both successes and failures in governance, politics and personnel management.

History is seen as a mirror to reflect on the past, so that the emperor would be able to recognise how to deal with the complexities of the present. Western historians see this book as a text of what happened in each dynasty, whereas Chinese emperors and bureaucrats learn the art of governance by reflecting on its lessons from many failures.

A thousand years later, Wang Anshi’s bold but failed reforms still resonate in Chinese history. Wang Anshi was not an academic, but an experienced mandarin who realised that the Song Dynasty faced a perennial problem central to any empire — internal decay versus external threat. Facing continuous attacks from the Mongols in the North (who later succeeded in pushing the Song Dynasty south and then conquered China, forming the Yuan Dynasty, 1271-1368), the Song government faced an impossible fiscal and governance problem that haunted even the mighty Han emperor 1,000 years earlier.

If you maintain a large standing army (or build a Great Wall), you face huge fiscal expenditure and debt that are unsustainable. If taxes are too high, the people suffer. Worse, a standing restless army can easily engage in a coup d’état, as happened during the An Lushan rebellion (755-763) in the Tang Dynasty (618-907).

Wang Anshi promised reforms in tax and money that were revolutionary in their time. He advanced loans to peasants to buy seed and plant crops, collecting the debt with interest after the harvest. He loaned state assets to merchants to raise revenue, restructured land taxes and tried to reform the military by creating locally financed militia. Exactly like today, the court was split between the reformers and the anti-reformers.

Sima Guang was also a reformist, but disagreed with Wang Anshi in terms of philosophy and method. A staunch Confucian, he understood the other contradiction in Chinese governance — officials are either loyal or competent, but rarely both. In his view, reforms can be conducted only with the right people in place. Picking the right people before policies are implemented is critical to success. The best policies executed by bad officials end up with worse outcomes.

By Sima Guang’s standards, Bolton would be classified as competent but not loyal. All empires operate by taking it, making it or faking it. The Roman and British empires expanded by taking new colonies to pay for their expenses. The British empire grew through the Industrial Revolution, then advanced to become the largest trading empire, but then exhausted its resources through two world wars. Then London stepped up as a global financial centre, “faking it” through finance and services by riding the power of its former colony as well as the inability of continental Europe to get its act together.

Today, as the US struggles with a growing debt and military and welfare burden, her toxic mix of corrupt politics, captured institutions and outmoded thinking in a multi-polar age makes her uncertain and insecure. From a grand historian’s perspective, the US is facing her own internal decay versus external threats. To deal with these complex issues, the urgent and existential issue is clearly reform, but if you have both disloyal and incompetent officials in place, together with huge inequalities in society and warring politics, internal decay is probably more threatening than any external rival.

In short, if you cannot make success, then you fake it by declaring victory and move on.

In Sun Tzu’s Art of War strategic terms, whether you win depends on your rival (making mistakes) and whether you lose depends on yourself (making more blunders). This means that, given the US’ overwhelming military, technological, financial and wealth edge, the game is for it to lose, not for China or anyone else to win. Whether Trump or Joe Biden (both in their 70s in an age of millennials) is the right leader to make the crucial internal reforms is for American voters to decide in November.

History never repeats itself, but it does rhyme and also turns on a dime. We are truly in the moment of history when we need better rear mirrors and grand historians.

Tan Sri Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective

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