Why a 2,500-Year History of Suzhou, China Is Relevant

One of the factors that motivated me to tell the story of a 2,500-year-old Chinese city was the gradual realization that I was discovering (for myself, at least) a much broader story about greater China. And not just about the Chinese empire’s history and culture, but explanations for many characteristics and behaviors of China as a twenty-first-century global power.  

Just as America today is a clear product of its careening, four-hundred-year past, so too, present-day China bears the burdens of a much longer, and far more fractious and tear-stained, history. “Study the past if you would define the future,” Confucius wrote in the Analects, and so it is that any understanding of modern China on the global economic and geopolitical stage demands an understanding of its past.

Suzhou was never the imperial capital, never the home of emperors, never a seat of military power beyond the city’s first few founding decades some twenty-five centuries ago.  Yet culturally, commercially, intellectually, and aesthetically, it could be viewed as the beating heart of the Chinese empire’s corpus for nearly the entire millennium just past. Suzhou’s past is thus China’s past, or at least a highly informative mirror of that broader past, and consequently provides numerous insights into today’s (and, likely, tomorrow’s) China.

For example, the story of Suzhou sheds helpful light on the inordinate Chinese attention to education, on the university admissions system (their infamous, three-day-long, one-shot-only version of the SAT called the gaokao), and on the current predilection for the very highest levels of government to be populated so heavily by technocrats, predominantly individuals with engineering backgrounds. The same history helps explain the long-standing desire of so many for civil service and similar official positions, the benefits derived therefrom, the predilection for top-down internal control, and the difficulty of imposing centrally issued directives on a widespread bureaucracy. Suzhou’s story also yields a better understanding of China’s attitude toward the Western world, its periodic introversion, its deep distrust of cult religions and their charismatic leaders, and its anathema toward any forms of social unrest and organized protest. National characteristics like the ones above are just a handful of those whose rationale can be better grasped through the story of Suzhou’s long, nationally meaningful history.

The usual pathways to China’s daunting past are weighty tomes filled with endless accounts of Emperor This and General That, Invaders Them and Battled There, nearly always centered on palace intrigues and succession disputes at the empire’s various seats of government over the centuries. Beautiful Su offers a refreshingly different approach, static in a place that was evolving, thriving, and suffering over time with the rest of the nation. Chinese life and history can be seen as lived, not simply viewed from 30,000 feet as some abstract exercise of realpolitik.